32 The New York Review
colleagues. A civic organization called
the Committee on Arrangements was
formed, probably by him, for the pur-
pose of celebrating his valor. On the
day of his release—“the day,” writes
Wilson, “when his career as a showman
began”—the committee escorted him
to the courthouse, where, according to
his own newspaper, a crowd of 1,500
had assembled. Prominent admirers
serenaded him with hymns and recited
odes in his honor.
Afterward several hundred men
conveyed him to a nearby hotel for a
“sumptuous dinner,” in which Barnum
received another dozen or so acco-
lades; one of the toasters hailed him as
“a young man just on the threshold of
active life whom neither bolts, nor bars,
nor prison walls, can intimidate.” He
was picked up by a six-horse coach that
carried a small band blaring patriotic
anthems; it was trailed by a marshal
hoisting an American flag, forty peo-
ple on horseback, and sixty additional
carriages. A cannon fired on the vil-
lage green and hundreds cheered as the
twenty-two-year-old was paraded three
miles to his home.
Did any of this actually happen? The
only source Wilson lists is Barnum’s
own Herald of Freedom. Wilson has his
doubts—“odes and formal speeches do
not occur on the spur of the moment,
nor do bands and coaches arrive by
chance”—though he grants the basic
facts of Barnum’s account. In the spirit
of fun, let it be so. What matters ulti-
mately is that the occasion, fabricated
or real, marks the crystallization of
Barnum’s formula for popular success.
Wilson writes:
Beginning on December 5, 1832,
more would always be more, keep-
ing sympathetic newspaper editors
close would always be useful, com-
missioning songs and poems and
speeches would ever enhance an
occasion, mixing serious intentions
with entertainment sure to draw a
crowd would continue to be a good
strategy for engaging the public, and
his own notoriety would never fail
to be a calling card ready at hand.As one of Barnum’s early partners told
him in a letter, “Remember, all we need
to insure success is notoriety.”
All press was good press to Barnum,
at least in the early stages of his career,
before he devoted himself to political
crusades against slavery, railroad mo-
nopolies, and alcohol. It’s the reason
why the expression, without evidence,
is often attributed to him. (Also mis-
takenly attributed is “There’s a sucker
born every minute,” a phrase far too
crude for his tastes, no matter how
much he might have agreed with the
sentiment.) One of Barnum’s most reli-
able tactics derived from his realization
that public skepticism need not be a
hindrance but could be the main draw.
His first success as a traveling show-
man came with Joice Heth, an elderly
black woman who claimed to be 161
years old and the nursemaid of George
Washington. In her act she sang an-
cient hymns, recounted anecdotes
about raising “dear little George,” and
brandished a creased and worn bill of
sale from the Washington family, dated
- Initially Barnum used his lottery
methods to boost attendance—pam-
phlets, posters, and aggressive courting
of newspaper editors, which included
outright cash bribery. When ticket sales
began to decline, however, he leveraged
public skepticism of Heth’s age to re-
vive business. A newspaper received
an anonymous letter claiming that the
elderly black woman was, in fact, “not
a human being” but “a curiously con-
structed automaton, made up of whale-
bone, India-rubber, and numberless
springs ingeniously put together.” At
the prospect of an ancient robotic nurse-
maid, sales rebounded. When, shortly
thereafter, Heth died, Barnum sold tick-
ets to her autopsy. The next day, after
headlines revealed that Heth had been
no more than eighty years old, Bar-
num’s associate convinced the editor of
the New York Herald that the autopsy
had itself been a hoax—a new outrage
that, in Barnum’s words, further served
“my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping
my name before the public.”
His marketing of skepticism was
more than a sales trick: it became his
career’s organizing theme. During an
age, in Neil Harris’s phrase, of “tech-
nological progress and egalitarian
self-confidence,” Americans were flat-
tered to be granted the privilege of
judging what was real and what was
humbug. Barnum invited them in on
the joke. “The deal he would make
with his audiences,” writes Wilson,was that they would be entertained
and that they would get their mon-
ey’s worth, either by enjoying the
state of doubt in which one of his
exhibits placed them or by sharing
in the pleasure of distinguishing
between what was false and what
was true.In his entertainments, dignified ex-
perts—scholars, priests, newspaper
editors—became props and figures of
mockery. Only the common man was
invested with real authority, and he
voted with coins.
Barnum invented almost none of his
material. Many of his acts were stolen
from Europe. Twenty years before the
Fejee Mermaid came into Barnum’s
possession, it had been a sensation in
London, which is also where he found
the Siamese twins Chang and Eng,
Jumbo the Elephant, and the Happy
Family, a menagerie of animals that
would have been hostile in the wild
but lived amicably together in a single
cage. His first smash success, an Amer-
ican tour by the Swedish opera singer
Jenny Lind, began only after she had
become one of the most famous per-
formers in Europe, her portrait ubiqui-
tous on popular merchandise and in the
press, though Barnum downplayed this
fact at every opportunity. At least two
dwarves named Tom Thumb had been
exhibited in New York before he found
his own. Barnum’s genius lay in sales-
manship. He knew what would sell and
how to sell it. And he did it on a larger
scale than anybody had dared to imag-
ine, let alone risk: an American scale.There are limits to the jollity that can
be summoned from the reflected thrills
of more than a century ago. Barnum’s
most vivid moments are the fugitive
flashes of a different Barnum, a dop-
pelgänger whom he banished from his
own memoirs and largely succeeded in
concealing from the historical record.
Some of these details are less incrim-
inatory than revelatory, suggesting anarrative that doesn’t square with the
one he cultivated for public consump-
tion. Wilson suggests that Barnum—
who in his writing made references
to Charles Dickens and Walter Scott,
and in his personal life made pain-
fully obsequious efforts to befriend
William Thackeray and Mark Twain,
and sought to buy and transport to the
United States the birthplace of William
Shakespeare—was a novelist manqué.
While hustling in New York in his early
thirties, before he had established his
first museum, he published serially, in
newspaper columns, a picaresque auto-
biographical novella called The Adven-
turers of an Adventurer, Being SomePassages in the Life of Barnaby Did-
dledum. It appears he never stopped
writing it, at least in his mind. Subse-
quent installments took the form of
his almanac-like advertisements, pro-
motional pamphlets printed by the ten
thousand (some the length of novellas
themselves, and larded with gratuitous
embellishments and subplots), and his
auto-hagiographies.
Yet the charming life of Barnaby
Diddledum left no room for unsym-
pathetic detail. Barnum makes much
in his autobiography of his impossibly
cool reaction to the cataclysmic fires
that haunted his career. Fires destroyed
Iranistan, his gargantuan Oriental
sandstone villa bedecked with mina-
rets and elaborate scrollwork and five
onion domes; his American Museum,
with its freaks and “numberless exotic
animals” and “one million objects”; his
second museum, of even larger scale,
four years later; the Hippotheatron in
Manhattan, where he held his circus
(“everything destroyed except 2 ele-
phants, 1 camel”); and the circus’s win-
ter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut
(killing every animal but a lion and
thirty elephants). In each case he gives
his readers the sense that, upon receiv-
ing the news over breakfast, he returns
to his paper, takes a ruminative bite of
croissant, and finishes sipping his tea,
before wiring his scouts with orders to
replace all that has been lost and more.
He neglects to report that he reacted
with the same supreme sangfroid to more
personal losses. After being informed
of the death of his youngest daughter,
Frances, before her second birthday, he
declined to cut short a British tour withTom Thumb (apart from one mention,
he ignores Frances in all of his writing).
Nor did he return from another Euro-
pean engagement when Charity, his
invalid wife of forty-four years, passed
away; he missed her funeral, though he
insisted that he had mourned her in his
Italian hotel room (“my lonely head was
bowed, and my tears flowed”). During
the same trip, if not earlier, he began a
relationship with Nancy Fish, a friend’s
daughter forty years his junior, whom he
married less than three months into his
widowhood. When he finally returned
with Fish to his estate after their honey-
moon, his family was still wearing black.
He would later joke to a reporter that
he planned to spread Charity’s ashes
on his icy front stair to prevent his sec-
ond wife from slipping.
Wilson finds himself in the uncom-
fortable position of celebrating Bar-
num’s outrageousness while pausing
to censure those qualities that “a mod-
ern sensibility must struggle to under-
stand”: the casual if spirited racism
of his early career; his aloof attitude
toward the women in his life; his in-
difference to the capture, torture, and
indiscriminate slaughter of animals. “It
is hard not to feel disappointed in him,”
writes Wilson, though disappointment
is nearly the opposite of fun. Neil Har-
ris set himself the challenge of studying
Barnum as an exemplar of his time;
Wilson tries to make sense of Barnum
in ours. But Barnum refuses to submit.
The contortionist act forces Wilson into
a retiring middle ground: “Barnum
embodied some of America’s worst im-
pulses, but also many of its best.”
The most disturbing line of the book
comes not from anything Barnum did
but from a lesson he learned. The suc-
cess of General Tom Thumb’s act—a
precocious young “dwarf,” dressed in
military attire and paraded about on
a carriage pulled by Shetland ponies
and attended by a liveried footman—
yielded several successors. The first of
these was George Washington Mor-
rison Nutt, whom Barnum renamed
Commodore Nutt. He debuted twenty
years after his predecessor, who was no
longer a reliable draw, having grown
taller, fatter, and altogether less charm-
ing. Still the resemblance between
Thumb and Nutt led crowds to question
whether the two were the same person.
Barnum, always quick to capitalize on
his audience’s skepticism—“to turn all
doubts into hard cash,” as he put it—
brought the two men together on stage.
To his surprise, this only deepened the
audience’s suspicion. The more he tried
to convince customers of their error,
he wrote, “the more they winked and
looked wise, and said, ‘It’s pretty well
done, but you can’t take me in.’” He
had trained his audiences in the art of
the humbug too well. “It is very amus-
ing,” Barnum concludes, to see how
easily people “deceive themselves by
being too incredulous.”
Wilson notes this episode only in
passing, but to an American reader in
2020, it barks from the page. The great
danger to democracy today comes not
from marks slow to spot a humbug
but from a public made cynical to the
point of believing that everything, and
everyone, is a humbug, especially the
humorless class of credentialed experts
whom Barnum took such joy in ridicul-
ing. In the end, though, it’s a distinction
without a difference. Too credulous or
too incredulous—you’re a sucker either
way. QAn advertisement for Commodore George
Washington Nutt’s appearances at
Barnum’s American Museum, 1860New York Public Library