66 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST 5 &12, 2019
in the mermaid he saw a potential bo-
nanza. The thing was an obvious fake—
it had been stitched together out of parts
of an orangutan, a baboon, and some
kind of salmon—but that was a minor
matter. How “to awaken curiosity to see
and examine the specimen” was, Barnum
said, “the all-important question.”
The scheme he came up with was to
package one fraud inside another. Under
a variety of assumed names, he com-
posed letters to New York
newspapers and arranged
to have them mailed from
cities including Montgom-
ery, Alabama, and Charles-
ton, South Carolina. The
letters referred to a nat-
uralist visiting from Lon-
don, one Dr. Griffin, who’d
recently procured “a veri-
table mermaid” from the
“Fejee Islands.” Eventu-
ally, Dr. Griffin—actually, an associ-
ate of Barnum’s named Levi Lyman—
checked into a hotel in Philadelphia,
where he graciously invited a few jour-
nalists to view the specimen. Barnum,
meanwhile, made the rounds of New
York editors, complaining that his plan
to exhibit the mermaid had been nixed
by the fastidious Dr. Griffin. The wood-
cuts that he’d had made of the creature
were now of no use to him, he said, so
he’d allow them to be reproduced, free
of charge. Three papers printed the im-
ages on the same day, each believing it
had an exclusive.
“The mermaid fever was now get-
ting pretty well up,” Barnum later re-
called. When the specimen went on
display at the American Museum, ticket
sales tripled. Newspapers across the
country printed notices about the “Fejee
mermaid,” because, as Barnum observed,
these “caught the attention of readers.”
Thus the mermaid’s fame—and his
own—“wafted from one end of the land
to the other.”
Barnum lied easily and often. When
he was not fabricating, he was exaggerat-
ing; he routinely inflated how much he’d
spent on his various business ventures.
He may or may not have said, “There’s
no such thing as bad publicity,” but cer-
tainly he believed in this maxim and wel-
comed any imbroglio that would be no-
ticed by the press. (Many times, he staged
controversies for the express purpose of
generating coverage.) He made a for-
tune, then lost it. While broke, he gave
speeches on “the art of money-getting”;
improbably enough, these proved ex-
tremely profitable. Toward the end of
his life, Barnum toyed with the idea of
running for President. His running mate,
he suggested, should come from a state
like Indiana. Barnum called himself the
“Prince of Humbugs,” which, gener-
ously and perhaps presciently, left open
the possibility that one day
there would arise a king.A
new biography, “Bar-
num: An American
Life” (Simon & Schuster),
by Robert Wilson, traces
the long arc of the show-
man’s career, which spanned
most of the nineteenth cen-
tury. According to Wilson,
the editor of The American
Scholar, Barnum’s peculiar gift lay in his
relationship to his audience. Better than
anyone who’d come before, the Prince
of Humbugs understood that the public
was willing—even eager—to be conned,
provided there was enough entertain-
ment to be had in the process. That the-
ory of Barnum’s genius makes Wilson’s
book peculiarly relevant, although it’s
not altogether clear that this is the au-
thor’s intent.
Phineas Taylor Barnum—Tale to his
family and friends—came from a long
line of humbugs, Wilson relates. He was
born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810,
and named for his maternal grandfather.
Uncle Phin, as the older man was known,
had fought in the American Revolution
and then managed to buy much of the
property around Bethel. Growing up,
Barnum was told that Uncle Phin had
purchased a prime piece of farmland for
him, a gift that made him the wealthiest
child in town. Uncle Phin alluded to
the purchase at least once a week, and
Barnum’s parents, too, often mentioned
their son’s good fortune. When, at the
age of about twelve, Barnum was finally
taken to visit—or, really, wade out to—
his patrimony, he realized he’d been the
victim of an elaborate prank: instead of
fertile fields, he’d been deeded a hornet-
infested swamp. If he was wounded by
the hoax, he also seems to have profited
from it. “My grandfather would go far-
ther, wait longer, work harder and con-trive deeper, to carry out a practical joke,
than for anything else under heaven,” he
later wrote. “In this one particular, as well
as in many others, I am almost sorry to
say I am his counterpart.”
In contrast with Uncle Phin, Barnum’s
father, Philo, was a failure at money-
getting, and when he died, in 1826, he
left the family in debt. Still a teen-ager,
Barnum was sent to clerk at a general
store outside Bethel, where he staged
his earliest recorded swindle. He ad-
vertised a “MAGNIFICENT LOTTERY!”
and sold a thousand tickets at fifty cents
apiece. Winners who came to claim their
prizes received empty bottles or black-
ened tinware from the store’s inventory
of old junk. Not surprisingly, the place
soon closed.
Barnum tried opening his own store.
He also founded a newspaper, the Her-
ald of Freedom, and created an agency to
sell lottery tickets. (This was long before
government-sponsored gambling, and
the contests were private ventures.) The
store lost money. The Herald prompted
several libel suits, including one that
landed Barnum in jail. The agency, for
its part, did quite nicely, until lotteries
were banned by the Connecticut state
legislature, in 1834.
The following year, Barnum finally
found his vocation—or perhaps it found
him. An acquaintance told him about a
travelling act that was up for sale. It fea-
tured a woman, Joice Heth, who was ad-
vertised to be a hundred and sixty-one
years old and the former nursemaid of
George Washington. Barnum rushed to
Philadelphia, where the show with Heth
was playing. She was blind, toothless, and
practically paralyzed. Still, as Barnum put
it, she “was very garrulous when speak-
ing of her protégé, ‘dear little George.’”
He resolved to buy the act, which effec-
tively meant buying Heth, who’d been
a slave in Kentucky but whose legal sta-
tus in Pennsylvania was murky.
In New York, Barnum engaged Levi
Lyman, who later posed as Dr. Griffin,
to serve as Heth’s director-cum-chaperon.
The two men flooded the city with ads
and, it seems, bribes; Lyman paid off ed-
itors to gin up interest. Whether or not
New Yorkers were convinced by the
claims made about Heth, they flocked
to see her, and soon Barnum had made
back the thousand dollars he’d paid for
her. When the crowds in New York began