Selects: PT Barnum: More Complicated Than You've Heard

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Hi, everybody. Chuck here with the greatest show on earth.
Wrangling Brothers, Barnum, and Bailey Circus, you say? No, Stuff You Should Know the Podcast. That's right.

It's Saturday, and that means it's time for another Selex. And this one is from May 2018.
P.T. Barnum, colon, more complicated than you've heard.
And I picked this one, you guys, for two reasons.

One, because I believe in this episode, I predicted that Hugh Jackman would play the man in a movie one day. One of my two two predictions, along with Jared from Subway being a creep.

And the other reason I picked it out is because I finally saw the movie The Greatest Show on Earth recently with my daughter. And I didn't like it so much.
I didn't think it was that good.

So I'm sorry to anyone who had a part in that movie. My daughter loved it.
My wife loved it. I just thought it was okay.
But this episode is great. So I hope you enjoy P.T.
Barnum colon.

More complicated than you've heard.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bright.
There's Jerry. Hello, hello, hello.

Hello.

Jerry's got a top hat on.

I know. I don't know why.
I don't know. She's trying to be all Mr.
Monopoly

or

P.T. Barnum.

Oh, yeah, I forgot he wore a top hat, allegedly.

Oh, no, he did. I saw a picture of it.
Yeah, Hugh Grant certainly did. Hugh Grant, Hugh Jackman?

Hugh Laurie. I think it's Hugh Laurie.

No, it's Clive Owens you're thinking of. Yeah, Hugh Jackman, man.
He wears that top hat like a champ. He does.

I don't know how much you went on the internet for this one, because this is a pretty comprehensive article.

It actually was.

but um

the greatest showman really set the internet on fire man and a lot of like it really brought out a lot of people saying like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa yeah whoa

yeah this is the the very definition of the word fantasy yeah it seemed like that movie was uh can be best described as a musical whitewashing

in every sense of that word yeah

so let's destroy it.

Yeah, I mean, after reading this, I didn't think, like, man, P.T. Barnum, what a complete a-hole.

No, he was just a lot more complicated than that, and did a lot of stuff that you just shouldn't just pass over because you can't figure out lyrics to

what why what rhymes with racism.

Yeah, I mean, he was definitely an enigma, and

it seems like he did some good, but also

I mean he was a hustler man

for sure. So this is what I didn't fully understand until researching this Chuck he he was he's known as the greatest showman, right?

But there were plenty of other showmen out there at the time,

which makes sense because you have to have something to compare you be compared to to be the greatest, right?

But I guess I had just assumed he was like the first or the originator. No, he was not the first showman.
He was a great showman.

What he really left his mark on was introducing America to pure unadulterated hucksterism. Sure.
And using it for marketing. Humbug.
That's what he called it. And he had a lot of quotes.

Some were definitely something he said, like, every crowd has a silver lining, which means you can shake it out of them and get some money from a bunch of people, right? Yeah.

The one about a sucker born every minute, that's never been successfully attributed to him 100%.

Well, yeah, and one thing is for sure, and

is that his autobiography is, I think if you order it, it comes with a salt lick.

So you can just lick on that salt while you're reading it. Right.

I don't know what that means, but that seems like something that they would do. Yeah, I mean, he, he, uh,

I think when the man is writing about himself, it's like, you know what, you may just want to believe a third of this.

I would take it with a grain of salt, but so much so that you need an actual salt lick. Oh, yeah.

I got it now. I got it.

So there is one quote that I think kind of describes this guy best, or at least his philosophy. And it also kind of reveals like

you can't call him harmless,

but also the intentions were not entirely evil, right? Right. He had a quote that said that

people don't mind being deceived so long as they're being amused at the same time. Which is kind of true.
It does, and it largely lets him off the hook as far as being a huckster, right?

But the thing that the greatest showman really glossed over or just outright ignored was that a lot of the amusements that he was presenting to the public were extraordinarily degrading to people at the time.

They were super racist. There were

just

There was just a lot of exploitation. He made his money not just by hustling Americans, but by exploiting other Americans too, right?

And again, like this, a lot of this is contextual. It's not necessarily fair for later generations to judge previous generations, although it's really fun to do.

But

yes, you can say this guy was exploitative,

even compared to his contemporaries, right? Perhaps. So he is just this very complex character who I think you and I can agree was not an evil person.
He just did some horrible things here or there.

Should we go back in time? Yes, let's. All right, let's go back to the beginning.
Let's hop in the Wayback Machine, which is appropriately steampunky right now. Yeah.
It takes many forms.

I don't know if people realize that. It has a clock without the glass, and you can see the parts inside, but it doesn't actually function.
It's strictly for decoration.

So let's go back to 1810,

back to Bethel, Connecticut, where this man was born, Mr. Phineas Taylor Barnum.

He had sort of a mixed family life. I mean, he was, they point out in this article, he was firmly American.

His great, great, great grandfather came over from England as an indentured servant in the 17th century,

eventually became a landowner,

but they didn't, it's not like they had a ton of money. His dad, Philo, great name.
Yeah, all these are great names.

He was not super successful.

So it was kind of up to young P.T.

to

make his own way in life. Right, yeah.
His father was a farmer, which introduced Phineas

to the idea that he really hated like manual, mindless work. No, he didn't like doing that farm work.

But

that's not to say he didn't like work. He just liked very specific kinds of work where his energies were appropriately channeled.
He was bilking people out of money. Sure, yeah.

I mean, that was kind of it. He liked, he was the definition of the word enterprising, right?

He could figure out a way, he could look at something, literally look at something that you couldn't, you could almost not give away. You certainly couldn't sell and turn it into pure profits.

Like he got into lotteries for a little while once, right?

Yeah, I mean, he went to work, he left the farm, went to work at a country store, and realized quickly, like just because you're in the country doesn't mean there aren't like swindlers and cheaters out here.

Yeah. So he kind of learned some of the tricks of the trade there.
His old man died when he was 15

and he was kind of his his mom had his mom had to get a job but he was basically like all right it's kind of up to me now to provide for my family so he moved got that another job as a store clerk and as you said got into lotteries yeah and he was early on pursuing a career at clerkship which I guess is a thing.

But yeah, so there's this,

he saw easy money in lotteries. So he set up one himself.
Apparently, when he was working for these owners of the store,

they were away at one point, and he got his eyes on some tin kitchenware that just would not sell.

So he took some other stuff that wouldn't sell at that store. These things weren't his, by the way.

And he traded them for a bottle collection, which I guess was the thing that people wanted at the time.

And he put those things up as prizes, right? And he started a lottery and these were the prizes.

And there were cash prizes, but he ended up selling like a thousand tickets or something like that in this little town store

based on these prizes and some cash prizes saying like half of all tickets were going to be winners.

And you might win a bottle or you might win like a tin muffin pan, but you could also win this cash.

And so these things that had just been sitting on these shelves forever were suddenly turned into something valuable thanks to his marketing expertise. And this is while he's still a teenager.

Yeah, we've covered this in something before, that lotteries were a thing back then that someone could just cook up.

You know, like it's not like the lotteries we have today, like these sanctioned

sanctioned ways of stealing people's money.

But back then, you could just cook up a lottery in a small town and be like, you know what? I've got,

it was almost like a Ponce thing. Like I can raise money, give away some of that money and prizes, and then keep the rest.
Right. I think that was in our lotteries episode.
Oh, really? Yeah. Okay.

Well, in order to do that, though, you have to be

a natural-born salesperson, which is what he was. You really do.
And like lotteries would play like a theme throughout his early career. Like, that's how he ended up making his initial...

I don't know if fortune is the right word, but that's how he staked himself and his family was through lotteries and working in stores and then eventually owning stores like general stores, grocery stores, that that kind of thing.

But the lotteries are where he made his money. And he actually figured out that you could make more money with less work than having to go to the trouble of setting up a lottery.

Like you said, anybody could just set up a lottery

by taking tickets from somebody else's lottery and selling them further out at an increased price. But then he figured out one more thing, Chuck.

You didn't even have to go out and sell these things yourself. You could hire other people to sell them even further out.

All you had to do was give them the tickets and collect the money that they brought you. So, he ended up making money by basically

expanding other people's lotteries for a while. That's right.
And in the middle of this, and he had moved to Brooklyn at this point, he's kind of hopping all over the place there in the Northeast.

And to be fair, we're hopping kind of all over his early life right now. Yeah, sure.
Chronologically. Yeah, yeah.
So, in this time period, he met

who would become his wife, a woman named Charity Hallett, who he described in his autobiography as a fair, rosy-cheeked, buxom girl with beautiful white teeth. Did I mention she had big boobs? Right.

But those teeth, man.

So they would get married, and I think they had four daughters.

But during all this time,

he had a little Josh Clark in him because... How do you mean? Well, he was writing letters to local papers that weren't getting published.
So he said, you know what? I'm going to start my own paper.

Yeah.

He clarked himself a paper. I'll see you all in hell, media.

Yeah, and much like yourself, you started your own paper, which was kind of cool. Sure.
I mean, like if people won't print your crank ideas,

go start your own paper. It's like if you want to get your manifesto out there and

either become young Obama-esque, which we don't recommend, or start your own paper. That's right.
And his was called The Herald of Freedom. Which is terrible.

And this is where it gets a little weird because

he kind of went after people,

was eventually hit with a libel suit and spent 60 days in jail. But that sold a lot of papers and he was also hailed as a hero because apparently he was legitimately exposing corruption.
Right.

So to me, Chuck, that one really stood out

because

it shows just how huge this guy's life story is. Yeah.

That even even if you make a movie out of it, the best you can hope for is to pick like five or six or 10 different things and try to find a thread throughout them, right?

Whether that's an accurate portrayal or not, it can't possibly be because this guy's life was just so enormous and he did so many things and he was such an outsized character that a lot of times you either vilify him or glorify him.

And it was much more a combination of both of those things. And I think that example really says it all.

Like he had his notions, and he started his own paper and ended up going to jail, and subscription boosted, so he ended up making money from it.

But at the same time, he was legitimately trying to call out corruption in this town that he cared about. So

his character was much more complex than you get

from just about any source unless you read biographies about him. Yeah, agreed.

So finally, he says, or I'm sorry, Connecticut said, no more lotteries in Connecticut. So he's like, all right, what am I doing here even if I can't do this little scam?

He's like, I love this town, but not that much. So in 1834, he left the paper, shut that down, moved his family to New York City.
And

should we take a break? Perfect time. All right.
We're in New York City, and we'll be back right after this. If you want to know, then you're in luck.
Just listen up to Josh and Chuck.

Stuff you should

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Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about.
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Stuff you should

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Stuff you should

know.

I got a falafel. Is it good? It's pretty good.
Is it from the halal guys? Uh-huh, of course. Oh, man.
Who else are you going to get a falafel from? That's good stuff. Yeah.

So, man, this guy really, just reading through this thing, he did so many

jobs.

Right. He was a factotum.
Dozens and dozens of jobs through his lifetime. Yeah, and I'm glad he didn't just stick to clerking, right? Or even lottery.
He had this thing, like something about

show business. attracted this guy.
Oh, yeah. I don't know what it was.
Maybe nobody but him knows what it was. Maybe he doesn't even know what it was.

But he was attracted to the idea of like wowing and amusing and amazing crowds. And

he did that pretty early on. I think he was 25 when he got into

exhibiting a human being who he purchased and owned for a while, which, by the way, does not show up in The Greatest Showman. Right.

And this is after in New York he started a boarding house for a while

and co-owned a grocery store for a while. Right.

And so, like, his life is full of him just trying to do these kind of regular things and then being like, nope, I got to go buy a lady and put her on display. Right.

And this was after, Chuck, by the way, he had come down with smallpox for a while. Oh, did we miss the smallpox? Yeah.
That's what I'm saying. Like, this guy had a huge life.
Man.

But let's get to Joyce Heth, right? Yeah. Because she is a very controversial part of P.T.
Barnum's life. She was the first, his first foray into show business, and there's no other way to put it.

Like, he purchased her. She was a slave, an elderly slave,

who he purchased from another promoter who had been touting her as General George Washington's nursemaid. Yes.
From when George Washington was a child. This is 1835, right? You do the math.

She was supposedly 161 years old. Yeah, so he negotiates a price.
He went and saw her, and she was blind. She had no teeth.
She was partially paralyzed,

but she could talk and tell her story. Yeah, she told stories about young George as a boy.
Oh, yeah. And to be fair,

she was already being exploited. It's not like he, which is not great, but it's not like Barnum introduced this into her life.
No, he just purchased her and took it over. Yes.

Took over the exploitation for the money.

For $1,000. And he toured with her until she died not that long later, just like a year later, not even in 1836.
He made a lot of dough.

And

it was sort of a watershed moment for him where I think he was like, wait a minute, I've realized that I can get people

in a room. by cooking up these stories and getting things in the newspaper and printing these posters.

And even if, like, if business was down, he would do these crazy things. Like, one of them,

when business was down appearing with Heth at one point, he accused her of being a robot, what they called at the time, an automaton. In an anonymous letter to the editor in a newspaper.

Yeah, a robot made of whalebone, rubber, and springs. So everyone was like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Not only is she George Washington's nursemaid, but she's really a robot. Right.

And what that did was it got the people who had been avoiding going to see her because even at the time, people were like, this is pure exploitation.

This woman is being exhibited like a giraffe would be or something like that. She's an old lady.
He's working her 10 to 12 hours a day. Some people think that he worked her to death, literally.

And so there was part of the press that was saying and reporting on this with great distaste.

So there's a segment of American society who would not be caught dead seeing George Washington's 160-year-old nursemaid.

But they would conceivably go see an autonomaton if that's really what was going on. So he managed to

dupe the very people who were critical of this exploitation that he was undertaking. He got everybody in that one.
Well, yeah, and it gets even worse.

Finally, when she passed away, he actually sold tickets to a public autopsy in a saloon. So people could come look at this poor woman's insides.
And this is where it was finally revealed.

Doctor said she's maybe like 80, 81 years old at most. Right.
And this was, so

Jane McGrath kind of walks past like what a controversy this was. Like

this guy had been... like very much touting that she was the nursemaid.
Like he supposedly had the bill of sale to George Washington's father for her.

So like he was saying, like, this is legitimately a 160-year-old woman. So in this autopsy that he charged for,

when it was exposed that she was actually half that age,

there was a bit of disgrace there. And he had to learn to roll with the punches.
And it was about this time that he basically said to himself,

you can take this as a lesson and go on the straight and arrow, maybe get back into clerking. Yeah.

Or you can double, maybe triple and quadruple down on this and see where that goes. And he chose the latter of the two for sure.
That's right. He sure did.

The next thing that he did, the next person that he kind of took under his wing was his greasy, greasy wing, was someone called

Signor.

Is that Signor? Yeah.

Why is it spelled that way?

That is the Italian spelling of Signor. Oh, Oh, well, let me turn it on then.
Signor Antonio. Antoniono.
Nice.

Antonio. Antonio.
I added an extra bit in there. Signor Antonio is another way to say it.
Well, sure.

If you're a dullard. I'm a bit of a dullard, Chuck.
I think you know that after 10 years. So this guy...

Oh, we're really milking that 10-year thing, huh?

I've got my S-Y-S-K 10-year Army shirt on. I see that.
It's very nice. Thank you.
I've been working on my buxomeness.

You're quite buxom.

So Senor Antonio was a balancer. He's one of these guys, like a plate spinner, walked on stilts, juggles.

He could throw things in the air and catch them very fast. Yeah, he's like a hippie.
Yeah, exactly. He would be on tour with, he'd have those little sticks.
What are those called? Devil sticks.

Devil sticks. Or a hacky sack.
Any of those things. Yeah, he'd pull a hacky sack out of his ear at any moment.

So this guy, guy, he said, all right, you need to be my newest client. I will make you famous.

Change your stage name from Senor Antonio to Senor Vivala. Nice.
Because that's a little more, I don't know, exciting. I guess.

I like Senor Antonio. Yeah.
I did too. It's a lateral move.

Here's the thing, though, is there were a lot of dudes out there spinning plates. So it wasn't like he was so unique.
But Barnum thought, you know what, I think you're better than the rest.

So here's what I'll do. And again, this is just another example of how good he was at promotion.
He said, I'll do a free performance for a theater,

and I'll even be your assistant on stage.

And people came. And so the theater said, all right, I guess if people come for free, they'll pay.

I think what he was saying was he, yeah, I think that's exactly. I think you're right.
He just wowed them enough, I think. That's the impression I have.
Yeah.

But even still, despite Vivala being genuinely good, he was, I think, head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries. Most plate spinners.
Yeah.

I think people saw in the press: oh, there's a really good plate spinner. We saw a plate spinner

at the office last week, so I'm not going to go anywhere to see another plate spinner. I'm certainly not going to pay.

So Barnum had a pretty good idea, but I actually came out of

an uncomfortable situation that fell into his lap with Roberts, another plate spinner. Yeah, so this is a rival plate spinner who apparently would go to performances.

Yeah,

he was a crip, and he would go to Vivalo's performances and heckle them, I guess.

You call that plate spinning? Boo, terrible plate spinning. Stuff like that.
And so

P.T. Barnum cooked up a thing where he was like, all right, I'll offer $1,000 American dollars to anyone who can perform Vivala's act in public.

Roberts accepted, but here's what really happened: he got together with Roberts, and they all three hatched a plan to do these kind of staged competitions. Right.

So they promoted in the plate spinning competitions. East Coast, West Coast plate spinning rivalry is going on right now.

Everybody's going to come see this. And everybody did.
And in that first performance, Roberts, as was staged, conceded he could not replicate Vivala's act. It was too good.

But I would love to see Vivala replicate my act. And I challenge you, Senor Vivala, to replicate my act tomorrow night at this same theater.
And they kept going back and forth like that

with this staged rivalry that

they made some cash off of, thanks to Barnum's ingenuity. They did.
Finally, in 1836, the circus comes into the picture.

He joined a traveling circus. Barnum did as a ticket ticket seller, which I take it to mean he doesn't sit in a booth and sell tickets, but he goes around town selling tickets.

Yeah, to like chambers of commerce or something like that. Yeah, and of course, he got a little commish off this thing.
So he was making some dough. Vilvala joined that same circus as a performer.

Of course. They were attached at the hip at that point.
No, that was Cheng and Ang, bunker you're thinking of.

That's a dad joke. It totally was.

And this one I thought was a little bit weird.

Apparently, the circus proprietor, a guy named Turner, was into practical jokes and not very good ones because this practical joke was he convinced a crowd that Barnum was the Reverend Ephraim Avery,

who had been acquitted of murder, but everyone thought that this guy had committed murder. And back then, no one knew what anyone looked like.

So he said, this guy is Ephraim Avery, and he almost got lynched, apparently. Yeah, like Ephraim Avery's Avery's name was not very well liked in the area.

He was, at the very least, he, through having an adulterous affair with a young woman, had induced her to kill herself, or at worst, had murdered her to prevent her from having his illegitimate child.

But he'd been acquitted, right? Andy's a reverend, did we mention?

So, yeah, the crowd, like,

according to Barnum, almost killed him. That's a real funny joke.
I know. But then later on, Jane says that

Barnum got even with him with his own practical joke. I could find nothing anywhere, including in Barnum's autobiography, that mentions that.
I think he covered his toilet and saran wrap. Oh, gross.

That is so nasty.

No, no, he gave him an upper decker. Gross.

That's even worse.

So apparently these guys got into business together, and it became a thing where people would go see the circus where the two ringmasters would kind of go at each other with these practical jokes.

Right. That became a thing.

So, so there's a transition going on, another transition now.

He is, he started out store clerking, lotterying, went, got into show business where he's like basically a Colonel Tom to different performers. Yeah.

And then now he's transitioning into the circus. But by now, he's been like married to the road about as much as he's been married to charity as well.
And from all accounts,

like he was very much in love with her, and they were like, he was faithful, and

they were a real couple. But he was on the road a lot.
There's just no ifs, ands, or buts about it. He was out there on the road quite a bit.
So transitioning to a circus was basically the same thing.

It was just a little bigger of an outfit. So it was like a step up.

But you got to also keep in mind here that he's spending a lot of time on the road at a time when travel was really long and really tough.

That's right. And so he eventually decides working for someone else's circus is for the birds.

I'm going to start my own. I'm going to buy some horses and wagons.
I'm going to get a clown. You've got to have a clown.

I think he still had Vivala at the time. Yep.
And started Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater,

toured all over the place for a little while, and then they disbanded. Right.
Nothing ever seemed to work out for very long.

No, I think that

he got fed up, it says, with some of the rivalries with other showmen,

that

you would build your whole circus around like an act, and all of a sudden the act would be like, I'm sick of this. I'm sick of being on the road.
I'll see you later.

And all of a sudden, your circus would fall apart. I think they were kind of tenuous outfits, right?

But

the thing about Barnum is like something about this called to him.

Like he would, when his circus collapsed and he was out in the middle of the country on the road and he had to go back home, the first thing he would do is start figuring out his next circus or his next act or whatever it was.

He would go back out again. He was

indefatigable.

Indefatigable

in that sense.

Yeah, so I mean, we'll quickly speed through the next couple of years. He did a little steamboat.

circus for a little while along the Mississippi River.

That didn't come along. He tried to do a respectable business again,

went into business with a guy who manufactured a grease

paste and cologne. That did all right for a little while, but then that failed.

And then this whole time, he still feels that pull to the tent.

Right. He sold illustrated Bibles for a little while.
Yeah.

Finally, here's the thing. He wanted stability.
Like, being out on the road was tough. S.
Steve Perry, right?

But

he wanted this to be tied to show business in some way.

Finally, one day, and I think

1841,

he had another big break or another big vision.

There is a place in New York, a museum, and what you would call today a museum, that was up for sale in, I'm not sure where it was, but it was in New York, right? Yes.

And it was called Scudder's American Museum.

And Barnum heard that Scudder wanted to get out and was putting the whole collection up for 15 grand, which is a substantial amount of money and definitely more money than Barnum had.

But he said, that's it, right there. I can have a permanent place where people come to me and I can be home with my wife and daughters, but I can still have this daily interaction with show business.

I got to buy that thing. Well, and it will also also accomplish this is

I can still have my freak show performers,

but because it's a museum, somehow it has a little bit more respectability because apparently at the time, theaters weren't like they are today. It wasn't like we're going to the theater.

Theaters could be a little bit like a second-tier entertainment. Right.
It was like hoi polloy, tawdry crowds went to the theater.

That was associated with like burlesque or something like that. Or even like human odities exhibitions, stuff like that.
That was theater stuff.

A museum like Scudder's, like respectable people could go there. So what Barnum did was he bought a museum and then dragged it down into the mud.
Right.

And this, this whole, the way he financed the museum, I didn't fully understand, to be honest. Do you want me to explain it?

If you want.

Or we could just say he ended up with the museum in 1841 through a lot of work. And I think that's fair enough because it is a little bit like, you know, Robin Peter did pay Paul.
Right.

It wasn't just a straight-up purchase. Let's just say that.
Right. But so one thing that you can say about this museum, which he renamed Barnum's American Museum, it was a big success.

And one of the reasons it was a big success was because

he tirelessly worked at finding new and interesting ways to market the thing, right? Yeah.

And by,

I'm not sure sure exactly when, but by a very short time after he opened it, I think that same year in 1841,

he charged 25 cents a person for admission. He had something like 4,000 visitors a day.
Yeah.

And he took this thing, like I say that he dragged the word museum down in the mud. He definitely added and expanded to the definition of museum.

And then he also had this lecture hall where he had like performances that you would see like in a circus or something like that. And he turned this place into an emporium, just something huge,

an enormous spectacle. And something like 850,000 pieces were on display in his museum.
So you definitely got your quarter's worth for sure. Yeah, and those are just the pieces.

He also, I mean, as far as the circus element, he had everything covered. He had dancers, musicians,

plate spinners, ventriloquists. Well, you got to have the plate spinner.
He had little people. He had big people.
He had ladies with beards and robots and puppets and animals.

He had giraffes and grizzly bears.

He really had everything

humming on all cylinders at this point. Yeah, he really did.
And again, there was still, there was that whole threat of like, you know, there are people being exploited.

There were people who were complicit in that. There were people who were

anyone who came to the museum was

gawking at the weirdness of these other people or whatever, which again, today is very odd to us, but at the time

was still odd. Like, that's the thing that I think gets lost on people.

Like, there were sideshows and things like that, but Barnum took it to an extraordinary degree and really ran with it and became extremely rich as a result, actually.

Should we take a break? I am ready ready to. All right, the museum's humming along.
We're going to take a break. We'll be back right after this.

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Stuff you should

know.

Stop

you should soon.

Okay, we're back.

Yeah, so we mentioned earlier about the humbug, this kind of hucksterism.

In his biography there, or autobiography, which was rewritten by himself, by the way, after people read the first version and said, what a jerk.

Yeah, yeah, he was like just openly boastful and a braggart about how much he exploited people and how much he duped the American public. He toned it down a little bit in the revision,

but

he did talk a little bit about being slightly embarrassed about kind of how shameless he was. But then again, in the next line, he would say, but you know what? This is how everyone is in my business.

I'm just better at it than them, basically. Yeah, he said

he said, oh, there's a great quote. I can't find it anywhere, though.
Where basically, if he, if he, oh, here it is.

If his advertising was, quote, more audacious than his competitors, it was not because I had less scruple than they, but more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promises.

He thought a lot of himself. He definitely did, but he also worked pretty hard at it for sure.
And I think

if you compared apples to apples at the time, Barnum's jam was way better than anybody else's jam. Yeah, for sure.

So

he had three really big successes in a row with his with his museum here. The first one was called the Fiji Mermaid, F-E-E-J-E-E.

This was in 1842.

And this was a big deal. He got a man named Levi Lyman, or Levi Lyman.
He was an old colleague of his.

And he said, here's what I'll do.

You are now Dr. Jay Griffin.
You are a naturalist for the British Lyceum of Natural History, which was not a real place.

And

you were in ownership of what we'll call the Fiji Mermaid, which was a,

what did we call it in the taxidermy? Rogue taxidermy? Yeah. It was rogue taxidermy.
It totally was. It was like a jackalope, except what was it?

It was a head of a baboon, torso of an orangutan, and a fishtail just for good measure.

Yeah, and as far back as they can tell, it was probably made by a Japanese sailor in the 1820s, and it passed through a few hands before Barnum finally leased it and put it on display.

I wonder where that thing is now. I looked.
I

don't know. There are other Fiji mermaids out there.

It was like kind of a thread of rogue taxidermy in the mid-19th century, and I think Harvard has one on display. But I looked to find out where P.T.
Barnum's is, and I can't find it.

It's probably like on Richard Branson's headboard or something.

It may have actually burned up in one of the many fires that plagued P.T. Barnum's life.
Yeah, things are going to get fiery here in this last bit, too.

Yeah, well, anyway, let's get back to the Fiji mermaid, though. Okay.
Okay, so Dr. Jay Griffin is

touring with this, supposedly touring with this mermaid, right? Sure.

And Barnum...

But the guy's actually not out there touring.

Barnum basically creates out a whole cloth, a tour of this mermaid, writes letters about how great this thing is in different people's names, and then mails them to friends that live around the country and asks them to mail those letters in to newspapers in New York talking about how this thing has to be seen to be believed.

Yeah, so people came far and wide to see this piece of taxidermy.

Yeah, and by the way, this whole Jay Griffin thing, like this guy was posing as him. He was giving public lectures

made up as a naturalist, a British naturalist, and he was an American promoter. He had nothing to do with it.
He was just making all this stuff up, but he would give like public lectures on it.

I love it. Like the audacity, it's amazing.
So the second big victory was when he met up with a four-year-old named Charles Stratton. He was a little person.
His cousin, actually.

And he stopped growing when he was two feet tall, and he changed his name, rebranded him as General Tom Thumb. And that name probably rings a bell.
They became very famous together.

He said he was 11 years old, and they were

a media and ticket-selling sensation. Yeah, they would be like invited in to meet like royalty, whatever country they toured.

He was a huge hit at the museum. It was like a big deal for both Barnum and Charles Stratton.
That's right.

A sensation, that's the best way to put it. And the final big victory of the trifecta, when he was in Europe with

Stratton, he heard of Ginny Lynn. She was a Swedish opera singer.
And this was the kind of thing where he was like, you know what? She doesn't have a beard.

All she is is a talented singer, but she's amazing. And this would really legitimize me if I did like a straight-up act for a change.
Right.

So even though she's big over here, they don't know about her in America and she could blow up there. So I'm going to offer her $1,000 per performance, which was a ton of money and a big risk.

But he made about a half a million dollars with her or more, who he branded the Swedish Nightingale by trotting her around the United States. And she was like beyond a sensation in the United States.

Yeah, that was another thing, too. I mean, like, she was pretty big in Europe, but I don't think she was well known, if known at all, in America.

But by the time she showed up for the tour starting in 1850, he had managed to, like you said, just turn her into a national sensation.

People had like beetle mania for this lady. Yeah.

This article says that she was not a very nice person. I didn't see that anywhere else.
And I actually saw that.

So after the contract between her and Barnum was up in 1851, she continued to tour America with like an actual orchestra, I believe.

And she made $300,000 in 1850s money from this whole American tour and donated every single penny of it to Sweden's public school system, which was

burgeoning at the time. Yeah.
So I don't know what Jane was talking about, but I think she just kind of didn't find America very cultured, is what I get. But apparently, Jane didn't like that.

Well, America probably wasn't very cultured in 1850. Right.
But I thought that was pretty neat, man. She took all of that money and donated it to the public school system in Sweden.
Man, that's crazy.

But yeah, so Barnum was not legitimized thanks to that. I think it actually didn't go all that well, but he did enrich himself thoroughly through Jenny Lynn for sure.

That's right, but he would go broke again because he's P.T. Barnum.
Jeeze. And that's what he does.

In the 1850s, he bought up a lot of land near Bridgeport, Connecticut because he wanted to make East Bridgeport the Happnin Place.

He invested in the Jerome Clock Company, wanted to relocate it to East Bridgeport. It was not a smart thing to do.

The company went bankrupt, and all of a sudden he was broke again, and this is fire number one.

He moves out of his mansion because he's broke, and then after he had moved out, the mansion burned down. Right, but if he had to move out, you would think that he had relinquished ownership.

So why does it matter as far as his life goes? Oh, unless he had a bunch of money stuffed into the insulation or something. I don't know.
There's no breaking bad thing going on.

It might have just been a footnote or something. Or

maybe he did.

No, I guess if he had moved out, then he didn't own it.

I just thought that was a little weird. Yeah.

So

he was in debt, like big time, like broke, bankrupt, in debt, because of this terrible clock company thing, which you should always take as a reason to never put all of your eggs in one basket, which I guess is what he did.

But he managed to emerge from debt after, I think, five years.

and he ended up during this time he pawned his museum but he also put the name of the museum in his wife's name who was not bankrupt and so they were able to make some income off of the lease of for the museum and then when he managed to buy the museum back after five years he just went like right back to it like like like he didn't miss a beat yeah I mean this this 10-year period from 1850 to 1860 he went broke He did the smart thing, like you said, with his wife.

He started giving lectures about making money. He went on tour again with Tom Thumb.
He got a dead whale. He bought a dead whale and said,

surely people will pay money to see this. So he was still doing all this crazy stuff.

He bought a hippopotamus. He bought two beluga whales.
Like, it's just crazy the things that he was doing.

Also, Chuck, we have to say that the title of the lecture tour, The Art of Money Getting.

It's not even the art of making money, the art of money-getting. Yeah.

So

his star is starting to rise again. At the very least, his fortunes are reversing from

just doing any kind of work he can get his hands on. And then

all along this way, like Barnum was a pretty, he was what's known as a Jacksonian Democrat.

Andrew Jackson was a populist president, and

he was,

I think, didn't we lay?

He was the one who was responsible for the Trail of Tears, right?

I'm pretty sure that was Andrew Jackson.

It was. Remember our two part on Trail of Tears? I do.
Okay, so he was, he was,

P.T. Barnum was of this man's party.
He was a Jackson supporter. And then the Civil War breaks out.
And all of a sudden,

Barnum has this like

total conversion. He was not like an outright bigoted racist who worked to keep African Americans enslaved, worked as a Confederate sympathizer, anything like that.

He was fairly unremarkable and pretty normal. Like, for example, at his museum.

If you were black, you couldn't come in. It was a segregated museum.
But that was like a lot of businesses at the time. So he was a very normal pedestrian person as far as his politics go and

socially as well. But

something happened around the time of the Civil War, and he converted and actually became an abolitionist, huge union supporter, and

just basically became patriotic and dedicated this idea of preserving the Union and abolishing slavery. Yeah, and he used that museum as a

sort of ground zero for his cause.

He had speeches, he had plays that sort of endorsed this. He had southern copperheads that were protesting outside.
They threatened his life. And then he said, at this point, you know what?

I might as well just get into politics legitimately.

And in April of 1865, he actually won an election to the Connecticut General Assembly, where he worked really hard to ratify the 13th Amendment and supported another cause to allow the rights of black people to vote in Connecticut.

Yeah. So like he was legitimately dedicated to the cause of abolition, which is totally bizarre, right?

And about this time too is when the revisions to his autobiography are starting to get much more contrite, much less boastful,

and even more apologetic.

So he, he, like, he, something happened, and he was converted to the right side of history, I guess you could call it, you know. Yeah, so here's where fire number two comes in.

After a few months after this election his museum burned down uh along with the animals and the exhibit which is super sad yes it's the first of like two animal fires uh he opened a new museum a couple of months after that three years later that museum burned down

didn't want to rebuild that one uh and then finally in the 1870s

like it took a long long time before he became the P.T. Barnum that most people know as the big circus guy.
Right. The greatest show on Earth guy.

Yeah, he hooked up with Barnum and Bailey after hooking up with a guy named William Cameron Coop or Coo. I'm not sure which one it is.

But he had P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus.
Yeah, a little wordy. That was 1871.
And then,

did you cover the 1872 fire?

No. There was another fire that killed all the circus animals.

At the winter

camp, which is on the site of where Madison Square Garden is right now, there was a horrific fire in the winter camp in 1872, killed a bunch of other circus animals, which

this is one of the reasons why, years later,

Barnum and Bailey's Wringling Brothers Circus went away was because of animals. Yeah, and he, I mean, he was, by the time this fire happened, at the, what was it called? The Hippo Theatron.

I think so.

He

was very successful with that circus. He started with Coop or Coo.

They made about 400 grand in the first year, and it was the very first circus to kind of do the traditional thing that we all think of as travel by train, acrobats, clowns, exotic animals, stuff like that.

And that's when it officially was called the greatest show on earth. So

the hippo-theatron,

such a strange word, burns down, and then he's visiting his friend in England,

John Fish, and this is when his wife, Charity, passes away. Yeah.

And as Jane put it, he was supposedly too grief-stricken to return for her funeral, but the grief must have subsided quickly because he secretly married Fish's daughter.

At 63 years old, he married 22-year-old Nancy Fish

about three and a half months later after his wife passed. No worries about her teeth.
No, no, or her bra size.

So

they got married secretly 14 weeks after charity died. And then when they came to the U.S., they had a public wedding nine months after that.

So,

yeah, he married her, and I guess he was with her until his death, right?

Well, yeah, in 1860, or I'm sorry, 75,

he took a break from the circus, got back into politics,

and became the mayor of Bridgeport for a little while. Not East Bridgeport, though.
He's talking trash about them.

And apparently, he gets a little on his high horse now because even though he was a drinker, pretty heavy drinker for a while, he quit drinking and then campaigned against

like Sunday sales in saloons and kind of got a little self-righteous, it seems like.

Yeah, he also sponsored the Comstock law in Connecticut, which banned contraception, which puts a lot of onus onto the ladies.

And it was in place apparently until 1965.

And there's a really important word in there, Chuck, sponsored. Like, that means you're the person who brought it to the General Assembly.

You didn't just vote yes on it. Sure.
You're the one who said, everybody, everybody.

Let's ban contraception for 100 years.

And it was successful, actually. So, yeah,

he was a weird dude with a lot of different weird

thoughts about things and that were sometimes very contradictory over time.

And then finally, ironically, here at the very end of this podcast, in 1880, he partnered with one James A. Bailey for P.T.
Barnum's Great London Combined.

It's a terrible name for a circus. Worst circus name ever.
Doesn't he have the word circus in there?

And this is when he got Jumbo the Elephant, which

Jumbo was a legendary attraction until 1885 when Jumbo was killed by a train. And probably caught fire, too.

And did you know, we were just in Boston, that Tufts University, their mascot is Jumbo the Elephant. No, I didn't know that.
Yeah, my buddy Robert explained that to me. And

apparently Barnum was one of the early

people who give universities a lot of money?

Endowment

donors. Grant person.
Sure. He was all of that.
What is that word? I know what you're talking about. He was all that to Tufts.
And so Jumbo the elephant became their mascot.

And I think, because it does say in here,

he displayed Jumbo's preserved hide and skeleton. I think it was, or maybe is, on display at Tufts.
Oh, wow.

I'm not sure if it still is, but I think at one time it was. So wait a minute.
This guy also gave a substantial amount of money to help found a university?

I don't know found but to the university that's a benefactor is that the word benefactor yeah maybe the fountain found it I'm not sure the timeline there man that's that's really crazy he did a lot of stuff so go jumbos

yeah the fighting jumbos or the passive aggressive jumbos or what the stomping jumbos there you go that's pretty good so Barnum and Bailey weren't together for too long initially they parted ways but then again joined in 1887

ultimately finally for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Yep.
They broke up and then they got back together and then it stayed that way until 2016, I think, and then the circus finally closed down.

I went to that thing as a kid. I think we talked about that.
Sure, I did too.

And now we will only go to the Big Apple Circus, as you know. And I took a long break because Emily and I were tired of going.

And then now that we've got a kid, my mom was like, you know, you've got to start going again.

You have to. So we went this year.

How was it? Oh, it's okay, you know.

I'm not the biggest circus guy, I've realized. Are you afraid of clowns? No, not these.
Are you afraid of acrobats? I could take these clowns.

No, and actually, the acrobats at the Big Apple Circus are the

what's it called? It's the famous ones. The family.
Oh, the flying Zambonis? Yeah, or was it Zambonis? Not Zambonis?

I don't remember. It's something like that.
But it's them. It's still that family.
Wow, that's really, something. And they, you know, they did a great job.

But at the end of the day, I'm just kind of about a third of the way through. I'm looking at my watch, you know.

Oh, I gotcha. I've seen a couple of Cirque de Solets.
Those are the last circuses I saw. Yeah, those are okay.

We saw the Michael Jackson one in Las Vegas, and man, alive. Was it good? Yeah.
There's a Michael Jackson cirque? Yes, dude.

And I have to tell you, like, I'm not some die-hard Michael Jackson fan, but you don't have to be this to appreciate this. It is amazing.
Like, it's worth going to Vegas to go see.

Who's not in Michael Jackson? And then turning around and going home. I don't know.
There's probably a few. I'll bet we hear from some Michael Jackson, anti-Michael Jackson fans.

Finally, 1890, P.T. Barnum has a stroke during a performance.
He has one weird, strange wish at the end of his life is to have his obituary published before he dies. Yeah.
I don't know why I did that.

Maybe to.

I don't know either. I think I don't know, but that's a heck of a way to end this podcast.

Maybe he wanted to feel the public outpouring or something.

It could be that, or he wanted to proofread it or something. I don't know.
But if he wanted, if that was what he was after, why didn't they just

send it to him ahead of time? They actually published it. Yeah, that's weird.
Yeah.

Well, we'll find out one day when we die and go to heaven and meet P.T. Barnum.

Agreed.

So,

you got anything else? Nope. There's probably tons more that we missed.
And if you know something about P.T. Barnum that we didn't know, let us know.

We'll just add to this guy's story over time, okay?

In the meantime, if you want to read this great article by Jane McGrath, type in P.T. Barnum in the search bar at How Stuff Works.
And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

All right, I'm going to call this Unibomber follow-up. Oh, good.
I was into that one. The Unibomber? Yeah.
Yeah, that was a good episode.

That was a good 10th anniversary episode.

Milk.

Hey, guys, congratulations on 10 years. Milk, milk.
I look forward to many more.

Listen to Unabomber and thought I would share something that covers a related, if somewhat different, aspect of the story.

About 10 years ago, when I was still a wee law student taking a legal ethics course, one of the situations we discussed was Ted Kaczynski and the ethical dilemma his lawyers faced.

Criminal defendants have the absolute right to dictate certain aspects of their representation, like whether or not to plead guilty, but there are other aspects of the representation that the lawyer controls, the most notable being trial strategy.

While lawyers should always listen to the client's overall goals, sometimes it's necessary to override a client's wishes on how to achieve their goals because the client's desired strategy is either legally incorrect, unethical, or simply ill-advised.

Kaczynski's case presented an interesting ethical problem for the attorneys because he refused to allow them to pursue what they perceived to be his best defense and his only hope of avoiding the death penalty, namely claiming he was not guilty by reason of mental disease known as the insanity defense.

The conflict was that on one hand his attorneys had a duty to zealously represent him, but Kaczynski objected so vehemently to the chosen defense that at one point he attempted to go pro se aka represent himself, which would have been an utter disaster

as you noted he pled guilty so we'll never know what they would have decided to do had he gone to trial but his case is one which most lawyers have thought about or discussed at some point in their careers

that is good

Fordham Law go Rams and that is from Deb. Thanks Deb.
Appreciate that.

Yeah, I remember we were kind of saying like his whole thing was he didn't he pled guilty because he didn't want to plead insane because his ramblings would have been the ramblings of a convicted insane madman.

Yeah, very interesting. Uh, well, again, thanks, Deb.
We always love hearing from lawyers out there.

That whole joke about lawyers at the bottom of the sea being a good start, we have always found it tasteless. Sure, so get in touch with us.

You can send us and Jerry an email to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com.

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