Travel: Getting to Know P. T. Barnum

In September 1850 P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” across the Atlantic to tour America. He risked everything, even mortgaging his home, to guarantee the famous soprano her extraordinary fee of $150,000. Determined to turn a profit, he generated a blizzard of publicity. He salted the crowd that greeted her at the New York dock with dozens of his own men. Some 20,000 onlookers gathered outside her hotel; city firemen paraded past her window.

Some thought it crass when Barnum auctioned the best seats at her concerts to the highest bidders. A hat maker named John Genin, a friend of Barnum’s, shelled out $225 to buy the very first ticket in New York, and his hats became the rage across the country. In other cities, entertainers and businessmen outbid one another to buy the first ticket and bask in the resulting notoriety. Here was the essence of Barnum, melding high and low culture with relentless publicity, instant celebrity, a profitable dash of controversy, and a good time had by all.

Often dismissed as a hoaxer and a huckster, Barnum was not only the most successful promoter in American history and one of the country’s first millionaires; he was also a pioneer at turning spectacle into profit. He was one of the first people to use the term “show business,” and he attended at the birth of what has become an important part of our economy and our culture.

Artifacts of his life are collected at the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut, his adopted hometown (he was born in 1810 not far away, in Bethel, Connecticut). A visit offers an intriguing glimpse into his life and era.

When he died, in 1891, he left $150,000 for the construction of the exotic stone and terracotta building, one of the city’s architectural landmarks. It was completed in 1893 and opened as the Barnum Institute of Science and History, home to two local institutions, the Bridgeport Scientific Society and the Fairfield County Historical Society. Both held artifacts left by Barnum and his wife. The two organizations failed in the 1930s, and for several decades after that the city used the building for offices. The Barnum Museum opened in 1968, both with original artifacts and with others on loan, and it was extensively renovated and enlarged in the 1980s.

Displays on three floors tell of the social and industrial history of Bridgeport as well as the accomplishments of its most famous citizen. They include a recreation of Barnum’s library and an elaborate 1,000-square-foot model of a five-ring circus, with 3,000 carved figures.

Barnum’s name has long been linked with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which later merged with Ringling Brothers and still calls itself “the Greatest Show on Earth,” a phrase he himself coined. In fact, he didn’t get involved with the circus until the 1870s, when he was over 60. He devoted most of his life to exhibits and theatrical events.

As a youth, he worked as a storekeeper, lottery salesman, and newspaper publisher. In 1835 he chanced upon an opportunity to acquire the right to display Joice Heth, a Kentucky slave who was being promoted as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington. The promotion turned a handsome profit. When attendance began to flag, Barnum sent an anonymous letter to a newspaper claiming that Heth was a nonhuman fake—an ingenious automaton. The curious flocked back to see if this could be true. Phineas Taylor Barnum had found his calling.

One of the exhibits in the Barnum Museum is a replica of the dried “mermaid” he used to draw customers to his New York City museum in 1842. An amalgam of fish, orangutan, and baboon, the shriveled specimen in no way resembled the lovely fin-tailed maidens on the advertising posters. Such obvious fakery led many to call Barnum a cheat, a “humbug.”

He protested that his mission was “to arrest public attention; to startle, to make people talk and wonder,” because he wanted people to appreciate the variety and fascination of the natural and human world. Science, natural history, human oddities, all were grist for his mill. He happily lumped together displays of rare bird specimens, Indian chiefs, jugglers, snake charmers, rope dancers, glassblowers, a dog that could operate a knitting machine, and “the great Paganini whistler.” The mermaid and similar fabrications were “skyrockets” to get people into his museum, his “wilderness of realities.” The tactic was legitimate, he held, “provided that when customers are once attracted they never fail to get their money’s worth.”

One of the keys to his success was his partnership with a Bridgeport native named Charles Stratton, better known as Gen. Tom Thumb. Barnum put the famous dwarf on display in 1842 when Stratton was four (claiming he was 11 and had been brought from Europe at “extraordinary expense”). The two became close friends, and the impresario’s expert management yielded years of mutually profitable collaboration. Tom Thumb exhibits at the museum include his Lilliputian carriage, boots, and top hat.

In the lobby of the museum there’s a stuffed baby elephant named Baby Bridgeport, which was the second elephant ever born in captivity. It’s emblematic of another of Barnum’s passions. Among the many elephants he owned was the six-and-a-half-ton Jumbo, which he imported in 1882 to display in his circus. He generated a “Jumbo-mania” so widespread that the animal’s name entered the language.

The museum also explores a lesser-known side of Barnum’s long and varied life. “It always seems to me,” he wrote, “that a man who ‘takes no interest in politics’ is unfit to live in a land where the government rests in the hands of the people.” He was elected to the Connecticut legislature in 1865; there he struggled against Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroad monopoly and pushed for ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, barring slavery. He ran for Congress in 1867, as a Republican, but The Nation was not alone in its sentiments when it blasted him as personifying “a certain low kind of humbug” marked by “intense and concentrated vulgarity.” He lost the election and said he was disgusted with politics.

Nonetheless in 1875 he ran for and won a term as mayor of Bridgeport. In that job he improved the city’s water supply, initiated the installation of new gas street lighting, and fought for the rights of blacks to join trade unions. He had already played an important role in developing East Bridgeport into an industrial center, and he continued to contribute to public improvements in the city afterward.

Bridgeport has followed the pattern of many cities in the Northeast, its prosperity evaporating in the second half of the twentieth century with the disappearance of its manufacturing enterprises. The museum highlights some of the bygone local industries, including the manufacture of sewing machines, guns, corsets, and electrical devices.

A walk around the neighborhoods near the museum reveals a mixture of preservation, decay, and renewal. The nearby Barnum-Palliser Historic District, which Barnum helped develop, is full of ornately elegant Victorian architecture. Barnum was the chief sponsor and benefactor of Seaside Park, the nation’s first urban waterfront park. That extensive stretch of land bordering Long Island Sound contains a larger-than-life statue of the great promoter.

In the decades after his death, in 1891, high and low culture largely parted ways in America. Museums promulgated dusty scientific and historical knowledge; show business was exiled to the carnival and the theater. The Barnum approach would not return until later in the twentieth century, when television began to offer a similar potpourri of high and low. Today many museum directors again spice their attractions with a dash of Barnum ballyhoo to bring in the crowds. Go to this museum to see where it all started.

The Barnum Museum, at 820 Main Street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, is open 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 4:30 Sunday. For information visit www.barnum-museum.org or call 203-331-1104.