Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  From the perspective of our own time, its seems clear that Barnum crossed the line numerous times in his exhibition and promotion of Heth. Within his own lifetime, he seems to have realized this as well. If it was the most troubling venture Barnum ever undertook, it was also his first effort in the national spotlight, coming at a time in his life when his eagerness to establish himself seems to have overwhelmed any scruples he might otherwise have had. Barnum would grow in judgment, and even in virtue, throughout his career as a showman. But he was more than willing to court disapproval early on, and he would never be able to escape the cost to his reputation, despite later efforts to improve himself and his approach.

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  ON BROADWAY

  Although newspapers at the time estimated that Barnum cleared more than $10,000 on Joice Heth while she was alive and another $700 on her postmortem, he struggled to find further success in the years that followed, and he was forced to scramble both before and after the Panic of 1837. That nationwide crisis saw bubbles burst and banks fail, and a severe recession resulted that lasted into the mid-1840s in many places, and into the late 1840s in New York City. Barnum would spend much of the five years after the Heth affair on the road with various acts, ranging from dancers to a small circus. In the meantime, he moved Charity and Caroline back to Bethel, where they lived above the Yellow Store, and after a few years they were joined by a second daughter, Helen. During this period he would sometimes be away from home for a year or more, and each time he returned he would say that his life on the road was over, that he wished to stay home with his family. But then off he would go again. The tension most of us feel between home and away, the domestic and the exotic, existed deeply in him. He grappled with it in the late 1830s and early 1840s, before he would eventually have the means to pursue both aspects of living on a grand scale.

  The first act Barnum promoted during this period was a juggler named Signor Antonio, whom he met in Albany while on tour with Heth. Antonio specialized in the “balancing and spinning of crockery” and other feats that were unfamiliar to Barnum, so he signed the fellow up on the spot. Barnum’s first thought was to rename him Signor Vivalla, reasoning that the name Antonio was not “sufficiently ‘foreign.’ ” He took Signor Vivalla on the road, and he was well received until they reached Philadelphia, where a portion of the audience hissed him. When Barnum discovered that the hecklers included another juggler and his friends, he managed to engage this competitor in a series of sham contests between the two men. Barnum whipped up enthusiasm with publicized claims of a thousand-dollar reward for the winner, while paying the two jugglers far, far less than that. When he confessed to this scheme years later, explaining how it was done and adding that the same sort of thing was often done by the managers of other entertainers, Barnum said he did not think revealing “tricks of the trade” would hurt business, “for the public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.” This would become a keystone of his philosophy.1

  Barnum next became a short-term partner in a small circus based in Danbury, Connecticut, run by a man named Aaron Turner. Soon they went out on the road, with Turner’s two sons, who were trick riders, and a clown who did magic tricks rounding out a troupe that now included Signor Vivalla. After they had been touring for six months, traveling as far south as North Carolina, Barnum created his own small troupe. Grandiosely named “Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theatre,” it wandered through the Deep South until May 1837. He went home to Bethel for a few weeks and then was off again, traveling with his troupe as far as New Orleans and returning home only after another year had passed. Barnum wrote, “I was thoroughly disgusted with the life of an itinerant showman.” He was determined to settle into something permanent in New York.2

  Despite this protest, life on the road, while often hard and sometimes dangerous, had clearly engaged if not enriched him, and he came home with a suitcase full of stories. He had kept a diary of his journeys, and although it is now lost, it provided ample fodder for the 1855 version of his autobiography. The tales included his learning magic tricks, preaching in local churches of a Sunday, being forced to ride a rail, nearly getting lynched because of a practical joke, and ruining a magic trick when a squirrel that was part of the act “bit me severely” and “I shrieked with pain.”3

  The tale of the near lynching is vintage Barnum. It happened in Annapolis, Maryland, one Sunday morning when he was traveling with Turner’s circus. He had bought a new black suit the night before and, “feeling proud” of it, perambulated through the town to show it off. Turner, who like so many people from back home had a fondness for practical jokes and Yankee cuteness, had decided that the black suit made Barnum look like a preacher. He thought it would be amusing to tell the townspeople that Barnum was a well-known and widely despised reverend from Rhode Island who had committed an infamous murder and escaped justice. Barnum wrote that he was “very innocently, though rather pompously, strutting down the side-walk” when a group of townspeople overtook him: “I believe I must have been uncommonly proud of that suit of clothes, for I was vain enough to believe that my new suit was what attracted such special attention.” Even when he heard people call out “Let’s tar and feather him,” he professed to think that they were speaking of someone else. Finally, the light dawned through the comic fog of self-absorption, and Barnum managed to persuade what had now become a lynch mob to ask Turner for the truth about his identity.

  Turner revealed the joke to the crowd, which “roared with laughter” in response, but not before Barnum’s new suit had been nearly ripped to shreds and he himself had been dragged in the dirt. “I was exceedingly vexed,” Barnum wrote. When he asked his friend why he’d done such a mean and frightening thing, Turner’s response was, “My dear Barnum, it was all for our good. Remember, all we need to insure success is notoriety. . . . Our pavilion will be crammed tomorrow night.” Barnum admitted that their show attracted “immense audiences during our stay.” But he wouldn’t forgive his partner easily, because “self interest was an after consideration in this case, the joke being prompted solely by a desire to see some fun, no matter at whose expense.” Presumably it would have been more acceptable for Turner to risk Barnum’s life if the goal had not been merriment but instead profit. Still, Barnum had the good humor, years later, to make an amusing story of it.

  In his autobiography, Barnum did not often reveal his deepest personal feelings, but he let his emotions slip out when he wrote about splitting off from Turner’s circus and setting out on his own. He had signed a six-month contract with Turner, and had made enough money, $1,200, to start his own traveling troupe. His company included Vivalla, a black singer and dancer named James Sandford, a few musicians, horses, wagons, and a tent. They had set out before him, and Turner had given Barnum a ride in his carriage in order to catch up with them. “We rode slowly, because reluctant to part, and twenty miles of road was beguiled by pleasing conversation before we overtook” the troupe. When they did say goodbye, Barnum referred to Turner as “my old friend,” and then admitted to feelings of loneliness for “several days.” It’s safe to say that Barnum was so rarely alone in his life that his periods of loneliness stood out for him as they do for his readers. But he shut the door on these feelings midsentence, adding, “but my mind was so occupied by business, that I soon became reconciled to my new position.” Once again Barnum’s helpless love of commerce cured an ill.4

  Upon his return to New York in June 1838, Barnum again tested his belief in the efficacy of advertising, creating an ad seeking a partner for a “permanent, respectable business,” and mentioning that he had $2,500 to invest, along with his own energy and enthusiasm. In those recession days after the 1837 Panic, Barnum received ninety-three replies, a third of them from owners of porterhouses, which suggests how few people had the income to spend on beer and beef. Among the other responders were many confidence men, as well as those who were o
penly criminal: patent-medicine purveyors, a confessed counterfeiter, the inventor of a perpetual-motion machine run by a hidden spring. Barnum turned his nose up at one oddly prescient, if felonious opportunity when a failed merchant dressed as a Quaker proposed they go into the oats business. The merchant suggested that the good reputation of the Quakers would permit him to sell underweight bags of oats to middlemen, who would be less inclined to weigh out shipments from a trustworthy source, and thus would he make his profit. (Presumably this was not the basis on which the Quaker Oats Company would be founded in 1901.) Barnum’s reaction to this leering fellow: “There were better men in the State prison.”5

  Among those who responded to the ad, Barnum chose for his partner “a German named Proler,” who came with a recommendation from a city alderman, which in New York at that time might itself have been grounds for suspicion. Together, Proler and Barnum set up a small factory on Bowery Street, producing an unlikely assortment of products, from paste blacking and Cologne water to bear’s grease. After about six months, Barnum sold out his share on credit to his partner, but the German made haste back to Europe, leaving Barnum with nothing but his unpaid note and the recipes for the products. Years later, in his autobiography, Barnum good-naturedly shared them, “gratis.” Although the recipe for bear’s grease—at the time believed to restore hair growth in men—called for the fat of hogs and sheep but no bear, a note to retailers advised, “To encourage the faith of your customers, exhibit a live Bear in front of the store, with the label, ‘To be slaughtered next!’ ”6

  In May 1840 Barnum returned to what he knew best, public entertainment, renting a stage space in Vauxhall Gardens at the top of the Bowery in Astor Place. The recession left the theater world in a particularly bad spot, and as Gotham, a history of New York City by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, puts it, “the shabby but genial Vauxhall Gardens . . . still offered substantial food at reasonable prices, and its promenades, deserted by toffs, were thronged with toughs.”7

  Barnum’s plan was to beat the bad times by offering “variety shows,” which were inexpensive to produce and featured a changing mix of performers who were hired only by the night. Barnum had recently discovered a young man he believed was “really a genius in the dancing line.” The boy, named John Diamond, was white, but Barnum put him in blackface and “he became justly celebrated as the best negro-dancer and representative of Ethiopian ‘break-downs’ in the land.” Such was the racism of the day that “Negro dancing” was all the rage among white audiences, but only if it was not performed by an actual black person. At some point while Barnum was putting on shows at Vauxhall Gardens, Diamond was unavailable, so Barnum searched the dance halls of the Five Points area for someone to replace him. He found another young man who, according to the contemporary journalist Thomas Low Nichols, danced even better. The problem for Barnum was that this person “was a genuine negro, and not a counterfeit one, and there was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” Undeterred, Barnum rubbed the young man’s face with grease, then blacked it with burnt cork, colored his lips red, and put him in a “woolly wig.” His Vauxhall audience, assuming that the blackface disguised a white face, was roundly satisfied with the performance.8

  Nevertheless the dancers, singers, street performers, and storytellers upon whom Barnum drew were not enough to make headway against the bad economy, and Barnum was forced to give up the Vauxhall business after only a few months. Afterward Barnum decided to take “Master Diamond,” as he styled his young blackface dancer, “a lad of about sixteen years of age,” back on the road. Once again he left Charity, Caroline, and now Helen behind to set off to Canada with a troupe consisting of Diamond, a singer, and a fiddler. They then made their way south to Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, and finally New Orleans. “With blackened face and hands,” wrote a theater manager in New Orleans, Diamond continued to dance “to the no small delight of many who admired such exhibitions of suppleness. He could twist his feet and legs, while dancing, into more fantastic forms than I ever witnessed before or since in any human being.”9

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  BARNUM RETURNED HOME EIGHT MONTHS later, in April 1841, “re-resolved that I would never again be an itinerant showman.” The sentiment was undoubtedly genuine, and his next move would underscore his determination to settle down. But itinerant he would always be, and he would never again be known as anything but a showman—even as he pursued secondary careers beyond the show line. Still, New York remained a hard place to get ahead. He set up an unprofitable Bible-selling business, made another run at putting on acts at Vauxhall Gardens, and even clerked for an equestrian show at the Bowery Amphitheatre, for which he also wrote advertisements at $4 a week. In his autobiography, he glided over an extended literary effort from this period, one that he had probably worked on in the first months of 1841, describing it only by saying, “I also wrote articles for the Sunday press” in order to “keep the pot boiling” at home. The work, appearing serially on Sundays in the New York Atlas, was a picaresque novella called The Adventures of an Adventurer, Being Some Passages in the Life of Barnaby Diddledum. The first four letters and final two letters of his antihero’s name suggest that the sketches are autobiographical, but the name was also meant to be comic and uncomplimentary.10

  Outwardly the adventures are the same ones Barnum himself had on his travels and are based on the journal that he would consult for his autobiography. But he turned his fictional self into a hard-bitten, cynical fellow who would do anything to make a buck—an approximation of what his reputation has become today. In the Joice (or “Joyce,” as Barnum spelled it in his narrative) Heth affair, he portrayed Diddledum as the culprit Lyman had invented for James Gordon Bennett, the man who discovered her on a plantation, taught her the George Washington stories, and concocted the entire deception. Barnum called his alter ego the “King of Humbugs,” using humbug in its most exploitative sense, meaning a bald-faced fraud, whereas when he would later refer to himself as merely the “prince of humbugs,” the definition was softened considerably to mean an event put on to arouse public curiosity. The Adventures of an Adventurer is an odd effort, clearly true in some places and fictional in others, an attempt, perhaps, to expel the demons of actions he regretted and to remind himself of what he must never become.11

  After a few months of barely getting by with these activities, months in which his family’s health had turned from “excellent” to “poor,” Barnum later wrote, “[I] began to realize, seriously, that I was at the very bottom round of fortune’s ladder, and that I had now arrived at an age when it was necessary to make one grand effort to raise myself above want.” He heard that Scudder’s American Museum, where he had once turned down an opportunity to invest in a hydro-oxygen microscope, was looking for a buyer. This “collection of curiosities,” located on Broadway across from St. Paul’s Church, had its origins in 1791 in a museum room in City Hall created by the New York Tammany Society to “protect and preserve whatever relates to our country in art or nature.” But offerings soon consisted mostly of “stuffed animals and doleful curiosities,” as Gotham described them. Perhaps the low point in the Tammany Museum’s early days came when, in a grotesque display of republican solidarity during the Reign of Terror in France, it exhibited a guillotine complete with a beheaded wax-figure counterrevolutionary.12

  Like many such collections, the museum had passed from hand to hand, each owner adding attractions. John Scudder, an amateur taxidermist, began to manage it in 1802 and became its owner in 1810, specializing in natural history specimens until his death a decade later. New York City had given his New American Museum space in a building in City Hall Park in 1816 for the cost of one peppercorn in annual rent, an arrangement that lasted for nearly ten years after his death, when neighbors persuaded the city to make a change because of the noisy crowds the museum now drew with “vaudeville shows of magicians, freaks, ventriloq
uists, and tame Indians.” A board of trustees ran the museum for the family after Scudder’s death, intermittently asking Scudder’s son to operate it. Although John Jr. soon “deteriorated into an unreliable and unpleasant alcoholic,” he retained a showman’s touch and briefly made the museum pay, “mainly by forsaking any remaining educational value it had.” When in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville visited the establishment, now housed in a building at Broadway and Ann Streets, expecting to see fine paintings, he “laughed like the blessed” at the disjunction between something called the American Museum and its dusty exhibits and magic-lantern show.13

  One thing that had distinguished the museum throughout its earlier history was its educational appeal. Even when Scudder’s had turned to vaudeville to keep the customers lining up, its educational content had helped to show which side of the vice/virtue street it inhabited. Whether or not the museum had been stripped of its educational value by the younger John Scudder depends to a large extent on where the line is drawn between education and entertainment. The collection in its various iterations reaching back to its eighteenth-century beginnings had never been purely educational, but with the senior Scudder’s earnest interest in natural history, its educational value had been emphasized and recognized. As making a profit from a museum with unchanging exhibits became harder throughout the 1820s and 1830s, more and more emphasis was placed on amusements that would bring people in the door, and often those new visitors were not themselves very well educated. The response of Tocqueville and other members of the educated class was predictably one of alarm and condescension. But a historian of the American Museum gives a more democratic view of its contributions in the decades before Barnum acquired it: