Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  As for the exhibits throughout the museum and the entertainments offered within, he promised, “The most fastidious may take their families there, without the least apprehension of their being offended by word or deed.” He was explicit about why he called his lavish new stage a Lecture Room rather than a theater: the “hundreds of persons who are prevented visiting theatres, on account of the vulgarisms and immorality which are sometimes permitted therein, may visit Mr. Barnum’s establishment without fear of offence.”3

  Those hundreds of reluctant theatergoers were more like thousands and tens of thousands in Barnum’s mind. His marketing strategy of appealing to members of the rising middle class, who had the means to buy tickets for the whole family, would come to fill his pockets. But Barnum kept his price at a quarter, half that for children, and admittance to the Lecture Room did not require an extra fee for ordinary seating. Like his friend Moses Kimball, Barnum was genuinely interested in the theater and determined to make a comfortable place not only for lectures but also for the performance of moral dramas, melodramas, and the occasional work of the Bard—although as Barnum later wrote in his defense against an accusation of pandering, “Even in Shakespeare’s plays, I unflinchingly and invariably cut out vulgarity and profanity.” This sort of statement and the distinctions he often made between the probity of his offerings and the moral laxity of the regular playhouses made more rarefied observers see him as a threat to the serious theater. However, A. H. Saxon, an expert on nineteenth-century American entertainment, credits Barnum, Kimball, and others like them with the growing respectability of American theatergoing in the second half of the century.4

  The first play presented at the reopened American Museum was, appropriately enough, the temperance melodrama The Drunkard; or, The Fallen Saved: A Moral Domestic Drama in Five Acts, which had first been adapted for the stage in 1844 by Kimball’s Boston Museum stage manager, William H. Smith. Smith himself directed the play and acted the title role at Kimball’s establishment, where it ran 140 times in its first season. Inspired by the growing temperance movement, the play became one of the movement’s founding documents. In early 1848 Barnum had offered the play in his Philadelphia museum, where it was popular enough to be performed eighty times alongside a companion drama called The Gambler, which had also run at the Boston Museum. For the American Museum production of The Drunkard, certain Boston place-names were replaced with local references to Broadway, Trinity Church, Five Points, and even the American Museum itself. In its first four months in New York, the play was performed at Barnum’s 150 times. Competing New York theaters that did not mind calling themselves theaters also offered productions of The Drunkard at the same time it was running at the American Museum.5

  The Drunkard tells the story of a young man who lives happily with his comely wife and little daughter in a “pretty rural cottage” until a lecherous and unscrupulous lawyer, who has designs on the wife, tempts the husband into becoming a brandy-swilling lush. The young man turns into such a drunk that he abandons his family and heads to the barrooms of the Five Points. Eventually his now impoverished wife and daughter follow him to the city, hoping to reform him. Before that happens, when he is at his lowest point and his wife and daughter are near starvation, a Good Samaritan gets the husband to take the temperance pledge, cleans him up, and reunites him with his family. In the fifth act, they are back in the cottage, their finances restored, a Bible on the table, and the young man plays “Home, Sweet Home” on the flute as his daughter sings the first verse, eventually accompanied by her mother and, as the curtain descends, by other members of the cast. The fallen drunkard has been saved.

  After the debut performance, the audience called out Barnum to speak, a possibility for which he had been prepared, since two days later the text of his remarks appeared on the front page of the New-York Daily Tribune. In it, he managed to say a number of things that, given his public reputation as a man who was not above a bit of exaggeration in service to making a buck, were humorously self-deprecating but at the same time self-promoting. He said, for example, that the expensive renovations to his museum were, “believe me, when I pledge my honor,” not undertaken with any “thought of gain.” Heaven forfend! His only motive was to provide wholesome entertainment, so much so that “I pledge myself to withdraw into private life, if ever the moment arrives that the great mass of our citizens prefer immoral, and vicious, to moral and reformatory entertainments.” His Lecture Hall audience and the readers of the Tribune were meant to believe that his remarks should not be taken “as reflecting in the slightest degree upon other places of public amusement” or as challenging the judgment of their managers, despite “their peculiar views.” Finally, he invited his auditors to say whether “I fall short in my endeavor thus felicitously to combine innocence with pleasure, rational amusement with a proper sense of virtue and morality.”6

  Reading his words many decades later, and noting his glib overstatement (“During a somewhat eventful life, this is the proudest moment I have ever yet experienced”), his false modesty (“I was doing well enough pecuniarily”), his orotund phrasing (“vividly painting the positive and inevitable evil consequences of vice, in whatsoever form”), and his naked self-congratulation (“erecting and perfecting . . . the most beautiful, commodious, comfortable, and best-contrived Saloon in this country, and I verily believe in the world”), it is easy to imagine in every word of this well-tooled, tonally consistent speech its self-parodying wit. We can only imagine these lines delivered with a theatrical flair and a twinkle in the eye. At about this time, Barnum was described as a “handsome, medium-sized man . . . smooth shaven, with a wealth of curly black hair, and a smile all over his face.” The hair would thin and the face would thicken, but for now he was in his prime, delivering his observations in his strong, well-enunciated tenor. How could he not have been flushed with the excitement of the moment, his whole being bursting with an understandable pride at his revamped museum, his elegant new hall, all renovated in a mere nine weeks? Barnum had been on stage often, going back to his traveling shows in the South and more recently for his appearances as straight man to Tom Thumb, and his growing success as a temperance lecturer attested to his ability to hold an audience. He was comfortable when he spoke this night, imbued with both a sense of purpose and a winking self-awareness.7

  His audience would, as ever, be included in the humor. “There goes old Barnum again,” they would be saying to themselves with an inward chuckle, while nonetheless admiring his actual accomplishments. The verbal pyrotechnics of this mostly self-educated man, the splendid setting that he owned outright, the famous temple in Connecticut where he lived, the promise of years of entertainment to come and the notoriety of the amusements he had already provided—all of these aspects of Barnum’s success would be well-known to his mostly striving, middle-class audience, whose members were indeed looking for pastimes suitable for the whole family. And Old Barnum’s confidence was so complete that he could mock himself even as he indulged in bold self-promotion. Is it any wonder that of all the attractions available in Barnum’s newly commodious museum, few could rival its owner and impresario?

  * * *

  THE FRENZY THAT MET JENNY Lind’s arrival in New York only grew in the days before her first concert, on September 11, at Castle Garden, a covered theater that occupied what had been a circular fort built just off the Battery, accessible by a 200-foot wooden bridge. The army had used the fort from the time of its completion in 1811 until 1823, and then leased it to New York, after which the city opened the site in 1824 as a “place of resort.” The next year, Castle Garden was the site of a 6,000-person reception for the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette, wrapping up a grand return tour to the United States.8

  Barnum had paid $1,000 to have an awning built over the bridge to Castle Garden, which was brightly illuminated on the night of the concert, creating a “triumphal avenue” for the more than five thousand excited people who had already passed through an alley
formed by sixty New York City policemen. Some two hundred boats bobbed outside the walls of the castle, bearing ruffians beating drums and raising a “hideous clamor of shouts and yells.” At times they tried to force their way into the fort, but the police pushed them back. The theater, itself also brightly illuminated, was divided into four color-coded sections that helped people match their tickets to their seats. Facing the stage from above the balcony was a banner made of flowers with the words “Welcome, Sweet Warbler,” and at the back of the stage, behind where the orchestra was seated, was a large wooden sounding board on which the flags of Sweden and the United States had been painted. The crowd was mostly male, which a reporter for the Tribune attributed to the $5 price for a ticket; the ladies, he wrote, “must stay at home, it seems, when the tickets are high, but the gentlemen go nevertheless.”9

  Lind’s conductor, Julius Benedict, opened the show at 8 p.m. with his sixty-piece orchestra playing the overture from Weber’s opera Oberon, followed by baritone Giovanni Belletti singing a tricky aria from Rossini’s Mahomet the Prophet. After the applause for his performance stopped and the crowd grew silent, the Swedish Nightingale herself, dressed in white, passed through the orchestra to Benedict, who led her to the footlights. “The vast assembly rose as one man,” the Tribune writer reported, “and for some minutes nothing could be seen but the waving of hands and handkerchiefs, nothing heard but a storm of tumultuous cheers.” Bouquets piled up at her feet. Barnum claimed it was “by far” the most people she had ever stood before. When the audience calmed down, the violins and flute began the first strains of what was even then a bel canto warhorse, the “Casta diva” aria from Bellini’s Norma. Although the critic for the Herald felt that nervousness caused Lind to falter at first, and that all in all her performance of the song “was not equal to her rehearsal,” the Tribune writer was inspired to release a flood of adjectives. Her modesty, her sweetness, her power, and her birdlike trills were what most distinguished her in his mind.10

  The highlights of the rest of her performance were a Rossini duet with Belletti from “Il Turco in Italia,” an aria with two flutes from Meyerbeer’s opera A Camp in Silesia, the Swedish “Herdsman’s Song” and “The Echo Song,” and, as a finale, the song that won Barnum’s contest, “Greeting to America.” Benedict had hurriedly matched the poem to music “in the style of the Marsellaise,” as the Herald critic described it, almost getting the spelling right. The Tribune writer noted that the cheers at the end of her concert were somewhat “less vehement” than those at the beginning, but perhaps this could be attributed to voices in the audience gone hoarse with overuse. The applause was sufficient, however, to draw Lind out for a final bow, after which people in the crowd began to call for Barnum. Naturally he had a speech prepared for just such an eventuality.

  Among the calls was one, “Where is Barnum?,” that had lately become a question people applied to any new curiosity, suggesting that he must be behind it in some way. Like so many things that were said about Barnum, this phrase seems to have originated with the showman himself. In any case, when he took the stage at Castle Garden, Barnum seemed to acknowledge his authorship by saying, “If there has ever been a moment when I aspired to have the question generally asked, ‘Where Is Barnum?’ that time has passed by forever.” Why? He pointed in the direction Lind had gone upon leaving the stage and asked the audience if, “in the presence of that angel I may be allowed to sink where I really belong—into utter insignificance.” Thus the answer to the question, he said, had become “Barnum is nowhere!” Jenny Lind’s superiority to himself, he said, was proven not only by the talent she had just put on display but more significantly by her decision to donate $10,000 from her share of the proceeds to charities in the city. Barnum then read the names of the dozen lucky organizations, after which three cheers were raised. Calls for Lind to return to the stage went unanswered, as she had already departed the theater.

  The second beneficiary on the list Barnum read was the Musical Fund Society, which had played for her on the night of her arrival. When word of her gift reached them, off they went with a band to the New York Hotel, where Lind had moved to be less conspicuously located. Another crowd of thousands gathered and persuaded her to greet them from her balcony. As it happened, Barnum would write, her share of the receipts from that night did not reach $10,000, but the next concert, two nights later, easily made up the difference. Barnum professed to have worried that he might have overdone the publicity for Lind, that the hype could have led to disappointment and a reaction against the singer. But the first concert had allayed those fears. “The Rubicon,” he writes, “was passed.”11

  * * *

  LIND GAVE FIVE MORE CONCERTS at Castle Garden, the last coming on September 24. When the crowds grew to as many as eight thousand, Barnum’s first-night competence at seating five thousand customers in an orderly way was overwhelmed; at the next-to-last concert, some fifteen hundred standing-room-only ticketholders first blocked the gate to those with seats and then, when they were admitted, “acted more like rowdies than gentlemen . . . actually trampling over ranks of persons already seated.”

  The next stop on her tour was Boston, for which Lind and Barnum departed on the afternoon of the 25th on the steamer Empire State, leaving from a pier near the Battery and sailing past Castle Garden on an overnight trip via Newport and Fall River, where they boarded a special train in the morning. Barnum’s agent for the Jenny Lind tour, Le Grand Smith, had gone ahead to make the arrangements. Among the things Smith arranged were enthusiastic crowds to greet the steamer at Fall River and the train when it arrived in Boston. Soon after her carriage reached the Revere House, where she was staying, another crowd materialized in spite of a persistent rain. The mayor turned up, and in the course of his tedious prepared greeting, her patience with the overnight boat ride, the nearly impassable crowds, and the bloviating politician addressing her came to an end. She interrupted his encomium about her character with the icy query, “What do you know of my private character? . . . Sir, I am no better than other people; no better.” Her tone alone made her point and finally earned her some rest.12

  Things had generally gone so well in New York that the Boston preparations followed the same plan. One of Barnum’s most successful publicity gambits had been to auction off the first ticket to the first Castle Garden performance. Ticket auctions were not his invention, but his goal was less the dollar amount he could squeeze out of that sale and more the publicity it could inspire. He persuaded his next-door neighbor on Broadway, a hatter name John Genin, to go all out at the auction so that he too could soak up some of the publicity it generated. The scheme worked out at least as well for hat sales as it did for ticket sales. Genin won the auction, which took place before an audience at Castle Garden, with a bid of $225, after another friend of Barnum’s, who had gotten the same encouragement to participate, lost his nerve. Genin received national attention for his winning bid, and owning a Genin hat became a sign of sophistication, making him as rich as he was well known. Le Grand Smith arranged a similar auction for the day before Lind’s Boston arrival, and a local singer named Ossian F. Dodge bid up to $625. When Lind got word of this, according to her attorney, her reaction was “What a fool!” But afterward attendance at his own recitals more than compensated Dodge for his investment. Ten days later, in Providence, Rhode Island, a Col. William Ross paid the largest amount of anyone on Lind’s tour, $650, but, contenting himself with the publicity, didn’t bother to attend the event for which he held the most expensive ticket.13

  The first Boston concert took place on September 27 at the Tremont Temple, which had been built as a theater but was now owned by the Baptists. Presumably Moses Kimball had no hard feelings about the choice of venue, since the Tremont seated twice as many people as his theater in the Boston Museum. The program repeated the selections from the opening night in New York, and the reception by the again largely male audience was considered enthusiastic by the more reserved standards of Boston. O
ne departure was that Barnum, when called to the stage after the performance, had very little to say. He did, however, speak at the Tremont two nights later, delivering a temperance lecture to another full house, and was so well received that he was asked to deliver another talk on the following Sunday.14

  Lind gave a second concert at the Tremont and, after a day trip to perform in Providence, devoted an evening’s performance to charity. Perhaps because it was the least well attended of the three so far in Boston, Barnum decided to change the venue for the last two Boston concerts. He chose the upstairs hall of the Fitchburg Railway Depot, which had a much larger capacity than the Tremont but only two narrow entrances and, up a long flight of stairs, a square, low-ceilinged room with bad acoustics. The first concert went off without a hitch, the crowd being much smaller even than those at the Tremont, but Barnum’s advertising and aggressive ticket sales in outlying towns pulled in a huge crowd for the last Boston performance, on Saturday, October 12. According to one report, the six thousand people who turned up made it the largest crowd ever for a Boston event, and since the hall was meant to accommodate only half that number, chaos resulted.15

  Ninety minutes before the concert began, so many standing-room customers had arrived that those with seats could not enter. At 7:30, when the promenade or standing-room customers were admitted, the crowd surged into the building and a scene ensued like that of Lind’s first London concert. Doors were smashed, clothes were torn, women fainted, and once people reached the upstairs lobby they pushed into the hall and took seats that were not theirs. Even after the orchestra began to play, the pandemonium still unfolding in the hall made it impossible to hear. What could be heard was the sound of glass shattering, as the atmosphere in the room became suffocating and the many windows, which could not be opened, were broken in a matter of minutes. First a representative of Lind and then, to hisses, Barnum himself came onto the stage and told the audience that they could have their money back, and word spread to the many people who were still outside waiting to be admitted. Some people then left and the concert went on. But after angry customers surrounded Barnum, shaking fists in his face, he retreated to the Revere House, returning later to make sure Lind could leave the hall safely.