One of Barnum’s other projects was to move a small clock-making business in which he owned stock from the nearby town of Litchfield to an “immense” building in East Bridgeport, from which, he believed, would eventually emerge more than five thousand clocks a month. He estimated that it would bring six hundred new residents to the city. The Litchfield clockmaker merged with another small clockmaker that had already moved to the city, the merger was incorporated as the Terry and Barnum Manufacturing Company, and in 1852 they built a factory for this business. As successful as this venture was as an example of the sort of development Barnum wished to see in East Bridgeport, it led directly to a much bigger outlay and greater risk for Barnum.
Just a few years later, he would write, a visitor named Chauncey Jerome called at Iranistan. He was an inventor and the president of the Jerome Clock Company, a large and well-known clockmaker in New Haven, which employed in good times as many as a thousand people. Jerome had paid for an impressive new church in New Haven and had recently been elected mayor of that city. The company would relocate to East Bridgeport, Jerome said, if Barnum would help his business secure a substantial loan. In the autobiography, Barnum went on at length about the due diligence he did to be sure Jerome’s company was solid. But in the end it was not solid. Barnum never addressed what would seem to be the best reason for him to have been skeptical of the deal: that a newly elected official would willingly initiate a plan to move a thousand workers out of his city. Jerome himself had a different story to tell: that he never called at Iranistan to begin with; that his company, which had by then been run by his son and other investors, had been in good financial shape until it got involved with the Terry and Barnum Company; and that Barnum and Terry’s manufacturing company was itself in debt. If Jerome’s account were the true one, it seems that Barnum could have just as easily blamed his coming financial troubles on Terry as on Jerome, but he did not.3
In any case, Barnum made the decision to involve himself with the Jerome Clock Company, offering to endorse up to $110,000 in notes to help it through a lean time. At this point, Barnum seems to have relied too heavily on his bookkeeper son-in-law, David W. Thompson, husband of Caroline, who oversaw for the busy Barnum all of the East Bridgeport businesses. Barnum began to endorse notes for the Jerome Company willy-nilly, wittingly or unwittingly putting his name on nearly half a million dollars in notes. These notes were used to prop up the Jerome Company, until it went bankrupt in early 1856, paying its debts at only twelve to fifteen cents on the dollar. “To cap the climax,” Barnum wrote, the company “never removed to East Bridgeport at all.”
When the Jerome Company went bankrupt, all but a few of the many balls Barnum had been juggling came thudding to earth at once, “and then,” he admitted, “I failed!” His financial situation was so complicated that he was forced to file for bankruptcy. In his later autobiography, he made his bankruptcy out to be a complete shock. In that book, from the distance of years, he was able to blithely write that his agent brought him “the refreshing intelligence that I was a ruined man!”4
However, as early as the previous summer, Barnum had begun to make moves to protect parts of his fortune, proving that he knew his financial footing was growing increasingly risky. First he sold for a dollar his long-term lease on the first of the two buildings now housing the American Museum to his chief assistant, John Greenwood Jr., who the next day sold it to Charity Barnum for the same amount, thus protecting that asset. At about the same time, he sold the contents of the museum to Greenwood and Henry D. Butler, another associate, for twice what he had spent to create the collection—but he held their notes for “nearly the entire amount.” Greenwood and Butler then rented the museum building from Charity for $19,000 a year above the annual lease amount, which would provide the Barnums with steady income no matter what happened next.5
In a letter he wrote in early February, Barnum began, “The clock folks have wound me up. Never mind. My wife owns the Museum lease, which will give her an annual income for the next 23 years that will support us.” He also moved other properties in Bridgeport into Charity’s name. In the two weeks after he declared bankruptcy, he had mortgaged Iranistan several times for a total of $102,000, an amount more than three times its assessed value. He then used this money to pay his Bridgeport debts to bankers and shopkeepers and made good to local banks some $40,000 in notes they held for the Jerome Company.6
Within days, courts in Connecticut had appointed assignees to handle his assets there, including his East Bridgeport holdings and Iranistan itself, from which the Barnums moved immediately. On February 14 the New York Post reported, “Iranistan is untenanted, all of the furniture having been removed to this city and sold.” The Barnums now lived “in a very frugal manner” in a furnished rental house on West Eighth Street, near Sixth Avenue, many blocks north of the museum that was no longer, at least legally if not in any other way, his. To punctuate their change in circumstances, Barnum wrote that his new landlady and her family were boarding with his family, which was sadly reminiscent of a time in the city when the Barnums had taken in boarders out of immediate financial necessity; he added that he was “once more nearly at the bottom of the ladder.”7
Neither Charity nor her husband could be anything but depressed by this situation, and by April they had moved again, this time on the “orders” of Charity’s doctor, to “a secluded spot on Long Island where the sea wind lends its healthful influence.” Charity was evidently having a hard time adjusting to the loss of their elegant home and servants, and Barnum was himself affected. He wrote that even his “own constitution . . . through the excitements of the last few months, has most seriously failed.” He was, understandably if uncharacteristically, “in the depths.”8
But even now he could not keep his hands off his business. In early February he wrote to a friend in hopes that the friend’s dental assistant, who was Turkish, could help the museum’s nominal proprietor Greenwood acquire “two beautiful Circassian slaves.” The Circassians inhabited a region that touched on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, and the women were famous for their beauty and much desired by sultans as concubines. Barnum reported that he had already written to the U.S. consul in Constantinople, but he was hoping to gain further Turkish assistance for Greenwood. “For my own part,” he wrote disingenuously, “I have renounced business & care forever.” He and his family would stay on Long Island for four months, living on the seaside farm in Westhampton of a man who had often sent shells and other curiosities to the American Museum. One day Barnum and the farmer were out walking on the beach when they came upon some men and a twelve-foot black whale, dead but still “hard and fresh.” Barnum immediately counted out a few dollars to the men who had found it, and shipped it to the museum, “where it was exhibited in a huge refrigerator for a few days.” People swarmed to see it, as Barnum knew they would, and Greenwood and Butler sent him a portion of the receipts, enough to pay the boarding bill for his family for their whole stay in Westhampton. The farmer could not believe Barnum’s luck, especially since it was the first black whale he had ever seen washed up on that shore. “I wonder if that ain’t ‘providential,’ ” the farmer remarked, with a laugh that “resounded, echoed, and re-echoed through the whole neighborhood.”9
Barnum’s financial misfortune inspired the glee of those who had long despised what he stood for, as well as those who no longer felt the economic need to pretend to be his friend; he included a number of newspaper editors in the latter category. But it also became a morality tale of a man brought down by his vanity, of one who had often played fast with others now being the victim of such “cuteness.” Even before his bankruptcy became official, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a letter to his wife, pointed out “that P. T. Barnum has assigned his property,—which is what old people called—the gods visible again.” By “old people” he meant the ancients and their belief that the gods would step forward to administer justice where it was deserved. James Gordon Bennett and other newspapermen sa
w Barnum’s downfall as the final chapter of his autobiography: “The author of that book glorifying himself as a millionaire . . . is completely crushed out. . . . It is a case eminently adapted to ‘point a moral or adorn a tale.’ ” As for the Richmond Daily Dispatch, always eager to see any situation through a regionalist lens, it blamed Barnum’s troubles on his Yankee sharpness and delighted that a different Yankee sharper, the Connecticut clockmaker Jerome, had “stopped the clock of Barnum, and prevented it from ever ticking again.” The paper predicted, prematurely, that Barnum’s “sayings and doings will no longer be chronicled by the New York press,” and scolded that when his bankruptcy was “added, by way of appendix to his autobiography, [it] will prove an antidote to the bane of that shameless production.”10
But, as Barnum related, a strong gale of support arose from “hosts of hitherto unknown friends” who were eager to offer him “something more than sympathy.” Many people proposed to lend or give him money to get back on his feet or to organize public benefits “by the score, the returns of which would have made me quite independent.” A letter signed by more than a thousand New Yorkers, among them Cornelius Vanderbilt, journalists, businessmen, hoteliers, the Delmonico’s restaurant family, and at least one prominent general, appeared in New York papers in early June, expressing support and proposing benefits on his behalf—and drawing the predictable scorn of the Herald. Theater owners such as Laura Keene and William Niblo offered the proceeds of an evening’s performance. In Bridgeport a large meeting of citizens, called by the mayor to express their collective sympathy and support, featured addresses by prominent citizens, resolutions, and the reading of a letter from Barnum, an event such as he himself might have organized. (Aware that people could see his own hand behind this gathering, Barnum felt the need to assert in his letter, “I knew nothing of this movement until your letter informed me of it.”) In the days after the meeting, a group of his neighbors across the city line in Bridgeport offered him a loan of $50,000.11
With some exceptions, Barnum declined these many outpourings of financial support, publicly stating, “While favored with health, I feel competent to earn an honest livelihood for myself and family.” His unwillingness to accept help had several sources. He was, and had every right to be, proud of the things he had accomplished largely on his own, and that pride and the self-confidence that went with it were not likely to evaporate even in this moment of distress. Because he was still besieged by creditors both honest and conniving, and was and would continue to spend many hours defending himself in court, any gifts or loans publicly known might soon be attached in legal proceedings. But, finally, he could fall back on the truth expressed by one of his favorite witticisms, drawn from the King James Version of First Corinthians: “Without Charity, I am nothing.” Because enough of his wealth had been put in Charity’s name, safe from legal challenges, he could afford to take the time he needed to wade through the mess he had created—or as he constantly emphasized, the mess created by the deception of others.12
Perhaps the most welcome and the most heartfelt of all the offers Barnum received in his first months of bankruptcy came from Tom Thumb, now all of eighteen years old. Filled with the usual dreadful puns about his size, Tom’s letter acknowledged the many people who had offered Barnum help and asked to be remembered as someone who belonged to “that mighty crowd.” Although he was in Philadelphia at the start of a western tour, he pledged himself “ready to go on to New-York, bag and baggage, and remain at Mrs. Barnum’s service as long as I, in my small way, can be useful.” He mentioned that he had pulled in two thousand customers at a single performance that very day and volunteered to help Barnum “attract all New-York.” Whether or not the letter was intended for publication, it feels, for all its sincerity, like a performance, and Barnum soon saw it published in the Tribune. The showman declined even this offer from his friend, but soon enough he and the little general would be collaborating again, although far from Philadelphia or New York.13
* * *
TAKEN TOGETHER, THE REACTIONS TO Barnum’s autobiography and bankruptcy provided an unusual, and unusually intense, public evaluation of a person still in his forties who was not a presidential candidate, a general, or an explorer. Barnum had become so familiar a public figure that by this time in his life his name was often used in the newspapers, and presumably in private conversation, as shorthand for a number of qualities: energetic promotion or self-promotion, interest in the odd or the exotic, business acumen and the ability to beat out competition, and, finally and foremost, the vast realm of humbug. In the United States, the British Isles, and Europe, Barnum embodied an identifiable American type—the go-getter—and was also one of the most renowned examples of the growing fluidity in social class that was a central factor of life on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century.
Barnum’s financial success was one thing, but his acceptance by the British upper class in the 1840s and by such prominent Americans as Commodore Vanderbilt and Horace Greeley in the 1850s suggested that a person could move not only from rags to riches but even from obscurity to respectability. This proposition was what made him such a controversial figure, someone whom Bennett and many other editors could routinely denounce to an audience eager to see Barnum put in his place, a man whom Emerson and members of the intelligentsia in the United States and Britain could find both sneer-worthy and also alarming. That the middle classes responded so readily to what Barnum offered—to his hoaxes and publicity stunts but also to the way he challenged them to see with their own eyes and rely on their own judgment—was partly what defenders of tradition, the perquisites of class, the intellectual elite, and culture itself, as they saw it, were railing against when they attacked Barnum. Yes, his smugness was irritating, but it was his role as a leader of the mob assaulting the citadels of culture—for example, by undermining serious theater with his moralistic melodramas—that made him a palpable threat.
Even those who sneered, however, could get Barnum’s place with the average American just about right. John Delaware Lewis, the British son of a Russian merchant whose sneering came by way of Eton and Cambridge, made a jaunt to the United States and brought back sketches collected in 1851 as Across the Atlantic. “By ‘going-a-head’ to an extent hitherto unprecedented in his trade—devoid of any absurd delicacy as to the means by which the ends are to be accomplished,” Lewis observed, Barnum “has endeared himself to the middle and lower ranks of his countrymen, and seems to stand forth proud and preeminent as their model of a speculator and a man.” Lewis might not have fully approved, but he recognized Barnum’s preeminence. The perennial popularity of the American Museum, the robust sales of the autobiography, the widespread appeal of his nostrums for success in business, and the eagerness of newspapers across the land to print any snatch of news or gossip about him all proved that, for all his faults, “Old Barnum” was, in our striving, democratic country, the object more often of respectful affection than of scorn.14
* * *
BY EARLY DECEMBER 1856, WEARY of the financial shell game and legal wrangling that took up so much of his time, and longing for his old life as a showman, Barnum set sail for Liverpool, where nearly thirteen years earlier he had landed with Tom Thumb to begin their successful campaign to win over the British public. The little general himself would soon join him again, but for the moment, Barnum accompanied “an exceedingly talented trio, Mr. & Mrs. Howard & their little daughter, Cordelia, an exquisite actress of eight years.” The Howards were known for playing in the musical version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and little Cordelia broke hearts as the soulful Little Eva. Once he reached Liverpool, Barnum went back to the Royal Waterloo Hotel, where he was now friendly with the staff, marveling over how little they and the hotel had changed over the years, and ordered again the meal he had first had there, “fried soles and shrimp sauce.”15
As was the case on that first trip to England, he came without bookings but soon approached theater managers with the pitc
h that, given his dire financial straits, “I should never have crossed the Atlantic with an attraction which I did not know possessed every element of immense success.” Soon both the Howards and Tom Thumb were “making much money” for Barnum in London and other English cities, and as a result, “my health & spirits are much better than I would like to have many suppose.” Charity was also feeling stronger, and by late spring she and two of their daughters, Helen and Pauline, joined him in London. Meanwhile he was dining often with old friends like Thackeray, Albert Smith, Julius Benedict and Giovanni Belletti, and various theater managers and journalists. Otto Goldschmidt visited him with an offer of help from Jenny Lind and encouraged him to move to Dresden, where he and Jenny lived and where he said that Barnum could live frugally.16
But the financial picture was brightening, and after the Howards returned to America, Barnum and Tom Thumb went to Germany, via Paris and Strasbourg. The general appeared at various spas in Germany, including Baden-Baden—“a delightful little town, cleaner and neater than any city I had ever visited.” The high-rolling clientele, who visited these spa towns as much for their gambling establishments as for taking the waters, supported large admissions charges for Tom’s exhibitions. These performances soon became “the most profitable that had ever been given,” permitting Barnum to send thousands of dollars back home to help clear his debts and buy back some of his former holdings. The two men went on to Holland, where Barnum was once again hugely impressed by the local neatness and cleanliness, in which the country was “evidently not next to, but far ahead of godliness.” But the frugality of the Dutch made it harder to fill seats for Tom’s performances, so he and the general spent most of their time sightseeing before returning to England.17
Barnum Page 21