Barnum

by Robert Wilson

  In spite of Clemens’s reluctance to be used for promotional purposes by Barnum, the two men developed a kind of friendship. They had many friends in common, among them Horace Greeley, and both men had been present at a party celebrating what turned out to be Greeley’s last birthday, his sixty-first, in February 1872, at a private home on West Fifty-Seventh Street.5

  Although Clemens would not write on demand, he did find Barnum a good subject, and in 1874, when a great comet was visible in the northern hemisphere for much of July, he wrote a humorous sketch for the July 6 Herald called “A Curious Pleasure Excursion.” In it, he informed his readers that he had teamed with Barnum to rent the comet for “an extended excursion among the heavenly bodies.” The plan was to fix up a million staterooms in the tail of the comet, each room with all the amenities, ranging from hot water to a parachute. Such public amusements as a driving park and bowling alleys would also grace the comet, and a daily newspaper would be published as they flitted among the stars. The cost would be $2 per fifty million miles of travel, and the date of return would be December 14, 1991. Requests for further information were to be addressed “to my partner but not to me.”6

  Barnum wrote in response, “My dear Clemens, I owe you a thousand thanks for taking me into partnership,” and invited him and his family to Bridgeport for clambakes and “jolly times.” Clemens seems to have accepted, because within two weeks he was expressing his enthusiasm for a project the two men had discussed, a collection of the odd letters each of them received as public personalities. Barnum had sent him a sample, to which Clemens responded, “Again I beseech you, don’t burn a single specimen, but remember that all are wanted & possess value in the eyes of your friend.” Over the next few years, Barnum would send him the best of these letters, “bushels” of which he had been destroying before the Clemens project came along. But in the end nothing came of these plans.7

  An easy habit developed between the Barnums and the Clemenses of visiting back and forth between Bridgeport and Hartford. Nancy liked literary people, and when Clemens sent him a stack of his books, Barnum wrote him, “My wife ardently hopes to see you place your autograph in these volumes under the roof of Waldemere. There will be a row if her anticipations are blasted.” Six months later, Barnum wrote of a visit that he and Nancy had made to Clemens’s Nook Farm home, “My wife is deranged on the subject of a fernery like yours, so our call on you the other day will be cheap if I get off for $1000 or $1500.”8

  Barnum persisted in sending Clemens long letters describing the latest efforts in his traveling show and requesting that Mark Twain write something about it. Often the thrust of his description was not just the variety and magnificence of what Barnum had put into the shows, but how much they had cost him to put on. Clearly Barnum seemed to feel that Clemens would be impressed by these large expenditures, and just as clearly Clemens was not. These letters don’t just feel obtuse; they feel more than a little embarrassing.9

  When Barnum asked Clemens to come down from Hartford to introduce him for a speech he would be giving to benefit the poor, he seemed to know that the answer would be no, and so he implored, “This once, & I will never, NEVER, NEVER ask a like favor of you.” Once again, the answer from Hartford was no. Yet exactly three months later, in January 1878, Barnum began another letter, “This is a begging letter! Awful!! ” He asked this time for only five lines above Twain’s signature, to be included in a collection of “congratulatory utterances” on Barnum’s career by “distinguished gentlemen,” which he intended to publish in his circular for the next season. The letter ended on an imploring note, calling Clemens “My dear boy” and hoping he had not written in vain. Yet again, he had. Barnum’s response to this latest rejection sounded notes of frustration and even self-pity. If Mark Twain could only have said publicly some of the complimentary things he had said in letters to Barnum, well, “it would have been nice.”10

  That Clemens had a high opinion of Barnum’s autobiography seems to have been something Barnum knew, and he was sure to send Clemens each year’s new edition. Yet he remained overeager for approval from the famous younger man, and his eagerness always had to do with winning that approval on his own, very public terms—rather than accepting Clemens’s continuing resolve not to mix art and commerce. Eventually it was obvious to the two men that this dynamic was not making either of them happy; after early 1878 the flow of letters slowed, and the relationship became more distant.

  * * *

  IN 1875 BARNUM DECIDED TO incorporate the two principal shows he had going, the Travelling World’s Fair and the Roman Hippodrome, along with smaller ventures, into the Barnum Universal Exposition Company, which brought into ownership his senior managers and some of his friends. However, the larger show proved a loser for the season. Several factors began to hurt attendance, the most unlikely of which was that, because the hippodrome show did not include clowns, country people would not attend, and so it did poorly outside big cities. (Barnum admitted in the year’s edition only that it had been a “tolerably successful season, notwithstanding the depressed state of finances generally.”) At the end of the 1875 tour, the new company was broken up, and its assets, including its animals, were sold at auction. Barnum bought back some of these assets to try out a new centennial touring show in 1876.11

  In the meantime, he was approached by a group of Republicans urging him to run for mayor of Bridgeport. Because the town had a Democratic majority, he said he would run only if both parties supported him. They did, but even so there was another candidate in the race, and the election came down to the wire. Barnum won a one-year term by just 141 votes out of four thousand votes cast. His opening speech in April to the Common Council, whose members also served for a year, encouraged them to act honestly, impartially, and prudently. His own special interest would be to regulate as much as possible the sale of alcohol, or at least to vigorously enforce existing liquor laws. More quixotically, he also called for stamping out prostitution and gambling.

  During his year in office, Barnum did make a serious dent in the sale of liquor in saloons on Sundays. As mayor, he was also an advocate for good and efficient government, finding a company that would provide gas to the city more cheaply, and pushing without much success to get the company that supplied water to the city (in which he held stock) to do a better job. The biggest stink during his mayoralty came when a local newspaper wrote that he had referred to Jewish saloon owners who had kept their establishments open on Sundays as “miserable Jews,” whereas Barnum claimed he had in fact said “miserable whiskey” and asked the newspaper to print a retraction. A committee of Jewish citizens considered the matter and cleared him on the grounds of what he had presumably meant, if not on what he had actually said. The Common Council itself was largely made up of Democrats, leading to frustrations and frequent clashes. After a year Barnum decided that one term as mayor was sufficient.12

  While mayor, he spent parts of the summer traveling to Niagara Falls with Nancy and some of her English friends, former neighbors from Southport who had been visiting at Waldemere, and stopping in at the hippodrome show as it appeared in various cities. In the fall he gave thirty lectures titled “The World and How to Live in It,” under the auspices of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, whose clients included Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, and many of the country’s other most sought-after lecturers. He traveled as far west as Leavenworth, Kansas, on the tour, and spoke in Kansas City, Chicago, and major cities in the East. At the end of the tour, Barnum received a letter from the Bureau saying that he had delighted audiences more than any of their “best lecturers.”13

  When Barnum’s 1876 American Centennial show was up and running, it would augment his tried and true exhibits with “patriotic features that gave the people a Fourth of July celebration every day.” This included an abundance of American flags, a thirteen-cannon barrage before each morning’s parade, marchers dressed as Revolutionary soldiers led on white hor
ses by figures depicting Generals Washington and Lafayette, a fife and drum corps, a chorus of several hundred people singing patriotic songs, a live eagle, and fireworks at night, along with the usual museum, menagerie, and circus features. Although Coup and Castello were no longer involved, Hurd was, as were the owners of the European Menagerie and Circus, which Barnum had bought and folded into his new show.

  One of his innovations in 1876 was the creation of a specially fitted-up advertising rail car that would precede the show by at least two weeks, with press agents and poster hangers—a twelve-person “paste brigade”—to stir up interest in the city or town where the show would appear as well as in the surrounding countryside. The car itself was put on display where it stopped, with a portrait of Barnum and scenes from the upcoming circus painted on either side. Up to $100,000 a year was devoted to these publicity efforts. The Centennial show traveled as far east as Nova Scotia (where the chorus sang “God Save the Queen” rather than its usual “Star-Spangled Banner”) and as far west as Illinois, but the profits from the season were, Barnum wrote, only “satisfactory.”

  To increase the crowds and profits for the 1877 season, the patriotism was toned down and five black stallions from Germany that could stand in unison on their hind legs were introduced. Traveling on nearly a hundred steel railcars, the spectacle was now billing itself as P. T. Barnum’s New and Only Greatest Show on Earth—Barnum’s first use of that famous phrase. In 1877 the show would visit Canada, go across the Midwest and as far south and west as Texas, advertising ten thousand “rare and startling curiosities” and a menagerie that included a “$25,000 Hippopotamus from the river Nile.” A “Greek nobleman,” Capt. George Costentenus, tattooed on every inch of his body, often topped the promotional efforts.

  Barnum’s partners were now grumbling about their arrangement with him, suggesting that he should spend more time visiting the show on the road and that he was soaking up profits while selling the use of his name elsewhere. Hard feelings grew on both sides, as Barnum, perhaps rightly, felt that his partners were taking for granted just how much he was doing behind the scenes to bring in new performers. At least for a time, the rift was patched up, and the partnership would last through the 1880 season before coming to an end.

  Near the close of this run, one of the acts that drew the biggest crowds was “Zazel, the Beautiful Human Cannon Ball,” a young Englishwoman who would walk a tightrope and then dramatically sight a large cannon before climbing down into it. The cannon contained a powerful spring that projected her as high as eighty feet, sending her into a net. A harmless charge of powder sent smoke and flame up after her as she was sprung.

  Such new acts did not appear by magic, as Barnum was keen to point out. Agents would approach him, seeking the prestige of having their performers appear in a Barnum show. But much of the new talent emerged through the worldwide network of agents he had spent years developing and still worked hard to maintain. In March 1877 an English weekly society paper, The World, published a profile of Barnum at Waldemere for one of its “Celebrities at Home” features. Even the subject himself admitted that the piece was “too flattering,” but it feels persuasive in describing him contentedly spending his mornings in his “work-shop” or study, a paneled octagonal room where he sat at “a large and much littered desk, with papers strewn ankle-deep around his chair,” an assistant within calling distance in the next room.14

  Each morning, Barnum would busily answer his mail and send out requests to his agents, asking them to procure specific animals or acts he needed to fill out a show or replace an act that wasn’t drawing or an animal that had died. These letters reminded his agents that he was always on the lookout for something special and would pay top dollar to procure it. He was protective of this morning time just as, later in the day, he would protect his leisure time, telling people who had business on their mind to see him the next morning.

  The article in The World was also glowing about Nancy, praising her for the good taste displayed inside the house and the high regard in which “the best families in Bridgeport” held her for her kindness, intelligence, and good conversation. Barnum’s “full face beams with extra smiles when he is near,” the reporter wrote.

  Not a month later, however, sadness would envelop this happy home. On April 11, 1877, Barnum’s youngest daughter, Pauline, died suddenly at the age of thirty-one, having first caught measles and then diphtheria. She left behind her husband, Nathan Seeley, a daughter, two sons, and a broken-hearted father. The family was “stricken with a heavy sorrow,” Barnum wrote, adding that only his faith kept the blow from being “insupportable.” In midsummer he and Nancy sailed to England for two months, where he gave lectures and visited with old friends, whose solace he had sought soon after Charity’s death three and a half years before.15

  That November, Barnum chose to step back into politics once more, now representing not Fairfield but Bridgeport in the Connecticut General Assembly. This time he was given the chairmanship of the Temperance Committee, where he worked on behalf of his favorite cause. He would be reelected the following November for a fourth term as an assemblyman, and during that year he introduced an amendment to abolish capital punishment, a Universalist cause. At age seven, he had witnessed the hanging of a black man in Danbury before a huge, carnival-like crowd. He remembered later that his mother had groaned when the man’s body dropped, and his memory of it as an adult disgusted him. Now, as a legislator, he could try to do something about it.16

  During this legislative session in Hartford he also distinguished himself by enlivening a debate over tax exemptions for religious and educational entities, proposing with mock seriousness that his own “great moral show” ought certainly be included among those exempted institutions. In January 1878 he wrote a letter marked “private” to the Tribune’s editor and owner Whitelaw Reid, asking for a “fair showing” should his name be put forward as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut. It wasn’t, and instead, in 1880, he ran for the state senate from Bridgeport. He was beaten this time around in an unusually vituperative race, and soon after the loss he wrote in a letter that he “never had any real taste for office, & now in my 71st year I have a real dislike for it.” He expressed his relief, as ever looking on the bright side, at not having to spend time in Hartford that might have been devoted to his children and grandchildren. Although there would later be some faint rumblings about his running for president on a Prohibition ticket, with this his political career came to an end.17

  Barnum’s name recognition, his speaking ability, and his strong opinions had often tempted the Republican Party to put him forward for elective office, and his own eagerness to run was surely an outgrowth of his need for respectability. Whenever he was in office, though, he did not rest on his celebrity. Barnum was genuinely civic-minded, generously contributing to his city and his church, and the voters who knew him best chose him to represent them. His five terms in office, four in the assembly, one as mayor, gave him opportunities to put his political and moral views into play, and he acquitted himself honorably as an officeholder, if not always as a candidate. Perhaps he did not change the world, but he worked hard at getting things done and lived up to the Founders’ ideal of the citizen politician. The exigencies of politics drove him away more than the voters did, and for this reason it was probably for the best that his attempts at higher office never succeeded. More than anything else, his forays into politics were an expression of his restless energy and productivity, and it is hard to imagine him, Mark Twain’s parody notwithstanding, mired in the halls of Congress.

  * * *

  AFTER LOSING THE ELECTION IN 1880, Barnum returned his focus to his touring show. In this season, one of his most vexed, and in the end most telling relationships would erupt in public acrimony. For more than a decade, Barnum had engaged in a contentious back-and-forth with Henry W. Bergh, the wealthy son of a New York shipbuilder who had served as one of President Lincoln’s envoys to Russia before retu
rning home to found the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

  In Barnum’s telling, and to some extent in the newspapers of his time, which referred to him as “The Great Meddler,” Bergh was a comic figure, prone to act before he thought and to base his strong condemnations on an imperfect understanding of the fauna he sought to protect. Just months after his society was founded in 1866 and an anti–animal cruelty law was passed, which gave the society the responsibility of enforcing the measure, Bergh took on Barnum for publicly feeding live animals to his boa constrictor. He accused Barnum of being a “semi-barbarian” for allowing the practice, which Bergh called an “atrocity.” He predicted that no animal would allow itself to starve if dead food were available, which his opponent took issue with. Barnum sent the letter in which these charges were made to famed Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz, who agreed with Barnum that the snakes would eat only live food. Barnum kept feeding his boas live prey and saw the ordeal as an unnecessary fuss. Yet Bergh did achieve a small victory, convincing Barnum at the very least to stop making a public spectacle of the feedings, which thereafter happened only at night.

  For the 1880 circus season, Barnum had imported from Germany a horse named Salamander, which would jump “through flaming hoops of blazing fire . . . over burning gates, bars & barriers,” as one dramatically colorful circus poster promised. This again sparked Bergh’s concern. On the first night, one of the handlers mishandled a hoop, and Salamander’s mane and tail seemed to have caught fire, which brought an immediate reaction from Bergh. He ordered Barnum to stop putting on the act.