Barnum, however, held that Bergh had got it wrong, that the horse had not been burned at all, because the hoops were not blazing with real fire but a chemical compound that only looked like fire. Ever the showman, Barnum announced to the world that he would reprise the act on a particular day, and invited Bergh and his “Berghsmen” enforcers to attend. The dispute had of course made the papers, so the circus was crowded with patrons and reporters when Barnum entered the ring and announced, “Either Mr. Bergh or I shall run this show, and I don’t think it will be Mr. Bergh.” Bergh himself had chosen not to be present for the challenge, but ranged around the circus ring were a number of his agents and policemen, apparently ready to arrest Barnum. In front of the crowd, Barnum ran his hand through the flames and then stepped through one of the burning hoops. Ten clowns then “performed a number of ludicrous antics through the hoops,” followed by Salamander. Barnum then invited an ASPCA official to do the same thing, which he did, after which he declared that the flames were harmless and Bergh had been mistaken. As the crowd cheered wildly, the enforcement officers departed, the police captain “looking somewhat crestfallen.”18
Although Barnum drew the maximum amount of publicity value from his victory, he wrote, “This episode did not impair my personal regard for Mr. Bergh and my admiration of his noble works.” This is perhaps the most Barnumesque thing about their rivalry: the regard was real and mutual between the two. At the beginning of the same month of the Salamander dispute, Bergh had recommended Barnum for the board of the Bridgeport ASPCA, which was just forming, citing the showman’s “generous and sympathetic instincts” for animals. In the inevitable speech he had given upon entering the ring for the Salamander fire demonstration, Barnum had pointed out that he had decades before been a member in England of the royal society upon which Bergh had patterned his ASPCA and that he had lobbied Bridgeport’s mayor to start a local chapter. After the chapter was founded, Barnum liked to style himself the “Bergh of Bridgeport.” Eventually the two men became friends, and in 1885 Barnum invited Bergh to Waldemere for the inevitable clambake, Bergh presumably accepting on the condition that the clams were indeed baked and not still alive. When Bergh died during a huge snowstorm in March 1888, a wreath from Barnum was among the few decorations near the altar for Bergh’s “impressive funeral services” at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan, and Barnum marched in the processional.19
After fighting hard with elbows out for their own point of view, both men may be credited with a willingness to not demonize and ultimately dismiss the other but to see what was good about a man with whom they strongly disagreed. It’s worth pointing out, though, that Bergh, despite the gaps in his zoological knowledge and his occasional overzealousness, would be seen by history as far more than the comic figure that Barnum and others accused him of being. What he started has done and still does a remarkable amount of good. Barnum may have known animals and their habits better than Bergh did, and had a clear economic incentive to treat them as well as the state of human knowledge about wild animals permitted, retaining naturalists and successful animal keepers to care for his menageries. But even leaving aside troubling questions in our own day about the morality of capturing, training, and displaying wild creatures, it must be recognized that Barnum’s unceasing efforts to cull animals from distant places in the world had a price beyond the dollars he boasted about spending in their procurement. Capturing them was often a bloody business, and transporting them an imperfect science, as was keeping them alive once they arrived in an often inhospitable climate. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington was a frequent recipient of the remains of exotic animals that died in Barnum’s care. The showman undoubtedly regretted these losses for more than their financial consequences, but the show business demanded that they be replaced, and Barnum’s own credo was to always add more than had been lost.20
NINETEEN
* * *
* * *
AND BAILEY
In March 1880 the first elephant conceived in America was born in Philadelphia, at the winter quarters of the Great London Circus. The glut of publicity surrounding the birth impressed Barnum, and when the baby was two months old, he telegrammed its owners, three Jameses surnamed Bailey, Cooper, and Hutchinson, offering $100,000 in cash for the mother, named Hebe, and her offspring, which would eventually be known as Little Columbia. As Barnum good-naturedly wrote, “They gleefully rejected my offer, pleasantly told me to look to my laurels, and wisely held on to their treasure.” Not only that, but they began an advertising campaign under the heading “What Barnum Thinks of the Baby Elephant,” reproducing his telegram with its lavish offer.1
Barnum was also impressed by how well the three younger men had turned the tables on him, using his own methods. “Foemen ‘worthy of my steel,’ ” he called them. The Great London had dogged Barnum’s circus in the previous season, often scheduling dates in the same towns to draw off his business. Even in Bridgeport itself they had outsold Barnum’s show two to one. “Barnum finally retreated to the West,” according to an 1891 article that had Bailey as its source, “and Bailey had the East to himself.”2
The aging showman realized he had finally met his match, and he concluded it would be wiser to join them than to continue competing with them. Difficult negotiations began, as Barnum decided at the same time to extract himself from his existing partnership, but by late August he had an agreement with Bailey and Hutchinson, their partner Cooper having withdrawn. The new arrangement would combine the two circuses, at least in the first year, with Barnum responsible for half of the expenditures and receiving half the profits, and the other two men each in for a quarter of the same. None of the three would draw a salary, and the two younger men, whom Barnum called “sagacious and practical managers,” would run the show with advice from Barnum, who would be encouraged but not required to be present at performances. Barnum also agreed not to sell the use of his name elsewhere, unless he decided to start another museum.
As the ink was drying on their agreement, Barnum, Bailey, and Hutchinson decided to combine their wintering operations on land Barnum owned in Bridgeport—the very same land where Barnum had years before so ostentatiously farmed by elephant for the benefit of passing railroad passengers. The site’s adjacency to a railroad line—the New York, New Haven, and Hartford—was its major advantage. A huge shed more than three hundred feet long went up in the fall of 1880 to shelter eight tracks containing scores of railroad cars. Other buildings contained what the cars transported: an elephant house; another for lions, tigers, and leopards; one with a large pond for amphibians (where, Barnum said, the elephants were allowed to visit for a bath); another for other caged animals; and stables for up to seven hundred horses. A nursery tended to newborn animals, and a number of shops repaired the equipment, from gilded chariots to harnesses. All of the structures were heated by steam to an appropriate temperature.
A circus ring was set up to give performers a chance to practice in the off-season. Many of the hundreds of performers—and those who supported them, who raised the tents and handled other equipment, and who trained and cared for the animals—would make their homes in Bridgeport or thereabouts, establishing the city as an important circus town well into the next century, a boon to rival the establishment of East Bridgeport three decades earlier.3
In the middle of November, while all of this frenzied construction was under way, Barnum was in lower Manhattan wrapping up his affairs with his former circus partners when “he was seized by a violent pain in the abdominal region” and “with much difficulty” gotten to Samuel Hurd’s house at 334 Lexington Avenue. Several doctors examined him, including his family doctor from Bridgeport, and they agreed that he had a blockage in his intestine. They gave him morphine for the pain, and for more than a week he was critically ill. By Thanksgiving Day, November 25, he was able to sit up and visit with friends at Hurd’s, but he was sickened again in early December. A violent inability to keep food down dropped his weight from 215 pounds t
o an alarming 144. By the middle of the month, he asked that all the congregations in Bridgeport pray “for His blessings to rest upon me,” and there was real fear that he would die. (Even in extremis, he or someone he knew managed to get his appeal to the churches published in the New-York Times.) Barnum himself later wrote that he spent “many weeks between life and death.” By the spring he was well enough to travel to Florida to complete his recovery, but he did not return north until April, and so missed the grand opening of the Barnum & London Circus at his Hippodrome site, which was now known as Madison Square Garden.4
The arrangements by his new partners more than satisfied Barnum. Half a million people watched as the new circus snaked its way through the crowded streets on Saturday night, March 26, 1881, beginning and ending at the Garden. The parade featured twenty elephants large and small, golden chariots, car after car containing animal cages—some drawn by wild animals ranging from camels to zebras—open cages of tigers and leopards with their trainers, a dozen riders on horseback in military uniforms representing as many nations, Gen. and Mrs. Tom Thumb in their tiny carriage, four brass bands, a steam calliope, a chariot full of bagpipers, and much more, all illuminated by torchlight, fireworks, limelight, and electric lights. As the Tribune succinctly put it, “The procession was very long.” People paid up to $10 for a spot in a window overlooking the parade route.
Two days later, when the circus opened in Madison Square Garden, admission was fifty cents, half that for children under nine. “The only drawback,” a writer for the Herald said of the combined circus performing in three rings surrounded by a hippodrome track, “was that the spectator was compelled to receive more than his money’s worth. . . . While his head was turned in one direction, he felt that he was losing something good in another.” Among the attractions was the baby elephant, not yet named, that had brought the circuses together, “now one year old and still nursing,” as an advertisement for the show put it. The circus paid all expenses for nearly a hundred newspapermen from outposts along the route that the show would follow to come to New York for its grand parade and opening show. Freebies for journalists were nothing new, especially in the entertainment business, but to appeal for good press coverage on this scale, and to assure it for the months the circus would be out on the road, was positively Barnumesque. As the showman himself put it, the effort and expense yielded “a magnificent return.”5
After a short run in New York, the circus went to Washington, where Barnum met it on his return from Florida, feeling well enough to call on the newly inaugurated President James A. Garfield, to whom he had sent a congratulatory and promotional letter in March, headed “No office wanted!” and including an eerie expression of hope: “Do please have the kindness to live, and then our country will be blessed.” (President Garfield would be shot a few months later and die of his wounds in September.) Barnum gathered endorsements for the show from the president, who called him “the Kris Kringle of America,” and other Washington worthies. He also had time in April to sue the Philadelphia Sun for writing that he did not own the circus but only leased his name to it. The newspaper relented and the suit was withdrawn.6
As further evidence of his recovery, he, Nancy, and his grandson Clinton Hallett Seeley—Pauline’s oldest son—sailed to England in May, staying for a month, after which he reported that he was now “invigorated by that finest of all tonics, a sea-voyage.” In August he presented to his native village of Bethel a comically oversized Baroque bronze fountain topped by a statue of Triton. The fountain had originally been placed just beyond the fence at Waldemere, sized for its distance from the house and its backdrop of Long Island Sound. Saxon writes that Barnum tried to give the thing to Bridgeport, but when its Common Council demurred, he dropped it on Bethel instead. The day of the presentation, August 19, 1881, turned into a village holiday, with a large crowd before which Barnum gave a nostalgic homecoming speech about growing up there. Even given his warm memories of his boyhood, Barnum concluded that the present was “a more charitable and enlightened age,” evidence that “the world is continually growing wiser and better.”7
Barnum’s optimism might have been enhanced by the recovery of his health but also by how well the new combined circus was doing on the road. It would travel more than twelve thousand miles in 1881, before closing for the season in Arkansas in November, having netted more than $400,000. The next year the show would clear more than $600,000, and it would be profitable every remaining year of Barnum’s life.
Early in 1881 there had been some testing of the limits of authority on both sides in the new arrangement, and several of Barnum’s people left when they felt preempted by the London Circus managers. Hutchinson, nicknamed Lord Hutchinson by Barnum’s people, was especially irksome to them. He had worked for Barnum before, as a sales agent for Struggles and Triumphs, and had been head of the concessions for the Cooper and Bailey circus. Now he was the financial officer for the new circus and Bailey’s second in command. When the frustration he caused induced Barnum’s bookkeeper for the show to quit, Barnum replaced him with a cousin of Nancy’s from England. The cousin, Benjamin Fish, who had also previously worked for a Barnum show, would discover that Bailey and Hutchinson’s bookkeeping left something to be desired. But he ultimately counseled that this unscrupulousness be overlooked because of how much money the show was making. The partnership held together, but it undoubtedly reassured Barnum to have a family member watching the show’s finances.
Besides employing Fish to look out for his interests on the road, Barnum had two other faithful employees in Bridgeport who helped him with his many interests. From offices on Main Street, Henry E. Bowser closely watched Barnum’s other business finances, assisted with his correspondence, and generally kept things moving smoothly with or without Barnum’s immediate involvement. Charles R. Brothwell, whose background was in public works, managed Barnum’s real-estate empire, advising him on purchases and sales, overseeing construction projects, and handling rental properties. Barnum’s holdings just in Bridgeport and East Bridgeport were estimated to be worth more than a million dollars in 1880, plus he owned a considerable amount of property in New York City, on Long Island, and in Colorado and a number of other heartland states. Barnum liked to call Bowser and Brothwell his “Busy B’s,” and they seem to have been as loyal and honest as they were busy.8
But it was another B, James Anthony Bailey, who was undoubtedly the great find of Barnum’s later business life. Bailey was a showman through and through, even acquiring his surname from a circus advance man named F. H. Bailey, who hired him at the age of fourteen. Named James McGinnis when he was born in Detroit on July 4, 1847, the boy lost both his parents by the age of eight and was afterward treated as the Cinderella of his guardians’ family. “I was made to work like a dog,” he later said. “On the slightest provocation I was whipped. . . . I was kept working so hard that I was always late at school, so I was continually being whipped by the teacher and kept after school.” He ran away from this unhappy arrangement at twelve, barefoot and wearing “a big straw hat”; his “only possession was a jackknife, with one broken blade.” He worked for a farmer until he met Bailey in Pontiac, Michigan, and after that did a variety of jobs, including posting bills for the circus before working in 1865 as clerk to a sutler (a civilian who sold provisions to the army) for Sherman’s army near the end of the Civil War.
After the war, back in the show line, he eventually saved enough money to buy into a circus, and by 1874 he was half owner of Cooper & Bailey’s International Allied Shows. That circus went on an extended tour in 1876, sailing from San Francisco, making its way through the Pacific to Australia, Tasmania, Java, New Zealand, and from there to Peru, around Cape Horn, and eventually up to Rio de Janeiro. The circus made money on the Pacific part of the tour but lost many animals on the rough and lengthy passage to Peru, and the South American tour did not pay. When they returned to New York in December 1878, they restored themselves by buying the Great London Circus an
d its menagerie with what money they had left and soon became the threat to Barnum that led to the uniting of the two major shows.9
Bailey and Barnum were different in striking ways, but ways that turned out to be complementary. As the lion tamer George Conklin, who worked for what became Barnum & Bailey, recalled:
Barnum was a big, strong man; Bailey was small and thin; Barnum was seldom troubled; Bailey was always anxious. There was never a man who loved publicity more than Barnum, while Bailey disliked personal notoriety. . . . He enjoyed best being the great silent power that made the show go and grow. . . . Bailey was the first man to appear in the morning, and no detail was too small for him to consider.10
Bailey was extremely hardworking, not only the first man up when the circus was on the road but continuously in evidence as he kept personal tabs on every aspect of the show. Yet he was also extremely taciturn. According to Conklin, “he seldom spoke to anyone round the show except on business,” but instead was often seen nervously “chewing away on an elastic band, and slowly turning his pocketknife between a thumb and forefinger.” By the time he teamed up with Bailey and Hutchinson, Barnum, who had for most of his career also sweated the details, was perfectly happy to be the face of the circus, to meet with presidents, create publicity stirs, and make occasional forays to England to find new acts, while leaving the day-to-day operations to his partners. On his seventy-eighth birthday (one day after Bailey’s forty-first), Barnum wrote to Bailey, “You manage [the circus] ten times better than I could do it, & I have no fault to find.”11
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