Selects: PT Barnum: More Complicated Than You've Heard

28:40and all of a sudden your circus would fall apart. I think they were kind of tenuous outfits, right? Yeah. But the thing about Barnum is like something about this called to him. Like he would, when his circus collapsed and he was out in the middle of the country on the road and he had to go back home, the first thing he would do is start figuring out his next circus or his next act or whatever it was. He would go back out again. He was indefatigable. It's fatigue-able in that sense. Yeah, so, I mean, we'll quickly speed through the next couple of years. He did a little steamboat circus for a little while along the Mississippi River.

29:23That didn't come along. He tried to do a respectable business again, went into business with a guy who manufactured grease paste and cologne. That did all right for a little while, but then that failed. And then this whole time he still feels that pull to the tent. Right. He sold illustrated Bibles for a little while. Yeah. Finally, here's the thing. He wanted stability. Like being out on the road was tough. Ask Steve Perry, right?

29:58But he wanted this to be tied to show business in some way. Yeah. Finally, one day, and I think 1841, he had another big break or another big vision. There was a place in New York, a museum, and what you would call today a museum, that was up for sale in, I'm not sure where it was, but it was in New York, right? Yes. And it was called Scudder's American Museum. And Barnum heard that Scudder wanted to get out and was putting the whole collection up for 15 grand, which is a substantial amount of money and definitely more money than Barnum had. But he said, that's it right there. I can have a permanent place where people come to me and I can be home with my wife and daughters, but I can still have this daily interaction with show business.

30:52I got to buy that thing. Well, and it will also accomplish this is I can still have my freak show performers, but because it's a museum somehow, it has a little bit more respectability. Right. Because apparently at the time, theaters weren't like they are today. It wasn't like we're going to the theater. Theaters could be a little bit like a second tier entertainment. Right. It was like hoi polloi, tawdry crowds went to the theater. Yeah. That was associated with like burlesque or something like that. Or even like human oddities exhibitions, stuff like that. That was theater stuff. A museum like Scudders, like respectable people could go there.

31:35So what Barnum did was he bought a museum and then dragged it down into the mud. Right. And this whole, the way he financed the museum, I didn't fully understand, to be honest. Do you want me to explain it? If you want. Or we could just say he ended up with a museum in 1841 through a lot of work. I think that's fair enough because it is a little bit like, you know, Robin Peter did pay Paul. Right. It wasn't just a straight-up purchase. Let's just say that. Right. But so one thing that you can say about this museum, which he renamed Barnum's American Museum, it was a big success. And one of the reasons it was a big success was because he tirelessly worked at finding new and interesting ways to market the thing.

32:20Right? Yeah. And by, I'm not sure exactly when, but by a very short time after he opened it, I think that same year in 1841, he charged 25 cents a person for admission. He had something like 4 ,000 visitors a day. Yeah. And he took this thing, like I say that he dragged the word museum down in the mud. He definitely added and expanded to the definition of museum. And then he also had this lecture hall where he had like performances that you would see like in a circus or something like that. And he turned this place into an emporium, just something huge, an enormous spectacle. and something like 850 ,000 pieces were on display in his museum.

33:11So you definitely got your quarter's worth for sure. Yeah, and those are just the pieces. He also, I mean, as far as the circus element, he had everything covered. He had dancers, musicians, plate spinners, ventriloquists. Well, you got to have the plate spinners. He had little people. He had big people. He had ladies with beards and robots and puppets and animals. He had giraffes and grizzly bears. Like, he really had everything humming on all cylinders at this point. Yeah, he really did. And again, there was still, there was that whole thread of, like, you know, there were people being exploited.

33:48There were people who were complicit in that. There were people who were, anyone who came to the museum was gawking at, you know, the weirdness of these other people or whatever. which again today is very odd to us, but at the time was still odd. Like that's the thing that I think gets lost on people. Like there were sideshows and things like that, but Barnum took it to an extraordinary degree and really ran with it and became extremely rich as a result actually. Should we take a break? I'm ready to. All right. The museum's humming along. We're going to take a break. We'll be back right after this.

34:29If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen up to Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. Okay, we're back. Yeah, so we mentioned earlier about the humbug, this kind of hucksterism. in his autobiography, which was rewritten by himself, by the way, after people read the first version and said, what a jerk. Yeah, he was just openly boastful and braggart about how much he exploited people and how much he duped the American public. He toned it down a little bit in the revision, but he did talk a little bit about being slightly embarrassed about how shameless he was, But then again, in the next line, he would say, but you know what?

35:33This is how everyone is in my business. I'm just better at it than them, basically. Yeah, he said, oh, there's a great quote. I can't find it anywhere, though. Where basically, if he, oh, here it is. If his advertising was, quote, more audacious than his competitors, it was not because I had less scruple than they, but more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promises. He thought a lot of himself. He definitely did, but he also worked pretty hard at it for sure. And I think if you compared apples to apples at the time, Barnum's jam was way better than anybody else's jam.

36:13Yeah, for sure. So he had three really big successes in a row with his museum here. The first one was called the Fiji Mermaid, F-E-E-J-E-E. This was in 1842. And this was a big deal. He got a man named Levi Lyman or Levi Lyman. He was an old colleague of his. And he said, here's what I'll do. You are now Dr. Jay Griffin. You're a naturalist for the British Lyceum of Natural History, which was not a real place. Mm-hmm. And you were in ownership of what we'll call the Fiji Mermaid, which was a, what did we call it in the taxidermy? Rogue taxidermy? Yeah. It was rogue taxidermy. It totally was. It was like a jackalope, except, what was it?

37:06It was a head of a baboon, torso of an orangutan, and a fishtail just for good measure. Yeah, and as far back as they can tell, it was probably made by a Japanese sailor in the 1820s, and it passed through a few hands before Barnum finally leased it and put it on display. I wonder where that thing is now. I looked. I don't know. There are other Fiji mermaids out there. It was like kind of a thread of rogue taxidermy in the mid-19th century, and I think Harvard has one on display. But I looked to find out where P.T. Barnum's is, and I can't find it. It's probably like on Richard Branson's headboard or something.

37:45It may have actually burned up in one of the many fires that plagued P.T. Barnum's life. Yeah, things are going to get fiery here in this last bit too. Yeah, well, let's get back to the Fiji mermaid though. Okay. Okay, so Dr. Jay Griffin is touring with this, supposedly touring with this mermaid, right? Sure. And Barnum, but the guy's actually not out there touring. Barnum basically creates out a whole cloth, a tour of this mermaid, writes letters about how great this thing is in different people's names, and then mails them to friends that live around the country and asks them to mail those letters in to newspapers in New York, talking about how this thing has to be seen to be believed.

38:31Yeah, so people came far and wide to see this piece of taxidermy. Yeah, and by the way, this whole Jay Griffin thing, like this guy was posing as him. He was giving public lectures made up as a naturalist, a British naturalist, and he was an American promoter. He had nothing to do with it. He was just making all this stuff up, but he would give like public lectures on it. I love it. Like the audacity, it's amazing. So the second big victory was when he met up with a four-year-old named Charles Stratton. He was a little person. His cousin, actually. And he stopped growing when he was two feet tall, and he changed his name, rebranded him as General Tom Thumb, and that name probably rings a bell.

39:18They became very famous together. He said he was 11 years old, and they were a media and ticket-selling sensation. Yeah, they would be, like, invited in to meet, like, royalty, whatever country they toured. He was a huge hit at the museum. It was like a big deal for both Barnum and Charles Stratton. That's right. A sensation, that's the best way to put it. And the final big victory of the trifecta, when he was in Europe with Stratton, he heard of Jenny Lin. She was a Swedish opera singer. And this was the kind of thing where he was like, you know what, she doesn't have a beard. All she is is a talented singer, but she's amazing.

40:03And this would really legitimize me if I did like a straight up act for a change. So even though she's big over here, they don't know about her in America and she could blow up there. So I'm going to offer her$1 ,000 per performance, which was a ton of money and a big risk. But he made about a half a million dollars with her or more. We branded the Swedish Nightingale by trotting her around the United States. and she was like beyond a sensation in the United States. Yeah, that was another thing too. I mean, like she was pretty big in Europe, but I don't think she was well known if known at all in America.

40:40But by the time she showed up for the tour starting in 1850, he had managed to, like you said, just turn her into a national sensation. People had like Beatlemania for this lady. Yeah. Um, the, this article says that she was not a, uh, a very nice person. I didn't see that anywhere else. And I actually saw that. So after the contract between her and Barnum was up in 1851, she continued to tour America with like, uh, an actual orchestra, I believe. Um, and she made$300 ,000 in 1850s money, um, from this whole American tour and donated every single penny of it to Sweden's public school system, which was burgeoning at the time.

41:25Yeah. So I don't know what Jane was talking about, but I think she just kind of didn't find America very cultured, is what I get. But apparently Jane didn't like that. Well, America probably wasn't very cultured in 1850. Right. But I thought that was pretty neat, man. She took all of that money and donated it to the public school system in Sweden. Man, that's crazy. But yeah, so Barnum was not legitimized thanks to that. I think it actually didn't go all that well, but he did enrich himself thoroughly through Jenny Lynn for sure. That's right. But he would go broke again because he's P.T. Barnum.

42:01And that's what he does. In the 1850s, he bought up a lot of land near Bridgeport, Connecticut because he wanted to make East Bridgeport the happening place. He invested in the Jerome Clock Company, wanted to relocate it to East Bridgeport. It was not a smart thing to do. The company went bankrupt, and all of a sudden he was broke again, and this is fire number one. He moves out of his mansion because he's broke, and then after he had moved out, the mansion burned down. Right, but if he had to move out, you would think that he had relinquished ownership, so why does it matter as far as his life goes?

42:40Oh. Unless he had a bunch of money stuffed into the insulation or something. I don't know. Breaking bad thing going on. It might have just been a footnote or something. Or maybe he did. No, I guess if he had moved out, then he didn't own it. I just thought that was a little weird. Yeah. So he was in debt, like big time, like broke, bankrupt, in debt because of this terrible clock company thing, which you should always take as a reason to never put all of your eggs in one basket, which I guess is what he did. But he managed to emerge from debt after, I think, five years. And he ended up, during this time, he pawned his museum.

43:26But he also put the name of the museum in his wife's name, who was not bankrupt. And so they were able to make some income off of the lease for the museum. and then when he managed to buy the museum back after five years, he just went like right back to it. Like he didn't miss a beat. Yeah, I mean this 10-year period from 1850 to 1860, he went broke. He did the smart thing like he said with his wife. He started giving lectures about making money. He went on tour again with Tom Thumb. He got a dead whale. He bought a dead whale and said, surely people will pay money to see this. So he was still doing all this crazy stuff.

44:10He bought a hippopotamus. He bought two beluga whales. Like, it's just crazy the things that he was doing. Also, Chuck, we have to say the title of the lecture tour, The Art of Money Getting. It's not even the art of making money, the art of money getting. Yeah. So, his star is starting to rise again. At the very least, his fortunes are reversing from just doing any kind of work he can get his hands on. And then all along this way, like Barnum was a pretty, he was what's known as a Jacksonian Democrat. Andrew Jackson was a populist president. And he was, I think, didn't we lay, he was the one who was responsible for the Trail of Tears, right?

45:03I'm pretty sure that was Andrew Jackson. It was. Remember our two-parter on Trail of Tears? I do. Okay, so he was, he was, P.T. Barnum was of this man's party. He was a Jackson supporter. And then the Civil War breaks out. And all of a sudden, Barnum has this like total conversion. He was not like an outright bigoted racist who worked to keep African Americans enslaved, worked as a Confederate sympathizer, anything like that. He was fairly unremarkable and pretty normal. Like, for example, at his museum, if you were black, you couldn't come in. It was a segregated museum. But that was like a lot of businesses at the time.

45:50So he was a very normal pedestrian person as far as his politics go and socially as well. But something happened around the time of the Civil War, and he converted and actually became an abolitionist, huge union supporter and just basically became patriotic and dedicated this idea of preserving the union and abolishing slavery. Yeah. And he used that museum as a sort of ground zero for his cause. He had speeches, he had plays that sort of endorsed this. He had Southern copperheads that were protesting outside. They threatened his life. And then he said at this point, you know what, I might as well just get into politics legitimately.

46:35And in April of 1865, he actually won an election to the Connecticut General Assembly where he worked really hard to ratify the 13th Amendment and supported another cause to allow the rights of black people to vote in Connecticut. Yeah. So, like, he was legitimately dedicated to the cause of abolition, which is totally bizarre, right? And about this time, too, is when the revisions to his autobiography are starting to get much more contrite, much less boastful, and even more apologetic. So something happened, and he was converted to the right side of history, I guess you could call it. Yeah, so here's where fire number two comes in.

47:18A few months after this election, his museum burned down, along with the animals and the exhibit, which is super sad. Yes. It is the first of like two animal fires. He opened a new museum a couple of months after that. Three years later, that museum burned down. Didn't want to rebuild that one. And then finally in the 1870s, like it took a long, long time before he became the P.T. Barnum that most people know as the big circus guy. Right. The greatest show on earth guy. Yeah, he hooked up with Barnum and Bailey after hooking up with a guy named William Cameron Coop or Coo. I'm not sure which one it is.

48:02But he had P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Circus. Yeah, a little wordy. That was 1871. And then did you cover the 1872 fire? No. There was another fire that killed all the circus animals. At the winter camp, which is on the site of where Madison Square Garden is right now, there was a horrific fire in the winter camp in 1872. Killed a bunch of other circus animals. Which, this is one of the reasons why, years later, Barnum and Bailey's Ringling Brothers Circus went away. It was because of animals. Yeah, and he was, by the time this fire happened at the, what was it called, the Hippotheatron?

48:53I think so. He was very successful with that circus. He started with Coop or Coup. They made about$400 ,000 in the first year, and it was the very first circus to kind of do the traditional thing that we all think of as travel by train, acrobats, clowns, exotic animals, stuff like that. And that's when it officially was called the greatest show on earth. So the hippo theatron, such a strange word, burns down. And then he's visiting his friend in England, John Fish. And this is when his wife, Charity, passes away. And as Jane put it, he was supposedly too grief stricken to return for her funeral.

49:37But the grief must have subsided quickly because he secretly married Fish's daughter. At 63 years old, he married 22-year-old Nancy Fish. Yeah. About three and a half months later after his wife passed. No word about her teeth. No, or her bra size. So they got married secretly 14 weeks after Charity died. And then when they came to the U.S., they had a public wedding nine months after that. So, yeah, he married her and I guess he was with her until his death, right? Well, yeah, in 1860, or I'm sorry, 75, he took a break from the circus, got back into politics, and became the mayor of Bridgeport for a little while.

50:22Not East Bridgeport, though. He's talking trash about them. Bridgeport. And apparently he gets a little on his high horse now, because even though he was a drinker, pretty heavy drinker for a while, he quit drinking and then campaigned against Sunday sales in saloons. and kind of got a little self-righteous, it seems like. Yeah, he also sponsored the Comstock Law in Connecticut, which banned contraception, which puts a lot of onus on to the ladies. And it was in place apparently until 1965. And there's a really important word in there, Chuck, sponsored. Like, that means you're the person who brought it to the General Assembly.

51:07You didn't just vote yes on it. Like, you're the one who said, everybody, everybody, let's ban contraception for 100 years. Yeah. And it was successful, actually. So, yeah, he was a weird dude with a lot of different weird thoughts about things that were sometimes very contradictory over time. And then finally, ironically, here at the very end of this podcast, in 1880, he partnered with one James A. Bailey for P.T. Barnum's Great London Combined. It's a terrible name for a circus. Worst circus name ever. Then you have the word circus in there. And this is when he got Jumbo the Elephant, which Jumbo was a legendary attraction until 1885 when Jumbo was killed by a train.

51:57And probably caught fire too. And did you know, we were just in Boston, that Tufts University, their mascot is Jumbo the Elephant. No, I didn't know that. Yeah, my buddy Robert explained that to me. And apparently Barnum was one of the early, what do you call the people who give universities a lot of money?

52:20Endowment donors. Grant person. Sure. He was all of that. What is that word? I know what you're talking about. He was all that to Tufts. And so Jumbo the elephant became their mascot. And I think, because it does say in here, he displayed Jumbo's preserved hide and skeleton. and I think it was or maybe is on display at Tufts. Oh, wow. I'm not sure if it still is, but I think at one time it was. So wait a minute. This guy also gave a substantial amount of money to help found a university? I don't know found, but to the university. That's a benefactor? Is that the word? Benefactor, yeah. Maybe to found it.

52:55I'm not sure of the timeline there. Man, that's really crazy. He did a lot of stuff. So go jumbos. Yeah, the fighting jumbos or the passive-aggressive jumbos or what? The Stomping Jumbos. There you go. That's pretty good. So Barnum and Bailey weren't together for too long initially. They parted ways, but then again joined in 1887, ultimately finally for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Yep. They broke up and then they got back together and then it stayed that way until 2016, I think, and then the circus finally closed down. I went to that thing as a kid. I think we talked about that. Sure, I did too.

53:33and now we will only go to the Big Apple Circus as you know and I took a long break because Emily and I were tired of going and then now that we got a kid my mom was like you know you got to start going again you have to so we went this year how was it? oh it's okay you know I'm not the biggest circus guy I've realized are you afraid of clowns? no not these are you afraid of acrobats? I could take these clowns No, and actually the acrobats at the Big Apple Circus are the what's-it-call-its, the famous ones, the family. Oh, the flying Zambonis? Yeah, or was it Zambonis? Not Zambonis. I don't remember.

54:16It's something like that. But it's them. It's still that family. Wow, that's really, that's something. And they, you know, they did a great job. But at the end of the day, I'm just kind of about a third of the way through. I'm looking at my watch, you know. Oh, I gotcha. I've seen a couple Cirque du Soleil. Those are the last circuses I saw. Yeah, those are okay. We saw the Michael Jackson one in Las Vegas, and man, alive. Was it good? Yeah. There's a Michael Jackson Cirque? Yes, dude, and I have to tell you, I'm not some diehard Michael Jackson fan, but you don't have to be to appreciate this.

54:49It is amazing. It's worth going to Vegas to go see. Who's not Michael Jackson? And turning around and going home. I don't know. There's probably a few. I'll bet we hear from some Michael Jackson, anti-Michael Jackson fans. Finally, 1890, P.T. Barnum has a stroke. During a performance, he has one weird strange wish at the end of his life is to have his obituary published before he dies. Yeah. I don't know why he did that. I don't know either. I think, I don't know, but that's a heck of a way to end this podcast. Maybe he wanted to feel the public outpouring or something. It could be that or he wanted to proofread it or something.

55:32I don't know. But if that was what he was after, why didn't they just send it to him ahead of time? They actually published it. Yeah, that's weird. Yeah. Well, we'll find out one day when we die and go to heaven and meet P.T. Barnum. Agreed. So you got anything else? Nope. There's probably tons more that we missed. and if you know something about P.T. Barnum that we didn't know, let us know. We'll just add to this guy's story over time, okay? In the meantime, if you want to read this great article by Jane McGrath, type in P.T. Barnum in the search bar at HowStuffWorks. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail.

56:17Alright, I'm going to call this Unabomber follow-up. Oh, good. I was into that one. The Unabomber? Yeah, that was a good episode. but that was a good 10th anniversary episode. Milk. Hey, guys. Congratulations on 10 years. Milk, milk. I look forward to many more. I listened to Unabomber and thought I would share something that covers a related, if somewhat different aspect of the story. About 10 years ago, when I was still a wee law student taking a legal ethics course, one of the situations we discussed was Ted Kaczynski and the ethical dilemma his lawyers faced. Criminal defendants have the absolute right to dictate certain aspects of their representation, like whether or not to plead guilty.

56:57But there are other aspects of the representation that the lawyer controls, the most notable being trial strategy. While lawyers should always listen to the client's overall goals, sometimes it's necessary to override a client's wishes on how to achieve their goals because the client's desired strategy is either legally incorrect, unethical, or simply ill-advised. Kaczynski's case presented an interesting ethical problem for the attorneys because he refused to allow them to pursue what they perceived to be his best defense and his only hope of avoiding the death penalty, namely claiming he was not guilty by reason of mental disease known as the insanity defense.

57:35The conflict was that, on one hand, his attorneys had a duty to zealously represent him, but Kaczynski objected so vehemently to the chosen defense that at one point he attempted to go pro se, a.k.a. represent himself, which would have been an utter disaster. As you noted, he pled guilty, so we'll never know what they would have decided to do had he gone to trial, but his case is one which most lawyers have thought about or discussed at some point in their careers. That is good. Fordham Law, go Rams. And that is from Deb. Thanks, Deb. Appreciate that. Yeah, I remember kind of saying, like, his whole thing was he didn't, he pled guilty because he didn't want to plead insane because his ramblings would have been the ramblings of a convicted insane madman.

58:23Yeah, very interesting. Again, thanks Deb. We always love hearing from lawyers out there. That whole joke about lawyers at the bottom of the sea being a good start, we have always found it tasteless. Sure. So get in touch with us. You can send us and Jerry an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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