Weekend, April 2-3, 2022 – AN INTIMATE ENCLAVE SO CLOSE BY, BUT NO MORE TEA GARDEN
FROM THE ARCHIVES
WEEKEND, APRIL 2-3, 2022
THE 639th EDITION
P.T. Barnum:
New York’s Famous
Entertainment
Entrepreneurs
Stephen Blank
This is the first in a series dealing with legendary entrepreneurs in New York’s entertainment world. In each case, reputations are multi-sided, vulgar and personable, selfish and civic. P. T. Barnum, the first in the series, embodies these contradictions and created the role of the New York pitchman that became an icon of the city.
Some of usrecall the Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey circus. The same Barnum, but the circus came later, after Barnum created one of the United States’ first widely popular attractions, the American Museum in New York City.
Barnum has been described as the “Prince of Humbugs” (as he called himself), a liar, a racist, and an entertainer who would do anything for a crowd. Barnum believed the public was willing—even eager—to be conned, provided there was entertainment in the process. (Although there’s no evidence he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute”.) Yet, others contend he was responsible for introducing many Americans to high culture – the public museum, the musical concert, European opera.
Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in Bethel Connecticut in 1810. When his father died, he supported his family, becoming publisher of a Danbury, Connecticut weekly newspaper. He was arrested three times for libel, first taste of notoriety. In 1829, Barnum married Charity Hallett and soon moved to New York City, where he found his vocation as a showman.
His first gig involved Joyce Heth, a woman purported to be 161 years old who had been George Washington’s nursemaid, who he purchased from a travelling act. Barnum’s genius for publicity flowered, New Yorkers flocked to see her, and soon Barnum had recouped what he’d paid. The play involved more cities and even wound up with a public autopsy. Bad press didn’t faze Barnum: “Newspaper and social controversy on the subject (and seldom have vastly more important matters been so largely discussed) served my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping my name before the public”.
americacomesalive.com/p-t-barnums-early-career/#:~:text=P.T.-,Barnum%3A%20Early%20Life,he%20had%20to%20stop%20publishing
Next, Barnum acquired John Scudder’s American Museum, located at one of the nation’s most important cross-roads – at Broadway and what was then the Boston Post Road (now Park Row) – a five-story marble building filled with stuffed animals, waxwork figures, and similar conventional exhibits.
Barnum’s museum opened on January 1, 1842, a combination zoo, museum, lecture hall, wax museum, theater and most celebrated, Barnum’s freak show.
His first attraction was the “Feejee mermaid” – really the torso and head of a juvenile monkey sewn to the back half of a fish — which Japanese sailors had sold to an Englishman for $6,000 ($103,500 today). The mermaid was displayed in London and then found its way to New York, where Barnum negotiated to lease it for $12.50 per week.
https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-circus-freakshows/
Barnum convinced many that the creature was real, fending off scientific opponents and even weaseling his way into the American Museum of Natural History. He fabricated a story about the mermaid’s discovery and distributed over 10,000 pamphlets. In a matter of weeks, he had the public’s attention.
Following the success of the Feejee Mermaid, Barnum searched for new human “freaks”. He found Charles Stratton, who had average-sized parents and developed normally until he was six months old, when he measured 25 inches tall and weighed 15 pounds. By age five, he hadn’t grown an inch. Barnum partnered with the boy’s father, taught the child to sing, dance, and impersonate famous figures (Cupid, Napoleon Bonaparte), and, in 1844, took him on his first tour around America. Now named “General Tom Thumb” — “The smallest person who ever walked alone” — the show became an enormous success, even leading to a European trip where Queen Victoria enjoyed the act. Barnum did well: he made so much on the European tour that he nearly purchased William Shakespeare’s birth home. His earnings extended well into the hundreds of thousands and by 1846, his museum was drawing 400,000 visitors a year.
William Henry Johnson was born to impoverished, newly-freed slaves in New Jersey, in 1842. While he possessed a modest physical deformity (a microcephalic, or cone-shaped, head), a local showman had showed him in sideshows in the mid-1850s. In 1860, Barnum enrolled Johnson, and transformed him into “Zip,” a “different race of human found during a gorilla trekking expedition near the Gambia River in western Africa.” His head was shaved, save for a small tuft on top, and he was dressed in a head-to-toe fur suit. Darwin’s Origin of the Species had recently appeared, and Zip was promoted as a “missing link”. Barnum displayed Zip in a cage and ordered that he must only grunt; he quickly became a star in Barnum’s array.
All of this seems pretty grim, even terrible stuff. But freak shows weren’t unusual at the time, and, apparently, Barnum treated his performers well.
Stratton was mobbed by crowds wherever he went and became an international star. For the better part of fifteen years, Barnum paid him some $150 per week ($4,100 today) and, then when Stratton retired, he lived in New York’s “most fashionable neighborhood,” owned a steam yacht, and wore only the finest clothes.
For his efforts, Zip was rewarded handsomely: Barnum paid him $100 per performance (of which he often had 10 per week) and purchased him a lavish home in Connecticut. His showmanship extended far beyond Barnum’s eventual death, and he performed into his late eighties. He was also a masterful marketer: during 1925’s Scopes Trial, he offered himself as living proof of evolution, generating a massive amount of publicity.
| Captain Costentenus, the Tattooed Man, partnered with Barnum in the 1870s and became the American Museum’s highest grossing act, taking home more than $1,000 per week ($37,000 per week today). The Times commented, “He wears very handsome diamond rings and other jewelry, valued altogether at about $3,000 [$71,500 in 2014 dollars] and usually goes armed to protect himself from persons who might attempt to rob him.” Fedor Jeftichew, “The Dog-Faced Boy”, was reported to have been found in a cave deep in Russian forests; after enduring a bloody battle to capture the “beast,” hunters taught him to walk upright, wear clothes, and speak like a dignified human. Barnum dressed Fedor in a Russian cavalry uniform, and had him play up his savage nature, “barking, growling, and baring his teeth” at onlookers. Throughout the 1880s, Fedor was among the highest paid performers in the business, netting $500 per week ($13,000 today). By the time of his retirement, his saving totaled nearly $300,000 ($7.6 million). Barnum’s bearded lady, Josephine Clofullia, developed a wide fan base during her tours, and received a large diamond from Napoleon III after fashioning her beard after his. His Museum wasn’t limited to freakshows. One historian writes that the Museum became “a central site in the development of American popular culture.” “Foreshadowing trends in American commercial amusement, the Museum gathered exhibitions and amusements that previously had been offered in separate milieus. In an urban culture characterized by increasing difference—in taste, in subject, and in audience—it was the first to combine sensational entertainment and gaudy display with instruction and moral uplift….the Museum also promoted educational ends, including natural history in its menageries, aquaria, and taxidermy exhibits; history in its paintings, wax figures, and memorabilia; and temperance reform and Shakespearean dramas in its theater.” Barnum organized flower shows, beauty contests, dog shows, and poultry contests, but the most popular were baby contests such as the fattest baby or the handsomest twins, and his lecture room and salons was one of the city’s few respectable public spaces for middle-class women. Perhaps his most daring adventure was to persuade Jenny Lind – the famous Swedish singer – to return to the stage in the United States. Sponsoring Lind would shine his image in higher culture, and to do this, he promised her an unprecedented $1,000 a night for up to 150 nights of performances—with expenses and musical assistants of Lind’s choice included. Not only that, Barnum offered to put salaries on deposit up-front, which required him to either sell or mortgage everything he owned. It was an enormous success. Barnum’s public-relations blitz worked brilliantly. From her first show on September 11, 1850, at the Castle Garden in New York, Jenny Lind was a sensation: “Jenny Lind’s first concert is over; and all doubts are at an end. She is the greatest singer we have ever heard.” In November 1864, the Confederate Army of Manhattan failed in an attempt to torch the museum, but on July 13, 1865 the American Museum burned to the ground in one of the most spectacular fires New York has ever seen. Barnum rebuilt and opened his New Museum on September 6, 1865, on Broadway, between Spring and Prince Streets, but that also burned down, on March 3, 1868. |
The 1865 fire that destroyed the museum’s Broadway and Ann Street location (NYPL)
Three years later, Barnum joined circus owners Dan Castello and William C. Coup to launch P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, and Hippodrome in 1871. In 1875, he owned it outright. And we are off and running on still another iteration of Barnum’s life.
At its peak, the American Museum was open fifteen hours a day and had as many as 15,000 visitors a day. Some 38 million customers (the U.S. total population in 1860 was under 32 million) paid the 25 cents admission to visit the museum between 1841 and 1865—among them Henry and William James, Charles Dickens, and Edward VII, then prince of Wales.
The Times’ coverage of the fire produced an appropriate epitaph for Barnum’s Museum: “Granting the innumerable sensations with which the intelligent public were disgusted and the innocent public deluded, and the ever patent humbuggery with which the adroit manager coddled and cajoled a credulous people, the Museum still deserved an honorable place in the front rank of the rare and curious collections of the world.” (NYT, July 14, 1865)
Despite the humbuggery, still an honorable place. That’s Barnum. Stay tuned. More entertainment entrepreneurs to come.
Stephen Blank
RIHS
March 12, 2022
WEEKEND PHOTO
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FRIDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY
THE TRYLON AN PERISPHERE AT THE 1939-40
NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR
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SOURCES
https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-circus-freakshows/
ttps://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/archive/barnums-american-museum
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/12/greatest-showman-hugh-jackman-p-t-barnum-jenny-lind/amp
https://www.britannica.com/biography/P-T-Barnum
https://www.history.com/.amp/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-p-t-barnum
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/05/what-p-t-barnum-understood-about-america/amp
https://americacomesalive.com/p-t-barnums-early-career/
Funding Provided by:
Roosevelt Island Corporation Public Purpose Funds
Council Member Ben Kallos City Council Discretionary Funds thru DYCD
Text by Judith Berdy
Edited by Deborah Dorff
ALL PHOTOS COPYRIGHT RIHS. 2022 (C)
PHOTOS IN THIS ISSUE (C) JUDITH BERDY RIHS
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