Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Sarah Downey and I'm Deblina chuckol Boarding, and we
Speaker 1: have a few podcast regulars who we like to talk about.
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria, of course, seems to pop up in the
Speaker 1: most unlikely of episodes, as does Arthur Conan Doyle Lord
Speaker 1: Byron had a little run there for a while, but P. T.
Speaker 1: Barnum may have the strangest record of all of those folks.
Speaker 1: I think if an episode takes place in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: you'll often find P. T. Barnum somewhere in it, trying
Speaker 1: to buy something, trying to hustle someone. And once I
Speaker 1: learned a little bit more about his life, though, those
Speaker 1: regular appearances seemed a lot less unlikely, because in life
Speaker 1: he really was everywhere buying odds and ends off of folks,
Speaker 1: cooking up hoaxes, entertaining celebrities, even running for state legislature. Today,
Speaker 1: of course, we think of P. T. Barnum as the
Speaker 1: Great circus Man, the guy behind the greatest show on Earth.
Speaker 1: Along with his cohort and former competitor James Bailey, the
Speaker 1: Barnum and Bailey Circus, which eventually teamed up with Ringling
Speaker 1: brother Circus became the premier circus in the US. So
Speaker 1: if you've seen one circus in the States, it's probably
Speaker 1: Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey. But while Barnum helped to
Speaker 1: make the Three Ring Circus the massive spectacle we know today,
Speaker 1: he really didn't get into the business until he was
Speaker 1: in his sixties. For most of his entertainment career, Barnum
Speaker 1: ran a curiosity museum filled with wax works, fun house mirrors,
Speaker 1: and other strange stuff like taxi jermy hybrid animals. He
Speaker 1: also ran ten and one shows, which we'll talk about
Speaker 1: a little bit more in a minute, and he management
Speaker 1: Nagerie's and he just really promoted everything he did, earning
Speaker 1: the nickname the Prince of Humbug. Which it's interesting to
Speaker 1: point out here that Humbug had the same meeting then
Speaker 1: as it does today, you know, being deceitful on purpose,
Speaker 1: but it also was the equivalent of what today we'd
Speaker 1: call hype. And I think that's really the point to
Speaker 1: remember when thinking about Barnum. He was a hype man.
Speaker 1: He was the Prince of humbug at the end, he
Speaker 1: really was so phineas. Taylor Barnum was born July ten
Speaker 1: in Bethel, Connecticut. His father was kind of a jack
Speaker 1: of all trades who was a tailor, a farmer, a
Speaker 1: tavern keeper, and as a kid. P T. Barnum worked
Speaker 1: the farm, but also showed his business streak pretty early.
Speaker 1: According to his New York Times obituary, he sold homemade
Speaker 1: molasses candy which sounds pretty good, and gingerbread, and even
Speaker 1: some sort of moonshine he'd make called cherry rum, not
Speaker 1: quite as appetizing as the molasses candy and gingerbread, I think.
Speaker 1: When Barnum was fifteen, his father died, leaving him to
Speaker 1: care for his mother and his five sisters and brothers.
Speaker 1: This started a string of jobs and moves to get
Speaker 1: away from manual farm work because he really disliked it.
Speaker 1: He worked in a general store, moved to Brooklyn, and
Speaker 1: came home to Bethel to open his own store at
Speaker 1: age eighteen. Then he got married at nineteen to a
Speaker 1: local girl named Charity Hallett. He published a weekly paper
Speaker 1: called The Herald of Freedom and Dan Barry, Connecticut, and
Speaker 1: was arrested three times for Libel gives you a little
Speaker 1: peek at his his future career too, But it was
Speaker 1: his eighteen thirty five moved back to New York City
Speaker 1: at the age of twenty five that really got him
Speaker 1: into show business, and compared to his later insistence on
Speaker 1: family friendly entertainment, his first gigs in New York were
Speaker 1: considered quote low amusements. According to Timothy Gilfoyle in the
Speaker 1: Journal of the History of Sexuality, He'd run minstrel shows.
Speaker 1: He'd write ads for the Bowery Amphitheater in the very
Speaker 1: rough Five Points neighborhood, and he would talent scout there too.
Speaker 1: He discovered acts like William Henry Lane, who was better
Speaker 1: known later as Juba Black Dancer, who broke into the
Speaker 1: all white minstrel shows. But Barnum's first really big discovery
Speaker 1: was an old old woman named Joyce Heth. And Heth
Speaker 1: claimed to have been born in sixteen seventy four, which
Speaker 1: would have made her a hundred and sixty one years old.
Speaker 1: But even more impressively, she claimed to have been the
Speaker 1: nurse for the young George Washington. She was blind and frail,
Speaker 1: but she'd smoke a pipe and tell visitors stories about
Speaker 1: Washington as a boy. To kind of authenticate these outrageous stories,
Speaker 1: Barnum presented her alongside her seventeen twenty seven bill of
Speaker 1: sale to George Washington's father. So no surprise probably that
Speaker 1: this was eventually exposed as a hoax, but it certainly
Speaker 1: convinced Barnum that show biz was worth a while. With
Speaker 1: Heth and his act, he earned seven d fifty dollars
Speaker 1: a week. So in eighteen forty one, after that first
Speaker 1: big success with Hath, Barnum decided that he wanted to
Speaker 1: go into the museum business. And it may be kind
Speaker 1: of hard to understand why a hoax promoting former minstrel
Speaker 1: show admin would want to get into museum, but David A. Norris,
Speaker 1: writing in History Magazine, helped explain a little bit to
Speaker 1: me how different and uncommon American museums were in the
Speaker 1: eighteen forties from what they are today. And one of
Speaker 1: the country's earliest museums was called Peels and it was
Speaker 1: in Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Was established in seventeen eighty
Speaker 1: four by Charles Wilson Peel, and visitors who were going
Speaker 1: there could just see a real mixed bag of stuff
Speaker 1: folk clothing from around the world, a quote tiger cat,
Speaker 1: even lava from Mount Vesuvius, or at least something built
Speaker 1: as lava from Mount Pesuvia's. The first mastodon skeleton shown
Speaker 1: in the United States was there, and there were also
Speaker 1: plant and animal specimens from Lewis and Clark's expedition, so
Speaker 1: anything you could imagine could be found, apparently at Peel's museum.
Speaker 1: Another major museum in the style of Peels was that
Speaker 1: of John Scutter, who ran his front of five story
Speaker 1: marble building in New York City. When Scutter's closed in
Speaker 1: eighteen forty one, Barnum tried to buy it, but was
Speaker 1: beat out by representatives from Peels, who paid for the
Speaker 1: building in stock. When that stock collapse, though, Barnum wound
Speaker 1: up being able not only to buy Scudders, but quite
Speaker 1: a few of Peel's exhibits too. He reopened this as
Speaker 1: Barnum's American Museum and kept some of the flavor of
Speaker 1: the old style museums, including the menagerie's tax Jurny's exotic
Speaker 1: items from around the world, but he also added another
Speaker 1: popular element of the day, which was freak shows. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's time to talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: tradition of so called freak shows, because if we just
Speaker 1: jump right into it, it's going to seem a little
Speaker 1: bit out of play. According to Laura Grand in History Magazine,
Speaker 1: the tradition of freak shows had really been around for
Speaker 1: quite some time by the time Barnum was getting into
Speaker 1: the business, really since the early sixteen hundreds, right around
Speaker 1: the time that many people stopped seeing major physical abnormalities
Speaker 1: as some kind of divine punishment or bad omen. But
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, the exit of people with physical
Speaker 1: abnormalities bearded ladies for example, or thin men really started
Speaker 1: to pick up. Ten and one shows would exhibit ten performers,
Speaker 1: usually a mix of physically unusual people with folks with
Speaker 1: unusual talents such as sword swallowing or fire eating, so
Speaker 1: two of the earliest American freak show stars where Chang
Speaker 1: and Hang can join twins the original Siamese twins. Of course.
Speaker 1: Then basically visitors would walk by these ten performers and
Speaker 1: look at them. It's something that sounds very awkward and
Speaker 1: uncomfortable today, but these shows were really getting very popular
Speaker 1: in the nineteenth century, and Barnum's technique of combining these
Speaker 1: ten and one shows and other types of freak show acts.
Speaker 1: With a curiosity filled museum proved to be a major hit.
Speaker 1: Visitors would flood to his American museum, paying twenty five
Speaker 1: cents for the privilege of seeing his curated collection from
Speaker 1: around the world. He built the place at admission to Everything,
Speaker 1: and in addition to a sideshow type performances, he staged
Speaker 1: beauty pageants, cultural exhibits, and dramatics like adaptations of Harriet
Speaker 1: Beatrice Stowe's novels or those of Charles Dickens, who was
Speaker 1: incidentally a visitor. So the museum was open six days
Speaker 1: a week, fifteen hours a day. He was a real
Speaker 1: modern businessman. I mean, I even think that admission to
Speaker 1: everything sounds kind of like a slogan you would hear today. Um,
Speaker 1: but well, many side shows at the time featured adults
Speaker 1: only entertainment. Barnett was really big on bringing the whole family.
Speaker 1: And once the whole family was there, though, he would
Speaker 1: hustle them through the exhibits by displaying a large sign
Speaker 1: in the back labeled egress, And so people would wonder,
Speaker 1: what's an egress? You know, it's just beyond that door
Speaker 1: I need to go see. And then once they get there,
Speaker 1: they'd realize, oh, agres is just another word for exit,
Speaker 1: and they'd have to pay if they wanted to get
Speaker 1: back in again. The museum's first big hit was Fiji Mermaid,
Speaker 1: supposedly caught by a Japanese fisherman, but this was really
Speaker 1: just a hoax personally engineered by Barnum. It was a
Speaker 1: monkey's body sewn onto a large fish tail. Other attractions
Speaker 1: over the years included a giant python and electric eels,
Speaker 1: and Albino Beauty, the Wild Boy, who was an exceptionally
Speaker 1: hairy child, Pharaoh's chariot Wheel, Rosa Richter, the Human Cannonball,
Speaker 1: Annie Jones, the Bearded Lady, Isaac W. Sprague, the American
Speaker 1: human Skeleton, Kraal Farini, the Missing Link, the Wonder of
Speaker 1: the World, who was an armless man who used his
Speaker 1: feet to do tricks like firing a pistol or playing
Speaker 1: an instrument. In eighteen sixty one, Barnum even added a
Speaker 1: white whale to his menagerie's pipes, would supply it with
Speaker 1: fresh sea water, and he'd also include hoaxes of hoaxes,
Speaker 1: like the fake version of the already fake Cardiff Giant
Speaker 1: we discussed in our historical hoaxes upside from last summer.
Speaker 1: After Barnum's offer to buy the real fake giant was
Speaker 1: turned down, he just made his own and started saying, well,
Speaker 1: that one is fake, I have the real one. I think.
Speaker 1: Ultimately he was sued and the judge ruled, both of
Speaker 1: your giants are fake. This is a non issue. M
Speaker 1: Barnum himself was also something of an attraction at his museum,
Speaker 1: much like Madam Tissot was at her wax works. He
Speaker 1: was fairly striking, six to balding. He had blue eyes
Speaker 1: and a giant nose in a pot belly, and was
Speaker 1: always there, always roaming around if he wasn't out looking
Speaker 1: for new curiosities to bring to it. Barnum's real name maker, though,
Speaker 1: was his own distant cousin, Charles Stratton, and we'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about Stratton's life later, maybe in
Speaker 1: a different episode. He and Barnum went from being manager
Speaker 1: and child performer to being business partners and lifelong friends.
Speaker 1: But Stratton's appearance as General Tom Thumb introduced Barnum to
Speaker 1: really new heights of fame. Stratton, who was a little
Speaker 1: person twenty I've inch just toll when He was discovered
Speaker 1: by Barnum at age five, was trained to sing, dance,
Speaker 1: and do comic impressions. He was a natural ham and
Speaker 1: an actor, and met folks like Abraham Lincoln and even
Speaker 1: Queen Victoria. She is again we need to start keeping
Speaker 1: a tally here, but Barnum had ambitions outside of the museum.
Speaker 1: Even though Tom Thumb made him a huge hit in
Speaker 1: this world. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, he wanted to be
Speaker 1: an impresario too, and he recruited the Swedish soprano Jinny
Speaker 1: Lynn to make that happen. She's somebody who appeared in
Speaker 1: our Hans Christian Anderson episode he had. She was his
Speaker 1: celebrity crush. Essentially, even though Barnum hadn't ever seen Lynde,
Speaker 1: hadn't ever heard her sing, he latched onto her, decided
Speaker 1: that she would be his ticket to the real big time,
Speaker 1: and publicized her as the Swedish Nightingale. He publicized her
Speaker 1: so successfully that forty thou people were waiting for her
Speaker 1: upon her arrival in the United States. She toured for
Speaker 1: about nine months to sell out shows and really became
Speaker 1: one of the earliest marketing sensations too. She had all
Speaker 1: this tie in merchandise connected to her, like a Jenny
Speaker 1: Lynn bonnet, a Jenny Lynn porcelain said, all sorts of
Speaker 1: things that are easy to imagine today, but we're fairly
Speaker 1: unusual at the time. Barnum also got into politics. He
Speaker 1: served twice in the Connecticut legislature and as mayor of Bridgeport,
Speaker 1: where he was an especially strong opponent of racial discrimination
Speaker 1: and of prostitution. In eighteen forty eight, he became a teetotaler,
Speaker 1: hiring undercover detectives to patrol his museum for anyone who
Speaker 1: could be maybe sneaking in a drink, or just any
Speaker 1: low people. He was very concerned about them potentially being
Speaker 1: in his museum. Kind of odd, considering his earlier show
Speaker 1: his career exactly when he got into real estate in
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties, he'd even have leasers or buyers signed
Speaker 1: covenants spanning the use of liquor or tobacco on the property.
Speaker 1: He even eventually made his performers swear off alcohol and
Speaker 1: ran a temperance point at the museum for one hundred
Speaker 1: shows so to mark all of his achievements in life.
Speaker 1: At this point in politics, in the business world, Barnum
Speaker 1: decided to build a palace. And you can't imagine somebody
Speaker 1: like Barnum building a little understated house, but this really
Speaker 1: was a palace. It was on seventeen acres in Connecticut.
Speaker 1: He called it a Ranistan and the inspiration for the
Speaker 1: building was Brighton's Royal Pavilion, which I saw when I
Speaker 1: was in ninth grade, I think, and it's a you
Speaker 1: can look up a picture of it. It's pretty elaborate.
Speaker 1: Anything that it's the inspiration for would be pretty elaborate
Speaker 1: to I'd imagine he entertained big names there too, people
Speaker 1: like Mark Twain, Horace Greeley. But in eighteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: Barnum's luck started to turn. The palace burned down, which
Speaker 1: started a chain of misfortune that eventually drove Barnum coincidentally
Speaker 1: into the circus business. He lost his money though through
Speaker 1: bad investments in a clock of business, and saw his
Speaker 1: museum burned down twice. During the Civil War, or Confederate
Speaker 1: spies had plotted to set fires throughout New York City,
Speaker 1: including one at Barnum's. The plot failed, with the museum
Speaker 1: burned down just a few months later. Anyway, after twice
Speaker 1: rebuilding his museum and twice losing it to fire. He
Speaker 1: switched to a menagerie, but saw this burned down two
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy three. That same year, his wife Charity died,
Speaker 1: and two outward appearances. After Charity died, Barnum waited ten
Speaker 1: months before remarrying twenty two year old Nancy Fish, who
Speaker 1: was forty four years younger than him. According to that
Speaker 1: Guilfoil article we mentioned earlier, though he was actually remarried
Speaker 1: after only thirteen weeks and before he had even returned
Speaker 1: home to the United States following Charity's death. The whole
Speaker 1: thing was super super secret. Nobody knew about it except
Speaker 1: the couple, and the marriage certificate wasn't even found until
Speaker 1: nineteen four, so he really took the secret to the grave.
Speaker 1: Barnum's remarriage also coincided with his entrance to the circus world.
Speaker 1: Though he started a traveling show and called it the
Speaker 1: Great Traveling World's Fair, it was really bigger than most
Speaker 1: of the circuses of the day, and Barnum would even
Speaker 1: arrange it was so big, in fact, that it would
Speaker 1: have to be way on the outskirts of town. So
Speaker 1: Barnum would arrange these excursion trains so that people in
Speaker 1: cities could easily come to his show. He could just
Speaker 1: shuttle them back and forth and get more customers that way.
Speaker 1: In eighteen eighty he merged with the Great London Circus,
Speaker 1: Sanger's Royal British Menagerie and the Grand International Allied Shows,
Speaker 1: and later became the Barnum and Bailey Circus, better known
Speaker 1: as the Greatest Show on Earth, which we talked about
Speaker 1: in the intro. Barnum, of course, didn't invent the modern circus,
Speaker 1: but by working with Bailey, he helped make it the giant,
Speaker 1: really spectacular event that we know it as today rather
Speaker 1: than the sort of small time entertainment it was in
Speaker 1: the past exactly, and Barnum's eighteen eighty two purchase of
Speaker 1: Jumbo the African Elephant also helped to make this act
Speaker 1: a hit, really helped to make the Barnum and Bailey
Speaker 1: Circuits get off the ground. Jumbo is another subject we're
Speaker 1: gonna say for later. He has a pretty interesting story,
Speaker 1: but he was popular enough that his name caught on
Speaker 1: as a term for Jumbo, really really big um. That's
Speaker 1: just a little hint of how crazy Jumbo's ultimate story is, though,
Speaker 1: the Prince of Humbug stayed devoted to self promotion to
Speaker 1: the end too. In eighteen eighty four, he moved his
Speaker 1: autobiography into the public domain because he was more concerned
Speaker 1: with attracting readers than making money off of it. In
Speaker 1: at the age of eighty one and clearly dying at
Speaker 1: this point, he had a New York obituary published ahead
Speaker 1: of schedule so that he could read it and enjoy
Speaker 1: his own hype before he passed away. So P. T.
Speaker 1: Barnum died April seventh in Bridgeport, leaving most of his
Speaker 1: estate to his sole grandson, and aside from his circus legacy,
Speaker 1: of course, I think Barnum is probably most famous for
Speaker 1: a quote that he likely never said, and that's of course,
Speaker 1: there's a sucker worn every minute. We meant to mentioned
Speaker 1: that in the Cardiff Giant episode. One quote that might
Speaker 1: suit him a little better, though, in one that he
Speaker 1: really did say, is that people quote appear disposed to
Speaker 1: be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.
Speaker 1: And he got a lot of flak for some of
Speaker 1: his deceptions. I think he was pretty frank about them
Speaker 1: in his autobiography, but he stuck by it. To a
Speaker 1: certain extent, revised some things in his in his biography,
Speaker 1: but was fairly open about the deceptions he had committed
Speaker 1: and how he did them, and how it was all
Speaker 1: just in good fun if you still enjoyed the show.
Speaker 1: According to his biographer Candice Flemming, when he was asked
Speaker 1: whether he wished he had done something more important with
Speaker 1: his life, he said, quote, Amusement may not be the
Speaker 1: great aim of life, but it gives us to our days.
Speaker 1: So that's it for P. T. Barnum. But we're not
Speaker 1: going to completely close out this story yet because if
Speaker 1: you haven't picked up already with all these hints about
Speaker 1: John Bo and Tom Thumb, we'd really like to talk
Speaker 1: more about some of P. T. Barnum's famous acts, whether
Speaker 1: elephant or man. And I think that'll give us sort
Speaker 1: of the other side of the story too, because of course,
Speaker 1: today something like freak shows, you don't even want to
Speaker 1: call people freaks or mentioned freak shows. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: an uncomfortable term. But we're gonna look a little bit
Speaker 1: about the performers and whether they were taken advantage of
Speaker 1: or whether they made fortunes out of it, or maybe
Speaker 1: sometimes both. I think it'll be fun. But before we
Speaker 1: give too much away on that, I think we should
Speaker 1: go ahead and move on to listener mail. We have
Speaker 1: a card here from listener Steven, and he says he's
Speaker 1: been listening since serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in
Speaker 1: South Africa and that he'll for forever link part of
Speaker 1: his service to stuff he missed in history class. And
Speaker 1: he relates a story about the village that he was
Speaker 1: serving in, and he says that they're known for their
Speaker 1: beautiful bead work, bright geometric patterns, and generally being amazing.
Speaker 1: So he goes on to say, the boys go out
Speaker 1: to the bush for six weeks during an initiation school,
Speaker 1: and I didn't realize I wasn't allowed to go out
Speaker 1: there during that time. While enjoying a wonderful stuff you
Speaker 1: missed in History class podcast, I took a shortcut through
Speaker 1: the bush. Immersed in historical drama, I wasn't paying attention
Speaker 1: and stumbled across the boys. I was chased for half
Speaker 1: a kilometer by a gang of half starved teen boys
Speaker 1: who had been ritually circumcised the prior week for initiation school.
Speaker 1: When they finally caught me, they wanted to swap music
Speaker 1: on their phones. Next time you get too engrossed in history,
Speaker 1: be careful you don't get chased by a bunch of
Speaker 1: music loving semi naked teen boys. So yes, advicee to
Speaker 1: live by. Thank you Stephen for sending that and sharing
Speaker 1: that story with us, And we should say, we really
Speaker 1: want to caution you guys not to listen to podcasts
Speaker 1: when you are in potentially dangerous situations. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you really need to pay attention in certain scenarios. But
Speaker 1: thank you for sending that. If you have other tidbits
Speaker 1: to share with us, stories of what you do while
Speaker 1: you're listening to the podcast, or even just suggestions for us,
Speaker 1: maybe Pete Barnum related maybe otherwise, you can write to
Speaker 1: us Where History Podcast at Discovery dot com and you
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