by Yunte Huang
ASTONISHING INTELLIGENCE BY PRIVATE EXPRESS FROM
CHARLESTON VIA NORFOLK! THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
CROSSED IN THREE DAYS!! ARRIVAL AT SULLIVAN’S ISLAND
OF A STERLING BALLOON INVENTED BY
MR. MONK MASON!!
The news of eight people in a balloon crossing the Atlantic in three days spread like a prairie fire, and both the earlier and the later editions of the newspaper were sold out. “I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper,” Poe gloated privately. The newspaper boys jacked up the prices so high that even Poe himself could not get hold of a copy all that day.4
Most of these hoaxes were committed for the purpose of selling papers. While making good copy, they also earned the perpetrators notoriety and money. Poe, for instance, in addition to earning much-needed cash to eke out a precarious living, was also credited with having inspired such later science-fiction writers as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. But no one in nineteenth-century America was more successful in making a fortune out of tomfoolery, or did so with more swagger and braggadocio, than P. T. Barnum, the nation’s first great purveyor of mass entertainment, a brash Connecticut Yankee who believed with evangelical fervor that “the American people like to be humbugged.”
P. T. BARNUM AND GENERAL TOM THUMB
Phineas Taylor Barnum, born in Bethel, Connecticut, on July 5, 1810, was a tireless polisher of his own résumé later in life. Barnum certainly wished that he had not dillydallied in his mother’s womb a day too long so that he could have basked in the patriotic glory of having entered into the world to the jovial fanfare of July Fourth. Or, in the words of one biographer who knows all too well his subject’s unusual hunger for attention, “Probably his tardiness was for the best; competition between P. T. Barnum and the national holiday would have been too much—for the national holiday.”5 Named after his maternal grandfather, Phineas Taylor, Barnum certainly would live up to the romantic significance of “Phineas,” a biblical name meaning “brazen mouth.” Even though Bethel, a town known for manufacturing combs and hats, was “a tight little prison of Puritanism” ruled by the iron fist of the blue laws, out of this religious crucible would come a man whose lifetime mission was, as he put it himself, “to cater to that insatiate want of human nature—the love of amusement.”6
Appropriately, the future Prince of Humbugs learned his first lesson in humbuggery from his namesake, Grandfather Taylor, who enjoyed a reputation as a village wit and wag. At his birth, Barnum not only was christened with the name of his grandfather, but the latter, an inveterate prankster, also gifted the baby with a plot of land he called “Ivy Island.” As Barnum retold it in his autobiography—a narrative feat retrofitted nine times and said by many to be the most widely read book, after the Bible, in the second half of the nineteenth century—“My grandfather always spoke of me . . . to the neighbors and to strangers as the richest child in town, since I owned the whole of ‘Ivy Island,’ one of the most valuable farms in the State.”7 Always feeling his oats as a rich landowner, young Barnum could not wait to see his prized dominion. After repeated begging, he was finally allowed to take a peek. To his utter dismay, his so-called inheritance was “a tract of swampy, snake-infested land.” At that moment, everyone hooted, and young Barnum learned the truth that he had been the laughingstock of the family and neighborhood for years. More important, he learned his first lesson in chicanery, the art of pulling off a practical joke at another’s expense.
Barnum bragged in his autobiography that his “organ of ‘acquisitiveness’ was manifest at an early age,” acquisitiveness being a phrenological faculty responsible for one’s compulsion to acquire and hoard. He did not know that when Franz Joseph Gall, the father of phrenology, had first identified this organ in many of the prisoners he was studying, he had called it in German Diebssinn, the “organ of thieving.” Whether criminally pilfering or just Yankee shrewd, the acquisitive young Barnum was “always ready for a trade,” peddling molasses candy, gingerbread, cookies, and cherry rum. Like Poor Richard, Benjamin Franklin’s industrious alter ego, young Barnum generally found himself “a dollar or two richer at the end of a holiday” than he had been at the beginning.8 Averse to manual labor, he was not a great help on the farm, so his father opened a country store and made twelve-year-old Barnum the clerk.
While Melville had called the whaling ship his “Harvard and Yale College,” Barnum could have made the same claim about the country store for what it could teach him. As he later recalled:
There is a great deal to be learned in a country store, and principally this—that sharp trades, tricks, dishonesty and deception are by no means confined to the city. More than once, in cutting open bundles of rags, brought to be exchanged for goods, and warranted to be all linen and cotton, I have discovered in the interior worthless woolen trash and sometimes stones, gravel or ashes. Sometimes, too, when measuring loads of oats, corn or rye, declared to contain a specified number of bushels, say sixty, I have found them four or five bushels short.9
Deception was so common in this business that the grocer would make it into the hall of fame for humbugs when many years later Barnum wrote a book called The Humbugs of the World.
From a country store, Barnum quickly graduated to the lottery business, another common scheme for scamming the gullible. One time, to move a large quantity of worthless glass bottles and worn tinware from his store, Barnum “conceived the idea of a lottery in which the highest prize should be twenty-five dollars. . . . It is unnecessary to state that the minor prizes consisted mainly of glass and tin ware,” Barnum gloated in his memoir. “The tickets sold like wildfire, and the worn tin and glass bottles were speedily turned into cash.”10 From this cocoon of country-store trickery would emerge the most fabulous showman of the age, and what occasioned the metamorphosis was a chance encounter with Joice Heth’s freak show.
Wizened like a mummy and blind like a bat, Joice Heth, the toothless black woman, was believed to be 161 years old in 1835. Paralyzed either from age or disease, Heth was nonetheless pert and sociable at exhibitions, garrulous about her protégé, “dear little George,” for she claimed to have been the nurse of the nation’s founding father, George Washington. Like love at first sight, when Barnum saw her display in Philadelphia, he sensed an opportunity and bought her from her owner for a thousand dollars. Whether or not Barnum actually believed in Heth’s authenticity was beside the point. What Barnum found in her was the greater truth, something that would become the cornerstone of his success as a showman.
“Everything depended upon getting people to think, and talk, and become curious and excited over and about the ‘rare spectacle,’ ” Barnum shrewdly put it. “Accordingly, posters, transparencies, advertisements, newspaper paragraphs—all calculated to extort attention—were employed, regardless of expense.”11 Thanks to publicity, the exhibition rooms where Barnum showcased Heth—in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Albany, and other large and small cities—were continually thronged by the gullible and skeptical alike, because both wanted to see the rarity in person in order to add some weight to their own opinions. When Heth died the next year and her autopsy revealed that she could not have been older than eighty, the scandal of a hoax provoked even more interest than when she was alive. And more money flowed into Barnum’s pocket, making him recognize “the perfect good nature with which the American public submit to a clever humbug,” and the fact that untruths succeed better than truths.
Having found his true vocation, Barnum spent the next few years on the road, working with different partners, showcasing oddities and talents, and running circuses. But he hated the life of a traveling entertainer and yearned for something more stable and glamorous. His big moment came on January 1, 1842, when he opened the American Museum in New York, an institution with which his name would forever be associated, a ladder by which he rose to fortune and fame. Like the Disneyland of today, almost no American living in the mid-nineteenth century had not heard of or dreamed about
visiting Barnum’s museum. Open every day from sunrise to sundown, the museum assaulted the senses of visitors with a superfluity of permanent collectibles and transient novelties, including
. . . educated dogs, industrious fleas, automatons, jugglers, ventriloquists, living statuary, tableaux, gipsies, Albinoes, fat boys, giants, dwarfs, rope-dancers, live “Yankees,” pantomime, instrumental music, singing and dancing in great variety, dioramas, panoramas, models of Niagara, Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem; Hannington’s dioramas of the Creation, the Deluge, Fairy Grotto, Storm at Sea; the first English Punch and Judy in this country, Italian Fantoccini, mechanical figures, fancy glass-blowing, knitting machines and other triumphs in the mechanical arts; dissolving views, American Indians, who enacted their warlike and religious ceremonies on the stage.12
The secret of Barnum’s success was the art of advertising, not merely by means of printer’s ink but by turning every possible circumstance to his advantage. “It was my monomania,” he said, “to make the Museum the town wonder and town talk.” An indefatigable carnival barker, Barnum was never short of ingenious ideas for ensnaring crowds and making them pay. “When people expect to get ‘something for nothing,’ ” he remarked with candor, “they are sure to be cheated, and generally deserve to be.” At one point, Barnum realized that his museum was getting too crowded because the visitors, once inside, had been milling around for too long. Some of them even brought their dinners, with the evident intention of literally “making a day of it,” while hundreds were waiting outside to pay up and get in. To speed up the flow of the crowd and the money into his coffers, Barnum creatively erected a big sign over the door leading to the back stairs that read in large letters: TO THE EGRESS. Mistaking the arcane word for a rare species of animal they had not seen, the dallying throng began to pour down the back stairs, only to realize too late that they were back on the street. Their loss was Barnum’s gain, because he was now able to “accommodate those who had long been waiting with their money at the Broadway entrance.”13
“Advertising is like learning,” Barnum said, “a little is a dangerous thing. . . . When an advertisement first appears, a man does not see it; the second time he notices; the third time he reads it; the fourth he thinks about it; the fifth he speaks to his wife about it; and the sixth or seventh he is ready to purchase.” In a unique scheme to advertise his museum, Barnum once put an elephant to work plowing on his farm in Bridgeport right next to the train tracks. To maximize the effect, he dressed an elephant keeper in an Oriental costume and gave him a timetable of the railway, “with special instructions to be busily engaged in his work whenever passenger trains from either way were passing through.” Pretty soon, the whole world was talking about how the proprietor of the celebrated American Museum had introduced elephant farming.14
For his unscrupulous ways of grabbing public attention, Barnum never felt any remorse. Instead, he believed that he had his finger on the pulse of the nation. “I fell in with the world’s way,” he said. “If my ‘puffing’ was more persistent, my advertising more authentic, my posters more glaring, my pictures more exaggerated, my flags more patriotic and my transparencies more brilliant than they would have been under the management of my neighbors, it was not because I had less scruple than they, but more energy, far more ingenuity, and a better foundation for such promise.”15
In the spring of 1849, when Chang and Eng arrived in New York and tried to restart their career as showmen, they faced a daunting competitor in the American Museum, which had dominated showbiz since its inception. That year, General Tom Thumb, a twenty-five-inch midget, the crown jewel of Barnum’s exhibition, was all the rage. Barnum had discovered his pygmy prodigy a few years earlier in Bridgeport, Connecticut. After signing a contract with the parents, Barnum changed the name of his prized acquisition from the plain-as-shoe Charles S. Stratton to the fanciful General Tom Thumb and turned him into an even bigger cash cow than the Siamese Twins had once been for the Coffins. As Philip Hone duly recorded in his diary, Tom Thumb was the lion of the city at the time:
I went last evening with my daughter Margaret to the American Museum to see the greatest little mortal who has ever been exhibited; a handsome well-formed boy, eleven years of age, who is twenty-five inches in height and weighs fifteen pounds . . . lively, agreeable, sprightly, and talkative, with no deficiency of intellect. . . . His hand is about the size of a half dollar and his foot three inches in length, and in walking alongside of him, the top of his head did not reach above my knee. When I entered the room he came up to me, offered his hand, and said, “How d’ye do, Mr. Hone?”16
Compared with this smooth-talking, cigar-puffing dwarf, even the famous Siamese Twins might have seemed a little passé, especially when they did not have an ingenious and indefatigable carnival barker like Barnum backing them. Their own promoter, Doty, was apparently no Barnum; no one could be. The other disadvantage for the twins lay in the fact that, as Barnum had learned from his own experience, in the pyramidal hierarchy of showbiz, “ranging from the mammoth wholesale establishment down to the corner stand,” a traveling, single-installation display was really at the bottom of the ladder. Thanks to Barnum and his ilk, Americans had by this time become more accustomed to glittery extravaganzas in museum galleries than scruffy freak shows in drawing rooms and on street corners.
Even Doty’s clever scheme of displaying the twins’ children, as well as recycling the old promotional line that the twins were considering (again) surgical separation, did not do much to boost ticket sales. But the twins’ return to the world stage did get some attention from the press. As the New York Tribune announced on April 23:
After ten or twelve years of retired life on their farm in N. Carolina, the celebrated Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng, are about to start another tour of exhibition. They will commence in this City in a few weeks, and after visiting the principal cities of the North and East, will proceed to Europe. One object of their travel, we learn, is to obtain the opinion of eminent surgeons as to the possibility of their separation. They will be accompanied by several of their children, who will also be included in the exhibition.17
Against the formidable competition from Barnum’s menagerie of freaks and curios, the Siamese Twins opened their show in New York in late April of 1849 without much fanfare. The exhibition lasted but six weeks, during which time they also made a quick trip to Washington, where, as the New Hampshire Patriot noted on May 17, they “receiv[ed] calls at the modest price of a quarter of a dollar admission.” The ambitious Northeast tour did not happen, nor did the planned trip to Europe pan out, nor did the financial arrangement with Doty. In July, when the twins and their daughters returned to North Carolina, they had “nothing to show for their trouble but an IOU from Doty.” Their disappointing homecoming garnered only a scant mention in the Pittsfield Sun: “The Siamese Twins have gone back to their homes and their wives.” In the Age of Humbugs, authenticity was destined to be outgunned by sales puffery, an indignation that would become routine in the coming era of billboards, neon signs, and “Mad Men.”18
The show, however, had to go on. A few years later, Chang and Eng accepted an offer from a Mr. Howes to do another tour, again with their children. This time, they did tour the Northeast, traveling along the Atlantic Seaboard all the way up to Nova Scotia and then back to central and upstate New York before moving northward again as far as Quebec. Touring with them this time were Chang’s son Christopher and Eng’s daughter Katherine. From April 1853 to March 1854, the quartet made 130 stops and covered about forty-seven hundred miles.
All this time, Barnum had kept a hovering eye on the twins, a rare specimen that had so far eluded his capture. Over the years, as Barnum added more novelties—his dwarfs shrinking and giants expanding—to his collection, the Siamese Twins had remained missing from his menagerie, or refused to be Barnumized, a term Barnum proudly used to describe the process by which he would discover, acquire, prep, and control oddities, human or not.19 Perhaps they were too ind
ependent, or perhaps they were weary of the ill repute of the Prince of Humbugs; Chang and Eng had repeatedly spurned Barnum’s overtures. But the pitiful tour in 1849 and the lackluster one in 1853–54 made the twins wonder whether they should indeed give the crass Yankee a second look. In the autumn of 1860, only weeks before the election of Abraham Lincoln as president, they agreed to be put on display at Barnum’s museum for a fee of $100 a week.
Compared to the weekly $300 fee they used to get from Peale’s Museum, which had by now been forced out of business and taken over by Barnum, $100 was an insulting amount, especially considering that they were now accompanied by two of their children. But for Barnum, this was already proverbial highway robbery compared to the wages he had been paying the living curios of his establishment. This arrangement between the twins and Barnum was really a marriage of convenience, one full of distrust and misgivings at the outset. According to Patrick Bunker, Eng’s son who was displayed at the American Museum along with his father and uncle, the twins found Barnum to be tight-fisted and exploitative. “They never liked Barnum,” Patrick said. “He was too much of a Yankee, and wanted too much for his share of the money.”20 The ill feeling was mutual: Barnum resented the fact that, unlike the other oddities under his wing, the twins were too independent and they drove a hard bargain. Despite these niggles, having the Siamese Twins inside his museum gave Barnum plenty of bragging rights. Contrary to all the facts and evidence, Barnum would later claim that he had discovered the united brothers and also coined the term Siamese Twins, a fib that still holds sway in some quarters of popular culture.
