All eyes were turned towards the sky. It was coming soon, you see, and the people were excited. Holley's comment was due to pass by the Earth with a tale twenty four million miles long and careening over three million miles overhead. The residents of New York City marveled at the heavens and wondered what it could all mean. Richard Locke certainly had an idea. For him, it meant dollars if he
played his cards right. He was in the business of newspapers, a ruthless, cutthroat game in Old New York, one that pitted titans and penny press publishers against each other. He knew you had to give the people what they wanted, and in this moment, people wanted the stars. But he would do them one better. He would also give them the moon. On August thirty five, Lock published the first installment of a new otherworldly story. It would run in six parts, with each ending luring its readers to come
back for more. He titled it Celestial Discoveries and hid behind the identity of a very real and very famous astronomer, John Herschel. But beyond that, the story was what he would call today fake news. Over the course of six issues, lock I mean, Herschel told readers about what he was seeing through his superpowered telescope aimed at the moon, plant life, rocks, animals. He told of lunar forests, herds of brown bison like creatures, even bluish unicorns, in a voice that echoed the same
travelog sensibilities of America's Age of New imperialism. His dispatches read like field notes, and then came the big reveal. He had discovered intelligent life on the Moon. They had darkish yellow skin, beards and protruding lower jaws. They had wings and a striking resemblance to beavers, but lived in homes with smokestacks. There was a crystalline temple and another taller,
lighter skinned population. The social hierarchy here, unfortunately, is pretty implicit, and just as external pressure to provide any and all evidence mounted, the paper reports that Herschel's lab very conveniently burned down. That was the end of that, or was it The real Herschel was sought out by many readers. One group of missionaries even asked how they could go about sending Bibles to the Moon. Herschel's wife Margaret didn't
even blame readers for believing the hooks. The ruse had gone on for weeks, but the public talked about it for much longer. It turns out that Locke's readership didn't care if the story was completely true or not. They wanted to know how true it potentially could be. It was a good tale, whether it was real or not. The story had done its job, though it certainly sold papers. This blurry line between fact and fiction, the world of hoaxes and humbugs would go on to be a defining
cornerstone of the rest of the century. At that very same moment, an intrepid young man arrived in the city. We can imagine that for those few weeks in the fall of eighteen thirty five, he cracked open his issues of The Sun and followed along with rapt attention. We can picture him making notes and seeing opportunity ahead. The world was changing and he was going to be a part of it. I'm Aaron Manky and welcome to the side show. Taylor had always believed that he was destined
for greatness. As a young boy in the tiny village of Bethel, Connecticut, he felt like a king, a shrewd pint sized sales clerk at his father's general store. He drove a mean bargain with a mix of Yankee wit and thrift. He had big shoes to fill, after all. He was named after his grandfather, Phineas Taylor, who was
an old sage and loved by all. Phineas so pleased to have a small protege of his own, purchased Taylor and I quote the greatest farmland in all of Connecticut, which made him the richest kid in town, and everyone else knew it. Not a week went by without Uncle Finn waxing poetic to Taylor of this grand inheritance, a place by the name of Ivy Island. In Taylor's mind, it must have looked something like El Dorado. Minds of gold, outcroppings of emerald diamonds, all aglow, a place where you
could pluck rubies from trees and silver from streams. His autobiography talks about visions of milk and honey, and on a practical level, we can think this picture included some cows and chickens. Being New England in eighteen twenty two, after all, so when the time came to finally visit the land, his land. Taylor was ready. He was twelve and all grown up. He left town early that morning with the family friend. They trekked for hours. And we're
not talking about rolling hills of grassland. No, they mucked through swamp. This couldn't be right, though. We can imagine Taylor, like any other kid, asking are we there yet? But then they stopped. And where they stopped did it turn out to be the island of his wildest dreams? Not at all. In front of him was a slice of squishy, boggy ground. It was muddy, ugly, dotted with scraggly trees and mosquitoes, and filled with stink and snakes. And then
it hit him. This was one of his grandfather's infamous practical jokes. And worse, the whole town had been in on it for years. Taylor had left his home that morning, ready for retirement, and returned a laughing stock. We can imagine that he went back to his job at the Register of feeling a bit miffed and also scheming, because Taylor never forgot that lesson the years went on. He worked hard and loved the barter and banter of country life.
He was a quick talker, jovial, a teller of tall tales, A charmer, he traded in commodities and gossip, but he eventually took a job in Brooklyn and developed a taste for the spectacle of city life. Still home had a hold on him. His granddad implored him to come back, so he did. It was back in Connecticut that he met Charity Hallett. Soon the two were married, and then Taylor set up a new shop with a co conspirator,
or at least company along for the ride. It was here that he kept dreaming of riches and how to get them. Taylor's magic was people. His emotional radar was finally tuned to the desires, wants, and secrets of his customers, catering to their whims and imaginations. At his newly minted store, he sold everything from bibles to brandy to lottery tickets, a little something for everyone. He had a natural sense for psychology, and he was going to capitalize on it.
America in the mid eighteen hundreds, you see, was quickly changing. Religious revivals were in full swing, the nation was quickly industrializing, Immigration was on the rise, and the young country was beginning to look west to far flung places, the word scientist entered the vocabulary for the first time, and a war that would fracture the country loomed ahead, and Taylor wanted to ride these new waves, so he bought a
printing press. He believed that words had power and that they would take him further than his horse could run. He wanted to reach people in the world beyond Bethel. On October nineteenth of eighteen thirty one, he began printing his weekly Herald of Freedom. It fit right in with the trend of independent newspapers being sold on street corners in major cities across the nation, and Taylor wanted a slice of that pie. He wanted the freedom to share
his ideas, to advertise, to call people to action. He saw an opportunity to wrestle control of the narrative, to spin yarns in his own fashion, much like his grandfather Phineas had done all those years before. It was his turn to become a bona fide, widely respected storyteller. Well most of the time, you see, Taylor did like to get mouths wagging. He loved to stir up controversy with his paper, and it wasn't long before his affinity landed
him in a Connecticut jail for libel. While in this jail, Cell one, he decorated with carpets and other cozy furnishings. From home, he had an idea. He gathered his friends and created what he called the Committee of Arrangements. They spread the word of his imprisonment and impending release far and wide, both through word of mouth and through his printing press. We can imagine that on the day of his release, he put on his best suit, threw his shoulders back, and marched out of his cell and into
a throng of thousands his audience and their applause. Picture this will you horse drawn carriages astride dusty town roads, a marching band, blaring brass cannon, fire on the green, sticky champagne, toasts and revelry airing on deep into the night, all for him. At twenty two and back in the world, he had made a statement. The show business career of Phineas Taylor Barnum had arrived. The Mermaid was a game changer.
It was a decrepit specimen sewn together with the bottom half of a fish and the top half of a monkey, and holy dead p t. Barnum held it in his hands. He was on the hunt for artifacts with star factor. He went about these things with an open mind. You see, they didn't have to be perfect, No, they didn't even have to be real. What they did need was a thread of a yarn that he could spin up into a fantastic tale. And he immediately saw potential in this
scaly specimen, and had did a few years before. Like many people at the time, he had transplanted his growing family to New York City. It was a bustling, bursting metropolis dressed up like a promise. The city was teeming with life, a riot of foreign tongues, unrelenting construction, and air thick with the smells of smoke, cooking and the perfume of bodies. There was death and there was life,
and a lot of each. For some time he worked in the throes of this at another dry goods shop, and then one day, in eighteen thirty five, a customer came in with the story to tell and an offer to make Barnum was all ears. This customer was in show business, but he was tired. He happened to manage a very particular, very interesting charge. The purportedly one hundred sixty one year old black nanny of George Washington, a
woman by the name of Joyce Heth. What he wanted to know was this, would Barnum be interested in taking his show on the road. Now, I can't overstate what transpired that day. By saying yes, Barnum effectively purchased Joyce and then paraded her in front of a pain audience. We'll get to Joyce's whole story in her own episode later this season, but for now, what you need to
know is this. Her life and her death made Barnum a huge success, so successful, in fact, that he decided to give up his mercantile life and get into full time show business. He wanted to become a proper showman. In eighteen forty one, he purchased New York City's American Museum, two blocks from where the Twin Towers would later stand. It was a grand brick building smack at the corner of Broadway and Ann Streets. Visitors could see wax figures,
taxidermy art, and even hear lectures. But Barnum's version would be a little different. They would be grand, they would expand it would be his very own brick and mortar world to fill with a menagerie of magical and living curiosities. It would be open seven days a week, sunrise till way past sunset. Doors flung open for any one who could pay, and people paid. Interest in science and exploration
in medicine was booming. Yes, he wanted to have legitimate specimens, but he wasn't above exploiting the ignorance of the masses in order to serve their fantasies. He acquired objects from around the world, animals from the ocean, and notably, individuals with bodies that the Victorian era public saw as abnormal dwarves, giantesses, people with dark skin, and he attached stories to each
of them, just as he had done with Joyce. Heth capitalizing on this young country's expanding leisure time and burgeoning imagination. He mixed fact and fiction and it was a smash hit. But to understand how all of this came to be, we first have to understand what was going on with the mermaid that Barnum was holding, because it was this very mermaid that helped put this museum, his museum, on
the map. Moses Kimball appeared on Barnum's doorstep in eighteen forty two saw the specimen into as the young proprietor of the Boston Museum. He had something that might be of interest and offering, one might say, He presented Barnum with an ugly, withered body roughly three ft long, with its mouth a gape in a scream. Barnum took a closer look. It was weird, but it was believable too. Even at a time when only presidents and war heroes
count themselves in the ranks of American celebrities. Barnum knew he could make this mermaid famous. Then Kimball unspoiled the Mummy's story. It involved the tale of a ship captain out of Calcutta, bill, gotten gains and lost fortune. Now, while you might bring back snow globes or refrigerator magnets from trips these days, this guy brought home a mermaid. If he was duped into believing its authenticity, we don't know.
But what we do know is that these fabricated Franken creatures were fairly common in East Asia at the time. Barnum knew that too, but he didn't think the general public would. He christened it the Fiji Mermaid, implying an exotic origin story far from the reaches of Lower Manhattan. Folklore across the world has long told stories of mermaids. Who was to say that this wasn't a bona fide corpse. So he decided to do something clever. Let the public
decide for themselves. Barnum got to work. He blitzed small town newspapers with fake news. He took pseudonyms and sang the mermaids praises. He had them postmarked from Alabama and South Carolina and Washington, d C. And the papers ran them. His trusted friend Levi Lyman posed as the esteemed Dr Griffin. His backstory was as fake as the mermaids, but it landed him an exclusive interview in Philadelphia. The Eastern seaboard
was entranced, credulous, curious. Within a few weeks, Barnum produced woodcuts, engravings, and banners of busty, fair life size women with fish tails, advertising a fleeting one week opportunity to see this merm made in the flesh. The city was electrified, it clamored. Barnum promised three different city papers exclusive access to his exhibit, which was a surprise to each editor. When Barnum's exhibit opened, each of them ran the story anyway. Opening nights arrived,
the Mermaid packed the hall. Thousands came, paying a quarter and sweltering in the summer heat, surely shocked at what stood on stage before them. The discrepancy was very, very obvious, but some wondered, could there be some truth here? Maybe it wasn't the Mermaid in the picture, but it certainly didn't disqualify it from mirror status. And that is exactly
what Barnum had hoped for. And the numbers spoke. The show was a resounding success, so successful, in fact, that the Mermaid hit the road on a Southern tour, passing through the Bible Belt. It was only when the Mermaid's veracity was attacked in the Charleston papers that Barnum grew concerned. You see, at Charleston Minister had a bone to pick. This man's daughters had married sons of the famed naturalist John Ottobon, and he smelled a fraud. Barnum, to his credit,
countered his accusations. If it was so easy to craft a fake, he would give any person who could show him another example of a fish sewn to a monkey five hundred dollars. No one came forward, but a group of local scientists and naturalists piled on. They thought this lie was a dangerous one, exploiting the public's trust as they so desperately tried to move the legitimacy of their work forward. The mermaid was evacuated and put on a
slow ship back to New York. Back in the city, it sat dusty and dejected in a box on the top shelf of Barnum's office, and there it rested a spell. Barnum thought about what to do next, and of course he came to the natural conclusion he had eventually put the mermaid back out for a display. He had learned something important through his experiment. Though by and large the public wasn't upset about his dis option. On the contrary, they seem to have actually enjoyed it, reveled in it,
even wanted more. The show he decided must go on. The show went on for a good long while. To be in Barnum's orbit was to have front row seats to the spectacle of his life. He was known to be more attentive to his exhibits than his family, often gallivanting on tour meeting presidents, having audiences with the Queen. But he had an idea that would bring him back closer to home, an idea that proved, when all was
said and done, to be disastrous. He thought he knew what he was getting into, But when Barnum invested in the Jerome Clock Company with designs on moving it to his beloved east Bridgeport, Connecticut, he didn't realize he was buying into a sour deal, one that bankrupted him and forced his family out of their palatial estate. They to a house by the sea on Long Island, where charities, health declined. We can imagine that depression loomed large, but
the gears kept turning. His time there offered him space that the big city did not. It was a pastoral place, and we can imagine that it reminded him of Bethel. It was in this quiet that Barnum incubated, hoping for a rebirth, ideally spurred on by divine intervention. The newspapers celebrated his downfall with headlines such as the deceiver has been duped. People cheered, But Barnum never meant to hurt anyone in his line of work. There was no mal intent,
no malice. He merely meant to charm, to entertain, to open the world to people beyond the confines of their geography. This stroke of bad luck, this clock swindle, was something entirely different. Never one to be alone much, he made a friend, a local farmer. While walking the shore. One day, they came across a commotion. Just ahead were some men and a twelve ft black whale, dead but hard and fresh. He said, never want to turn down a carcass. Barnum
fished around in his pocket. While it's true that he could have spent the last few dollars on milk and bread, he instead spent it on this big, hulking corpse, And because its shelf life was short, he had to make quick work of it. He shipped it to his museum and exhibited it in a refrigerator. It was a success, too, He was able to pay his rent. He took this as a sign. It all felt pretty providential After all. The papers, though, continued to predict his end, but Barnum
wasn't one to stay down or stay put. In the winter of eighteen fifty six he went out on more tours, again with a few trusted sidekicks, including General Tom Thumb, a fellow who would become a lifelong friend. It's seeing that Barnum was making a comeback without missing a beat and with no sense of irony. He began a lecture series called The Art of Money Getting or Success in Life, and the allowing string of sold out shows sent a loud and clear message. He was back, and he was
going to do those newspapers and naysayers won better. He was going to run for public office and was going to do it well. In eighteen sixty five, he was elected to the Connecticut State Legislature. It was not lost on him that Americans needed a reprieve from the Civil War. To his museum, he added pro unionist exhibits, lectures, and plays, and he also enlisted Pauline Kushman, an actress who had been a spy for the Union, who regaled audiences with
her tales behind enemy lines. Barnum had become a staunch abolitionist, running squarely on the antislavery platform. In later years, he would amend his story about his time with Joyce. Heth again and again and again his guilt was clear, even if his conscience was not. On July thirteenth, eighteen sixty five, Barnum was at the podium speaking to the legislature when he was slipped a note, casting his eyes downward and barely missing a beat. He continued on about the state's
train system. But that piece of paper, well, it held some devastating news. At that very moment, it seems Barnum's Great American Museum was burning to the ground. Was it a furnace failure, Was it set by Confederate sympathizers. Will never truly know. But what we do know is this around noon and employee came running from the basement yelling fire. There were no sprinkler systems or fire extinguishers. There wasn't
even a fire code at the time. This place was a labyrinth of Barnum's own design and a veritable tinder box. Window panes exploded, flames licked up the walls, and smoke poured out as thick as oil. The most famous building in New York City was choking. The air was gone, gobbled up by the fire birds flew from the building's belly. Snakes evacuated down Broadway. There are even reports of firefighters saving a seal named Ned and rumors of a lion
that escaped to roam the streets. Any movable artifacts were launched from the windows, including a wax likeness of Jefferson Davis wearing a dress. The roof was collapsing, the walls were caving in. Two whales recently kidnapped from the coast of Labrador boiled in their own salt water tanks before firefighters broke their glass. They collapsed through the building and landed on Broadway, where they spent weeks rotting there in the summer heat because no one could figure out how
to move them. Upon reading the note, Barnum, true to his unruffled form, finished his speech, folded it back into his pocket, and went home to Bridgeport. He left for New York City the following day. Once there, he assessed the carnage, and wouldn't you know it, he decided to begin again. Mere months after the tragic fire, he opened a new version of his museum about a mile uptown. He found more artifact x and more guests. This was all fine until it wasn't. Because this new museum eventually
burned down as well. We can only imagine the tenacity and blind faith it would require to believe that this would all eventually work out. After all, he had sold thirty eight million admission tickets at the time when the population of his country was only thirty five million. He knew he was onto something. At sixty, this master of reinvention was now free to embark on his next act,
the creation of the American side show. P. T. Barnum was the ultimate showman and he could sell just about anything, So it should come as no surprise that there are countless stories about his business dealings, more than we could ever fit into a single epiodode. But if you stick around through this brief sponsor break, my friend and co producer Robin Miniter, will share one more golden tail. Jenny Lynde wasn't going to be played for a fool. She was a woman self possessed, the lady Gaga of the
Victorian age. Jenny counted the Queen and her cronies among her most rabid fans. In fact, Jenny believed her voice to be divinely gifted, and for this reason she never took it for granted. She dressed plainly, lived modestly, and curated a private life according to her deep seated faith, and she did this stunningly well. By the way, for a very long while. But by the time she neared her seven performance, she found herself about to turn thirty
and totally exhausted. Marriage betrothals had been broken, and a dear friend of hers had passed away. So she retreated into herself and into retirement, stumbling into a personal and professional crossroads. Until that is, she was offered a lot of money. You see, word of her success had traveled far and wide. Jenny was the most famous opera singer in the world, after all, and when P. T. Barnum heard whispers of this, he saw dollar signs, so he
decided to shoot his shot. When Barnum's man came knocking, Jenny was ready to shake him down. He wanted to cut a deal with her for two years of her time. Now, if Barnum was ruthless about money, Jenny was in a position to best him. She negotiated to bring along two servants, a music director and a companion, as well as having
every single expense taken care of along the way. On top of that, she required Barnum to deposit the modern equivalent of six and a half million dollars into her bank account, all before she had even left her house To head off towards America before she had even met him, and Barnum agreed to all of her terms. Jenny set off on a steamership and Barnum got to work. For six months, he peppered the papers with news of her impending arrival in her great success in Europe, cranking his
ink splash star making printing presses like never before. In fact, on September two of eighteen fifty, the New York Herald dedicated five of its six front page columns to the Swedish Nightingale, who would soon be arriving on the American mail steamer the Atlantic. By the time the ship docked, Barnum had drummed up enough interest that thousands of people had gathered to meet her. The throngs arrived in their
Sunday best, hanging from the docks and waving madly. And yes, it was also true that he had hired some of these people to just stand around, but few would know this at the time. This was an arrival fit for a queen, but it was all for Jenny. It was here, at long last, that the two finally made their acquaintance way. Jenny wondered had Barnum first heard her sing, Actually, he said as he handed her a bouquet of red roses, he never had. When it came down to it, he
wasn't even that interested in her voice. What excited him most about her was what she represented to him, the access to the upper echelons of society and something that wasn't immediately afforded to him while trying to push a frank and fish monkey on a pedestrian Lower Manhattan audience. Basically, he was just interested in her reputation, and as any woman knows, a reputation can be a very powerful thing. In the case of Jenny Lynn, she won the game.
Her tour of America was hugely successful. The narratives that Barnum spun around her were of the most agreeable kind and actually set her up for even more success in the future. But as you'll see, she was an anomaly in our collection of stories to come. As we will soon learn, most of the folks who entered Barnum's orbit rarely on themselves in a position to ever escape. Sideshow was written by Robin Miniter, with executive production, narration and
audio editing by me Aaron Mankey. Research for the series was done by Taylor Haggerdorn and Sam Alberty. Graham and Mild Presents was created in partnership with I Heart Radio. You can learn more about this show and everything else from Grim and mild Over at Grimm and mild dot com, and, as always, thanks for listening.