Hi, everybody, check here with the Greatest Show on Earth wrangling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus. You say, no, stuff you should know the podcast. That's right. It's Saturday, and that means it's time for another SELECX and this one is from May twenty eighteen. P T. Barnum Colon More Complicated than You've Heard. And I picked this one, you
guys for two reasons. One because I believe in this episode, I predicted that Hugh Jackman would play the man in a movie one day, one of my two predictions, along with Jared from Subway being a creep. And the other reason I picked it out is because I finally saw the movie The Greatest Show on Earth recently with my daughter, and I didn't like it so much. I didn't think it was that good, so I'm sorry to anyone who had a part in that movie. My daughter loved it,
my wife loved it. I just thought it was okay. But this episode is great, so I hope you enjoy. P. T. Barnum Colon More Complicated than You've heard. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles W. Chuck Bright, There's Jerry Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello.
Jerry's got a top hat on.
I know, I don't know why she's trying to be all mister monopoly or P. T.
Barnum.
Oh yeah, I forgot he wore a top hat allegedly. Oh no, he did. I saw a picture of it.
Yeah, Hugh Grant certainly did. Hugh Grant, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Laurie. I think it's h l No, it's Clive Owens you're thinking of. Yeah, Hugh Jackman Man, where's that top hat? Like a champ?
He does. I don't know how much you went on the internet for this one, because this is a pretty comprehensive article actually, but The Greatest Showman really set the Internet on fire Man and a lot of like it really brought out a lot of people saying like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa whoa whoa Yeah, whoa Yeah, this is the the very definition of the word fantasy.
Yeah, it seemed like that movie was can be best described as a musical whitewashing.
Mm hmm in every sense of that word.
Yeah, so let's destroy it. Yeah, I mean, after reading this, I didn't think, like man P. T. Barnum, what a complete a hole.
No, he was just a lot more complicated than that, and get a lot of stuff that you just shouldn't just pass over because you can't figure out lyrics to what rhymes with racism.
Yeah, I mean he was. He was definitely an enigma and seems like he did some good. But also I mean he was a hustler man.
For sure. So this is what I didn't fully understand until researching this. Chuck. He was. He's known as the greatest showman, right, m But there were plenty of other showmen out there at the time, which makes sense because you have to have something to compare be compared to to be the greatest, right. But I guess I just assumed he was like the first or the originator. No, he was not the first showman. He was a great showman.
Yeah.
What he really left his mark on was introducing America to pure unadulterated hucksterism, sure, and using it for marketing.
Humbug that's what he called it.
And he had he had a lot of quotes, some were some were definitely something he said like every crowd has a silver lining, which means you can shake it out of him and get some money from a bunch of people. Right, Yeah, the one about a sucker born every minute that's never been successfully attributed to him one hundred percent.
Well yeah, and one thing is for sure, and is that his autobiography is I think if you order it, it comes with a salt lick, so you can just lick on that salt while you're reading it.
Right. I don't know what that means, but that seems like something that they would do.
Yeah, I mean he I think when the man is writing about himself, it's like, you know what, you may just want to believe a third of this.
Oh take it with a grain of salt, but so much so that you need an actual salt lick.
Oh yeah, I got it, now, I got it.
So So there is one quote that I think kind of describes this guy best, or at least his philosophy, and it also kind of reveals like you can't call him harmless, but also the intentions were not entirely evil, right Right. He had a quote that said that people don't mind being deceived so long as they're being amused at the same time.
Which is kind of true.
It does, and it largely lets him off the hook as far as being a huckster. Right, But the thing that The Greatest Showman really glossed over, just outright ignored, was that a lot of the the amusements that he was presenting to the public were extraordinarily degrading to people at the time. They were super racists. There were just a lot of There was just a lot of exploitation. He made his money not just by hustling Americans, but
by exploiting other Americans too. Right, Yeah, and again, like this, a lot of this is contextual. It's not necessarily fair for later generations to judge previous generations, although it's really fun to do. But yes, you could say, like this guy was exploited of even even in compared even compared to like his contemporaries. Right, perhaps, so he is just this very complex character who I think you and I can agree he was not an evil person. He just did some horrible things here or there.
Should we go back in time? Yes, all right, let's go back to the beginning. Let's hop in the way back machine, which is appropriately steampunky right now, Yeah, it takes many forms. I don't know if people realize that.
It has a clock without the glass and you can see the parts inside, but it doesn't actually function. It so strictly for decoration.
So let's go back to eighteen ten, back to Bethel, Connecticut, where this man was born, mister Phineas Taylor Barnum. He had sort of a mixed family life. I mean, he was they point out in this article. He was firmly American. His great great great grandfather came over from England as an indentured servant in the seventeenth century. Eventually became a landowner. But they didn't It's not like they had a ton of money. His dad, Filo great.
Name, yeah, all these are great names, was he was.
Not super successful, so it was kind of up to young pt to make his own way in life.
Right. Yeah. His father was a farmer, which introduced Phineas to the idea that he really hated like manual, mindless work.
Now, he didn't like doing that farm work.
But that's not to say he didn't like work. He just liked very specific kinds of work where his energies were appropriately chanting.
Builking people out of money.
Sure, yeah, I mean that that was kind of it.
He liked.
He was the definition of the word enterprising, right, she could figure out a way. He could look at something literally, look at something that you couldn't you could almost not give away, you certainly couldn't sell, and turn it into pure profits. Like he got into lotteries for a little while once, right.
Yeah, I mean he went to work. He left the farm, went to work at a country store and realized quickly, like, just because you're in the country doesn't mean there aren't like swindlers and cheaters out here. So he kind of learned some of the tricks of the trade there. His old man died when he was fifteen, and he was kind of his mom had his mom had to get a job, but he was basically like, all right, it's kind of up to me now to provide for my family.
So he moved got that another job as a store clerk, and as you said, got into lotteries.
Yeah, and he was early on pursuing a career at clerkship, which I guess is a thing, but yeah, so there was this he saw easy money and lottery, so he set up on himself. Apparently when he was working for these owners of the store, they were away at one point, and he got his eyes on some tin kitchen ware that just would not sell. So he took some other
stuff that wouldn't sell at that store. These things weren't his, by the way, and he traded them for a bottle collection, which I guess was the thing that people wanted at the time. Yeah, and he put those things up as prizes, right, and he started a lottery and these were the prizes,
and there were cash prizes. But he ended up selling like a thousand tickets or something like that in this little town store based on these prizes and some cash prizes, saying like half of all tickets were going to be winners, and you might win a bottle or you might win like a tin muffin pan, but you could also win this cash. And so these things that had just been sitting on these shelves forever were suddenly turned into something
valuable thanks to his marketing expertise. And this is while he's still a teenager.
Yeah, we've covered this in something before that lotteries were a thing back then that someone could just cook up. You know, it's not like the lotteries we have today, Like these sanctioned, sanctioned ways of stealing people's money. Right, But back then you could just cook up a lottery in a small town and be like, you know what I've got. It was almost like a Ponzi thing, like I can raise money, give away some of that money and prizes, and then keep the.
Rest, right. I think that was in our lotteries episode. Oh really yeah?
Okay, Well, in order to do that, though, you have to be a natural born salesperson, which is what he was.
You really do and like lotteries would played like a theme throughout his early career, like that's how he ended up making his initial I don't know fortune's the right word, but that's how he staked himself and his family was through lotteries and working in stores and then eventually owning stores like general stores, grocery stores, that kind of thing.
But the lotteries are where he made his money. And he actually figured out that you could make more money with less work than having to go to the trouble of setting up a lottery. Like you said, anybody could just set up a lottery by taking tickets from somebody else's lottery and selling them further out at an increased price. But then he figured out one more thing, Chuck. You didn't even have to go out and sell these things yourself. You could hire other people to sell them even further out.
All you had to do was give them the tickets and collect the money that they brought. So he ended up making money by basically expanding other people's lotteries for a while.
That's right. And in the middle of this, and he had moved to Brooklyn at this point, he's kind of hopping all over the place there in the northeast.
But uh, and and to be fair, we're hopping kind of all over his early life right now. Yeah, chronologically.
Yeah. Yeah. So in this time period, he met who would become his wife, a woman named Charity Hallett, who he described in his autobiography as a fair, rosy cheeked, buxom girl with beautiful white teeth. Did I mention she had big.
Boobs, right, but those teeth.
Man. So they would get married, and I think they had four daughters. But during all this time he did he had a little Josh Clark in him, because you mean, well, he was writing letters to local papers that weren't getting published. So he said, you know what, I'm going to start my own paper. Yeah, he clarked himself a paper.
I'll see you all in Hell media.
Yeah, and much like yourself, you started your own paper, which was kind of cool.
Sure. I mean like, if people won't print your crank ideas, yeah, go start your own paper.
It's like if you want to get your manifesto out there and.
Either yeah, either become you and Obama esque, which we don't recommend, or start your own paper.
That's right. And his was called Herald of Freedom, which is terrible. And this is where it gets a little weird because he kind of went after people, was eventually hit with a libel suit and spent sixty days in jail. But that sold a lot of papers, and he was also hailed as a hero because apparently he was legitimately exposing corruption.
Right, So to me, Chuck, that one really stood out because it shows just how huge this guy's life story is. Yeah, that even if you make a movie out of it, all, the best you can hope for is to pick like five or six or ten different things and try to
find a thread throughout him. Right, Whether that's an accurate portrailer or not, it can't possibly be, because this guy's life was just so enormous and he did so many things, and he was such an outsize character that a lot of times you either vilify him or glorify him, and it was much more a combination of both of those things. And I think that example really says it all. Like he had his notions, and he started his own paper and ended up going to jail and subscription boosted, so
ended up making money from it. But at the same time, he was legitimately trying to call out corruption in this town that he cared about. So his character was much more complex than you get just from just about any source unless you read biographies about him.
Yeah, agreed. So finally he says, I'm sorry, Connecticut said no more lotteries in Connecticut. So he's like, all right, what am I doing here if I can't do this little scam?
He's like, I love this town, but not that much.
So in eighteen thirty four he left the paper, shut that down, moved his family to New York City and should we take a break? Perfect, All right, we're in New York City and we'll be back right after this.
If you want to know, then you're in luck. Just listen to josh selfus.
No stuff you sho.
No, I got a falafel.
Is it good?
It's pretty good?
Is it from the halal guys? Uh?
Huh of course, man, who else are you going to get a falaffel from?
That's good stuff? Yeah? Uh so, Man, this guy really just reading through this thing. He did so many.
Jobs, right, he was a factotem.
Dozens and dozens of jobs through his lifetime.
Yeah, and I'm glad he didn't just stick to clerking, right, or even lottery. He had this thing like something about show business attracted this guy. Oh yeah, I don't know what it was. Maybe nobody but him knows what it was. Maybe he doesn't even know what it was. But he was attracted to the idea of like wowing and amusing and amazing crowds. And he did that pretty early on.
I think he was twenty five when he got into exhibiting a human being who he purchased and owned for a while, which, by the way, does not show up in the Greatest Showman.
Right, And this is after in New York he started a boarding house for a while. Yeah, and co owned a grocery store for a while.
Right.
And so like his life is full of him just trying to do these kind of regular things and then being like Nope, gotta go buy a lady and put her on display.
Right, this is after Chuck. By the way, he had come down with smallpox for a while.
Oh did we miss a smallpox?
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, this guy had a huge life. Let's get to Joyce Heath right, Yeah, because she is a very controversial part of P. T. Barnum's life. She was the first, his first foray into show business. And there's no other way to put it. Like he purchased her. She was a slave and elderly slave who he purchased from another promoter who had been touting her as General George Washington's nurse maid. Yes, from when George
Washington was a child. This is eighteen thirty five, right, you did as she was supposedly one hundred and sixty one years old.
Yeah, so he negotiates a price. He went and saw her, and she was blind, she had no teeth, she was partially paralyzed, but she could talk and tell her story.
Yeah, she told stories about young George as a boy.
Oh yeah, and to be fair, she was already being exploited. It's not like he which is not great. But it's not like Barnum introduced this into her life.
No, he just purchased her and took it over. Yeah, it took over the exploitation money.
For a thousand dollars, and he toured with her until she died, not that long later, just like a year later,
not even in eighteen thirty six. He made a lot of dough and it was it was sort of a watershed moment for him where I think he was like, wait a minute, I've realized that I can get people in a room by cooking up these stories and getting things in the newspaper and printing these posters, and even if, like if business was down, he would do these crazy things, like one of them when business was down, appearing with Heath.
At one point he accused her of being a robot what they called at the time an automaton.
In an anonymous letter to the editor in a newspaper.
Yeah, a robot made of whalebone, rubber and springs. So everyone was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Not only is she George Washington's nurse maid, but she's really a robot.
Right. What that did was it got the people who had been avoiding going to see her, because even at the time, people were like, this is pure exploitation. This woman is being exhibited like a giraffe would be or something like that. She's an old lady's working her ten to twelve hours a day. Some people think that he worked her to death, literally, And so there was part of the press that was saying a reporting on this
with great distaste. So there's a segment of American society who would not be caught dead seeing George Washington's one hundred and sixty year old nursemaid, but they would conceive a go see an autonomaton if that's really what was going on. So he managed to dupe the very people who were critical of this exploitation that he was undertaking. He got everybody in that one.
Well, yeah, and it gets even worse. Finally, when she passed away, he actually sold tickets to a public autopsy in a saloon so people could come look at this poor woman's insides. And this is where it was finally revealed. Doctor said, she's maybe like eighty eighty one years old at.
Most, right, And this was so Jane McGrath kind of walks past, like what a controversy this was, Like this guy had been like very much touting that she was the nurse maid, like he supposedly had the bill of sale to George Washington's father for her, so like he was saying, like, this is legitimately one hundred and six year old woman. So in this autopsy that he charged for. When it was exposed that she was actually half that age, it was there was a bit of disgrace there, and
he had to learn to roll with the punches. And it was about this time that that he basically said to himself, you can you can take this as a lesson and go on the straight and narrow, maybe get back into clerking. Yeah, or you can double maybe triple and quadruple down on this and and see where that goes. And he chose the ladder of the two for sure.
That's right. He sure did. The next thing that he did, the next person that he kind of took under his wing was his greasy greasy wing, was someone called yea, why is it spelled that way?
That is the Italian spelling of signor.
Oh, well, let me turn it on then nice antonio antonio, And an extra bit in.
There, signor antonio is another way to say.
Well, sure if you're a dullard.
I'm a bit of a dullard, chuck. I think you know that after ten years.
So this guy, we're really milking that ten year thing.
Hum. I've got my SYSK ten year Army shirt on.
I see that. It's really nice.
Thank you. I've been working on my bucksomeness.
You're quite buxom. So Senior Antonio was a balancer. He's one of these guys like a plate spinner, walked on stilts, juggles. He could throw things in the air and catch them very fast.
Yeah, he's like a hippie.
Yeah, exactly. He would be on tour with he'd have those little sticks what are those called, devil sticks?
Devil sticks or a hackey sack, any of those things.
Yeah, he pull a hacky sack out of his ear at any moment. So this guy, he said, all right, you need to be my newest client. I will make you famous. Change your stage name from Signor Antonio to Senor Vivala because that's a little more I don't know, exciting.
I guess I like Senor Antonio. Yeah I did too. It's a lateral move.
Here's the thing, though, is there were a lot of dudes out there spinning plates, so he it wasn't like he was so unique. But Barnum thought, you know what, I think you're better than the rest. So here's what i'll do. And again this is just another example of how how good he was at promotion. He said, I'll do a free performance for a theater and I'll even be your assistant on stage. And people came, and so the theater said, all right, I guess if people come for free, they'll pay.
I think I think what he was saying was he Yeah, I think that's exactly I think you're right.
He just wowed them enough.
I think that's that's the impression I have.
Yeah.
But even still, despite Vivala being genuinely good, he was I think head and shoulders above most of his contemporary spinners.
Yeah.
I think people saw in the press, oh there's a really good plate spinner. We saw a plate spinner at the at the office last week. So I'm not going to go anywhere to see another plate spinner. I'm certainly not going to pay.
Yeah.
So Barnum had a pretty good idea, But I actually came out of an uncomfortable situation that fell into his lap with Roberts, another plate spinner.
Yeah, so this is a rival plate spinner who apparently would go to produce on the West Coast. Yeah, he was a crip and he would go to Vivala's performances and heckel him. I guess you call that plate spinning.
Boo, terrible plate spinning.
Stuff like that, And so P. T. Barnum cooked up a thing where he was like, all right, I'll offer one thousand American dollars to anyone who can perform the Vivalas act in public. Roberts accepted. But here's what really happened is he got together with Roberts and they all three hatched a plan to do these kind of staged competitions.
Right, so they promoted in the.
Place spinning competitions.
East Coast, West Coast played spinning rivalry is going on right now. Everybody's going to come see this, and everybody did. And in that first performance, Roberts, as was staged, conceded he could not replicate Vivala's act. It was too good. But I would love to see Vivala replicate my act.
And I challenge you, Senor Vivalla, to replicate my act tomorrow night at this same theater, and they kept going back and forth like that, with this staged rivalry that they made some cash off of, thanks to Barnum's ingenuity.
They did. Finally, in eighteen thirty six, the circus comes into the picture. He joined a traveling circus. Barnum did as a ticket seller, which I take it to mean he doesn't sit in a booth and sell tickets, but he goes around town selling tickets.
Yeah, like chambers of commerce or something like that.
Yeah, And of course he got a little commission off this thing, so he was making some dough.
Vivoala joined the same circus as a performer.
Of course they were attached at the hip at that point.
No, that was Changinang bunker you're thinking of.
That's a dad joke.
It totally was.
And this one I thought was a little bit weird. Apparently the circus proprietor, a guy named Turner, was into practical jokes and not very good ones. Because this practical joke was he convinced a crowd that Barnum was the reverend e from Avery who had been acquitted of murder. But everyone thought that this guy had committed murder, and back then, no one knew anyone looked like so he said, this guy is from Avery, and he almost got lynched.
Apparently, Yeah, like from Avery's name was not very well liked in the area. He was, at the very least he through having an adulterous affair with a young woman and had induced her to kill herself, or at worst had murdered her to prevent her from having his illegitimate child. Yeah, but he's going to quit it. Right, Andy's a reverend, did we mention? So, yeah, the crowd, like, according to Barnum, almost killed them.
It's a real funny joke, I know.
But then later on, Jane says that Barnum got even with him with his own practical joke. I could find nothing anywhere, including in Barnum's autobiography that mentions that.
I think he covered his toilet and saran wrap.
No crude, that's so nasty.
No, No, he gave him an upper decker.
Gross, that's even worse.
So apparently these guys got into business together and it became a thing where people would go see the circus, where the two ring masters would would kind of go at each other with these practical jokes. Right, that became a thing.
So there's a transition going on, another transition now he is. He started out store clerking, lotterying, went got into show business where it's like basically a Colonel Tom to different performers. Yeah, and then now he's transitioning into the circus. But by now he's been like married to the road about as much as he's been married to Charity as well. And from all accounts, like he was very much in love with her and they were like he was faithful and they were a real couple. But he was on the
road a lot. There's just no if ands or butts about it. He was out there on the road quite a bit. So transitioning to a circus was basically the same thing. It was just a little bigger of an outfit. So it was like a step up. But you got to also keep in mind here that he's spending a lot of time on the road at a time when travel was really long and really tough.
That's right, And so he eventually decides working for someone else's circus is for the birds. I'm going to start my own. You buy some horse and wagons, going to get a clown. You gotta have a clown. I think he still had Vivala at the time. Yeah, and started Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater. Toured all over the place for a little while, and then they disbanded. Right, nothing ever seemed to work out for very long.
No, I think that he got fed up and says with some of the rivalries with other showmen that they, you know, you would build your whole circus around like an act, and all of a sudden, the act would be like, I'm sick of this, I'm sick of being on the road. I'll see you later, and all of
a sudden your circus would fall apart. I think they were kind of tenuous outfits, right, but he he The thing about Barnum was 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 you 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 in indefatigable, into fatigueable in that sense.
Uh. 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. That didn't come along. He tried to do a respectable business again, went into business with a guy who manufactured a grease paste in Cologne. That did it all right for a little while, but then that failed. Uh, 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, s Steve Perry, right, but he wanted this to be tied to show business in some way. Yeah, finally one and I think the eighteen forty one he
had another big break or another big vision. There's 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 fifteen 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. I 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 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 hoypolloy, tawdry crowds went to the theater. Yeah, that was associated with like Burlasque or something like that, or even like humanodities exhibition stuff like that. That was theater stuff. A museum like scudders, like respectable people could go there. So what Barnum did was he bought a museum and then dragged it down into the mud.
Right and this hold 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 the museum in eighteen forty one through a lot of work.
And I think that's fair enough because it is a little bit like you know, Robin Peter to pay Paul. 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 was he tirelessly worked at finding new and interesting ways to market the thing, right, 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 eighteen forty one, he was he charged twenty five cents a person for admission. He had something like
four thousand visitors a day. And he took this thing, like I say that he dragged the Ward 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 in an norm as spectacle and something like eight hundred and fifty thousand pieces were on display in his museum, so 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 spin He had little people, he had big people. He had ladies with beards, and robots and puppets and animals, he had drafts 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 a whole thread of like, you know, there are people being exploited, there 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 it's lost on people.
Like there were side shows 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 museums humming along. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back right after this.
If you want to know then you're in luck. Just listen up to selfus.
Stuffus, Okay, we're back.
Yeah. So we mentioned earlier about the humbug, this kind of hucksterism in his biography there or auto biography, which was rewritten by himself by the way, after people read the first version and said, what a jerk. Yeah.
Yeah, he was like just openly boastful and braggered about how much he exploited people and how much he duped the American public.
He turned it down a little bit in this in the revision, but he did talk a little bit about being slightly embarrassed about kind of how shameless he was. But then again in the next line he would say, but you know what, this is how everyone is in my business. I'm just better at it than them.
Basically, yeah, he said, 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 are at it, for sure. And I think if you, if you compared apples to apples at the time, Barnum's jam was way better than anybody else's jam.
Yeah, for sure. So uh. He had three really big successes in a row with his with his museum here. The first one was called the Fiji Mermaid f e e j ee. This was in eighteen forty two, and this was a big, a big deal. He got a man named Levi Lyman or Levy Lyman. He was an old colleague of his, and he said, here's what I'll do.
You're gonna you are now, doctor J. Griffin. You're a naturalist for the British Lyceum of Natural History, which was not a real place, and you were the 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 I could jackalobe, except what was it? It was a head of a baboon torso of an orangutang 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 eighteen twenties, 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.
There was.
It was like kind of a thread of rogue tax at ermy in the mid nineteenth century, and I think Harvard has one on display. But I look to find out where PT. Barnums is and I can't find it.
It's probably like on Richard Branson's headboard or something.
It may have actually burned up in one of the many fires that plagued P. T. Barnum's life.
Things are going to get fiery here in this last bit too.
Yeah. Well, anyway, let's get back to the Fiji mermaid though. Okay, okay, So Doctor J. 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.
Yeah, 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 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. They became very famous together. He said, he was eleven 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 Barnoman and Charles Stratton. That's right, a sensation, that's the best way to put it.
In the final big victory of the trifecta. When he was in Europe with Stratton, he heard of Ginny Lynn. 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. She's all she is is a talented singer, but she's amazing and 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 a thousand dollars 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. Who 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, but by the time she showed up for the tour starting in eighteen fifty, he had managed to get, like you said, just turn her into a national sensation, like people had like Beatlemania for this lady. Yeah, this article says that she was not a very nice person. I didn't see
that anywhere else, and I actually saw that. So after the contract between her and barn was up in eighteen fifty one, she continued to tour America with like an actual orchestra, I believe, And she made three hundred thousand dollars in eighteen fifties money from this whole American tour and donated every single penny of it to Sweden's public
school system, which I oh, really burgeoning at the time. Yeah, 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 eighteen fifty.
Right, but I thought that was pretty neat. Man. She took all 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 and that's what he does. In the eighteen fifty he bought up a lot of land near Bridgeport, Connecticut because he wanted to make east Bridgeport. That happened in place. He invested in it 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 when 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? Oh, 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 he may maybe he did no I guess if he had moved out then Yeah, I didn't own.
It's I just thought that was a little weird.
Yeah.
So he 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, but 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 like he didn't miss a beat.
Yeah, I mean this ten year period from eighteen fifty to eighteen sixty 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 Thomb 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. He 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 that 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 so the the he's his stars starting to rise again. At the very least, his fortunes are reversing from from you know, 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, Jax 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, I'm pretty sure that was Andrew Jackson. It was remember
our two part on trailer 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. So he was a very normal pedestrian person as far as his politics go, and 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. And in April of eighteen sixty five he actually won an election to the Connecticut General Assembly, where he worked really hard to ratify the thirteenth Amendment and supported another cause to allow the rights of black people to vote in Connecticut.
Yeah, so 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 he like something happened and he was converted to the right side of history. I guess you could call it, you know.
Yeah, So here's where fire number two comes in. After a few months after this election, his museum burned down along with the animals and the exhibit, which is super sad. Yes, this 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 eighteen seventies, 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 Coope or Coop, I'm not sure which one it is, but he had pt Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, men Agerie, Caravan and Circus.
Yeah, a little wordy that was.
Eighteen seventy one. And then did you cover the eighteen seventy two fire. No, there was another fire that killed other circus animals that the winter at the Winter Camp, which is on the side of where Madison Square Garden is right now. There's a horrific fire in the Winter Camp in eighteen seventy two killed a bunch of other circus animals, which this this is why, this is one of the reasons why years later Barnum and Bailey's Wrinkling Brothers circus went away was because of animals.
Yeah, and he, I mean he was by the time this fire happened. That the what was it called the Hippotheatron I think so he he was very successful with that circus. He started with Coop or Coup. They made about four hundred grand in the first year and it was a very he first circus to kind of do the traditional thing that we all think of is 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. But the grief must have subsided quickly because he secretly married Fish's daughter at sixty three years old. He married twenty two year old Nancy Fish about three and a half months later after his
wife passed. No word about her teeth, no or her bras's eyes, So.
They got married secretly fourteen weeks after Charity died, and then when they came to the US, 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 eighteen sixty or I'm sorry seventy five, he took a break from the circus, got back into politics and became the mayor of Bridgeport for a little while.
Na East Bridgeport, though he's talking trash.
About the 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 like Sunday sales and 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 onto the ladies. And it was in place apparently till nineteen sixty five. 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. You didn't just vote yes on it. Sure if you're the one who said, everybody, everybody, let's ban contraception for one hundred years. Yeah, and it was
successful actually, So yeah, he was. 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 eighteen eighty, 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 had the word circus in there, and this is when he got Jumbo the elephant, which it was Jumbo was a legendary attraction until eighteen eighty five when Jumbo was killed by a train.
And probably caught fire too.
And did you know we were just in Boston that Tuff's University their mascot is Jumped 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 endowment and 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 Toughs, and so Jumbo the Elephant became their mascot. And I think because it does say in here he he displayed Jumbo's preserved hide and skeleton. I think it was, or maybe is on display at Toughs. Oh wow, I'm not sure if it still is, but I think at one time it was.
So it 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 the found it. I'm not sure.
At the timeline there, man, that's that's really crazy. He did a lot of stuff. So go jumbo's, Yeah, fighting jumbo's or the passificggressive jumbos.
Or what the stomping jumbos.
There you go, that's pretty good.
So Barnman Bailey weren't together for too long. Initially they parted ways, but then again joined in eighteen eighty seven, ultimately finally for the Barnman Bailey circus.
Yep, they broke up and then they got back together, and then it stayed that way until twenty sixteen, 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, And 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 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 Apples circus or the uh, the the what's it call it's the famous ones, the family.
Oh, the Flying Zamboni's.
Yeah, or was it Zamboni's not Zamboni's.
I don't remember. It's something like that.
But it's them. It's still 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 of cirqued is so late. Those are the last circuses I saw.
Yeah, those are okay.
But 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, like I'm not some diehard Michael Jackson fan, but you don't have to beat this to appreciate this. It is amazing, Like like it's worth going to Vegas to go see who's Michael jack 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, eighteen ninety 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 I did that.
Maybe do I don't know either. I think I don't know. But that's a heck of a way to end this podcast.
So maybe he wanted to feel the public outpouring or something.
It could be that. Or he wanted to proofread it or something. I don't know. But if he wanted, if that was what he was after, why didn't they just send it to him ahead of time they actually publish it.
Yeah, it's weird.
Yeah, well we'll find out one day when we die and go to having to 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 PT Barnum that we didn't know, let us know. We'll just add to this guy's story over time. In the meantime, if you want to read this great article by Jane McGrath, type MPT Barnum in the search bar at how Stuff Works. Since I said search bars time, for listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this Unibomber follow up. Oh good, I was into that one.
The yeah yeah, that was a good episode. Thought that was a good tenth anniversary episode. Milk.
Hey, guys, congratulation on ten years milk, Milk. I look forward to many more. Listened to Unibomber and thought it would share something that covers a related, if somewhat different, aspect of the story. About ten years ago, when I was still a wee law student taking a legal ethics course, one of the situations we discussed was Ted Kaczinski and
the ethical dilemma his lawyers faced. Criminal defendants had the absolute right to dictate certain aspects of their representation, like whether or not to fleet guilty, but there are other aspects of the representation that the lawyer controls, the most
notable being trial strategy. While lawyers should always listen to clients overall goals, sometimes as necessary to override at client's wishes on how to achieve their goals, but because the client's desired strategy is either legally incorrect, unethical, or simply ill advise, Kazinsky'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. The conflict was that, on one hand, his attorneys had a duty to zealously represent him, but Kazinsky objected, so vehemanly to the chosen defense. At one point he attempted to go pro say aka, 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 conned a trial. But his case is one which most lawyers had thought about or discussed at some point in their careers. That is good Fordham Walk go Rams, And that is from Deb.
Thanks Deb, appreciate that. Yeah, I remember, we're kind of saying like his whole thing was he didn't he pluged guilty because he didn't want to plead insane, because his ramblings would have been the ramblings of a convicted insane madman.
Yeah, very interesting.
Well 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 Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.