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Chapter 1
The Spark of Life
The life of Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891), America's first and foremost showman, burned with an incandescent energy that brightened two continents. That
spark of life which fueled the wonders of Barnum's museums and circuses fueled the fires that five times burned to the ground all his accomplishments. In Barnum's autobiography The Greatest Showman: Life of Barnum, the Greatest
Showman recounts five fires out of the many to consume his life. These fires were the destruction of his home Iranistan, the conflagrations of Barnum's American Museum, Barnum's new American Museum, and Barnum's Hippotheatron,
and the holocaust at the winter quarters of the Barnum & Bailey Circus. In each instance, Barnum was away from the scene of the devastation, often learning of the calamities nonchalantly over breakfast or at the barbershop.
Nevertheless, these five fires demonstrate a theatricality in execution worthy of the Greatest Showman himself. Barnum was famously quoted as saying that "the people liked to be humbugged." Was the Great Humbug himself a great
firebug as well?
Beginning life the son of a tavern-keeper in Bethel, Connecticut, P.T. Barnum grew up among the traveling drums and salesmen, listening to their jokes and learning their pranks, which would later define
his adult life. Barnum took the Yankee tradition of the practical joke and developed it into an art form of the public hoax. In the early nineteenth century, optimism and ambition were so strong that Americans were eager to
believe any wonder of their new republic. Two years before Edgar Allan Poe's notorious Balloon Hoax of 1844, P. T. Barnum was already humbugging the public to the public's delight. The Greatest Showman tells of one incident in
which he used a slight deception to move traffic through his American Museum and out the back door, allowing more customers to enter. On July 4, 1842, Barnum learned--
Pretty much all of my visitors had brought their
dinner [. . .] No one expected to go home till night; the building was overcrowded and meanwhile 100s were waiting at the front entrance to get in [. . .]. In despair [. . .] I happened to see the scene painter at work [.
. .] . 'Here,' I exclaimed, 'take a piece of canvas four foot square, and paint on it 'To the Egress.' [. . . ] The crowd [. . .] stopped and looked at the new sign [. . .- 'Aigress [. . .] Sure that's an animal we haven't seen
yet' and the throng began to pour down the back stairs [. . .]. Meanwhile I began to accommodate those who had long been waiting with their money at the Broadway entrance." (Barnum 95)
By such means, P.T. Barnum
defined his professional persona by his ability to outsmart competitors, whether in business or in sport. During his triumphant European tour with General Tom Thumb, the Greatest Showman met John Anderson, the Wizard of the
North. Anderson was then the premier magician of Europe due to his novel new trick, pulling rabbits out of his hat. The Wizard, obviously believing his powers greater than the Showman, played a harmless practical joke by
introducing Barnum as himself. Holding back to observe Barnum's discomfiture, Anderson himself received a shock. As Barnum tells it:
It occurred to Anderson to introduce me to several persons who were sitting in the room as
the Wizard of the North at the same time asking me about my tricks and my forthcoming exhibition. He kept this up so persistently that some of our friends [. . .] declared that Anderson was 'too much for me,' and meanwhile,
fresh introductions to strangers who came in had made me pretty generally known [. . . ] as the Wizard of the North who was to astonish the town in the following week. I accepted the situation at last, and said: 'Well,
gentlemen, as I perform here for the first time on Monday evening, I like to be liberal, and I should be very happy to give you orders of admission to those of you who will attend my exhibition.' The applications for orders
were quite general, and I had written 30 or 40 when Anderson, who saw I was in a fair way of filling his house with 'deadheads,' cried out: 'Hold on! I am the Wizard of the North. I'll stand the orders already given, but not
another one.' Our friends, including the Wizard himself, began to think that I had rather the best of the joke. (Barnum 144)
In this magician's duel, the Wizard of the North lost to the Wizard of the West.
In the
hard scrabble, sharp practice world of American business in the early nineteenth century, Barnum soon learned to give no quarter. Then practical jokes were lessons to steel men of business in their resolve not to lower their
guard lest they be taken in. However, the public hoaxes taught Barnum another valuable set of lessons concerning the importance of publicity. His early partner in a medicine show, Aaron Turner, once roused the entire town of
Annapolis, Maryland, against Barnum as a practical joke. Their circus in miniature, with its magician, dancer and singer, was just beginning to turn a profit and Barnum thought to spend an advance on a splendid new suit of
clothes. Looking finally respectable in black broadcloth, the Greatest Showman took a walk down the main thoroughfare as much to see as be seen. Turner, a self-made man himself, indulged Barnum's desire to be noticed in public
by spreading word that there on the street "as bold as brass" walked the notorious Reverend E. K. Avery, lately acquitted of the murder of Miss Cordell in nearby Rhode Island (Barnum 63). The sensational murder trial had been
in all the papers and sentiments ran high against the compromised clergyman, so much so, that Barnum found himself unaccountably fleeing from a mob threatening to lynch him themselves! After the hue and cry, P. T. Barnum was
apprehended and rode out of town on a rail, his new suit of black broadcloth in tatters. Later, when he protested this shabby treatment to Turner, his partner laughed and imparted this valuable advice: "All we need to ensure
success is notoriety. You will see that this will be noised all about town as a trick played by one of the circus managers upon the other, and our pavilion will be crammed to-morrow night" (64). And so it was!
In time
the Greatest Showman developed such business savvy that practical jokes, hoaxes and magic tricks came as second nature. One of his final practical jokes was played posthumously. When P. T. Barnum died on April 7, 1891, at 82
years of age, he left an estate worth more than $4 million. Part of this estate included a mystery box. This large packing case was nailed to the wall of the back office of his circus winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut,
and written on its side was the legend, "Not to be Opened Until After the Death of P. T. Barnum." Matthew Scott, Jumbo's trusty trainer who remained in Barnum's employ long after the elephant's death, "took it into his head
that this mysterious box contained his cash inheritance from Barnum. . . . When the box was opened, it was found to contain for each of his oldest employees a copy of The Life of P. T. Barnum Written by Himself." According to
Irving Wallace, "Scott went to pieces from sheer disappointment" (215). Too often P. T. Barnum's mysteries were hoaxes, yet these frauds were more than business ploys. They were works of art that expressed the Greatest
Showman's philosophy and even religion. In mysteries and hoaxes, and in works of art, the real and unreal are so blended as to be inseparable. Thus, Barnum believed, in any accident were blended the good and the bad
inseparably. As a Universalist, Barnum maintained that God does everything right. Even when interviewed about the fire of 1887, Barnum expressed no distress, perhaps as publicity, claiming that he had faith that good would come
out of it. As he told the press, "I have got a novel sensation. The destruction of the Greatest Show on Earth is a direct interposition of Providence on behalf of the public" ("Mr. Barnum Undisturbed").
Such august
equanimity in the face of such ensuing disasters is indeed impressive, yet it begs the question: Were the five great fires of Barnum's life merely accidents, publicity stunts, or devilish acts of infernal gods responding to the
Greatest Showman's flair for the dramatic?
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