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Glaubel here. This season on Revisionist

0:43

History, I am diving into one of the weirdest

0:46

and most infuriating corners in American

0:48

life.

0:49

Guns. All the crazy myths

0:51

we have about them, everything we get wrong.

0:54

We're going to talk about TV westerns, about a crime

0:56

in a little town in rural Alabama. About the

0:58

nuttiness of the Supreme Court. It's our

1:01

biggest series ever and one you

1:03

won't want to miss. Listen

1:05

to Revisionist History wherever you get podcasts.

1:15

Hello

1:21

and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4

1:23

comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is

1:25

Greg Jenner. I am a public

1:27

historian, author and broadcaster. And

1:29

on this podcast, we aim to amaze and astound

1:31

you with a combination of comedy contortions

1:34

and historical hilarity. And today

1:36

we are donning our top hat and tails and running away

1:39

to join the circus to explore the life

1:41

of showman and hoaxer P.T. Barnum. And

1:44

to help us uncover the truth behind the humbugs, we're

1:46

joined by two very special guests. In

1:49

History Corner, he's the chair of the English department at

1:51

Emory University in America, specialising

1:53

in 19th century American literature, disability

1:56

studies and health humanities. And he's the author

1:58

of The Showman and the Slave. Race,

2:00

Death and Memory in Barnum's America.

2:03

It's Professor Benjamin Reiss. Hi Ben, thank

2:05

you for joining us. Hi Greg, thanks for having me. And

2:07

in Comedy Corner, she's a playwright, actor, storyteller

2:10

and hilarious stand-up comedian. You'll recognise

2:12

her for more sorts of telly, including The Mash Report,

2:15

QI, Live at the Apollo, Taskmaster, Flinch

2:17

and Too Hot to Handle. And of course, hopefully you

2:19

remember her from our previous episodes of You're Dead to

2:21

Me on Harriet Tubman and Josephine Baker.

2:24

It's Desiree Burch. Welcome back Desiree.

2:26

Oh, it's so nice to be back. I

2:28

feel like I'm super proficient

2:31

at not knowing stuff about people from history

2:33

because they keep coming back to the

2:34

show. So last time out, Desiree,

2:36

we had you on to talk about Harriet Tubman and Josephine

2:38

Baker, two amazing women from American

2:41

history. And today we are talking about,

2:44

well, let's just say it's going

2:46

to be more problematic. You're in American

2:48

history now. Everywhere you look is

2:50

a sea of problematic, mate. So let's

2:53

go ahead and start with this guy because I

2:55

mean, I feel like he invented some

2:57

of it almost like some of the problematic

2:59

we know and love today. This guy started

3:01

so quite the ingenuous fellow.

3:03

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the

3:05

head. We're certainly going to be touching on some pretty

3:08

OG racism. So, hooray for that.

3:10

So what do you know?

3:16

This is where

3:17

I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about

3:19

today's subject. And you've heard of Barnum,

3:21

haven't you? You've heard of Barnum and Bailey's circus. You

3:23

will know about Barnum the entertainer, the

3:25

businessman, the marketeer extraordinaire.

3:28

And in terms of pop culture, well, he would be thrilled

3:30

to know that there's been many movies about him. But

3:32

let's address the elephant in the circus, shall we? The

3:35

massive all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood blockbuster,

3:37

The Greatest Showman, with a hunky huge acumen

3:40

giving Barnum the woke jazz hands razzle

3:42

dazzle dazzle. He's a business whiz. He's a family

3:44

man. He's best pals. The society's misfits

3:46

and outcasts.

3:47

He's a lovely fella. Hmm,

3:49

is it true? Let's find out, shall

3:52

we? And what else do we need to know about the real Greatest

3:54

Showman?

3:55

Professor Ben, we're going to be talking about a man

3:57

who did an astonishing amount of stuff... incredibly

4:00

busy, very industrious. One

4:02

of the underlying philosophies of his entire

4:04

career was the idea of

4:07

the humbug. Can you just briefly

4:09

give us an introduction to humbugging? That

4:11

was really his word for hoaxes. He

4:14

built much of his career on them calling himself the

4:16

Prince of Humbugs.

4:17

This was a way to present his hoaxes and elaborate

4:20

pranks as harmless fun. He

4:22

thought that a good hoax or a humbug should be satisfying

4:24

for all involved. He argued that people

4:26

can be played with as long as they still feel they have

4:29

value for the money. It wasn't fraud,

4:31

it wasn't injuring anybody. It was

4:33

playing around with the idea of ripping

4:36

somebody off. Let's have a quick rummage around in

4:38

Barnum's youth. By the age of 12, he's already

4:40

trying to go to work, selling sweets to other kids.

4:42

His dad dies when he's only 16 and

4:45

leaves the family indebted.

4:46

Does that mean that he's now responsible

4:49

for trying to earn some quick cash? Yeah,

4:51

he bounced around from job to job throughout

4:54

his teens and into his early 20s. He

4:56

was working in general stores, he worked in

4:58

the book auctioning trade, and then by

5:00

the age of 20, he set up a network of lotteries

5:03

all over Connecticut. Age 19,

5:05

in 1829, he marries a young lady called Charity

5:08

Hallett. In the Gracie Shoman movie,

5:10

She's Proper Fancy, I don't get the sense

5:12

in real life he was that classy. Yeah,

5:15

probably not much of a jump

5:16

up in the class ladder. So

5:18

they have a baby. Soon after, they eventually

5:21

will have four daughters, Desiree, but the four

5:23

daughters are spread apart over 16 years.

5:26

So he now decides to start his own newspaper

5:28

called the Herald of Freedom, which was critical of the

5:30

militant Calvinism that he grew up in. And

5:32

it lands in hot water. His own uncle,

5:35

who ran a rival newspaper, sues

5:37

him for libel, and P.T. Barnum

5:39

goes to jail for three months. But

5:42

Desiree, how do you think he celebrates getting out

5:44

of jail?

5:45

Well, if the movie is any truth, he

5:47

comes out, does a big song and dance,

5:49

swings from a lamp post and just invents

5:51

from his own bootstraps an entire business.

5:54

Is that it?

5:54

It's pretty close, to be honest. party

6:00

in the very courtroom where he had been sent

6:03

down. Yeah, and according to his

6:05

own newspaper, I mean completely fair and unbiased

6:07

source, I'm sure, there were 1,500 attendees. There

6:10

was a three-mile parade going back to his

6:12

home with a cannon salute, musicians,

6:16

60 carriages, marshals carrying the flag, 40

6:18

people on horseback. It's unclear who

6:21

organized it or whether it really happened to

6:23

this extent, but Barnum suggested

6:25

it was all spontaneous and he

6:27

emerged as a hero of free speech and the free

6:29

press.

6:29

So already as an incredibly young man,

6:32

he's already showing the showmanship.

6:34

If this story is true, Ben, we're seeing he

6:36

enjoys spectacle, he enjoys showing

6:39

off, but now it's time for us to hit the

6:41

klaxon that has marked the problematic

6:43

button. Desiree, have you ever heard of Joyce

6:45

Heath?

6:46

She's probably one

6:48

of the performers in his sideshow.

6:51

She might be the first of many people to

6:53

be commodified

6:54

as an object to stare

6:56

and gawk at and judge. You're absolutely right. And

6:58

Ben, I know you're a specialist on this particular subject.

7:01

Do you want to introduce us to the Joyce

7:03

Heath or Heath story and why

7:05

it's so grim? Yeah, well, it was before

7:07

his circus days and so she was a solo

7:10

act.

7:10

She was an enslaved disabled

7:13

black woman who Barnum exhibited

7:15

in New York in 1835. He

7:17

claimed that she was 161 years old, the oldest living human, and

7:22

that she had been the nursemaid to George

7:24

Washington. Barnum technically

7:26

rented her. He wasn't her enslaver, but

7:29

he exploited a loophole in slavery

7:31

laws in New York and Pennsylvania where slavery

7:34

had already been outlawed to take hold

7:36

of the Elise agreement to exhibit

7:38

her for a period of 12 months. So

7:40

she was blind.

7:41

She was paralyzed in one arm and both

7:44

legs. She had arthritis in her hands.

7:46

And Barnum exhibited her for 10 months,

7:49

starting out in a room on lower Broadway

7:51

and then moving by carriage and train to

7:53

dozens of cities and towns across the Northeast.

7:56

And she was made to work in her old age

7:58

up to 10 hours a day.

8:00

in dehumanizing conditions

8:02

where she would have been watched and touched by people who

8:04

came to see her.

8:05

So she was really treated as both a freak

8:08

and as a venerated relic of history

8:10

who told stories about bringing up dear

8:12

little Georgie. She sang hymns

8:15

to the audience that she'd supposedly taught him.

8:17

Although Barnum would later deny it, in

8:19

early autobiographical writing, he boasted

8:22

about extracting her teeth to exaggerate

8:24

her aged appearance. He also

8:26

placed a notice in a Connecticut

8:29

newspaper, implying that Heth

8:31

was not a human being at all, but

8:33

that she was simply a curiously constructed

8:36

automaton. So there was another example of him kind

8:38

of spinning out the original joke

8:40

or humbug into new dimensions. And

8:42

then at other times, in order to appeal

8:45

to moral sensibilities, he

8:47

spread word that the proceeds from the exhibit

8:50

would go to abolitionist causes,

8:52

including emancipating her

8:55

great-grandchildren who were still held in slavery.

8:57

And that was all, of course, bogus. When she

8:59

dies,

9:00

he makes money again by doing

9:02

a public autopsy. Yeah, so he

9:05

had the rights to exhibit her for 12 months,

9:07

but she died before the end of that time. She died

9:09

in February 1836. And

9:11

he then arranged for a public autopsy

9:14

to be performed ostensibly to verify

9:16

her age and the plausibility of the story

9:19

that she told about having raised George Washington.

9:22

And for the dissection, he rented

9:24

out an amphitheater on Broadway and

9:26

he sold 1500 tickets to the public.

9:29

The results were debated in the popular

9:31

press for weeks, fueling The Legend of

9:33

Barnum as the unparalleled prankster

9:35

and showman. That's really first how he comes

9:37

before the public eye. So this is the

9:39

basis of his fame. This is where he gets his first wind

9:41

full of cash. He is then hit by what's known

9:44

as the panic, which is basically the credit crisis

9:46

of the 1830s. But he survives that. In 1841,

9:49

he buys a museum called Scudder's American

9:51

Museum and he renames it as Barnum's American

9:53

Museum. And his modest ambition is to

9:55

acquire at least one example of everything in

9:57

existence.

9:58

He didn't want Noah's Ark. He just. wanted

10:00

half of the art. But his next big humbug,

10:03

this is what's known as the mermaid

10:05

hoax. His big thing is the Fiji

10:07

mermaid in 1841,

10:10

1842. I'm assuming we're not going to be calling this a sort of

10:13

aerial from the Little Mermaid style, you

10:15

know, flowing red hair, are we? We're talking here about

10:18

a sort of monstrosity, right? Yeah,

10:20

yeah, it was the head and body of a monkey

10:22

and the tail of a fish attached together, sewn

10:24

together, which somehow made its way to New

10:26

York 20 years later. He's inherited a hoax

10:29

here. This has been going for 20 years.

10:30

How is that a hoax? That's

10:32

just horrible. That's literally

10:34

somebody took a monkey corpse and

10:37

some big and sewed it together and whoever

10:39

put it in the display saw these big ass

10:41

stitches and was like, this is totally cool. This will

10:43

work. This is great.

10:44

So that's the Fiji mermaid. And then we

10:46

get in the same year to Charlie

10:49

Stratton, who is known as General

10:51

Tom Thumb. And I think he's in the movie. He

10:53

is, yes. This is a true story, isn't it? And

10:55

he met Charlie Stratton, who was an

10:57

American child, a very short stature.

10:59

He was about 25 inches tall in 1842. And he hired him as a human

11:02

oddity

11:05

for his museum. He claimed he was 11 when

11:07

he was in fact only four or five years old. Barnum

11:10

pretended that Stratton was from England and

11:13

he concocted the persona of the English folktale

11:15

Tom Thumb. Within a year, nearly

11:18

half a million Americans had seen Charlie Stratton

11:20

on tour and at the museum. And

11:23

in 1844, Barnum took him on a tour

11:25

of England. And he gets to meet Queen

11:27

Victoria

11:29

herself and perform in front

11:31

of her. She's not okay with it, really.

11:33

She writes in her journal, one cannot help

11:35

feeling very sorry for the poor little thing and wishing

11:37

he could be properly cared for, for the people

11:40

who show him off, tease him a good deal,

11:42

I should think. But Barnum is

11:44

making big money off Charlie, isn't he? He's

11:46

found a gimmick that he can tour.

11:48

And this is him raking

11:51

in the cash. Sorry, I'm confused.

11:53

So Charlie Stratton is

11:55

a little person who's just also young or

11:57

is not a little person. It is just very young.

12:00

He is very small and in

12:03

middle age he will be only a metre tall. So he is

12:05

a little person, but as a child he's a very

12:07

small little person.

12:08

In the movie he was like 22 or something

12:10

and he was like, okay, fine. He just

12:13

yanked a child out of his mom's house

12:15

and was like, we're going on a tour in the world.

12:18

Ha ha ha, you're a freak. And this kid's like, this is super

12:20

healthy, thanks.

12:21

Yep, that's about right.

12:23

While he's in England then, he tries to go a bit

12:26

legit by buying William

12:28

Shakespeare's house. And that's him trying to import

12:31

the house back to New York. Is that

12:32

the plan? Oh my God, no. He wants

12:34

to send it back brick by brick to New York

12:37

for his museum. It's the most new money

12:39

thing I've ever heard. And then

12:41

the house actually did go on auction, Desiree,

12:43

so you missed your chance. And he almost

12:45

bought it, but he was outbid by the Shakespeare

12:48

Association who could only afford it because

12:50

Charles Dickens helped them fundraise. Wow. Yeah,

12:53

it could have been rebuilt in New York.

12:54

Yeah, but instead he had to nearly bankrupt

12:56

Charles Dickens just to make a point.

13:00

So there we go. That's an episode of Homes Under the Hammer

13:02

that I want to see. The Charlie

13:04

Stratton tour, Ben, makes him an awful lot of money

13:06

and he gets back home and he's got all

13:08

this cash to splash. What is he splashing

13:11

it on? Is he investing in property? Yeah, he builds

13:13

his own mansion, a

13:14

huge Orientalist mansion

13:16

called Iranistan. And it's in the

13:19

style of the Brighton Pavilion. He

13:21

now tries to go legit again, Ben. And

13:23

this is the time where in the film, The Greatest

13:25

Showman, we're seeing a weird love interest. He

13:28

tries to recruit

13:29

or rather manage the great

13:32

celebrity of her age in Europe, the Swedish

13:34

Nightingale, Jenny Lind, who

13:36

is an opera singer, very, very famous Desiree.

13:39

And she is super expensive,

13:41

Ben. Can he afford her? Not really. I

13:44

mean, he got into a huge amount of debt trying to work

13:46

with her. But when he did take her on

13:48

tour, they both made a fortune. She was a sensational

13:51

superstar in the US as well. And

13:53

there were all sorts of celebrity tie-ins or clothes

13:55

or dolls, souvenirs. Yeah, I

13:58

mean, there's merch. High end.

13:59

Jenny Lind, she's real. In the

14:02

movie, she's a sort of homewrecker who fancies

14:04

Barnum, presumably because he looks like Hugh Jackman, which

14:06

is understandable. You

14:08

look like Wolverine, so it's on. In

14:12

The Greatest Showman, there's a bearded lady character

14:15

who sings the song This Is Me. But the bearded

14:17

lady, is that from this period

14:20

as well? Yeah, there were a number of bearded

14:22

ladies in his employ over

14:24

the years, but the most famous one was Josephine

14:26

Clofulia, who went by the stage name of Madame

14:28

Clofulia. She

14:29

was 24 when Barnum started exhibiting

14:32

her in 1853. Most of the ladies weren't treated

14:35

particularly well, unlike in the movie, where

14:37

all of the human oddities thank Barnum for allowing

14:40

them to find family through performing

14:43

in his show when their own families had shunned them

14:45

or hid them behind closed doors. With Madame

14:47

Clofulia, soon after she first appeared in

14:49

Barnum's American Museum, a man

14:51

called William Char publicly complained

14:54

that she was another humbug. The matter

14:56

was taken to court, it was covered in detail in

14:58

the press, including the New York Tribune, which

15:00

was run by Barnum's close friend Horace Greeley.

15:03

Clofulia was then subjected to examinations

15:06

to prove that she was a woman.

15:09

Maybe there's some echoes of the Joyce Heth autopsy

15:11

there. It's likely that Barnum had a hand

15:13

in both Char's complaint and the ensuing media

15:15

coverage. That final line is the thing, Ben, is

15:17

that he manufactured the complaint,

15:20

presumably, to generate sensation.

15:22

Yeah, no publicity is bad publicity. We

15:24

haven't heard much about his wife and children,

15:26

Ben. Where is Charity, his wife? Are

15:28

they happily married? So I don't get the impression

15:31

that they had a particularly happy marriage. One

15:33

of their daughters had died in 1844 while

15:35

Barnum was on tour, and he didn't

15:37

then return from the tour for months. And when

15:40

he finally did, of course, he decided

15:42

to play a humbug on his wife, letting

15:44

her believe that he was dead. And then she

15:47

found him waiting for her

15:48

in the museum. Ha ha, big surprise.

15:51

We know Barnum did eventually

15:53

stop drinking so much alcohol around 1851.

15:57

Charity is reported to have cried with relief.

15:59

with a somewhat unhealthy relationship with practical

16:02

jokes. Where you're like, did your mom not hug you

16:04

enough? Barnum

16:07

then publishes his first autobiography called

16:09

The Life of P.T. Barnum, written by himself, and

16:11

then almost immediately afterwards he files for bankruptcy

16:14

and loses his fancy Iranistan house.

16:18

The public's very sympathetic, there's an open letter

16:20

with a thousand signatures from American supporters.

16:23

Desiree, despite being in hardship, P.T.

16:25

Barnum, as a kind-hearted man, he did

16:27

still give a huge amount to charity.

16:29

I don't know, he seems like the kind of person who gives

16:31

to charity to be like, look, I'm super

16:33

high brow, see I gave all these poor cripples

16:36

money, see I'm the good guy, and you're like, no,

16:38

you're not actually. I'm

16:39

actually pulling your leg a bit there because when I say he gave

16:41

to charity, what I mean is he put his assets

16:44

in his wife charity's name and

16:46

then hid them from the tax man and then

16:48

declared bankruptcy. So he was fine,

16:51

but he lost the house. The house then burned down as

16:53

well as being a problematic dude, she's also weirdly

16:55

linked to a lot of arson.

16:57

It's the flames

16:59

of hell nipping at his heels, is trying

17:01

to get him. There

17:04

are deliberate attempts to destroy his exhibitions,

17:07

his buildings. There are repeated fires

17:09

later on, but there are definitely a couple of deliberate fires,

17:11

aren't there Ben? In 1864, Barnum's

17:14

American Museum was victim

17:16

to widespread arson attacks by Confederate

17:18

sympathizers, but there were more fires

17:21

in 1865, 1868, and 1872. And one of the most disturbing

17:27

aspects of the fires is the huge

17:29

loss of life of the animals that he purchased.

17:31

He exhibited whales, kangaroos,

17:34

tigers, snakes, all

17:36

of whom died in 1865 fire, but

17:38

Barnum just bought more animals who then

17:41

would

17:41

usually die in the next fire.

17:42

A whale should never die from fire.

17:48

Like, you've done something profoundly wrong, like

17:50

twice apparently. And fittingly enough, a

17:52

person of that quality then goes into politics,

17:55

of course, there's the

17:58

obvious next step. Desiree,

18:00

this is what's known as the Battle of the Barnums.

18:03

There's more than one of them. Is there a real more

18:05

than one of them or did he make up a whole other Barnum

18:07

that he could face off against that never existed?

18:09

In 1867, a couple of years after the end

18:11

of the Civil

18:13

War, he ran for US Congress as a Republican

18:16

against his Democrat cousin,

18:18

William Barnum. He ran on

18:20

a platform of civil rights for

18:22

formerly enslaved black people, P.T.

18:25

Barnum did. He referred to Joyce Heth

18:27

and some of the other enslaved performers in his

18:29

show saying, I had been a slave holder myself.

18:32

I probably should have been whipped for some of the things that

18:34

I did. While he really does seem

18:36

to have turned against the politics of slavery,

18:38

he was by no means rid of racism or for that

18:41

matter his penchant for turning people's disabilities

18:43

into a public spectacle. In the early

18:45

1860s, this is just before his

18:47

political career, he exhibited a microcephalic

18:50

black man, a man with a small head

18:53

named William Henry Johnson. He dressed

18:55

him up in a fake jungle suit with a spear

18:58

and claimed to feed him only on a diet

19:00

of raw meat and nuts.

19:02

The name of the exhibit is,

19:04

what is it? Implying that he was

19:06

neither a human being nor a monkey,

19:09

but somewhere in between the two.

19:11

When he ran for Congress, he

19:13

explained his support for black people's

19:15

right to vote by saying that black men were naturally

19:18

pious and submissive so that white

19:20

people had nothing to fear from them. It

19:22

had only been a few years earlier that

19:24

he exhibited a black man as

19:26

something of a wild beast.

19:27

I'm curious as to how much of his circus,

19:30

his show, outside of the animals

19:33

were people of color, because basically

19:35

from the film, it looks like everyone's superpower

19:37

is being brown. Like there's one incredibly

19:40

pale person and then everybody else is like

19:42

the United Colors of Benetton. And then

19:44

it's like Zac Efron and him like having

19:46

a great time. Like that's what it looks like. He

19:48

had large scale exhibits, supposedly

19:51

showcasing different cultures

19:53

from around the world. And often people who are exhibited

19:56

in them came under pretty dubious

19:58

circumstances.

19:59

definitely a major theme in

20:02

his career. I mean, the thing that we can't cover

20:04

in this episode, Desiree, is the sheer number

20:06

of things he did in his life, the industriousness, the

20:08

extraordinary number of shows and

20:10

exhibitions and things he was doing all

20:12

the time. So, this episode is the greatest

20:14

hits or worst hits. One of the things

20:17

that we need to talk about, of course, is the death of his wife,

20:19

Charity, in 1873. Desiree,

20:22

how do you think he mourned for the mother of his four

20:24

children? Probably

20:25

played a prank on the three children who were

20:27

still around and was like, here's your mom and then did

20:29

a weird weekend at Bernie's with her corpse. Is that

20:31

close?

20:32

It's a really good guess. I

20:34

mean, he would have had to have shown up to do that, whereas

20:36

he just didn't come home. Yeah, he was

20:38

on a foreign tour and he didn't come back to the US

20:41

when she died. But three

20:43

months after the funeral, he

20:46

did get remarried to a 23-year-old

20:48

woman named Nancy Fish. He was 63

20:50

at the time. He is an extraordinary

20:53

figure in American history and we do have to take

20:55

him seriously. He is a figure with tremendous

20:58

cultural heft and influence. Although

21:00

we are canceling him here

21:02

with our jokes, there's a reason that we're talking

21:04

about him. Yeah, he was arguably the

21:06

most famous person in the United

21:08

States in the 19th century and

21:11

around the world, the most famous face of America

21:13

for the world. And he really was brilliant

21:15

in figuring out how to manipulate the media

21:17

to extend the life of a

21:19

local attraction beyond the specific

21:22

place where it occurred. It's something that

21:24

I think really fueled

21:26

pop culture industry through the 20th

21:28

and 21st century. Can you tell us a bit more

21:30

about how he gets into circuses? In 1870,

21:33

although he had claimed he

21:34

was about to retire, he went into business

21:36

with other circus men and loaned his

21:39

name to P.T. Barnum's grand traveling

21:41

museum Menagerie, Caravan

21:43

and Hippodrome. So he had the traveling stuff and then

21:45

he had the permanent stuff in New York. And

21:48

the Hippodrome in New York featured

21:50

chariot racing, horse racing

21:53

and even elephant and ostrich racing. In 1872,

21:56

he decided the circus should be

21:58

toured by train to reach more.

21:59

audiences and this was the first circus of

22:02

a grand scale to travel in this way.

22:04

His circus went through several iterations

22:06

until he established Barnum's new and only

22:08

greatest show on earth in 1877 but

22:12

it's not until 1880 when he joined

22:14

forces with James Bailey that his reputation

22:17

as a circus man was really cemented. And

22:19

then that brings us to one of his biggest stunts or

22:21

shall we say jumbo sized stunts in 1882

22:24

and it really annoys Queen Victoria, second

22:26

time in the episode, that she's been displeased. What

22:29

does he do Ben?

22:29

He bought the beloved elephant

22:32

jumbo from Regents Park Zoo to

22:34

the dismay of Queen Victoria. There were public

22:37

protests campaigning for jumbo to stay in

22:39

England but Barnum shipped him over to New York.

22:41

We're mad at him for buying this elephant

22:44

but why did the UK

22:46

sell him? Apparently he was

22:48

getting kind of aggressive. Barnum got him

22:51

on a fire sale. Elephant

22:53

as is no questions

22:55

just take. Jumbo

22:58

is shipped across the ocean and arrives

23:00

in New York. He's quite quickly put

23:02

to use in a public safety

23:04

campaign. This

23:05

was a brand new landmark that had been

23:08

built in New York in 1884 and

23:10

the public did not trust it. They didn't think it

23:13

was safe and so Barnum stepped

23:15

in with 21 elephants to

23:18

prove that it was safe enough to walk

23:20

across. Do you want to guess what it is? Oh

23:22

is it one of the bridges like Brooklyn

23:24

Bridge or something? Brooklyn Bridge yeah absolutely.

23:27

Oh cool. I mean you shouldn't

23:29

do that stuff to elephants but it's still cool to think about

23:31

an elephant going across Brooklyn Bridge. But the following

23:34

year poor jumbo is killed in

23:36

another horrible accident. Do you want to guess what it is Desiree?

23:38

Is

23:38

it a massive fire? Not this time.

23:41

This time it's a train crash so it's

23:43

a whole other type of horror show I'm

23:45

afraid. But don't worry Desiree because jumbo

23:47

can still perform as a snow

23:50

jumbo. No! Yeah Barnum takes

23:52

the corpse, taxidermies it and actually

23:54

Barnum then gifted his elephant jumbo

23:57

taxidermied as it was to Tuft University.

23:59

and it became their mascot and still is today.

24:02

I guess he couldn't give her back to Queen Victoria. Barnum

24:05

at this point is 79 years old. He's

24:07

approaching 80. Does he retire at

24:09

this point? No, not really. At age 79,

24:12

he takes the greatest show on earth to London. And

24:14

the show at the Olympia Hall was seen by

24:16

approximately 2.5 million spectators

24:18

in just three months. Barnum's celebrity

24:21

meant that he was a significant draw and

24:23

it was advertised that he would attend every single

24:25

performance. So he would arrive

24:27

before the show in an open gilded carriage

24:29

and lapse a hippodrome

24:32

track. During this tour, he met Oscar

24:34

Wilde and William Gladstone, among

24:36

many other famous people. He also donated

24:38

an outfit for his very own wax

24:41

figure in Madame Tussauds. But it does

24:43

eventually catch up with him. He has lived

24:45

this incredibly industrious life, extraordinarily

24:48

busy man,

24:49

but he does die in 1891. He's

24:51

aged 80. We think a stroke and a heart

24:53

attack perhaps. So Desiree, the

24:56

greatest showman, is a very successful

24:58

movie. What is your opinion of the film,

25:00

having seen it, and then having listened to this podcast? The

25:02

film itself, it's

25:05

just one long music video and

25:07

it's super grating because I keep wanting

25:09

to get into the stories. It's got great actors

25:11

in it. And then every time I propose nothing,

25:14

they're like, I'm singing a pop song about

25:16

it. And you're like, no, no, I'm out of it. But

25:19

then you actually learn the real story

25:21

and you're like, this is a gross miscarriage

25:23

of justice. All of you guys need to stop right

25:26

now. Who wrote this? Who signed

25:28

on? Did anybody bother to Google

25:30

this guy before you said, yeah, I'll take

25:33

this gig. The Nuance Window!

25:35

["The Nuance Window!" theme music

25:38

plays in the background.] Well, that brings us to the

25:41

Nuance Window. This is where you and I

25:43

grab our popcorn and we allow Ben

25:45

to take two minutes to tell us something that we

25:47

need to know about P.T. Barnum. Without

25:50

much further ado, the Nuance Window,

25:52

please. Well, in the 19th century, P.T.

25:54

Barnum was one of the most famous people in the world.

25:57

He was a man known for bringing joy and humor

25:59

to the-

25:59

otherwise drab lives of customers

26:02

high and low. He's America's fun

26:04

uncle.

26:05

But there's another side to him as we've been

26:07

hearing. His first big success

26:09

as a showman was staging a public autopsy

26:11

of an elderly black woman who was held as

26:13

his legal property while she performed for him.

26:16

And as his exhibits grew bigger and more complicated,

26:19

so did the displays of

26:21

exotic, curious, and very often

26:23

non-white performers

26:25

who were generally presented as either backwards

26:27

and simple-minded or ferocious and animalistic.

26:30

His biggest multiracial exploitation

26:33

extravaganza was called the Grand Ethnological

26:35

Congress, which he ran in 1882, in which he secured the rights to

26:39

exhibit groups of indigenous people from

26:42

four different continents, often in

26:44

very dubious circumstances. And

26:46

yet now, only four

26:48

years ago, along comes a popular film making

26:50

him out to be a champion of the dispossessed and the

26:53

misunderstood. And there's a scene where

26:55

all

26:55

the circus performers, the bearded

26:57

lady, Tom Thumb, two black

26:59

aerialists, and the rest thank him

27:01

for giving them a sense of family and letting them be

27:04

who they are. It's as if they're thanking Lady

27:06

Gaga for singing Born This Way. The

27:08

point isn't that Barnum wasn't brilliant

27:11

at what he did, or that he didn't bring joy

27:13

and laughter into people's lives. He certainly did

27:15

all that. But I think that

27:17

the laughter he unleashed was often the laughter

27:19

of white supremacy, and the feeling that

27:22

public spaces like Barnum's Museum

27:24

were built for white people. And they

27:26

showed images of others in degrading circumstances

27:29

that reflected white people's own superiority

27:31

and power. Barnum was an extraordinary

27:34

entertainer.

27:35

He was a true innovator in creating public

27:37

spectacles that bonded people together through

27:40

shared responses to his show and all the gossip

27:42

and rumors that flowed from them. But

27:45

he was also an innovator in racism. He was

27:47

someone who developed new ways to

27:49

make living in a racially stratified country

27:52

feel like innocent fun and games for those

27:54

who were on top. Wow, thanks very

27:56

much. Normally

27:57

that window brings renewed

27:59

humanity.

27:59

to the subject, as opposed to just

28:02

like firmly entrenching them in time.

28:04

So he wasn't even an enslaver. He was like an in-leaser

28:07

because he was just like, I don't want to own anybody. That's

28:09

going to tie me down. I make more money just changing

28:12

hands all the time and flipping people in and out and doing

28:14

whatever I want with them. Thank you so much for

28:16

teaching me more about American

28:19

history, the things that I ran

28:21

thousands of miles away from to forget.

28:23

I'm

28:25

afraid that is all we have time for today. So

28:28

a huge thank you again to our guests in

28:30

History Corner, the outstanding Professor Benjamin

28:32

Rees from Emory University in America

28:35

and in Comedy Corner, the delightful Desiree

28:37

Birch. And to you, lovely listener, join

28:39

me next time as we once again look into the

28:42

circus of history to amazing high

28:44

wire acts. But for now, I'm off to go and see

28:46

if I can ship the Statue of Liberty over the

28:48

ocean and rebuild it in my garden. Bye.

28:51

Call

28:58

Jonathan Pye. I want

29:00

something better than that. No. What's wrong with Call

29:03

Jonathan Pye? It's really boring. Okay, so

29:05

let's all do a brain fart. Actually,

29:07

what about that? Jonathan Pye's brain

29:09

fart. It's hilarious. Jonathan Pye,

29:12

off my chest.

29:12

Off my chest. Chewing the fat, chewing the pie.

29:16

Chewing the cud. Cud? The

29:18

title for my new phone-in show is Jonathan

29:20

Pye chooses his own sick. I'm just

29:22

spit-balling. Let's just spit ball. Jonathan

29:25

Pye spits balls. Should

29:28

we just stick with Call Jonathan Pye? Yes. Call

29:31

Jonathan Pye. Listen first

29:34

on BBC Sounds.