In a New Yorker book review, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us about “Barnum: An American Life” by Robert Wilson. Her review is very interesting in that it brings to the surface the similarities between Barnum and Donald Trump, even if she never actually makes the leap.
Embedded in the review are some fascinating details making it well worth reading, but let’s look at some of the more obvious similarities:
Barnum lied easily and often.
When he was not fabricating, he was exaggerating; he routinely inflated how much he’d spent on his various business ventures. He may or may not have said, “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” but certainly he believed in this maxim and welcomed any imbroglio that would be noticed by the press. (Many times, he staged controversies for the express purpose of generating coverage.)
He made a fortune, then lost it.
While broke, he gave speeches on “the art of money-getting”; improbably enough, these proved extremely profitable. Toward the end of his life, Barnum toyed with the idea of running for President. His running mate, he suggested, should come from a state like Indiana.
“There’s no such thing as bad publicity,”
(Concerning the exhibition of the autopsy of “a woman, Joice Heth, who was advertised to be a hundred and sixty-one years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington.”)
Even by the standards of the time, Barnum’s use of Heth was shameful, a point made by at least one un-bought-off editor. A “more indecent mode of raising money than by the exhibition of an old woman—black or white—we can hardly imagine,” the Boston Atlas declared.
The New York Sun reported this finding the next day, under the headline “Precious Humbug Exposed.” To a rival paper, Lyman, presumably with Barnum’s blessing, peddled the fiction that the body on the table had not been Heth’s at all; she was in Connecticut, “alive and well.” Several other papers weighed in on the ghoulish dispute, providing Barnum with just the sort of attention he thrived on. “Newspaper and social controversy on the subject (and seldom have vastly more important matters been so largely discussed) served my purpose as ‘a showman’ by keeping my name before the public,” he crowed.
Then he went broke.
After a long run of success with General Tom Thumb …
According to Barnum’s version of events, he was ruined by a perfidious business partner, who tricked him into endorsing half a million dollars’ worth of promissory notes. But Barnum never convincingly explained how the deception worked, and there is some question about whether it ever took place. The business partner maintained that he was the one who’d been duped. And even though Barnum insisted that he’d had no inkling of the impending disaster, he had transferred a number of his assets to associates and to his wife, Charity, months before he declared bankruptcy. “Without Charity, I’m nothing,” he would joke. (Iranistan, which had been valued at thirty-two thousand dollars, somehow ended up mortgaged for more than three times that much.)And in summary:
Barnum became one of the most celebrated men in America not despite his bigotry and duplicity, his flimflamming and self-dealing, but because of them. He didn’t so much fool the public as indulge it. This held for Joice Heth and the Fejee mermaid and also for himself; he turned P. T. Barnum into yet another relentlessly promoted exhibit—the Greatest Showman on Earth. Americans, he knew, were drawn to such humbug. Why they are still being drawn to it is a puzzle that, now more than ever, demands our attention.