Review

Historian and American Scholar editor Robert Wilson has written a vivid new biography of our country's first showman, P. T. Barnum, whose life followed the trajectory of 19th Century America's meteoric growth and development. At his birth in 1806, the new republic consisted of 17 states hugging the East Coast and a population of 6,400,000. By his death in 1891, the country's population had topped 64,000,000, and 44 states stretched from coast to coast. The age of sail had turned to steam; railroads spanned the country; the Civil War had ended slavery; industrialization had transformed the economy. So, too, Barnum's transformation - from a poor boy in Bethel, Connecticut, determined to make money, eager for self-improvement, and aware that people "need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours" to an entertainer with a genius for promotion and advertising. He concocted such traveling shows as "a 161-year-old nurse to George Washington," midget "General Tom Thumb," Swedish nightingale Jenny Lind, the elephant Jumbo, and the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Before his American Museum in New York burned down in 1865, an estimated 38 million over 24 years had paid a quarter to see the combined zoo, lecture hall, wax gallery, museum, and freak show. A family man, Barnum built five homes, traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, to every corner of the U.S., and rubbed shoulders with European royalty, writers, newspaper men, clerics, U.S. Presidents, and entertainers. He himself was a newspaper editor, temperance lecturer, Connecticut Congressman, mayor of Bridgeport, real estate developer, and writer - his best-selling autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs, was a favorite of Mark Twain's. Tongue in cheek, Twain wrote in a July 1874 newspaper article that he and Barnum had teamed up to rent the tail of a great comet - currently visible in the night sky - for "an extended excursion among the heavenly bodies." The plan was to fix up a million staterooms in the comet's tail, each room with all the amenities, ranging from hot water to a parachute. The cost would be $2 per fifty million miles of travel, and the date of return would be December 14, 1991. Requests for further information were to be addressed "to my partner but not to me." Barnum wrote in return, "My dear Clemens, I owe you a thousand thanks for taking me into partnership" and invited him to his Bridgeport home for clambakes and "jolly times." Reverses plagued Barnum - tragic family deaths, bankruptcies, and five devastating fires - but he bounced back from these disasters with astonishing resourcefulness so that, at his death, the estate was valued at $10,000,000 (about $282,000,000 today). Barnum's was a hard act to follow and perhaps no one has equaled it since.

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