You're Dead to Me - P.T. Barnum

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Professor Benjamin Reiss and comedian Desiree Burch in the 19th century to meet self proclaimed showman P T Barnum. A man famous for his museums and shows as well as ‘curiosities’ such as General Tom Thumb, Bearded Ladies, and The Fiji Mermaid. But take a deeper dive beyond Barnum’s infamous spin and you’ll find that, contrary to his pop culture image, this showman was far from the greatest. Produced by Cornelius Mendez Script by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse Research by Charlotte PotterThe Athletic production for BBC Radio 4

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a Radio 4 history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, do like history, or people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And you might have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History,

but that one's mostly for the kids. On this podcast, we aim to amaze and astound you with a combination of comedy contortions and historical hilarity. And if you've listened to our previous episodes about the Harlem Renaissance, the US Revolution, Sacagawea and Prohibition, you'll know that we are ending series three of You're Dead to Me with five episodes dedicated to American history. And today we are donning our top hats and tails and running away to join the circus to explore the life of the showman and hoaxer P.T. Barnum. And to help us uncover the truth behind the humbugs, we are joined by two very special guests.

In History Corner, he's the chair of the English department at Emory University, specialising in 19th century American literature, disability studies and health humanities. And he's the author of The Showman and the Slave, Race, Death and Memory in Barnum's America. It's Professor Benjamin Rees. Hi, Ben. Thanks for joining us. Hi, Greg. Thanks for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a playwright, actor, storyteller, and hilarious stand-up. You'll recognize her from The Mash Report, QI, Live at the Apollo. She's the host of Flinch and Too Hot to Handle on Netflix. And of course, you'll remember her from previous

episodes of You're Dead to Me, including the Harriet Tubman and Josephine Baker episodes. It's the marvelous Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree. Oh, it's so nice to be back. I feel like I'm super proficient at not knowing stuff about people from history because they keep coming back to the show. So last time out, Desiree, we had you on to talk about Harriet Tubman and Josephine Baker, two amazing women from American history. And today we are talking about, well, let's just say it's going to be more problematic. You're in American history now. Everywhere you look is a sea of problematic, mate. So let's go ahead and start with this guy, because, I mean, I feel like he invented some of it almost.

Like some of the problematic we know and love today, this guy started. So quite the ingenuous fella. Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head. We're certainly going to be touching on some pretty OG racism. So hooray for that. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And you've heard of Barnum, haven't you? You've heard of Barnum and Bailey's Circus. You will know about Barnum the entertainer, the businessman, the marketeer extraordinaire.

And in terms of pop culture, well, he would be thrilled to know that there's been many movies about him. But let's address the elephant in the circus, shall we? The massive, all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood blockbuster, The Greatest Showman, with a hunky Hugh Jackman giving Barnum the woke jazz hands razzle-dazzle. He's a business whiz. He's a family man. He's best pals to society's misfits and outcasts. He's a lovely fella. Hmm. Is it true? Let's find out, shall we? And what else do we need to know about the real greatest showman? Okay. Professor Ben, we're gonna be talking about a man who did an astonishing amount of stuff, incredibly busy, very industrious, wore a lot of hats in life, including a big hat. But one of the sort of

underlying philosophies of his entire career was the idea of the humbug. Can you just briefly give us an introduction to humbugging? Well, Barnum loved humbugs. That was really his word for hoaxes. And he built much of his career on them, calling himself the Prince of Humbugs. This was a way to present his hoaxes and elaborate pranks as harmless fun. He thought that a good hoax or a humbug should be satisfying for all involved. And he argued that people can be played with as long as they still feel they have value for the money. And this meant that humbugs were different from scamming people. So there's a sort of playful quality to it. Is that the idea that it's in on the joke? Yeah, it wasn't fraud. It wasn't injuring anybody. It was playing around with the idea of

ripping somebody off. Is this the beginning in America of capitalism taking place of the truth? Basically, if you got value, who cares about truth? Because you've been entertained. Because if so, I want to go to this man's grave and shake the shit out of him. Because look at what we got now. I think that's fair to say. Mate, I'm so mad mad already you might just want to

pace yourself desiree because there's a lot more to come actually let's have a quick rummage around in barnum's youth ben because this is where perhaps we find the origins of that instinct to titillate amuse entertain what was his family situation as a child where is he born who are his parents he was born as Phineas Taylor Barnum, July 5th, 1810 in Bethel, Connecticut. And he was the eldest of five children. His father was Philo Barnum, who was an innkeeper and a store owner. And his mother was Philo's second wife, Irene Taylor. Middle class origins, but he presented himself as rags to riches throughout his career. Much like another self-made man we know, Donald Trump, a Gemini. Totally self-made.

That's possibly the first of several Trump references in this podcast. Oh my gosh. Phineas's grandfather played quite a drawn out practical joke on him when he was a child. Do you want to guess what it was? Something sick and almost sociopathic, I'm guessing. A long drawn out prank. Like, I'm not your real grandfather. Like we found you in the reeds by the river or something. It's not quite that. It is slightly sociopathic. Ben, do you want to tell us what it was? From ages six to 12, he was told that his grandfather had bought a farm for him called

Ivy Island. And his family in the wider community encouraged him to believe he would inherit riches and become hugely wealthy. When he was 12, he was finally shown the farm and it turned out to be a swamp. So the joke was on him. And even once he'd seen it, people continued to tease him that he was secretly rich. The whole town was in on the prank and mocked him for it. We're lucky he started a circus because he would have been like a serial killer. Like this is how you ruin people for it. We're lucky he started a circus because he would have been like a serial killer. Like, this is how you ruin people for society. There is a sense here that we may be finding the roots of the humbug philosophy, right? This is a prank that everyone has played on him. And then they keep playing it on. Even when he's shown the swamp, they're still like, no, but actually,

you really are rich. They keep running with the joke, which I think is going to become a Barnum trope later in life. Yeah. And it gives new meaning to the phrase, it takes a village. It takes a village to screw you over, right? Yeah. But do we know if this is a true story, Ben, or is this Barnum telling his own story and thereby inventing an origin story? I don't have the intel on the land deeds for Ivy Swamp, so I can neither confirm nor deny.

But he certainly enjoyed telling the story. By the age of 12, he's already trying to go to work, selling sweets to other kids. His dad dies when he's only 16 and leaves the family indebted. So does that mean that he's now responsible for trying to earn some quick cash? Yeah, I mean, he bounced around from job to job throughout his teens and into his early 20s. He was working in general stores. He worked in the book auctioning trade. And then by the age of 20, he set up a network of lotteries all over Connecticut. Age 19 and 1829, he marries a young lady called Charity Hallett. In the Greatest Showman movie, she's proper fancy. I

don't get the sense in real life she was that classy. Yeah, probably not much of a jump up in the class ladder. Yeah, because in the movie, the dad's like, grumble, grumble. Well, I guess you're going to marry my daughter because you really want to. No way in any real world we ever lived in in the past was that going to happen if she was rich. Like he would have killed that guy before that ever happened. Well, remember, he wasn't poor either. So maybe they met in the middle. Oh, yeah, right.

Of course. He had that swamp. I forgot. So they Oh, yeah, right. Of course. He had that swamp. I forgot. So they have a baby soon after. They eventually will have four daughters, Desiree. But the four daughters are spread apart over 16 years. So he now decides to start his own newspaper called the Herald of Freedom, which was critical of the militant Calvinism that he grew up in.

And it lands him in hot water. His own uncle, who ran a rival newspaper, sues him for libel and P.T. Barnum goes to jail for three months. But Desiree, how do you think he celebrates getting out of jail? Well, if the movie is any truth, he comes out, does a big song and dance, swings from a lamppost and just invents from his own bootstraps an entire business. Is that it?

It's pretty close, to be honest. And that time you could just do anything you could show up with five bucks and that was a fortune and you're like well i guess i'm a millionaire i've started a business not drain the swamp but monetize the swamp um no it's um he throws a party in the very courtroom where he had been sent down yeah and according to his own newspaper, I mean, completely fair and unbiased source, I'm sure, there were 1,500 attendees. There was a three-mile parade going back to his home with a cannon salute, musicians, 60 carriages, marshals carrying the flag, 40 people on horseback. It's unclear who organized it or whether it really happened to this extent,

but Barnum suggested it was all spontaneous and he emerged as a hero of free speech and the free press. It's going to be a military parade next, isn't it? I love the idea of a spontaneous, like just people, oh, I've just got a cannon out of the back. Actually, my friend Jeff's got some horses. We'll do a three mile parade just off the cuff. So already as an incredibly young man, he's already showing the showmanship. If this story is true, Ben, we're seeing he enjoys spectacle. He enjoys showing off. But now it's time for us to hit the klaxon that is marked the problematic button. Desiree, have you ever heard of Joyce Heath or Joyce Heath? She's probably one of the performers in his sideshow. She might be the

first of many people to be commodified as an object to stare and gawk at and judge. You're absolutely right. And Ben, I know you're a specialist on this particular subject. Do you want to introduce us to the Joyce Heath or Heath story and why it's so grim? Yeah, well, it was before his circus days. And so she was a solo act. She was an enslaved, disabled black woman who Barnum exhibited in New York in 1835. He claimed that she was 161 years old, the oldest living human, and that she had been the nursemaid to George Washington. Barnum technically rented her. He wasn't her enslaver, but he exploited a loophole in slavery laws in New York and Pennsylvania where slavery had already been outlawed to take hold of a lease

agreement to exhibit her for a period of 12 months. So she was blind. She was paralyzed in one arm and both legs. She had arthritis in her hands. And Barnum exhibited her for 10 months, starting out in a room on Lower Broadway and then moving by carriage and train to dozens of cities and towns across the Northeast. And she was made to work in her old age, up to 10 hours a day, in dehumanizing conditions where she would have been watched and touched by people who came to see her. So she was really treated as both a freak and as a venerated relic of history who told stories about bringing up dear little Georgie.

She sang hymns to the audience that she'd supposedly taught him. Although Barnum would later deny it, in early autobiographical writing, he boasted about extracting her teeth to exaggerate her aged appearance. He also placed a notice in a Connecticut newspaper implying that Heth was not a human being at all, but that she was simply a curiously constructed automaton. So there was another example of him kind of spinning out the original joke or humbug into new dimensions. disabilities, he spread word that the proceeds from the exhibit would go to abolitionist causes, including emancipating her great-grandchildren who are still held in slavery. And that was all, of course, bogus. Oh, wow. That is quite an opening gambit, Mr. Barnum. I don't know if this is better or worse or exactly on par with her conditions on whatever plantation or wherever she came from beforehand, considering she was disabled, but still having a bunch of people

poke and prod you is like continuing the slave auction every single day with everyone coming up and doing that for the rest of your life. And how actually old was she around this time? So he's claiming 161 years old. When she dies, Ben, he makes money again by doing a public autopsy. ostensibly to verify her age and the plausibility of the story that she told about having raised George Washington. And for the dissection, he rented out an amphitheater on Broadway, and he sold 1,500 tickets to the public. The results were debated in the popular press for weeks, fueling the legend of Barnum as the unparalleled prankster and showman. That's really first how he comes before the public eye. And most of the reports eventually suggested that she was actually 75 to 80 years old and that she had died of tuberculosis. He later claimed he gave her a respectable burial, but no evidence of that exists. Yeah, we only have evidence of him showing off all of her body parts. Oh man, this is usually so much fun, Greg.

Sorry. Yeah, I mean, this is perhaps the saddest of the stories but this is the launchpad for his phone like this guy will make money off of anything he's like literally if you want to look back at the toilet what you just left it's going to cost you yeah i mean none of this stuff is in the greatest showman and you can see why because that's yeah i bet it made huge actor man feel kind of weird to be singing a song about this asshole. There is one other thing he does with this story, Ben, is that he having said that she's dead, having said that she's a robot. He then says, oh, no, Joyce Heth is still alive. And the anatomy was done on a completely different woman. And she's gone to live on a farm somewhere.

So he still keeps spinning the story even after she has died. Why don't they chase him out of town? Like already. Everything I've heard about this one person that he worked with, I'm just like, he should have been run out of whatever town he was in.

That's the 19th century for you. This is popular entertainment, Desiree. This is fun at the time. Also, Desiree, I mean, if he'd done this to a white woman, they would have, obviously. Yeah, of course, of course, of course. They were like, oh, it's all good fun. No people were harmed in the making of this prank, so we're fine. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, she's a robot, remember? It doesn't even matter. Yeah, so it doesn't matter. Robot. So this is the

basis of his fame. This is where he gets his first windfall of cash. He is then hit by what's known as the Panic, which is basically the credit crisis of the 1830s. But he survives that. In 1841, he buys a museum called Scudder's American Museum and he renames it as Barnum's American Museum. And his modest ambition is to acquire at least one example of everything in existence. I think aim low. That's good. It's achievable. He didn't want Noah's Ark. He just wanted half of the Ark. But his next big humbug, this is what's known as there's the mermaid hoax desiree how would you describe a mermaid well a mermaid is half woman and half fish so which kind of like a centaur is half man half horse in that same way top half lady bottom half fishy tail yeah because

the other way around is really weird isn't it a fish head and like this rock and hips it's like i'm confused about all my feelings yeah but yeah that's our classic understanding of a mermaid ben barnum his big thing is the fiji mermaid in 1841 42 i'm assuming we're not going to be calling this an aerial from the little mermaid style flowing red hair are we yeah it was the head and body of a monkey and the tail of a fish attached together sewn together and it's very likely that was the same mermaid that was exhibited in London in 1822, which somehow made its way to New York 20 years later. He's inherited a hoax here. This has been going for 20 years. How is that a hoax? That's just horrible. That's literally somebody took a monkey corpse

and some big and sewed it together and whoever put it in the display saw these big ass stitches and was like this is totally cool this will work this is great the reason i like this story okay is that i i'm a historian of celebrity and i enjoy writing about this story because this is barnum is the genius of marketing okay so this is how he does it he concocts a story about sailors in the south sea discovering this mermaid he then in the press has an argument back and forth with the scientist who found it called Dr. Griffin, who works in a British scientific institution. And in the press, he's going, I want this in my museum.

And Griffin's saying, no, you can't have it. And they go back and forth for weeks and weeks and weeks. And the public is getting more and more excited. He then gets some drawings done of the mermaid. Griffin's like, you can't have those. So he's like, fine, I'll give them to the press. Instead, they can have them. The press publicised them.

Eventually, Griffin's like, fine, you can have the mermaid as long as I get to do the talks in front of the public. And Barnum's like, OK, fine, great, no worries. And so the public is knocking on the door, desperate to see the mermaid. And they come in and they see the monkey fish monster thing and they go, what the hell? And it turns out Dr griffin doesn't exist and dr griffin is barnum's best mate levi lyman and the two of them have been running a hoax through the newspapers for weeks on end writing to each other and they're in on the same joke that's how he gets everyone obsessed with this mermaid that doesn't exist is he uses the media

to sell the story it's incredibly clever it's marketing genius he's an absolute bastard and therein laid the blueprint for every annoying comedy or music promoter that you've ever come across it's just like working in it all the time you're like you suck as a person and they're like yeah but i filled the house and you're like oh you're gonna keep being employed. You're awful. So that's the Fiji mermaid. And then we get in the same year to Charlie Stratton, who is known as General Tom Thumb. And I think he's in the movie. He is. Yes.

This is a true story, isn't it? He met Charlie Stratton, who was an American child of very short stature. He was about 25 inches tall in 1842. And he hired him as a human oddity for his museum. He claimed he was 11 when he was in fact only four or five years old. Barnum pretended that Stratton was from England, and he concocted the persona of the English folktale Tom Thumb. Within a year, nearly half a million Americans had seen Charlie Stratton on tour and at the museum. And in 1844, Barnum took him on a tour of England. And he gets to meet Queen Victoria herself and perform in front of her.

She's not OK with it, really. She writes in her journal, One cannot help feeling very sorry for the poor little thing and wishing he could be properly cared for, for the people who show him off tease him a good deal, I should think. So Queen Victoria, who herself is not necessarily history's most progressive person, she looks at a small child and goes, that doesn't feel OK. But Barnum is making big money off Charlie, isn't he?

He's found a gimmick that he can tour. And this is him raking in the cash. Sorry, I'm confused. So Charlie Stratton is a little person who's just also young or is not a little person it is just very young he's both he has congenital dwarfism he is very small and and in in middle age he will be only a meter tall so he is a little person but as a child he's a very small little person in the movie he was like 22 or something and you're like okay fine he just yanked a child out of his mom's

house and was like, we're going on a tour of the world. Ha ha ha. You're a freak. And this kid's like, this is super healthy. Thanks. Yep. That's about right. While he's in England, Ben, he tries to go a bit legit by buying William Shakespeare's house as you do. Yeah. That makes people legit flashing a bunch of money around and buying stuff they don't understand. This is him trying to import the house back to New York. Is that the plan? Oh my God, no. He wants to send it back brick by brick to New York for his museum. It's the most new money thing I've ever heard. And then the house actually did go on auction, Desiree, so you missed your chance. Oh man. And he almost bought it, but he was outbid by the

Shakespeare Association, who could only afford it because Charles Dickens helped them fundraise. Wow. Yeah, it could have been rebuilt in New York. Yeah, but instead he had to nearly bankrupt Charles Dickens just to make a point. So there we go. That's an episode of Homes Under the Hammer that I want to see. The Charlie Stratton tour, Ben, makes him an awful lot of money. And he gets back home and he's got all this cash to splash. What is he splashing it on? Is he investing in property? Yeah, he builds his own mansion, a huge Orientalist mansion called Iranistan. And it's in the style of the Brighton Pavilion. And he also gets involved in politics around the same time. He invests a

lot of money in Bridgeport, Connecticut, his hometown. And in the late 1840s, he pledges himself to the temperance movement, which was promoting abstinence from alcohol. And he even put on temperance plays in his museum. He was in the temperance movement, but he drank champagne on a daily basis. So I'm not sure he got the memo. He does, in fairness, eventually go teetotal. Another Donald Trump overlap. Look at that. Yeah, I got to be sober because I don't need to be out of my wits at any point because I have to control every single person I interact with. So I got to be on it. He now tries to go legit again, Ben.

And this is the time where in the film Greatest Showman, we're seeing a weird love interest. showman, we're seeing a weird love interest. But this is where he tries to recruit or rather manage the great celebrity of her age in Europe, the Swedish nightingale, Jenny Lind, who is an opera singer, very, very famous Desiree. And she is super expensive, Ben. Can he afford her? Not really. I mean, he got into a huge amount of debt trying to work with her. But when he did take her on tour, they both made a fortune. She was a sensational superstar in the US as well. And there were all sorts of celebrity tie-ins or clothes or dolls, souvenirs. Yeah. I mean, there's merch. High end. Yeah. It's fancy stuff. Barnum is making money off it. He's also even making money by auctioning off premium seats in the theater. There's a guy

called Ossian Dodge who wants to be a celebrity. So he bids hundreds of dollars to be the first person to sit in the theater and see Jenny Lind. He's making money off the back of making money. He's always looking for a scam. It's really impressive in some ways, very cynical in others. So Jenny Lind, she's real. In the movie, she's a sort of homewrecker who fancies Barnum, presumably because he looks like Hugh Jackman, which is understandable.

It's like, you look like Wolverine, so it's on. Whereas the real Barnum was, let's not judge people's bodies, but he wasn't Hugh Jackman. You know, he was a fairly average middle-aged man, really. Yeah, a little balding. I don't think he spent a lot of time at the gym. There's not a lot of scams you can run at the gym. I don't know. Gym memberships are a scam, Desiree.

But they're only a scam because we believe we're not as lazy as we actually are. That's true. That is true. In The Greatest Showman, there's a bearded lady character who sings the song, This Is Me. But the bearded lady, is that from this period as well? Yeah, there were a number of bearded ladies in his employ over the years. But the most famous one was Josephine Clofulia, who went by the stage name of Madame Clofulia. And she was 24 when Barnum started exhibiting her in 1853. Most of the ladies weren't treated particularly well, unlike in the movie, where all of the human oddities thank Barnum for allowing them to find family through performing in his show when their

own families had shunned them or hid them behind closed doors. With Madame Clofulia, soon after she first appeared in Barnum's American Museum, a man called William Char publicly complained that she was another humbug. And the matter was taken to court. It was covered in detail in the press, including the New York Tribune, which was run by Barnum's close friend, Horace Greeley. And Clofulia was then subjected to examinations to prove that she was a woman. So maybe there's some echoes of the Joyce Heth autopsy there. It's likely that Barnum had a hand in both Char's complaint and the ensuing media coverage. That final line is the thing,

Ben, is that he manufactured the complaint, presumably, to generate sensation. Yeah, I feel like I've just spent the past four years with this guy somehow. I don't know why. It just feels like... Yeah. No publicity is bad publicity. That's something that's often attributed to him. The most famous line that's attributed to him is, there's a sucker born every minute. But it's not his line, is it? Yeah. No evidence that he ever said that. That's a shame. I mean, it does fit his philosophy.

Well, you know, if he didn't say it was probably Mark Twain or who else gets quoted? Winston Churchill. Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, one of those. We've heard so far about his relationship with Jenny Lind, with Madame Clouffoulia, with Joyce Heth, with The Mermaid, all the ladies. We haven't heard much about his wife and children, Ben. Where is Charity, his wife?

Are they happily married? So I don't get the impression that they had a particularly happy marriage. One of their daughters had died in 1844 while Barnum was on tour, and he didn't then return from the tour for months. And when he finally did, of course, he decided to play a humbug on his wife, letting her believe that he was dead. And then she found him waiting for her in the museum. Ha ha.

Big surprise. We know Barnum did eventually stop drinking so much alcohol around 1851. Charity is reported to have cried with relief. Perhaps he was a problem drinker then is what we're getting from that maybe. Well, anytime you're going to pretend that you've died after your daughter's just died, something's a problem. This is a man with a somewhat unhealthy relationship with practical jokes. Where you're like, did your mom not hug you enough?

Yeah. Did your grandpa lie hug you enough? Yeah. Did your grandpa lie to you for six years and get the entire town to mock you? Yeah. Barnum then publishes his first autobiography called The Life of P.T. Barnum, written by himself. And then almost immediately afterwards, he files for bankruptcy and loses his fancy Iranistan house. The public is very sympathetic. There's an open letter with a thousand signatures from American supporters. And there's also support from young Charlie Stratton, Tom Thumb, who by this point is about 18, 19 years old. He does a public, oh, let's all help Mr. Barnum. He's so lovely. He's been so kind to me. Desiree, despite being in hardship, P.T. Barnum, as a kind-hearted man,

he did still give a huge amount to charity I don't know he seems like the kind of person who gives to charity to be like look I'm super highbrow see I gave all these poor cripples money see I'm the good guy and you're like no you're not actually I'm actually pulling your leg a bit there because when I say he gave to charity what I mean is he put his assets in his wife charity's name and then hid them from the taxman and then declared bankruptcy i feel like a 12 year old who's just been told he's inheriting a swamp i'm afraid i just humbugged you desiree i'm sorry i walked right into it like a spider web like oh no what happened to me yeah i'm afraid he declared bankruptcy and then put all his wealth in his wife's name and was like i'm so poor help me

so he was fine but he lost the house the house then burned down as well as being a sort of and then put all his wealth in his wife's name and was like, I'm so poor. Help me. So he was fine. But he lost the house. The house then burned down as well as being a problematic douche. He's also weirdly linked to a lot of arson. But we'll get to that later. It's the flames of hell nipping at his heels. It's trying to get him.

Ben, in 1862, America is at war. It is a devastating, horrific civil war. Hundreds of thousands have died. It's terrible. And Barnum responds by throwing a wedding? Yeah, he orchestrated what he called a fairy wedding in 1862 between Charlie Stratton and Lavinia Bump, who was another little person. Thousands of people attended the wedding

reception and he sold tickets for $75, which is a huge amount of money back then. And it's kind of impressive how much delight audiences took at this wedding, not only in the midst of the Civil War, but you also have to consider it's a wedding of two disabled people. And that's a time when disabled people were really discouraged from getting married and from reproducing. And a couple of decades later, there would be laws against this. And over the next decade, Charlie, his bride Lavinia, and another performer called Commodore Nut and Lavinia's sister toured the world as The Wedding Party. It was kind of a traveling reality show. He's launched Keeping Up with the Strattons, basically. It's a wedding that he's been like, he's like, nothing good or bad happens

that I don't have a cut of, right? So like, oh, you're getting married. Great, I'm going to throw your wedding. Everybody's getting charged an exorbitant amount of money. Now you're all going on tour. No honeymoon. Oh, you can have your honeymoon anywhere in the world as long as it's on the tour schedule.

This guy sucks. I know we know this, but I feel like every two minutes, I'm like, this guy sucks again, more still. Let's get to the arson, actually. Barnum, he has some enemies by the sound of it, because there are deliberate attempts to destroy his exhibitions, his buildings. There are repeated fires later on, but there are definitely a couple of deliberate fires, aren't there, Ben? Yeah, I mean, some of them seem to have been accidental, but there were a lot of fires in this period of his career, maybe from the 1860s through 80s. In 1864, Barnum's American Museum was victim to widespread arson attacks by Confederate sympathizers. But there were more fires in 1865, 1868, and 1872. And one of the most disturbing aspects of the fires is the huge loss of life of the animals that he purchased. He exhibited whales, kangaroos, tigers, snakes, all of whom usually die in the next fire. And he had a long running dispute that came partially out of this with Henry W. Berg, who is the founder of the American

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Barnum's motive was always publicity and profit. A whale should never die from fire. Like, you've done something profoundly wrong, like twice, apparently. Yeah. He just like, you've done something profoundly wrong, like, twice, apparently. Yeah. He just keeps rebuilding these places, and they keep burning down, and animals keep dying in them, and it's like, he doesn't seem to care.

How did, oh, God. Just infuriating. It's like, stop, just stop it. You're doing the thing again. Stop it. Last time out, you got to do Josephine Baker, so this is your... Yeah, this is my penance.

She was, like, extremely awesome in profound ways and this guy just keeps finding new depths of just asshole but he's an entertainer and this is a sort of the curious thing yeah it's hard to take your eyes off him that's for sure i think this is one of the problems and the tensions and i can see in some ways why hollywood were like hey we'll do a razzle-dazzle circus movie with Hugh Jackman because it's flamboyant, it's spectacle, it's animals. And a tiny hint of this where you can say, yeah, I could see why this would be fun. But there's such a layer of cruelty to all of it, isn't there, Ben?

Yeah, I think there was a sadism mask behind a lot of the jokiness and the fun and games. And fittingly enough, a person of that quality then goes into politics, of course, Desiree. The obvious next step. Well, he's already had the reality show. It's the natural next step. So Desiree, this is what's known as the Battle of the Barnums. There's more than one of them. Is there a real more than one of them? Or did he make up a whole other Barnum that he could face off against that never existed? So in 1867, a couple of years after the end of the Civil War, he ran for US Congress

as a Republican against his Democrat cousin, William Barnum. And he ran on a platform of civil rights for formerly enslaved black people. P.T. Barnum did. But he didn't need a cousin in the race for this to be Barnum versus Barnum. In a sense, he was running against himself or his own past. While he was running, he did write about his shame for some of his previous episodes that didn't fit the abolitionist pose that he was striking. And he referred to Joyce Heth and some of the other enslaved performers in his show saying, I had been a slaveholder myself. I probably should have been whipped for some of the things that I did. And while he really does seem to have turned against the politics of slavery, he was by no means rid of racism or for that matter, his penchant for turning people's

disabilities into a public spectacle. In the early 1860s, this is just before his political career, he exhibited a microcephalic black man, a man with a small head, named William Henry Johnson. And he dressed him up in a fake jungle suit with a spear and claimed to feed him only on a diet of raw meat and nuts. And the name of the exhibit is What Is It?, implying that he was neither a human being nor a monkey, but somewhere in between the two. And when he ran for Congress, he explained his support for black people's right to vote by saying that black men were naturally pious and submissive, so that white people had nothing to fear from them. It had only been a few years earlier

that he exhibited a black man as something of a wild beast. He then followed that with, the blacks love me. No one's been better for the blacks than me. I've given them all jobs, the blacks. I'm curious as to how much of his circus, his show outside of the animals were people of color. Because basically from the film, it looks like everyone's superpower is being brown. Like there's one incredibly pale person and then everybody else is like

the United Colors of Benetton. And then it's like Zac Efron and him like having a great time. Like that's what it looks like. He had large scale exhibits supposedly showcasing different cultures from around the world. And often people who are exhibited in them came under pretty dubious circumstances. So this is definitely a major theme in his career. The idea of taking a person of color and dressing him up as a monkey man is obviously horrifically racist, but also it's a trope as well.

Other people were doing it too. I mean, this was the Civil War. It wasn't like everybody else was being super woke. But he was like, I'm progressive. And I guess at the time he wasn't totally wrong because he would at least be in the same room as some of these people. Yeah, although Desiree, almost all of the venues that he performed in were white audience only. So the only people of color tended to be people on stage.

Every once in a while, he would have a day for black people to come and visit, one day out of a month. So Ben, this idea of his atonement, his saying, I am ashamed of what I did to Joyce Heth when I was a younger man. I should be whipped for what I did. I am ashamed of what I did to Joyce Heth when I was a younger man. I should be whipped for what I did. Is this a cynical woke washing of his CV so that the party will vote for him? Or is there a genuine sense of personal growth here? Is he a genuine abolitionist who now thinks, oh, I shouldn't have done that?

In everything that Barnum writes, it's impossible to get below the surface. He's possibly the least introspective writer. Multiple volumes of his autobiography, his letters are all in print. You just never get a sense of anybody looking inside and saying, wow, what was I thinking? I could have done that differently or whatever. That's the only moment I ever found where he expressed anything like regret. And of course, it comes in the midst of a political campaign where it's in his interest to be on the side of enfranchising black people. So wait, do all of his books read like, and then I did that, and that was cool.

And then I did the next thing, and that was awesome. It's not that far off. I mean, the thing that we can't cover in this episode, Desiree, is the sheer number of things he did in his life, the industriousness, the extraordinary number of shows and exhibitions and things he was doing all the time. So this episode is the greatest hits or worst hits. One of the things that we need to talk about, of course, is the death of his wife, Charity, in 1873. Desiree, how do you think he mourned for the mother of his four children? Probably played a prank on the three children who were still around and was like, here's your mom, and then did a weird weekend at Bernie's with her corpse. Is that close?

It's a really good guess. I mean, he would have had to have shown up to do that, whereas he just didn't come home. Yeah, he was on a foreign tour and he didn't come back to the US when she died. But three months after the funeral, he did get remarried to a 23 year old woman named nancy fish he was 63 at the time i think we can all agree it's a pt barnum is a dick in every possible way at every turn he's like hmm kind thoughtful thing to do passable human thing to do dick move we gotta come up with new things to call him. I already called him a dick, douchebag and asshole so many times. And I'm like, is it ass clown the next time? Ass clown is good.

Or do we have to go back to old time? That rapscallion. Ben, we're laughing. We're joking. He is an extraordinary figure in American history. And we do have to take him seriously. You've written a very interesting book about him. I've written about him briefly. He is a figure with tremendous cultural heft and influence. Although we are cancelling him here with our jokes, there's a reason that we're talking about him. Yeah, he was arguably the most famous person in the United States in the 19th century and around the world, the most famous face of America for the world. And he really was brilliant in figuring out how to manipulate the media to extend the life of a local attraction

beyond the specific place where it occurred. It's something that I think really fueled pop culture industry through the 20th and 21st century. You mentioned there, Ben, that actually his taking a show on the road, that's a new technology. That's a new thing really that's happening in the mid 1800s is the railroads, the coming of the steam train changes the dynamics, the economics of being a showman, because you can take a show that ordinarily would play for three months and you can take it on a two year tour because you can go to every city in America and then you can take it to Italy and France and England and Scotland and Germany. So can you tell us a bit more about how he gets into circuses?

Yeah, so I mean, when he starts out in the 1830s with Joyce Heth, he figured out that he could exhibit her in one town one night and one town the next as they followed the route of the railroad to make that possible. But by later in his career, he figured out it was more economical for him to use the new transportation system to bring tourists into one location where he would have a mega complex of exhibitions and attractions. And so he had traveled with a number of small circuses going back to the 1830s. And then he tried out bigger ones starting in 1851 with his great Asiatic Caravan, which was another one that gave

white people a chance to gawk at non-white people from a safe distance. And then in 1870, although he had claimed he was about to retire, he went into business with other circus men and loaned his name to P.T. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum Menagerie Caravan and Hippodrome. So he had the traveling stuff and then he had the permanent stuff in New York. And the Hippodrome in New York featured chariot racing, horse racing, and even elephant and ostrich racing. In 1872, he decided the circus should be toured by train to reach more audiences. And this was the first circus of a grand scale to travel in this way. His circus went through several iterations until he established Barnum's new and only greatest show on earth in 1877.

But it's not until 1880, when he joined forces with James Bailey, that his reputation as a circus man was really cemented. And then that brings us to one of his biggest stunts, or should we say jumbo size stunts in 1882. And it really annoys Queen Victoria, second time in the episode that she's been displeased. What does he do, Ben? He bought the beloved elephant Jumbo from Regent's Park Zoo to the dismay of Queen Victoria. There were public protests campaigning for Jumbo to stay in England, but Barnum shipped him over to New York. He couldn't get Shakespeare's house, but he got Jumbo.

We're mad at him for buying this elephant, but why did the UK sell him? Like if he was in Regent Park Zoo, why was he for sale? Apparently he was getting kind of aggressive. Barnum got him on a fire sale. Elephant as is, no questions to take. Jumbo is shipped across the ocean and arrives in New York. He's quite quickly put to use in a public safety campaign. This was a brand new landmark that had been built in New York in 1884, and the public did not trust it. They didn't think it was safe.

And so Barnum stepped in with 21 elephants to prove that it was safe enough to walk across. Do you want to guess what it is? Oh, is it one of the bridges, like Brooklyn Bridge or something? Brooklyn Bridge, yeah, absolutely. Oh, cool. I mean, you shouldn't do that stuff to elephants, but it's still cool to think about an elephant going across Brooklyn Bridge. Yes, but the people of New York were scared that the bridge was unsafe.

The previous day, there had been a big surge of people who were very worried, and so the authorities brought in Barnum and his elephants to prove that, yes, even elephants can walk across it. Perfect for humans. But the following year, poor Jumbo is killed in another horrible accident. Do you want to guess what it is, Desiree? Is it a massive fire? Not this time. This time it's a train crash. So it's a whole other type of horror show, I'm afraid. So they were transporting Jumbo and then the train crashed. I think the train hit him oh come on why is an elephant on a train track this is just basic do you know what i mean

did a man with a spindly mustache tie him there like how does this happen if he was aggressive potentially he was having like a standoff with the train. He was like, come on, bring it. But don't worry, Desiree, because Jumbo can still perform as a stuffed Jumbo. Yeah, Barnum takes the corpse, taxidermies it. And actually Barnum then gifted his elephant Jumbo, taxidermied as it was, to Tufts University. And it became their mascot and still is today. I guess he couldn't give her back to Queen Victoria. Barnum at this point is 79 years old. He's approaching 80. Does he retire at this point? No, not really. At age 79, he takes the

greatest show on earth to London. And the show at the Olympia Hall was seen by approximately two and a half million spectators in just three months. Barnum's celebrity meant that he was a significant draw and it was advertised that he would attend every single performance. So he would arrive before the show in an open gilded carriage and lap the hippodrome track. During this tour, he met Oscar Wilde and William Gladstone, among many other famous people. He also donated an outfit for his very own wax figure in Madame Tussauds. This is how I know that this person is a sociopath, because he came out every single night for that show, like ready before and after. No performer wants to do that shit for that long. It's draining to any normal person. But like people like him get life from

doing that. And they only exist when they're being looked at. But it does eventually catch up with him. He has lived this incredibly industrious life, extraordinarily busy man, but he does die in 1891. He's aged 80. We think a stroke and a heart attack, perhaps. True to form, he has one last trick up his sleeve. He wants to read his own obituary. Allegedly, he requested the Evening Sun print his obituary before his death so that he could read it. And then he asked about the day's box office receipts. Money, money, money. That's what he cares about. So he held out for that to die. He's like, I just need to know what are the numbers?

Give me the numbers. Okay, good. And out. So Desiree, The Greatest Showman is a very successful movie. What is your opinion of the film, having seen it and then having listened to this podcast? The film itself, like, it's just one long music video and it's super grating because I keep wanting to get into the stories.

It's got great actors in it. And then every time, apropos of nothing, they're like, I'm singing a pop song about it. And you're like, no, no, I'm out of it. But then you actually are in the real story and you're like, this is a gross miscarriage of justice. All of you guys need to stop right now. Who wrote this?

Who signed on? Did anybody bother to Google this guy before you said, yeah, I'll take this gig? You just can't. That's like doing Pol Pot the musical and being like blithely jumping around. And like, you just can't do that. Yeah. That movie made a lot of money, but it's pretty tasteless.

Yeah, and we've all seen Cats. The Nuance Window! Well, that brings us to The Nuance Window. This is where you and I grab our popcorn and we allow Ben to take two minutes to tell us something that we need to know about P.T. Barnum. Without much further ado, the nuance window, please. Well, in the 19th century, P.T. Barnum was one of the most famous people in the world. He was a man known for bringing joy and humor to the otherwise drab lives of customers high and low. He's America's fun uncle. But there's another side to him, as we've been

hearing. His first big success as a showman was staging a public autopsy of an elderly black woman who was held as his legal property while she performed for him. And as his exhibits grew bigger and more complicated, so did the displays of exotic, curious, and very often non-white performers who were generally presented as either backwards and simple-minded or ferocious and animalistic. His biggest multiracial exploitation extravaganza was called the Grand Ethnological Congress, which he ran in 1882, in which he secured the rights to exhibit groups of indigenous people from four different continents, often in very dubious circumstances. And yet now, only four

years ago, along comes a popular film making him out to be a champion of the dispossessed and the misunderstood. And there's a scene where all the circus performers, the bearded lady, Tom Thumb, two black aerialists, and the rest thank him for giving them a sense of family and letting them be who they are. It's as if they're thanking Lady Gaga for singing Born This Way. The point isn't that Barnum wasn't brilliant at what he did, or that he didn't bring joy and laughter into people's lives. He certainly did all that. But I think that the laughter he unleashed was often the laughter of white supremacy

and the feeling that public spaces like Barnum's Museum were built for white people. And they showed images of others in's Museum were built for white people, and they showed images of others in degrading circumstances that reflected white people's own superiority and power. Barnum was an extraordinary entertainer. He was a true innovator in creating public spectacles that bonded people together through shared responses to his show and all the gossip and rumors that flowed from them. But he was also an innovator in racism. He was someone who developed new ways to make living in a racially stratified country feel like innocent fun and games for those who were on top. Wow. Thanks very much.

Normally that window brings renewed humanity to the subject as opposed to just like firmly entrenching them in time as like an even bigger, like top of the dick pile of enslaver dicks. Cause he wasn't even an enslaver. He was like an enleaser. Cause he was just like, I don't want to own anybody. That's going to tie me down. I'll make more money just changing hands all the time and flipping people in

and out and doing whatever I want with them. All I would say is that the only good thing I can tell about PT Barnum is that unlike Trump, he had the decency to wear a hat. So what do you know now? Time now for the so what do you know now? This is a quickfire quiz for Desiree to see how much she has learned. And last time out, Desiree, you achieved perfect 10 out of 10 scores twice.

So the pressure is on. I'm already trying to forget this guy as well. Okay, here we go. Question one. As a child, what prank did P.T. Barnum's beloved grandfather play on him? The best prank you can play on someone unless you actually care about them and they're in your family. He pretended that Phineas was going to inherit this amazing land. And he kept saying, this is your inheritance. And then he let him in on the joke that it was actually a swamp and everybody in the town knew and they all just continued to

make fun of him. Absolutely true. Question two. What was the name of the enslaved elderly woman that Barnum exhibited in 1835 claiming that she was George Washington's very, very old nursemaid? It's Joyce Hesse. Question three. What was the name of P.T. Barnum's first wife? Charity. It was Charity. Question four. What was the Fiji mermaid actually made of? A monkey and a fish.

So creepy. Absolutely. Question five. What was Barnum's name for his hoaxes and practical jokes? Oh, it was Humbugs. Humbugs. It was Humbugs. Yeah.

Question six. When touring the UK with Charlie Stratton, who is known as Tom Thumb, which literary landmark did Barnum try and buy and ship across the ocean? Tried to buy Shakespeare's house and move it piece by piece and then reconstruct it like a Jenga set, apparently. Absolutely right. Question seven. What was the Battle of the Barnums? That's when he ran against his cousin. But like basically, like, I don't know, his cousin was like a normal person. Question eight. Name the famous elephant that Barnum purchased from Regent's Park in London. Poor Jumbo.

Question nine. Name one of the rival circus men that Barnum joined forces with in the 1880s. Oh, Jesus. I can't even think of any of them. I mean, he obviously joined with James Bailey, but wasn't he a theatre guy? That's how they paint him in the movie. He was just like a weird playwright who happened to be very successful. You're right. You're spot on.

This for a perfect score, again, Desiree. It's for 30 out of 30. What very on-brand thing may Barnum have done shortly before his death? Oh, he checked to see the ticket sales, and he also made sure that he could print his own obituary so that he could read it. Once again, Desiree Birch, 10 out of 10. Amazing consistency. Well done.

I mean, these are incredibly fascinating human beings. Thank you so much for teaching me more about American history. The things that I ran thousands of miles away from to forget. I mean, obviously, you've learned a lot from Professor Ben. And listeners, if you fancy a bit more of Desiree, of course you do. Why not check out our episode on Josephine Baker, a dazzling American entertainer and civil rights activist, and not nearly as problematic. I mean, a little bit of problematic, but like a phenomenal woman. And she also, of course, did the Harriet Tubman episode, didn't you desire which was really extraordinary and if you want more problematic douchebags then check out the young napoleon bonaparte episode because he was a another

egomaniac and remember if you've had a laugh and learned some stuff please do share this podcast with your friends or leave a review online and make sure to subscribe to you're dead to me on bbc sound so you never miss an episode but all that's left for me to say is a huge thank you to our wonderful guests in history corner we've had the outstanding Professor Benjamin Rees from Emory University in Atlanta. Thank you, Ben. Thanks so much for having me on the show. And in Comedy Corner, we had the returning hero, the delightful Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree. Oh, thank you so much.

It's a pleasure. I'm afraid that's actually it for Series 3 of You're Dead to Me. We have had a lovely rummage through all sorts of different periods of history and we've finished our five part American history miniseries. Fear not, we shall, much like James Bond, return again. And yes, Series 4 will be coming back in the summer. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss that when we come back. But for now, I'm off to go and see if I can ship the Statue of Liberty over the ocean and rebuild it in my garden. Bye! and see if I can ship the Statue of Liberty over the ocean and rebuild it in my garden. Bye!

You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Charlotte Potter. The script was by Emma Magoose, Charlotte Potter and me. The project manager was Isla Matthews and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez. Hello, I'm Dr Michael Mosley. And just before you go, I want to tell you about just one thing you can do for your overall health and wellbeing.

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