Richie's Picks: THE GREAT AND ONLY BARNUM: THE TREMENDOUS, STUPENDOUS LIFE
OF SHOWMAN P. T. BARNUM by Candace Fleming, Random House/Schwartz & Wade,
September 2009, 160p., ISBN: 978-0-375-87197-2
"Shake the hand that shook the hand of P. T. Barnum and Charlie Chan."
-- Hunter/Garcia, "U.S. Blues"
Two summers ago I traveled across the country to attend the tie
dye-attired Gathering of the Vibes music festival at Seaside Park in Bridgeport,
Connecticut. While wandering about the Park that weekend, I came upon an
imposing statue of showman P. T. Barnum and also noticed a Park road named in
his honor. I wondered what that was all about. Now I know.
When P. T Barnum was born in Connecticut in 1810, the U.S. was comprised
of 17 states and Lewis and Clark had only recently completed their
death-defying expedition to the Pacific coast and back. When Barnum died in 1891,
the nation had expanded to 43 states and he was sending mile-long trainloads
of circus people, animals, and tents into those once-distant regions of
the country to entertain millions and generations of Americans.
By the time the paradoxical showman and impresario died, he was also the
best-known American in the world, and he had forever changed our world --
for better or for worse -- by giving birth to modern day concepts and
processes of celebrity, hype, and publicity machines.
"Tale learned two lessons that he remembered all his life. The first was
'learning how to call an adversary's bluff with a threat that cannot be
ignored.' The second was 'When entertaining the public, it is best to have an
elephant.'"
Writing and reading about many of the Founding Fathers is forever
complicated by the long, dark shadow cast by their ownership of slaves and their
treatment of women. In a similar fashion, Candace Fleming's fascinating and
thought-provoking biography of Phineas Taylor Barnum compels one to reflect
upon his treatment of people and animal performers, his outrageous
distortions and hoaxes, and his seduction and subversion of the media.
"'A fortune was made with a bit of good-natured deception,' said Barnum."
On one hand, it was horrible that Barnum placed people with physical
disabilities on public display to enrich himself. On the other hand, these were
people with no prospects for work outside of what he offered, and he gave
them a sense of belonging and paid many of them princely sums. On one
hand, he was forever lying to and defrauding his audiences. On the other,
people really seemed to relish it. "'First Mr. Barnum humbugs them, and then
they pay to hear him tell how he did it.'"
My own reflections on the showman's career primarily involve his
popularizing wild animal acts. Barnum actually won over the founder of the SPCA
who
admired Barnum's caring of and about the circus animals. And, yet, we
can assume that his trainers employed physical pain and coercion on a daily
basis to train those animals, a practice that has generally been the case
since those days.
"The fact is, animals do not naturally ride bicycles, stand on their
heads, balance on balls, or jump through rings of fire. To force them to perform
these confusing and physically uncomfortable tricks, trainers use whips,
tight collars, muzzles, electric prods, bullhooks, and other painful tools of
the trade." -- PETA (which provides graphic undercover videos online)
But it is also a reality that if the average American child is to become
emotionally invested in the future survival of lions, elephants, giraffes,
hippos, etc., they need to be afforded face to face opportunities to know
the world's greatest creatures. I know that I would not have experienced
quite the same emotional reaction to the scenes with Peter and the elephant in
Kate DiCamillo's upcoming THE MAGICIAN'S ELEPHANT, if it were not for
cherished memories of having gotten to be up close to an elephant many years
ago when I would drive my then-young children to Marine World-Africa U.S.A.
Through his museums and circuses, P. T. Barnum provided those in-person
experiences to so many Americans.
There is certainly no question that so much of what has constituted
entertainment for the average person over the course of my lifetime has deep
roots in the wildly successful career of P. T. Barnum. For example, I thought
that nothing like the Beatles coming to America had ever happened before.
But I sure was wrong! When Barnum -- more than a century before the
Beatles -- decided to contract with European singing sensation Jenny Lind to come
to America and perform for $1,000 a night, he found that virtually nobody
in America knew who she was. Undaunted, he churned up a publicity
whirlwind so immense that by the time her ship arrived in New York "a mob of
people -- forty thousand in all -- was waiting for her" and he proceeded to sell
out her concerts night after night after night.
As always, Candace Fleming does a stupendous research job and then knows
exactly what content and presentation of that information will make for a
tremendously entertaining book from which you can gain a whole mess of media
literacy, American history, and ethics without ever once realizing that you
are immersed in learning. From one end to the other, Barnum's life is an
amazing story. Again and again, Fleming enhances her telling of that story
through the use of memorable anecdotes, scores of photographs, and images
from newspapers of the day.
I'll be heading back to Seaside Park -- given to the city of Bridgeport by
Barnum -- for Gathering of the Vibes again this summer and, thanks to
Fleming's THE GREAT AND ONLY BARNUM, I have a lot to think about when I again
encounter that statue overlooking the Sound.
Richie Partington, MLIS
_http://www.librarything.com/profile/richiespicks_
(http://www.librarything.com/profile/richiespicks)
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