![]() ![]() Hugh Jackman’s Barnum would never be a person comfortable purchasing an enslaved woman to turn a tidy profit. It’s a story that The Greatest Showman, which presents Barnum as a smooth-talking Harold Hill-type lovable con, doesn’t address. In a research paper on Barnum and his legacy misrepresenting African peoples, Bernth Lindfors, professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, aptly sums up significance of that dark transaction as the launching point of Barnum the showman- someone who “began his career in show business by going into debt to buy a superannuated female slave, who turned out to be a fraud." Though slavery was outlawed in Pennsylvania and New York at the time, a loophole allowed him to lease her for a year for $1,000, borrowing $500 to complete the sale. With Heth, he saw an opportunity to strike it rich. "I had long fancied that I could succeed if I could only get hold of a public exhibition,” he reflected about his life at the time in his 1855 autobiography, The Life of P.T. He was living in New York City, employed at a boarding home and in a grocery store, and was hungry for a money-making gimmick. Growing up in the antebellum North, Barnum took his first real dip into showmanship at age 25 when he purchased the right to “rent” an aged black woman by the name of Joice Heth, whom an acquaintance was trumpeting around Philadelphia as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.īy this time, Barnum had tried working as a lottery manager, a shopkeeper and newspaper editor. “here are various trades and occupations which need only notoriety to insure success,” he claimed, concluding no harm, no foul, so long as at the end of the day customers felt like they got their money’s worth. Each were full of bigger-than-life ideas marketed to an audience interested in mass, and often crass, entertainment.Īs it was “generally understood,” Barnum wrote in the book, the term humbug “consists in putting on glittering appearances-outside show-novel expedients, by which to suddenly arrest public attention, and attract the public eye and ear.” And Barnum wanted to make it clear such a practice was justified. and Barnum & Bailey” circus) near the end of his life. Barnum's Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome" (the predecessor of “Ringling Bros. His legacy in show business stretched from the American Museum to "P. ![]() Barnum's career trafficked in curiosities, which he served up to a public hungry for such entertainment, regardless of how factual or ethical such displays were. ![]()
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