[There are few
practices more AmericanStudies, but also more complex, than that of collecting historical,
cultural, and artistic treasures and memorabilia. This week I’ll highlight and
analyze five such collections and the collectors who assembled them. Please
share collections and museums of interest to you for a collected weekend post!]
On the two sides
to an American legend, and how we might reconcile them.
P.T. Barnum
apparently didn’t actually say “There’s a sucker born
every minute” (ah, the perils of quote attribution, especially in this
internet age as
Abraham Lincoln famously noted), but I think it’s fair to say that much of
his showmanship proceeded according to that principle nonetheless. This is the
man who exhibited (and exploited) “the Feejee
mermaid” and “Tom Thumb,”
whose traveling “freak show” included (and exploited) such figures as “the man-monkey” and “Commodore
Nutt,” and who, perhaps most saliently, liked to feature a sign in his
tests that beckoned customers “This
way to the egress.” Even when he wasn’t activitely trying to fool and cheat
his customers, Barnum famously admitted that his principal ambition was “to put money in my own
coffers” by whatever means proved effective.
That’s the side
of Barnum that we collectively remember today (well, that and the three-ring circus that partly bears his
name), and again it’s certainly not inaccurate. But on the other hand, Barnum
was a lifelong reformer, on multiple levels: working to discredit false
spiritualists and other frauds, such as through his book The
Humbugs of the World (1865); serving his native Connecticut politically
in many capactities, including as a four-term state legislator and subsequently
as a
reformist mayor of Bridgeport; helping to found Bridgeport
Hospital and serving as its first president; and, most impressively and significantly,
leaving
the Democratic Party in 1854 to join the newly formed Republican Party,
whose anti-slavery and reform efforts he would champion in one form or another
for the remainder of his life (including an
impassioned 1865 speech in the legislature in support of ratifying the 13th
Amendment).
Those last
efforts are not just the most impressive, however, but also the most complex
and even contradictory. Again, Barnum made much of his fortune through
exploiting his performers, many of whom (like the “man-monkey”) were
ethnic minorities; he also produced
and promoted multiple minstrel shows, including multiple ones featuring Joice Heth, a elderly female slave
Barnum probably owned (and definitely exploited). Since the Heth shows were in
the 1830s and most of the other minstrel shows in the 1840s and early 1850s, it
would be possible to argue that Barnum evolved throughout his life and career,
and I’m sure to a degree he (like everyone) did. But to my mind such contradictions not only
likely persisted in Barnum, but represent the most telling and American element
to his identity and work. A reformer and a con artist, working both to improve
and to exploit the lives of his fellow citizens, even coining a philosophy known
as “profitable
philanthropy”—sounds pretty American to me.
Next collector
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Collections you'd highlight?
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