mermaid in manhattan
Or, the lies and unfathomable choices of Connecticut weirdo PT Barnum.
Hello, friends!
First, an announcement: we have a winner of the inaugural Dirtbag Madness bracket, and it is AGRIPPINA THE YOUNGER!!
Please congratulate Agrippina for poisoning, scheming, and Dance Momming her way to the top—it’s well deserved.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this high-stakes knockout tournament. I’m thrilled with the results and hope these matchups brought a little bit of joy to the weird ride we all call life. I can tell you one thing, seeing Cathy Meds knock out Napoleon was a highlight of my week.
But! Fun as it is to reminisce about the tournament, we cannot simply dwell in the past! This is a history newsletter! We must dwell in the…other past! Which means it’s time for a new story!
As is known, I love a hoax, scheme, or scam, the more elaborate the better. So this week’s dirtbag is squarely in my wheelhouse. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the story of…
PT Barnum, the Con Man to End All Con Men
Phineas Taylor Barnum was born in 1810 in Connecticut and assumed financial responsibility for his family at age 15 when his father died. He married his first wife, Charity Hallett, in 1829, which I report only because I think it’s a shame we don’t name children after Puritan virtues anymore. First member of Dirtbag Nation to name their child “Praise-God” gets $20.
Barnum’s first job was working at a local newspaper in the 1830s, except he kept saying mean and libelous things about church elders and got himself arrested no less than thrice. This didn’t slow Barnum down for a second, though. His thinking seems to have been “So I can’t lie in the newspaper? That won’t stop me. I’ll just become an absolute piece of shit professionally and lie about absolutely everything!!” And in 1835, the 25-year-old PT Barnum started up his first sideshow.
You may be vaguely familiar with the notion of the sideshow from the Hugh Jackman film The Greatest Showman. However, that movie was a jaunty musical, and bringing up the human exploitation, racism, ableism, etc. too realistically probably would have taken away from the dance numbers. So it gives me no pleasure to inform you that PT Barnum’s first sideshow “exhibit” was an elderly, blind, enslaved Black woman whom he made work 12-hour days for no pay and put on display telling people she was George Washington’s 160-year-old nurse.
People were into this, though, because it was the early 19th century and almost every white person in America was a raging racist. Barnum began building a name for himself as a sideshow entertainer, though he was terrible with money and almost had to close the show several times due to being broke.
Hold Onto Your Titties, Hans Christian Andersen
Then! What should arrive to change Barnum’s life but a real estate opportunity?
In 1841, Barnum purchased an old theater in Manhattan and transformed it into Barnum’s American Museum. “Museum” is a bit strong of a word for what it was. It was basically a giant permanent sideshow, where Barnum hosted regular performances, giant taxidermied animals, spooky animatronic robots, hot air balloon rides off the roof, and an ever-expanding series of sideshow exhibits. (My sources did not provide much information about the animatronics, so I am simply imagining the animal band at Chuck E. Cheese.)
The effect was all supposed to be magical and extraordinary, with exhibits you couldn’t possibly find anywhere else. Come see a mermaid, advertisements claimed! The world’s smallest man! A two-hundred-pound toddler!
In reality, I have to imagine any reasonably observant person attending Barnum’s American Museum felt like the population of Glasgow showing up at Willy’s Chocolate Experience: expecting a World of Pure Imagination and instead receiving a single jelly bean and a spooky villain called The Unknown in a spray-painted death mask.
Barnum’s sideshow exhibits were almost universally either A) an absolute fucking fraud, B) an ableist, racist, fatphobic, or otherwise horrible nightmare time, or C) both at once. The famous “Fiji Mermaid” exhibit, for example, consisted of the body of a monkey sewn to the tail of a fish. So that’s the level of sophistication we’re talking about with these frauds and scams. Oceans Eleven it is not.
Side note: I had heard about Barnum’s fake mermaid before, but I’d never actually seen a picture of it. In case you also had not, look:
LOOK AT IT.
WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK.
IT’S NOT EVEN A GOOD SEWING JOB.
CAN YOU IMAGINE BEING IN THE OCEAN AND THAT SHIT STARTS SWIMMING TOWARD YOU SINGING ABOUT WHOZITS AND WHATSITS GALORE.
NO THANK YOU.
Many of Barnum’s other sideshow “exhibits” were just people of different races or with various physical differences and disabilities, trying to make a living in the 19th century. Everything about it is gross, all the way down. Almost makes you miss the relatively harmless nonsense of The Little Demon Mermaid.
Sing Me A Song, You’re The Circus Man
Of course, though, people ate this shit up. “What ho!” I imagine them saying. “It’s the nineteenth century and we suck! Show me another Native American and tell me racist stories about how they talk to animals! Brava!”
Building on his success, Barnum took the Museum’s sideshows back on the road, making the stationary sideshow basically a regular old sideshow again. He took the show to various foreign leaders and royalty, which led to my favorite footnote on the PT Barnum Wikipedia page:
Never one to turn down a chance to make a buck, Barnum met a hot opera singer named Jenny Lind while touring through Europe and signed up to be her tour manager, driving a fully wild publicity circus to convince people to shell out and see her perform. He made lots of money on this, perhaps his one and only financial success.
Don’t feel bad for Jenny Lind in this situation, though, as she was a legend and I’m obsessed with her. She saw that Barnum was a dumbass who was bad at money and got him to agree to pay her the modern equivalent of $36,000 a day to go on tour with him. Taylor Swift fucking wishes.
Alcohol Me Maybe
After opening the World’s Most Racist Museum1 and parading around the world with a hot opera singer who absolutely took him to the cleaners, what was a dirtbag con man with no sense of decency to do?
If you guessed “go on a moralizing tour of the country yelling at people for drinking too much,” I’d pay to know how your mind works, but you’d be correct.
PT Barnum was a piece of shit, a compulsive liar, and possibly the worst person alive at maintaining a budget, but he had exactly one (1) principle that he clung to with his whole being, and it was that people should not drink. Mind you, America was deep in one of its period temperance movements at this time, so it’s less weird than it could be, but still. If I saw that mermaid skeleton I would need a stiff drink, let me tell you something.
Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, PT Barnum was funding temperance-themed theater performances, going on temperance lecture tours, and—at the same time—bankrupting himself by trying to buy the town of East Bridgeport, Connecticut. I do not want to know a single additional fact about this time in Barnum’s life. Go off, you weirdo. Buy Connecticut.
Then, a little thing called the American Civil War broke out.
Weirdly, that was good for business. The Manhattan-based museum was far away enough from the fighting to be unbothered, and people were emotionally distraught and in search of a distraction. And what could be more distracting than a weird-ass sideshow in a building full of birds and dancing robots and Poorly Treated Human People to stare at? Eh? Eh??
One positive thing I will say for PT Barnum is that he was a Union supporter during the Civil War and frequently denounced the Confederacy. Another thing I will say is that this surprised the fuck out of me, given the way he bought a Black woman and paraded her around the country like 14 paragraphs ago, but sure.
Jumbo the Elephant Girlies, We Ride at Dawn
The Civil War ended, and PT Barnum needed something new to do with his life. Probably because he kept pouring all of his money into buying small Connecticut towns and needed an additional source of income. Also because the museum had by now burned to the ground several times, which was, to put it lightly, frustrating.
So in 1870, Barnum opened up the circus that would, after a merger, go on to become Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. It was basically the same thing as the museum, except with bigger animals and while traveling, which would make it harder to burn to the ground. Though not impossible! Because they were still using gas lighting in giant canvas tents! So I can almost guarantee you the circus repeatedly burned to the ground also!
The main attraction of the circus was an elephant named Jumbo. As this newsletter’s opinion on Mean Things Happening to Elephants is surprisingly well documented (here, here, and here), we offer a hearty fuck-you to Barnum for fucking up that elephant’s life.
Jumbo performed with the Barnum & Bailey circus from 1882 to 1885, when he was hit by a train and died. Let me tell you something: there is one character in this story whom I would not mind getting hit by a train, and it’s not Jumbo. Barnum had Jumbo taxidermied and brought him around with the circus for several more years, because fuck him.
Strange Things Were Afoot in the 1870s
A bunch of other weird shit happened while Barnum was criss-crossing the country with his circus, and to be honest I can’t be bothered to work them into the narrative, so I’m just going to tell them to you.
First, Barnum’s first wife Charity Hallett passed away in 1873. The following year, the then-64-year-old Barnum married his best friend’s daughter, 24-year-old Nancy Fish. It’s one of those things that isn’t technically illegal but feels like it should be.
Second, Barnum got elected the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1875—the very town he had bankrupted himself trying to buy 30 years earlier. For some reason this is the funniest goddamn thing I have ever read in my life. Connecticut residents, explain yourselves.
Third, Barnum picked up a new hobby in the 1870s, and it is so delightful to me that I yelled when I learned about it: he got extremely into debunking spiritualists! That’s right! PT Barnum! The lyingest liar who ever conned people for money made it his mission to reveal that séances were a hoax!! Like, my brother in Christ! Where do you get off! Not since Helena Blavatsky have we seen such unmitigated audacity. I almost have no choice but to respect it.
I’m Making Fun of It But Rest Assured Part of Me Also Wants to Live There
In his twilight years, Barnum spent his time building elaborate mansions across the country and continuing to yell at people that he wasn’t afraid of no ghosts. And because you all know I can’t resist weird rich people’s houses, I want to give you a brief glance at one of PT Barnum’s mansions: a house he named, for reasons I cannot fucking begin to fathom, Iranistan.
Please behold:
This mansion, I cannot emphasize enough, was in Connecticut.
He rented another, different elephant to plow the land he was going to build this monstrosity on. I wish I was making that up.
There are no pictures of the inside because the whole eyesore—surprise, surprise—burned to the fucking ground like 15 years after it was built, but I just needed you to know this existed. It has profound Western Suburbs of Chicago energy, and if you know what I mean, then you know.
PT Barnum had a stroke in 1891 at age 81. Just before he died, he requested that the New York Times run his obituary in advance, so he could enjoy reading it. I hope the ghost of Jumbo the Elephant took a giant shit on his grave.
Thanks for joining me this week, friends! I hope I’ve completely ruined The Greatest Showman for all of you, although in my opinion Hugh Jackman once again trying to pretend he’s a tenor should have done that in the first place.2
Until next time, be well, and if you have ideas for Pro-Historical-Elephant-Rights merch I should be offering to subscribers please leave it in the comments because at this point it’s getting out of hand,
-Allison
Hotly contested title, probably not actually the world’s most racist museum.
This newsletter is not about how Hugh Jackman ruined the 2012 film adaptation of Les Misérables by being a baritone cast as the Extremely Tenor role Jean Valjean, but every time I think about it I have to bring it up, those are the rules.
A dirtbag extraordinaire, and that's even without mentioning one of his most dastardly schemes. While travelling overseas 'on the lookout for novelties' he tried to buy William Shakespeare's house in Stratford upon Avon and ship it over, every brick and timber, to the USA for a new museum. His plans were foiled by the great author (and secret dirtbag himself) Charles Dickens. Allowing him to steal an icon of our nation's heritage to put it on display in his own museum would have meant Great Britain had lost its collective marbles. Actually, let's not mention marbles...especially those of the Parthenon sort.
There is an actual braodway musical of Barnum that came out in the 1980s. Glenn Close was the original Charity! As you might expect, much of this outrageous cruel bullshittery was overlooked in that book, as well.