Honoring the Humbug
Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810-1891) always had a flair for the dramatic. The founder of part of what eventually became the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus, Barnum was one of the first people in America to bring ordinary citizens a taste of the exotic, and while not exactly a charlatan, he did have a remarkable sense of the sensational, even if the sensational didn't turn out to be true.
To understand Barnum, one must remember that in the Nineteenth Century people had much less access to information than they do now. There was no Internet with which to cross-check facts, no CNN, no news as it happens. The knowledge base, particularly in the realm of science, was much smaller than it is today, and new facts about the world were being discovered all the time. It was therefore much easier to get people to swallow some pretty outrageous things, provided that you made them palatable.
To Barnum, this was known as a humbug. Whether a stretch of the truth or an outright lie, it really didn't matter. As long as it was done in fun and meant to entertain people rather than cheat them, that was a good thing. And if people were willing to pay to see such chicanery--well, that was even better.
One of Barnum's earliest humbugs involved Joice Heth, a black woman who, at 161 years old, supposedly had been George Washington's nurse. An autopsy later revealed her to be half that age. Even here Barnum, who sponsored the autopsy, managed to crank the humbug up a notch by claiming that the dead woman wasn't really Joice Heth at all and that the real Joice was still alive.
Barnum was full of tricks like that. In another notorious stunt, Barnum sent a man around the outside of his American Museum, depositing bricks in various places. Visitors would follow the man around, wondering what the bricks were for, but all he was really doing was moving the bricks from one place to another without a specific purpose. It brought traffic to the museum, though, which of course was what Barnum wanted.
Barnum was not above creating his own controversies. When he first introduced the Fejee Mermaid--supposedly the remains of a legendary sea creature but in reality the head of a baboon and the chest of a female orangutan cleverly sewn onto the bottom of a fish--Barnum produced both an expert to vouch for the mermaid's authenticity and a skeptic to denounce the thing as a fraud. Even bad publicity was better than no publicity, or so Barnum's reasoning went.
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