Born 200 years ago, P.T. Barnum lives on. Bicentennial birthday celebrations were thrown recently in his birth town of Bethel, CT and his home town of Bridgeport, where he was elected mayor. But while the coverage affirmed his legend as America's saint of showmanship, the bamboozling side of Barnum was barely explored. And this is the aspect of Barnum that so fascinated a young L. Frank Baum, who made a study of the great con man of the Gilded Age. After all, P.T was the author of a book with a title you've got to love, about the Art of Money Getting (1880).
As I show in Finding Oz, Frank as a boy wrote a charming poem about the famed hoax of the Cardiff Giant, a fraudulent statue "discovered" not far from Frank's own hometown of Syracuse. When P.T. Barnum tried to buy it and was turned down, he simply created a replica and charged people to see it along with other fake discoveries at his American Museum. A Syracuse businessman marveled, saying that "I guess there's a sucker born every minute." But what Barnum himself said was even more insightful: "The American people love to be humbugged."
That is the legacy that captivated L. Frank Baum, who fashioned his Wizard character as a self-confessed "humbug" of the highest order. "Barnum was right that the American people liked to be deceived," Baum wrote in an 1890 newspaper column. Frank put his finger on a core truth about the American character: that if something seems too good to be true, we want in on it. But we also love when the deception is revealed, when the curtain is drawn wide open.
P.S. Believe it or not, the P.T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport recently got hit by a terrible tornado, and it's raising funds to fix the damage.
As I show in Finding Oz, Frank as a boy wrote a charming poem about the famed hoax of the Cardiff Giant, a fraudulent statue "discovered" not far from Frank's own hometown of Syracuse. When P.T. Barnum tried to buy it and was turned down, he simply created a replica and charged people to see it along with other fake discoveries at his American Museum. A Syracuse businessman marveled, saying that "I guess there's a sucker born every minute." But what Barnum himself said was even more insightful: "The American people love to be humbugged."
That is the legacy that captivated L. Frank Baum, who fashioned his Wizard character as a self-confessed "humbug" of the highest order. "Barnum was right that the American people liked to be deceived," Baum wrote in an 1890 newspaper column. Frank put his finger on a core truth about the American character: that if something seems too good to be true, we want in on it. But we also love when the deception is revealed, when the curtain is drawn wide open.
P.S. Believe it or not, the P.T. Barnum Museum in Bridgeport recently got hit by a terrible tornado, and it's raising funds to fix the damage.
