Phineas Taylor Barnum: The Real Greatest Showman

Vicki and I just returned from watching The Greatest Showman. We were immensely entertained. No assaults. No rapes. No torture. No murder. No spaceships. No superheroes. No explosions. I'm afraid it is doomed to fail at the box office.

The movie stimulated my curiosity about the real P. T. Barnum so I went to the source of the weird and wonderful, The People's Almanac, Volumes 1-3, the 1980s best sellers by David Wallechinsky and Irving Wallace. Not much there so I checked my favorite easy access reference, Wikipedia that had 12 printed pages, plus 43 references and a page of recommended books on Barnum. Here are some interesting tidbits:

• Although credited with coining the phrase, "there is a sucker born every minute," the attribution is incorrect. Barnum had too much respect for the general public and would avoid disparaging his customers. No one seems to know who coined the phrase, but some unknown, shady gambler is the chief suspect. 
• Barnum falsely known as the "Prince of Humbugs," debunked hucksters and exposed fraudulent manipulators. A master of marketing, he celebrated event promotion and advertising as long as customers received value for their money.
• Barnum believed that marketing requires an intuitive understanding of capricious public approval that without constant reevaluation, review and creativity would fail abysmally: i.e., those responsible for marketing The Greatest Showman better know what they are doing if they want to avoid my box office prediction. 
• Charles Stratton, "General Tom Thumb--the Smallest Person that Ever Walked Alone," weighed 9 pounds at birth, attained 35 inches at maturity, and was five-years old and 25 inches tall when he began working for Barnum who made him extremely wealthy. "The General" owned a yacht, a stable of thoroughbreds and, when he died of a stroke at age 45, had a life-sized stature placed over his grave by Barnum. When his diminutive wife died 35 years later her tombstone read, "His Wife." 
• Barnum marketed the "Swedish Nightingale," Jenny Lind's American tour so well that 40,000 people greeted her at the docks and another 20,000 at her hotel.
• Tickets for some of the "Nightingale's" concerts were in such demand that Barnum sold them at auction. He netted the equivalent of $14,300,000 from the tour.
• Barnum, who became know as the "Shakespeare of Marketing," created America's first aquarium, organized flower shows, beauty contests, dog shows, and the most popular, baby contests, changed public attitudes about the theater which had previously been thought of as a "den of evil" by starting the nation's first theatrical matinees to encourage family attendance,  and by opening the show with a temperance lecture to lessen the fear of crime. (Boy, that is a long sentence for a Texan, a compound-complex sentence for an English major.)
• Barnum who served four terms in the Connecticut legislature as a Republican supported the temperance movement and the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Later he became a progressive mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.
• He began the Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth Circus after he was 60 years old.
• Barnum contributed significantly to Tufts University including donating the hide of Jumbo the Elephant to raise money. Jumbo remains the school's mascot.
• Barnum so successfully promoted his own autobiography that at the end on the 19th century the number of printed copies was second only to the Bible. I just purchased a Kindle copy and will keep you posted.
• Just before his death Barnum had the newspaper print his obituary so he could read it.