Unitarian Universalist Church at Washington Crossing

Our kids and Alison love telling the story about the time we were visiting a small carnival/circus. They are targeting me in the telling – for two of my tendencies. We were vacationing in Blue Hill, Maine, visiting a neighboring town. As we walked around checking out the various sideshows, games, rides and other forms of entertainment, we came to a sideshow that was housed inside a small trailer. There was a ramp to an entrance door on one end of the trailer and another ramp leading out of a door on the other end of the trailer. There were all sorts of banners and signs that were enticing people to pay the fee to get in. The biggest banner read, Come and behold, “The strangest thing you will ever see.” Also, there was a barker repeating that phrase in a strong Irish brogue.

Our kids were young and eager for me to pay the price so we could go in and find out what the strangest thing was that they would ever see. Alison was game to spend the money and join the people going into the sideshow, but my inherent skepticism kicked in along with the strong message I had internalized from my parents, “Don’t waste your money because of some slick advertising.” I prevailed against my families’ protests and we passed up the opportunity to enter that sideshow and we lost the opportunity to look at “the strangest thing we would ever see.”

I can honestly say that I have never regretted passing up that once in a lifetime opportunity. I am sure that if we had gone in and seen whatever it was we would have seen – that by now we would probably have forgotten all about the whole experience, no matter how strange it might have been. Since our curiosity was never satisfied, we still have that entertaining twinge in our minds, what was it that we did not see inside that sideshow? Moreover, my family can chide me for my strong skepticism and for my being, shall we say, stubbornly frugal.

That enticement to lay our money down for the strangest thing that we would ever see was a style of promotion that came directly from Phineas Taylor Barnum, dedicated Universalist, and better known as the creator and promoter of the “Greatest Show on Earth.” In so many ways, P.T. Barnum was also the founder of today’s entertainment business.

P.T. Barnum embarked on his entertainment career in 1834. His started out with “Barnum’s Grand Scientific and Musical Theater.” A few years later, he bought the Scudder’s American Museum in New York and renamed it Barnum’s Museum. He used the museum to promote hoaxes and human curiosities. He had this very strange attraction called the “Feejee Mermaid.” He may even have referred to it as the strangest thing you would ever see. This Feejee Mermaid was actually the head and torso of a monkey sewn onto the body of a large fish by a taxidermist. One of his most successful curiosities was “General Tom Thumb.” He hired a very young midget and promoted him as “General Tom Thumb.” He called him, “the smallest person that ever walked alone.” By 1846, Barnum’s Museum attracted 400,000 visitors a year.

While some of P.T. Barnum’s actions were not entirely honest, he tried not to be entirely dishonest. He justified, at least to himself, his “small” dishonesties with his belief that people deeply want to and need to be amused. He saw his stretching of the truth as tools he used in the service of amusement. As P.T. said, “Men, women and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature.” By the Author of our nature, Barnum, the Universalist, was talking about his concept of God.

Entertainment like the Feejee Mermaid was permissible because it provided a bit of entertainment with just a little self evident and lighthearted deceit – no serious or large-scale deceit. He felt that his audiences were at least a bit complicit when they – with a wink and a nod – bought into his hype or humbug as Barnum referred to it. Doing this was tolerable, given that the public would get value for the money.

P.T. Barnum, however, would not tolerate the use of gross deceptions such as spiritualist mediums who were popular in his day and continue to be in our own time. He even volunteered to testify against the noted spirit photographer William H. Mumler in a fraud trial. Like the famous James Randi, he was willing to expose “the tricks of the trade” used by mediums to deceive and cheat individuals who were suffering from a loved one’s death and were seeking comfort from the spirit world. In writing, “The Humbugs of the World,” Barnum offered to give a $500 award to any medium that could prove they had the power to communicate with the dead.

Barnum was such a good showman and advertiser that his museum soon became over-crowded. People were so amused that they spent the whole day in the museum wandering around – not wanting to leave. Barnum realized that he was not maximizing his income because additional people could not get into the building. He solved the problem with a huge sign near the end of the exhibits. It read, “This Way to the Egress.” After seeing everything else in the museum, most of them wondered what a strange thing an egress might be. It could well be the strangest thing they would ever see. They wondered was it some sort of giant bird or some other strange and wonderful animal. So they eagerly followed the sign down some steps and through a door that led to the waiting egress. That is when they realized they had just been led out to the street – without a way back in.

P.T. Barnum learned a great deal about human nature as a child. He was the son of Philo Barnum a Connecticut innkeeper, tailor and storekeeper. His father died when he was 15. At 19 P.T. eloped with Charity Hallett, his wife and companion until she died 44 years later.

As a young man, P.T. had several businesses: a general store, a book auctioning trade, real estate speculation, and a statewide lottery network. He was active in local politics working against the New England blue laws that restricted gambling and travel. His interest in theology convinced him to start a weekly paper in Danbury, Connecticut The Herald of Freedom. He wrote editorials against traditional churches, their elders and the laws they imposed on the public citizens. His articles resulted in libel suits, a prosecution and a two-month imprisonment. On his release from prison, “a coach drawn by six horses” and a band met him for a parade back to town. P.T. continued as a political liberal throughout his life. He fought the railroad interests and worked for many progressive and humanitarian changes.

The people elected Barnum to the Connecticut legislature in 1865 where he served two terms. He ran twice unsuccessfully for the U.S. Congress. He was a strong promoter of the Thirteenth Amendment and before the legislature said, “A human soul is not to be trifled with. It may inhabit the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hotentot – it is still an immortal spirit!” As in all of his activities, Barnum was never clearly virtuous. Unfortunately, his shows were often laced with the racist stereotypes of his day.

P.T., the entertainment promoter, heard about Jenny Lind a famous European singer. They called her the Swedish Nightingale. Without ever having heard her sing, Barnum invited Jenny Lind to do an American tour. In 1850, he paid her the unheard of fee of $1000 a night for 150 nights. Barnum promoted her so well that 40,000 people came to the docks to greet her boat, and another 20,000 waited for her at the hotel. Jenny Lind was so successful for Barnum that he made four times his investment.

At this time, people thought theaters were “dens of evil.” They were open at night and only men visited them. Barnum used his profits from the Lind tour to change American attitudes about the theater forever. He envisioned the theater as a place for edification as well as entertainment, one that would be fit for respectable middle-class families. Barnum built the largest modern theater calling it the “Moral Lecture Room.” He wanted to attract families and gain the approval of the moral crusaders in New York. He started the first in the nation matinees, encouraging families to attend during the safety of daytime. Barnum had become a teetotaler by this time and his opening play was, “The Drunkard,” pretty much a temperance lecture. He put on everything from melodramas and farces to historical plays but all with highly thought of actors. He did simplified Shakespearean plays and a simplified “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to appeal to families.

Still, Barnum was also investing in East Bridgeport, Connecticut real estate and made sizable loans to attract a company that would promote his new industrial area. Barnum lost all his wealth and spent four years in litigation and public humiliation. Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of our Unitarian reformist ancestors, said that Barnum’s downfall showed “the gods visible again.” You see Emerson was from the educated elite of Boston and he disapproved of Barnum’s popular sensationalism.

Nevertheless, Barnum rose to prominence again, with the help of friends like Tom Thumb who came back to help P.T. with another tour. Barnum went on lecture tours that were largely about temperance. By 1860, he was out of debt and resumed ownership of his museum. Barnum, along with Tom Thumb, visited President Abraham Lincoln at the White House. He created pro-Unionist and anti-slavery exhibits, lectures, and dramas at his museum. Because of his strong Unionist sympathies, a Confederate arsonist started a fire in his museum in 1864. The next year his Museum burned to the ground from a fire of unknown origin.

Ironically, Barnum did not start his circus career until 1871 when he was 61. In Delavan, Wisconsin, he established “P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome.” The next year he billed it as “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Eventually he merged with Circus entertainer Bailey and it became the Barnum and Bailey Circus.

In 1881, Barnum purchased Jumbo, the largest elephant in captivity, from the London Zoo. The violent objections made by the English caused Jumbo and Barnum’s circus to be even more appealing here in the U.S. In 1882, the circus opened in Madison Square Garden, and became an American institution.

Barnum became a vocal Universalist because he believed in a loving God. As a child he remembered almost feeling the “burning waves and smell (of) the sulphurous fumes (of the promised Hell)” preached in his childhood church. He was an active member of the Universalist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut and he made significant contributions to help Universalist Tufts University and served on its Board of Trustees. Tufts was initially organized to train Universalist ministers. Interestingly, after his death, Jumbo was stuffed and became the mascot of Tufts University, in honor of Barnum.

Barnum strongly promoted Universalism. He was firmly convinced of the Universalist principle that we are all acceptable to God and that we ought to accept each other just as we are. One of his essential beliefs was that conduct is three-quarters of life, and this present life is the pressing concern.

In 1891, Barnum started to fail physically. His mind and his spirit continued as ever. He continued to take delight in jokes and laughing. Just a few weeks before he died, he allowed the Evening Sun to print his obituary. He wanted to have a chance to read it himself. Just hours before he died, he asked what the day’s receipts were at the box office.

P.T. Barnum figured that he and everyone else would need some ‘fixing up’ by God before arriving at a state of perfect holiness, and he was confident that God was up to the task.