and affinity for the world the slaves had made under conditions of severe adversity.42
In terms of the future course of popular culture, what was most significant about minstrelsy was its heterogeneous character. Not only did whites alter black culture in the course of its translation and migration into the cities—many minstrel songs have a strongly Celtic flavor that draws on shared traditions of oppression—but minstrelsy also found its way back into black communities, where it underwent further refinement. For the most part, minstrel songs that became part of the slave cultural tradition were those, like “Blue Tail Fly,” that retained their critical character.43 They eventually formed part of the bedrock for blues, gospel, and other forms of African-American music. Meanwhile, minstrelsy’s ideas and forms—comic skits, monologues, and a variety format—laid the foundations for burlesque, vaudeville, and eventually television. For better and worse, here was a true wellspring of U.S. culture.
DECEPTIVE SIMPLICITY: SHOW BUSINESS IN THE AGE OF BARNUM
The stage represented only one facet of the entertainment world in the decades before the Civil War. A series of separate but interrelated developments evolved in tandem with it: new forms of popular culture, new attitudes toward it, and the economic elaboration of what became known as show business. No one better understood these developments, or better integrated them, than P.T. Barnum, and no history of U.S. culture would be complete without him.
There was little in Phineas Taylor Barnum’s early life that would indicate the breadth of his later success. He was born in rural Connecticut in 1810, the son of a man who struggled financially, as tailor, farmer, tavern-keeper, livery-stable operator, and country-store merchant. Working in the store, young Barnum learned about the false pieties of Yankee business practices. In his famous memoir Struggles and Triumphs, he used the example of a New England deacon and grocer who asked his clerk: “‘John, have you watered the rum?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘And sanded the sugar?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘And dusted the pepper?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘Then come up to prayers.’”44
Barnum’s father died when the boy was fifteen, leaving behind heavy debts and five children. Over the course of the next decade, Barnum worked as a grocery clerk in New York, tried unsuccessfully to sell used books in Connecticut, and founded a weekly newspaper (he was a fervent Jacksonian Democrat in a highly federalist state). He also established a store of his own, where he made a fair amount of money managing a local lottery until new regulations forced him to curtail that activity. After his marriage in 1834, he returned to New York to try the grocery business again. His prospects seemed to be narrowing.
In 1835, however, Barnum heard about a slave named Joice Heth who was reputed to be George Washington’s 161-year-old wet nurse. The woman’s owner claimed to have a 1727 bill of sale proving her authenticity, and her appearance—she was blind and toothless, but very spirited and convincing in her talk of “dear little George”—was dramatic. Sensing an opportunity, Barnum bought her, sold his interest in his store, and launched his career as a stage manager by advertising Heth as a traveling entertainment exhibition.
In so doing, he was participating in a long-standing traveling-show tradition that predated the American Revolution. Exhibitors would present miscellaneous, crude, and often deceiving “entertainments”: animals, mechanical oddities, wax figures, peep shows, and so on. The practice continued through the nineteenth century and eventually became the featured element in the medicine show—the highly theatrical (and often tawdry) entertainment event that was used to create a crowd that could then be sold tonics, elixirs, and other products of dubious value.45
As Barnum himself must have realized—but never admitted—Joice Heth’s claim of being Washington’s nurse was highly dubious.46 The fledgling showman recognized her potential at a time when Washington was almost universally revered and anything about him was sure to attract an audience. Moreover, in a pattern that would mark many other such enterprises in his career, he was able to base Heth’s appeal less on his ability to prove her claims than on her and her former owner’s having made them in the first place, allowing others to judge for themselves. He also developed a number of the techniques that he would continue to use repeatedly: careful packaging through press releases, relentless exploitation of the local press, and indignant denials of lies he himself had planted. It would not be too much to say that Barnum was the inventor of the modern publicity business.
Barnum went on to manage a number of other acts, among them a blackface dancer and a professional Italian juggler. When another juggler boasted he could do everything Barnum’s performer did, Barnum publicly offered him $1,000 to try. When the juggler refused, Barnum secretly struck a deal with him to stage a rivalry, which Barnum portrayed as a test of national character, between foreign skill and native genius (foreign skill would win).
Over the course of the next few years, Barnum travelled widely, invested his earnings in a more respectable company—-and lost them. He mounted a few more shows, sold pictorial bibles, and even wrote advertisement copy for the Bowery Theatre. By 1841, his fortunes were at low ebb.
That year, Scudder’s American Museum, a once impressive but now run-down collection of exhibits, went up for sale in New York. Since the late eighteenth century, museums had been halls of learning for the elite, the most famous of which was Peale’s Museum of Philadelphia, founded in 1784. A bastion of the U.S. Enlightenment (Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were among its donors, and Jefferson was its first president), this and other museums were designed to collect, catalog, and exhibit artifacts of natural history. Their mission also included educating the public, but by the Jacksonian era they were facing increased competition from the theater and from other forms of entertainment that lacked the museum’s didactic air. On the other hand, museums had an undeniable cachet, particularly for a growing middle class that considered theater disreputable and museums a legitimate form of self-improvement.
Sensing an opportunity to fuse these cultural sensibilities, Barnum went to great lengths to acquire Scudder’s Museum. Through a series of clever machinations, he leased the site and began to reorganize the exhibits. Although many were retained, Barnum put a premium on the rapid turnover of attractions and was continually on the watch for novelty. He also orchestrated dramatic presentations, which brought to the museum people who would never have dreamed of attending even the relatively upscale Park Theatre. By blurring the line between edification and entertainment, he was able to greatly expand both the range of popular culture and the market for it.
Barnum applied many of the tricks he had learned over the previous years to attract visitors to the museum, including intense publicity, colorful displays, and staged controversies. He also played jokes on the public. As a publicity gesture, for example, he advertised that he had hired a band to play free music outside the museum. He then chose the worst band he could find. “When people expect ‘something for nothing,’ they are sure to be cheated, and so, no doubt, some of my out-door patrons were sorely disappointed,” he later reported in Struggles and Triumphs. Those willing to part with a quarter and go inside would get their money’s worth and more.47
Many did spend the quarter. For while some were offended by such tricks, others were fascinated by them. And Barnum was hardly alone in playing jokes on the public. One of the most famous examples of such trickery was the “Moon Hoax” of 1835, when the New York Sun ran a series of articles describing astronomical breakthroughs in South Africa that would allow a new picture of the solar system. The climax of the series was a piece describing winged men inhabiting the moon, prompting Yale University to send a delegation to investigate and Baptist preachers to lead prayer-meetings for their fellow beings. These stories were fabricated, of course, and those who considered themselves respectable, as well as the Sun’s ever growing cast of competitors, were indignant; most readers, however, were amused. Indeed, the paper gave itself credit for “diverting the
