Robert Wilson, Author of Barnum: An American Life Examines the Man Who Could Out-Trump Donald and Still Listen to His Better Angels

Last September, staff in the Barnum Museum moved with Big Top verve as Robert Wilson, author of Barnum: An American Life (Simon & Schuster, 2019) prepped for his talk. On this fair pre-COVID day in Bridgeport, Conn., sun streamed through the gallery’s skylights, making the already theatrical room of wonders even more wonderful. 

Showman Phineas Taylor Barnum was arguably the best-known American living during the 19th-century, “as close to a global celebrity as a person could be at the time,” according to Wilson. Relics on display include the impresario’s white top hat and General Tom Thumb’s black wool suit—the one the two-foot tall performer wore when P.T. Barnum took him to meet Queen Victoria in 1844. 

Wilson, well over six feet, moved with familiar grace around Barnum’s last surviving museum, completed in 1893 after his death at 80. First, Wilson dodged a cart stacked with portable chairs. Next, he maneuvered around a C-Span camera crew setting up near the stage. Then with a very tall person’s awareness, he folded himself to sit at a card table positioned between a Jenny Lind souvenir mirror and a miniature nightgown once owned by Lavinia Thumb, Tom Thumb’s wife. A few steps away stood the bones of a “centaur,” half man and half horse, and a reproduction of the FeeJee Mermaid, a hideous fusion of a monkey and a fish.

Among these curiosities, Wilson autographed copies of his book, his third to date. His two previous biographies of 19th-century notables include The Explorer King: Adventure, Science, and the Great Diamond Hoax —Clarence King in the Old West and Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation.

“My publisher made an incredibly beautiful book,” Wilson said of the red and blue hard-back cover with rough-cut pages. “I told my editor early on, I really want a book with deckled edges.’ I told this to my wife, Martha. She said, ‘I’ve never even heard the word ‘deckled’ before in our 45 years of marriage.’ And so my response to that was every successful marriage must have its secrets, and my secret is deckled edges.”
Even more surprising to Wilson than the physical quality of his book is the publicity, including C-Span’s coverage of the day’s event. Much excitement is because of Barnum’s likeness to Donald Trump, whom Wilson never mentions in his biography.

CBS This Morning noted commonalities during an interview with Wilson inside this very museum. (After a 2010 tornado and other storms nearly destroyed the Romanesque-Byzantine building, the museum is re-imagining itself as a world attraction.) The television segment re-examined Barnum’s catch phrase: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” As Wilson says in his book, there’s no evidence he ever wrote or said it. However, Barnum might also be known for another statement that he did make: “The noblest art is that of making people happy.”

The Atlantic noted how Barnum was “a serial disruptor of scale, unable to resist anything that was too tall or too short, too old or too new, too fat or too thin.” Of Wilson, the writer James Parker acknowledged that any modern Barnum biographer has the unenviable task of balancing facts with sensitivity for today’s audience, one often shocked by White House grandiosity. “What are we to do with this, Barnum’s primordial insight,” the review inquired, “now that Barnum-ness has irrupted into our politics?”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed Barnum: An American Life in four pages in The New Yorker, an honor so impressive one of Wilson’s friends now calls him “Four Pages.” Kolbert’s main criticism was that “Wilson admires Barnum,” a dig at the historian’s objectivity.

“It didn’t wound me as much as she thought it would because I do admire Barnum,” Wilson says. “One of the things that made him interesting for me to write about was he was not continuously admirable. As I went through his life, I found myself constantly looking at things in the context of his own time. I also tried to look at him as a man too, as a human being.” 

Not only did Barnum democratize American entertainment as an affordable diversion for the masses, he presented acts “that even Barnum’s many preacher friends could defend, in a setting that was appropriate for families and children.” His several books offer practical advice to the public, including The Life of P.T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World, and The Art of Money-Getting.” Finally, he believed in generous giving, still evident today in Bridgeport’s improvement projects like Seaside Park. Tufts University continues to honor him as a founding trustee. He also donated the remains of his elephant Jumbo, the university mascot.

Despite his appreciation of Barnum’s joy and energy, Wilson says the mogul was “hard to forgive” in his neediness for wealth and attention. Yet the father of the modern entertainment industry also enjoyed long friendships that endured through his extreme successes and financial lows. 

In the introduction, Wilson writes: “He would often hint at the dubiousness of his latest sensation, even promoting his skeptics’ views, and then challenge his audience to judge for themselves. This strategy was good for business if people were moved to go back for a second look, paying a second quarter, but it also recognized the need of his customers felt to exercise their own critical skills. He generally approached them with a wink so they would be part of the fun.”

“Gee, there’s a dispute here,” says Wilson, imagining how Barnum would exploit any type of controversy, particularly one involving him. “The Atlantic says one thing. The New Yorker says another. You must come and decide for yourselves by reading the book.’”

Today, Barnum is still a cipher best known for co-founding the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show On Earth. Yet that venture marked the last quarter of his long life. He was also a best-selling author, mayor of Bridgeport, and the promoter behind Tom Thumb and soprano Jenny Lind. 

In The Greatest Showman, the loosely factual 2017 film Wilson is “trying to forget,” characters danced on the bar to work out a business deal. However, the real Barnum signed a teetotal pledge and became a temperance speaker. He forbid alcohol in his American Museum in New York City, and he was not likely to throw back multiple shots the way Hugh Jackman’s character did in the movie. 

He had a strong moral compass, says Kathleen Maher, the Barnum Museum’s executive director.

And yet he was forever contradictory.

As a young man in the 1830s, Barnum exhibited Joice Heth, a blind, paralyzed slave, whom he falsely claimed was George Washington’s former nursemaid. Whether or not Barnum owned her or was renting her, the arrangement was “a tangled and morally specious engagement,” Wilson writes. As an older man, Barnum was ashamed of his actions. When he served on the Connecticut General Assembly, he supported abolitionist causes, including the 13th Amendment that freed African Americans from slavery.

“I’m not a believer in ‘presentism’ that says we have achieved some sort of level of perfection in our society that we can really look back and judge other societies,” Wilson says. “He lived in a racist society where things were very racist. Of course, we don’t live in a racist society, do we?”

Standing in front of an audience of 40, he admitted he felt intimidated to be in the same room with three individuals who knew more about Barnum than he did: Maher, scholar Arthur Saxon, and Elinor Biggs, Barnum’s great-great-great granddaughter. 

“It was such a great pleasure to work on this book, not only because of these three people and others who were very helpful to me but just because of Barnum himself,” Wilson told the crowd. “He’s just a wonderful character to write a book about. I mean ‘character’ in sense of sense of a character in a novel, say, a person with many parts, a person who had his dark side as well as his bright side, someone who never failed to engage me intellectually and emotionally. He had remarkable skills as a speaker and as a writer. Who knows where they came from.”

Biggs, a stately blonde with a delicate build and lively expressions, gave Wilson her blessing. Her ancestor “did change for the better at the end of his life,” she claims. Styling himself as “The Children’s Friend,” an elderly Barnum posed in a top hat with her great grandfather, then a toddler in a sailor suit. The charming photograph is included in the book. 

At the conclusion of the event, this reporter asked how the 19th-century giant would have adapted to Twitter. A lover of technology and an “avid advertiser,” Barnum would have embraced the platform, Wilson says, but perhaps “not in the way certain people do.”

“There’s some of these superficial ways they seem similar,” Wilson explains of Trump and Barnum. “They have a slippery relationship with the truth, their name is their brand, they were in real estate, they went bankrupt, they called themselves philanthropists, but I think the differences are so great that [comparing them] is an insult to Barnum.”

This piece was unpublished and unlikely to find a home during COVID-19.