Jim biggs. [applause] its always special to have them. Welcome, everyone, to the barnum museum. I know many of you have been here before, but is this anybodys first time here . Oh, well, welcome. Welcome to the barnum family. Were delighted to have you on this Beautiful Day in downtown bridgeport, connecticut. This is the barnum museum. It is, in fact, p. T. Barnums last museum. As we all know, he started his museum inn 1842, and this was hs last gift not just to city of bridgeport, but really to the Global Community that we serve. Many of you are very familiar with thewe museum. In 2010 we were hit by a tornado because thats the kind of stuff that happens to barnum. And then the year after that it was hurricane irene, and then the year after that it was superstorm sandy. Want to also give a huge shoutout to state of connecticut and our delegation who supported a 7 million bonding because we are just about to embark on a historic recap of thatde gorgeous barnum building from 1893. So thats a huge thing. And to add to that [applause] thank you, yes. And then to add to that also our congressman, congressman himes, has also really been working very hard with us to get the barnum building. Its on the National Register of Historic Places which is a fantastic thing. I feel like im on the National Register at this point. But we are in the process of being reviewed to become a National Historic land mark, and that is theres only about 250 in this country, and that is 2500 in this cup, and that is a significant, significant thing. So weve been working on that for a long time. And its reasons for why were here today, because were still talking about p. T. Barnum. He is still relevant in our lives today. And Robert Wilson is here to talk about the fact that you can contextualize him in a modern way, andex its something to be looked at and examined and reexamined and brought into modern culture. He is the father of the entertainment industry, but he was a philanthropist, he was the doer of good deeds many times. And those are the lesser stories that we know about barnum. But enough about me. Thank you all so much for coming to the barnum museum. Please support us. We do programming all year. The museum is opened during the week ayo couple of days, even during the big historic construction project thats going to be happening soon. But with no further ado, let me just introduce you to bob wilson. Bob has been the editor of the american scholar since fall of 2004 which won the National Award for the bestor feature sty in may 2006 and Digital National onmagazine award for commentaryn 2012. Bob is the editor of the 35 million circulation of aarp bulletin of which i am now a member [laughter] and he is also the editor of preservation magazine with the National Trust for historic preservation. Wi winning the National Magazine award for general excellence in 1998, and its the National Trust that to got me into this field. So i am credited to you. Bob was also bobs also founding literary editor at civilization, the magazine of the library of congress, in 19 is 94 and 95 during the time there, the magazine received the award of general excellence. And before civilization he did a few little things. He was the editor and columnist for usa today for 11 years, and he happened to be one of the assistant editors at the Washington Post for six years. Bob holds a b. A. In english from washington and Lee University where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa [inaudible] hes taught at the university of virginia and writing programs at Johns Hopkins university, George Mason University as well as american university, and hes the author of the explorer king a narrative on the adventurer Clarence King and math brady portraits of matthew brady. We are honored to have bob wilson speak today on barnum an american life. Welcome, bob. [applause] i have so many microphones going on here, i and now this is on too. Thank you, kathy, for that lovely introduction. Thank you for everything you do for the barnum museum. Thank you for having me here at the barnum museum. And thank you for everything that you and the people who work with you have done to help me in writing this book, researching and writing this. Book. I also want to thank adrian st. Pierre, the curator here, and really just throughout the years of working on the book offered me encouragement, lots of good information and helped me a lot with the photographs in the book later on. Im also really pleased to be able to tell you that the great barnum scholar of this time or any time, arthur saxton, is here in the front row here [applause] arthur could have been or forgiven for not being wholly welcoming of someone who wrote him a letter and said id like to write a biography of barnum. Said, well, i did that. And i did it pretty well. Not pretty well, very well. But another person thats written very well about barnum wrote to me when i was setting out on this and said, well, i think barnum is somebody who deserves a new book every generation. And although it wasnt arthur who said that, i think arthur must have believed it, because hes just been stalwart in his help, his encouragement, his humor, helping me to find things i didnt know i was looking for. And i probably could have written the book without arthur, but it would not have been nearly as good a book, and it might have taken me years longer. So thank you, arthur. Arthur never blushes, so i dont have to worry about that. So im in this funny position of i dont know how many people in the world know more about barnum than i do at this point. Maybe a lot. But i do know for sure that three people who know a lot more aboutno barnum than i do are hee inin this audience, so its mily intimidating to be standing before you. 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. Hes just a wonderful character to write a book about, and i mean character in the sense of, you know, a character in a novel, say. A person of many parts, a person who, lets say, had his dark side as well as his bright side, someone who just never failed to engage me intellectually, emotionally. I was just drawn to his wit, to his verbal skill. He just had remarkable skills as a speaker and as a writer. Who knows where they came from. I mean, if you want evidence that certain gifts are innate, i dont think these were learned skills particularly, or they may have been selftaught, but he just had some, something in that mode that was unusual. This is partly to say for now that, you know, barnum was a wonderful character. Was henu a wonderful man . This is something well get to infu a few minutes. And its part of what, that question is part of what made working on this book so interesting. Most of you know, i think a lot of you who are from around here and know the barnum museum, you know, know the brief outline of barnums life. I mean, you probably know that he was born 22. 3 miles from here, at least according to google this morning [laughter] in the village of bethel. And that he early on buzzied himself busies himself with a lot of sort of smaller and then larger entrepreneurial activities. I thought id just read just a very, one paragraph from the book where i kind of talk about, a little bit about the arc of his career. He is known today primarily for his connection to thehe circus, but that came only in the last quarter of his life. His principal occupation before that, occupations were running the American Museum and being the impresario behind the witty and talented or dwarf tom thumb, the an yellic swedish soprano jenny lend and dozens of other acts and traveling shows. Less well known today is that he was also a best selling author, an inspiration aleckturer on temperance and success in business and in life. A real estate developer, a builder, a banker, a state legislator, the mayor of the city of bridgeport, near or in which he lived for most of his adult life. He was even a candidate for congress, losing a bare knuckle contest to a cousin also named barnum. In all of these endeavors, he was a promoter and selfpromoter without peer. A relentless advertiser and an unfailingly imaginative con concocter of events to draw the interest, often the feverish interest, of potential patrons. Im goingng to read one other jt paragraph in a preliminary way just to sort of get you situated with barnum. Some of the things that come later. Central to barnums philosophy and success was the relationship to his audience that he developed during his decades as a showman. That relationship centered on the single word most associated with barnum in his lifetime, humbug. As he himself wrote in his 1865 book the humbugs of the world, weber thes definition is websters definition is to deceive, to impose upon. Definitions today include the words hoax, fraud, imposter, nonsense, trick. Barnums book is a survey of such practices intended, he said, to save the rising generation from being bamboozled by the unscrupulous whether in religion, business, politics, medicine or science. But for barnum not all forms of humbug were hurtful. Sometimes humbugerry could be harmless, evenn joyous. He claimed that for him the generally accepted definition of humbug focused on this benign variety, what he dined as putting on glittering appearances, novel expedience by which to suddenly arrest public attention and attract the public eye and ear. In other words, what he did. The crux of the matter was that a person who attracted patrons in this wayay but then foolishly failed tosh give them a full equivalent for their money would not get a Second Chance from customerss who would properly denounce him as a swindler, a cheat and an imposter. I think this is really, this whole idea of humbug and his idea of humbug is one of the things that distinguishes him from his h reputation as you gin to look at him as you begin to look at him in more depth. And im going to get to that in a second, but i wanted to tell you that since the book has been published, a few surprising things this is my third book a few things have happened that have not happened to me before and probably wont again. And in addition to having you all here and cspan here, i was astonished to see that my publisher madeub an incredibly beautiful book. [laughter] i can say this because i had nothing to dono with the physicl nature of the book. But it has, i think, a wonderful cover. It has wonderful, a wonderful inside design, and it im not seeming to be selling here, forgive me, but it has a 16page color insert which adrian and Elizabeth Van tool from down the road helped me postulate. It also has something called deckinged edges. I dont know if you know what those are, but often a book is cut straight on the edge, and if its cut rough on the edge, its called decled edges. And to me, its something very elegant and wonderful. And i told my editor early on i really want a book with deckled edges. [laughter] and he said, oh, wee can do tha. I didnt really believe him. I thought, no, thatll never until i opened the box and saw they were there, i didnt think it would happen. But i told this to my wife, whos sitting right here, martha, and i said, yeah, i told him ive always wanted deckled edges, and she said, well, ive never even heard that word in our 455 years of major. And so my of marriage. And so my response to that is every marriage thats successful must have its secrets [laughter] and my secret was deckled edges. [laughter] another wonderful thing that happened that ill just mention briefly, it happened right here in the spot in which cbs news, in its wisdom, decided to do a piece about barnum, about the book barnum, about barnum museum, kathy, me. And so i had this wonderful wexperience of, that as a small editor of a small magazine and somebody who spends a rot a lot of time in his study at home, i dont spend a lot of time in front of national tv cameras. So that was something else. And then the third thing is the new yorker, of all places, in its wisdom did a major piece on the book. They gave four pages by one of its most prominent writers, elizabeth kolbert, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book the sixth extinction. And this was utterly unexpected, most of all by my publisher. And one of my friends now refers to me as four pages, because i got four pages in the new yorker. [laughter] so naturally, this was deeply exciting and something that made me very happy. Although i couldnt help noticing as an editor and a writer and someone who tries to be, you know, to Pay Attention to the p nuances of language tht she seemed to be implying that i had spent six years writing a book about barnum in the era of trump and other things going on in our, in the present day. Had not made the connection, any connections at all between them that i am somehow living in this complete bubble. So this raised a further puzzle about the review which is how did this rather dim witted person, meaning me, manage to write a book that was worth didd i mention four pages . In the new yorker. [laughter] and also four pages, i should say, with very little attribution to my book. So anyway, theres that. And then some of that can be forgiven, but i felt there was a moment in her review where he really tried to sort of twist the knife, that she took her language and honed it to a fine point. In fact, theres a sentence right in the middle of the evreview thats only three word, and the words are wilson admires barnum. This was meant, this was meant as a great, a great critique, i think. Finish it didnt wound me as much as he might have thought it would because i do admire barnum. I think theres so much to admire about him. But you know, as i said earlier, one of the things that made him interesting for me to write about him was that, you know, he was not continuously admirable so that as i went through his life, i found myself constantly looking at things in the context of hisf own time, you know, is this something he did, is this a display he was able to bring himself to make because this was generally accepted at the time . But i also tried to, tried to look at him as a man too, as a human being and say, well, sure qualities that are beyond the pale, i dont in whatever century or millenium you live in. And that, to me, gave me the chance to be kind of continuously engaged intellectually. One thingng i tried not to do ws to work from the assumption that we have achievedded perfection in a given moment, which i think is an idea, the idea of presentism thats out there very much in the culture now, that its very easy to dismiss people who are not, who dont represent everything that we in our great wisdom have achieved. I mean, one could easily poke holes into this notion of presentism. But anyway, that was something i didnt do. Some of the things i did admire about barnum, his eagerness to make other people happy, his commitment to larger ideas, temperance, eventually to abolition, his commitment to make public entertainment safe for families and children. Arthur has written a lot about that in a definitive way. That the stage in the early years of barnums involvement with it, he when he started the American Museum on lower broadway, it had essentially a theater. He called it a lecture room because the reputation of the theater was so low that he didnt want to call it that. And as i learned from arthur and others, theaters in those days were often places where prostitutes worked the balconies. Even in the, you know, the ec pepsive seats expensive seats there was drunkenness, rowdiness. So one of the things that barnum and others did in that time period was to really commit themselves to moral entertainment but also to, you know, lack of drunkenness, to creating an atmosphere where families could airily could safely come. I also, i mean, as is implied by, you know, if being the mayor of bridgeport and many other things he did, he was truly civicminded. He was actually a philanthropist. There are certain people in life today that claim to philanthropy that it turns out dont actually give money. His philosophy early on was one that he called profitable philanthropy. If nothing else, it shows you his mastery of language to have come up with the phrase profitable philanthropy. And, you know, what he meant by that in part was if you go down the road here and look at east side park, that was a large part, a large chunk of property that barnum and others but largely barnum, gave to the city to create that park. But he kept out a chunk of it for himself. So he had a, he built beautiful houses in the middle of a nice park with a great view. Thatss profitable philanthrop. He helped develop east bridgeport, and they had a very generous scheme for developing housing across the river. They held out every other hot for themselves lot for themselves. Their own holdings create some value as well. But profitable philanthropy turned into real philanthropy later in his life, and he gave a great deal of money to his church, the local hospital in bridgeport, to tufts, now tufts university, other universities. And i think the thing that sort of sold me on barnum ill get to the [inaudible] of his personality in a minute, was this phenomenon of him becoming a better person throughout life. As ive got to know him better and better, i was just so impressed with the idea that here was a man who had a lot of success early in life. And i think how many people do you know who are very successful early in life are not convinced that its because of their perfection as a human being, that somehow they did everything right and so good things happen to them. Barnum had, you know, had success and yet throughout his life he evolved. His beliefs on race evolved. His beliefs on philanthropy if evolved. And that quality of kind of renewing himself into becoming a better person was another thing that really made me admire him. I mean, the racism early on is despicable. You can justify it to some degree by the racism of the times, but its also, there are also people who are ab lissists abolitionists from the day, you know, the declaration of independence came out. There are many people who were not racists, and so its not something that you can dismiss. He did become an abolitionist himself. He did run for the Connecticut Legislature after the war saying that one reason he ran was that so he could be, so he could vote