8 JULY 20-26, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | Mountain News, from a branch library, citing his keen support for the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, a U.S. Army attack on a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment that killed more than 200 people, mostly women and children. That library is now the John “Thunderbird Man” Emhoolah Jr. branch, in honor of an Indigenous activist and de- scendant of Sand Creek survivors. This time around, DPL is proceeding more tentatively than it did in deposing Byers. It is surveying area residents for opinions on the proposed name change; if not enough people feel strongly about Barnum, the name may not be changed at all. “We’re thinking about this, not as erasing history, but reframing history,” says Erika Martinez, DPL’s director of communications and community engage- ment. “We don’t have to change every name, but we can at least inform the community of the history and give them the opportunity to provide feedback.” Chala Mohr, vice president of the Community Coalition for Barnum, says there was “mixed feedback” at the neighborhood group’s recent meeting on the proposed name change. “There’s defi nitely not a consensus or a po- sition that we’ve taken,” she says. Councilmember Torres says a few constituents have told her that the library will always be “Barnum” to them. “For some of them, it’s the only name they’ve known,” she notes. “The library’s research uncovered stuff I didn’t know. I will go the direction of the community, but personally, I feel we could look at some really wonderful people and legacies for the name of this facility.” Martinez expects that the survey results will be compiled in the next week or two. If a de- cision is made to proceed with the name change, she adds, it could be implemented while the branch is closed for renovation later this year. But the library isn’t the only institution bearing the Barnum name; there’s also a park, a recreation center, an elemen- tary school, and several other going concerns that happen to be named after the neighbor- hood in which they’re located. That name may resonate with members of the com- munity for reasons that have nothing to do with the legacy of Phineas Taylor Barnum, a legacy that is about as easy to grasp as an elephant pushing a train up Boreas Pass. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, P.T. Barnum was arguably the most famous person on the planet. His tours of Europe with attractions in tow, his traveling circus shows, his sensational museum in the heart of New York City, his brazen publicity stunts and best-selling, periodically updated au- tobiography all helped to catapult him to international celebrity. According to Robert Wilson’s Barnum, a 2019 warts-and-all study of the showman, when former President Ulysses S. Grant returned to America after two years on a world tour, Barnum praised him as “the best-known American living.” Grant disagreed. “You beat me sky-high,” he said. “Wherever I went…the constant inquiry was, ‘Do you know Barnum?’” Do we know Barnum? The popular image of the man is soaked in hokum and tall tales, some of them circulated by Barnum himself in his relentless quest to bamboozle the public and the press. Hollywood has helped perpetuate the myth, embracing and embel- lishing it — most recently, in the version of Barnum played by Hugh Jackman in the 2017 movie musical The Greatest Showman, a largely fi ctitious account of P.T.’s struggles, romances and triumphs. For the record, there’s no evidence that Barnum ever uttered the phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute,” the quote most often attributed to him (though he probably would have seconded the sentiment). He didn’t launch his renowned circus until he was in his sixties. He doesn’t seem to have had a fl ing with Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. The historical Barnum is a more complex and problematic fi gure than the legend. He could be courageous and inspiring, hypocriti- cal and devious. He was a master of hype and a pioneer of mass entertainment, and his behav- ior could be crudely exploitive and appalling. But he was also, at various times, a crusading newspaper editor, a state legislator, the mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and a passionate advocate of abolition and the temperance movement — details that are mostly miss- ing from the Denver Public Library’s online summary of Barnum’s “complicated past.” Kathy Maher, executive director of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, says that her organization welcomes public discussion of Barnum’s legacy. His achievements are more extensive than most people realize, she adds, from introducing working-class American audiences to opera and ballet to donating thousands to improving animal welfare, long before the cause became fashionable. “Barnum had his critics,” Maher says, “but he had a lot more people who sup- ported him, from all levels of society. You have to look at his life through the lens of what the world was like almost 200 years ago. We’re not trying to sanitize him, but he came through some tough times and left the world a better place.” Born in Bethel, Connecticut, in 1810, Bar- num grew up in a Yankee family of modest means. By the age of twelve, he was peddling lottery tickets and running his own candy concession at a family general store. In his early twenties he started a newspaper, the Herald of Freedom, and was promptly sued for libel three times. But it was another venture from his money-hungry youth that has triggered the most red fl ags among those seeking to rename the Ross-Barnum library. In 1835, Barnum learned of an investment opportunity: An aged, enslaved Black woman named Joice Heth was being exhibited in country inns, city dance halls and other venues as “one of the greatest natural curi- osities ever witnessed.” Heth’s claim to fame was twofold: She was said to be 161 years old, and to have been George Washington’s nursemaid. Barnum went to Philadelphia to catch Heth’s performance. He saw a blind, toothless, emaciated and partially paralyzed woman who sang hymns and spoke fondly of “dear little George.” Convinced that he could do a better job of promoting Heth than her current handler, Barnum scrounged and borrowed a thousand dollars to obtain the right to exhibit her for one year. Technically, he wasn’t buying a slave, but he was renting her. Barnum and his star attraction embarked on a demanding tour of cities in both free and slave states. Public outcry over the shameful display of an elderly woman greeted them on occasion, but the crowds kept coming. When interest slumped, Barnum revived it by planting stories that hinted Heth wasn’t a real person but an automaton, constructed of whalebone, rubber and springs. In six months, Barnum made an estimated $10,000 from the enterprise and realized that he had “at last found my true vocation.” Then Heth fell ill and died at Barnum’s brother’s house in Bethel. Her service to Barnum was not yet concluded, though. The great showman announced that there would be an autopsy to resolve the public’s curiosity about Heth’s true age. According to some accounts, Barnum rented a New York theater for the event and sold tickets, at fi fty cents each, to 1,500 ghoulish gawk- ers; Maher says that isn’t true. Reporters, medical students and clergy were invited to attend, but Barnum didn’t sell tickets to the public. “That’s where fact and fi ction get blurred,” Maher says. “There’s a lot of that with Barnum.” Barnum glosses over this sordid business in his autobiography. He opines that Heth’s true age will remain a mystery (the doctor who conducted the post-mortem estimated that she was around eighty). He insists the arrangement he negotiated to take over the exhibiting of Heth as the world’s oldest hu- man was “a scheme in no sense of my own devising.” Barnum biographer Wilson views the episode as possibly the most troubling in Barnum’s long career: “He would never be able to escape the cost to his reputation, despite later efforts to improve himself and his approach.” Barnum moved on to other traveling exhib- its, including jugglers, dancers, contortionists and various circus performers. In 1841, he ac- quired a run-down museum in lower Manhat- tan and set about transforming it into the city’s most lucrative tourist attraction, stocking the galleries with exhibits that ranged from the scientifi c and educational to the ludicrous, including a monkey torso affi xed to a fi shtail and passed off as a mermaid. Before long, Bar- num’s American Museum was displaying live exotic animals and human oddi- ties, too — attractions that would excite the public imagination and bring in the crowds. Among Barnum’s dis- coveries were Charles Stratton, better known as General Tom Thumb, a two-foot-tall child who had basically stopped growing when he was six months old; eight-foot “gi- antess” Anna Swan; and William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic Black man, billed as Zip the Pinhead. He even lured Eng and Chan Bunker, famous conjoined Siamese-American twins, out of retirement. Barnum’s detractors contend that his marketing of these “curiosities” demeaned people with disabilities and traffi cked in racist stereotypes, portraying Indigenous people as bloodthirsty savages and Johnson as some kind of evolutionary mistake. Yet it would be misleading to characterize Barnum’s treatment of his human attractions as mere exploitation or “othering.” Under Barnum’s tutelage, Stratton demonstrated great skill as an actor, eventually garnering notices that focused on his talent rather than his height. He went on to manage his own career and became quite wealthy, even bail- ing Barnum out after one of the showman’s fi nancial disasters. Johnson had a successful career in show business that spanned sixty years. Barnum may have pandered to the public’s morbid curiosity, but he also gave his stars economic opportunities in a world where most doors were closed to them. In his own bombastic way, Barnum tried to make amends for exhibiting Heth, too. He became an ardent Republican and pushed as a state lawmaker for Black enfranchisement in Connecticut. His outspokenness may Sucker Bet continued from page 7 Promoter P.T. Barnum bought property west of Denver that was incorporated as the town of Barnum in 1887; it was soon annexed by Denver. LIBRARY OF CONCRESS DENVER PUBLIC LIBRARY
