21 March, 2002: The Arts of Deception
P.T. Barnum is probably best known today for being one of the founders of the Barnum & Bailey Circus and the man to whom the quote "There's a sucker born every minute" is attributed. But Barnum was a hugely popular and successful showman who made money off a vast spectrum of exhibits. James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum contends that as mass entertainment was beginning to develop in the nineteenth century, Barnum (always with a sense for what the public wanted) realized that ambiguity was something that could be sold.
The Arts of Deception looks at two exhibits by Barnum (the Fiji Mermaid and "What Is It?"), the chess-playing Turk, stage magic, and trompe l'oeil art as examples of wildly successful popular entertainment in which audiences were called upon to make up their own minds about the truth and falsehood of what they saw. Barnum, Johann Maelzel (the Turk's owner), and the others who stood to profit from the arts of deception saw that by intentionally creating confusion, debate, and even scandal around their exhibitions, they could draw a larger paying crowd, all agog to figure out the real story behind what they saw.
Cook's prose is dry and endnote-heavy, which is to be expected; this is, after all, a serious academic work. But I found it easy reading and terrifically fun. I love reading about con artists; even if stage magic and paintings designed to fool exhibition-goers aren't con games, the appeal is much the same. (And it was probably that appeal that set so many people walking through a St. Louis exhibition to arguing about whether they were seeing a door with hunting gear hanging from it or only a still life of same.) Promoters, particularly the masterful Barnum, would plant leads in obliging local papers specifically to whip up discussion of whether their marvels were real or fake and, if fake, how the deception was carried of.
And from within this narrow focus, there's much to be said about American culture, from Barnum's toying with racial stereotypes held by various groups of white Americans ("What Is It?", exhibited as some sort of man-savage, was in fact a microcephalic black man) to the local propagandizing that Maetzel used to help stir public fascination his Turk (which had a full-sized chess master within, regardless of what Poe thought) to the winking assistance newspapers gave the promoters to the horrific North and South culture clash when Barnum's Feejee Mermaid was exhibited in Charleston. (The gentlemen of South Carolina took truth a bit less playfully than those in New York; Barnum's partner was challenged to a duel and run out of town.)
For what it's worth, Barnum didn't say that there was a sucker born every minute. The person who said that was one of Barnum's numerous rivals, David Hannum, owner of the Cardiff Giant. In an inicident which doesn't make it into Cook's book, but certainly could have, Barnum's bid to purchase the Giant failed, so he simply had some sculptors make one for him. He then exhibited that as the original and let it be known that Hannum's was a fake. Hannum promptly sued, only to have his case tossed out when the original Cardiff Giant was itself revealed to be a fake; Barnum had triumphed over yet another adversary and probably laughed about it all the way to the bank. Cook shows that this story is not as unusual as one might have thought; for over a hundred and fifty years, American popular entertainment has relied on a sucker being born every minute -- and two to fleece him.