There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute

ON JANUARY 17, 1882, a shocking rumor began to circulate around the city of London, England.

London’s Regent Park Zoo, it was said, had sold Jumbo, England’s favorite elephant, to a circus in America.

When the park’s Zoological Society admitted that the rumor was true, the British public was outraged. The enormous African elephant, at 3.6 meters (12 feet) tall the biggest in the world, had been a fixture at the zoo for more than 20 years. Couples had been photographed beside him for their weddings, and later on with their new babies. Thousands of children had ridden and “grown up” with Jumbo. “Jumbo Sale Provokes Shock, Indignation,” the Daily Telegraph announced. The zoo was deluged with angry letters and telegrams.

The man to whom Jumbo had been sold—for the astonishing sum of 20,000 pounds (about $50,000)—was the notorious Phineas Taylor Barnum, known in the United States as “The Prince of Humbug.” Barnum was the owner of P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, a huge circus that toured North America year-round in 48 extra-large railcars. Barnum’s plan was to have Jumbo transported to New York by ship. His agent, “Elephant Bill” Newman, had instructions to load Jumbo into a huge wagon-crate and haul him down to the docks for transfer into the waiting freighter, Assyrian Monarch.

But Jumbo seemed to have other ideas. Confronted with his wagon-crate, he would not get in. And when Newman tried to force him in by poking him with a cattle prod, he was so insulted he simply lay down and refused to get up.

No amount of yanking and yelling could change his mind. Newman even tried hauling him up by hitching him to another elephant. It was no use. Jumbo lay stubbornly on his side on the pavement, his massive legs stretched away from his body and his trunk flopping idly about his head.

“Jumbo Doesn’t Want to Leave Us!” declared the Daily Telegraph. “Jumbo Loyal to the End,” announced the Sunday Times.

At the news, Londoners swarmed down to Regent Park to witness this amazing act of loyalty. They brought Jumbo peanuts, flowers, and casseroles. A bride brought him a piece of her wedding cake. Someone started a Jumbo Retention Fund, and thousands of children contributed their pennies to buy Jumbo back. The issue was raised and discussed in the British Parliament. Even the queen was said to have made “enquiries.”

Alarmed, Elephant Bill Newman telegraphed his boss in New York. PUBLIC OUTCRY ABOUT JUMBO, STOP. UNSURE WHAT TO DO, STOP. AFRAID THIS MAY DELAY OR BLOCK JUMBO SHIPMENT, STOP. PLEASE ADVISE, STOP.

To Newman’s surprise, P.T. Barnum replied: NOT WORRIED, STOP. LET HIM LIE THERE FOR A WEEK IF HE WANTS TO, STOP. BEST ADVERTISING IN THE WORLD, STOP. JUST MAKE SURE HE’S WELL FED AND WATERED, STOP.

Newman shouldn’t have been surprised, because this was the kind of approach that had already made Barnum famous (and infamous) all over the United States. “A problem is just another word for an opportunity!” he was fond of saying. Another one of his favorite sayings was: “All advertising is good advertising!”

To Barnum, any uproar was a good uproar, and any uproar at all was worth making bigger. So the famous scam artist devised a clever plan. He secretly sent money to London with instructions to start up a Rescue Jumbo crusade. This group—not realizing they were being financed by the very person they were opposing—used the money to print flyers, take out newspaper advertisements (SAVE OUR JUMBO!), and stage protest rallies (NO, NO, JUMBO WON’T GO!!). The rallies got lots of newspaper coverage.

Very good.

Then Barnum paid for a similar crusade in New York City. This group also printed flyers, took out newspaper advertisements (JUMBO’S OURS NOW—GIVE HIM UP!), and staged protest rallies (WE WANT JUMBO! WE WANT JUMBO!). These rallies also got lots of newspaper coverage.

Even better.

And once the two organizations became aware of each other, things really heated up. More statements to the press. More letters to the editor. Protest marches. Tremendous uproar!

Beautiful.

But Barnum was only getting started. He now proceeded to fan the flames by paying several British newspaper columnists to urge the public to write protest letters. Soon such letters were pouring into the Office of the British Prime Minister, the Queen’s Office at Buckingham Palace, the editorial offices of London’s newspapers, and Regent Park’s Zoological Society. The Zoological Society received so many, it had to hire extra clerks to answer them all.

The uproar was reaching maximum noise and heat.

When he’d fanned the flames about as high as he thought he could, Barnum began selling Jumbo souvenirs—Jumbo hats, Jumbo neckties, Jumbo frameable prints, Jumbo earrings, bracelets, fans, and trading cards (no T-shirts, because nobody wore T-shirts in those days). There were by now so many upset people coming down to the zoo to visit Jumbo for the last time that they became easy marks for Barnum’s aggressive salesmen. The profits started rolling in.

When Jumbo finally decided to get up—almost two weeks later—some columnists wondered whether the event had been rigged, or at least stretched out, by Barnum himself. It probably was. The record isn’t entirely clear, but one thing was certain—the journalists were beginning to understand how Barnum operated his scams.

As Jumbo’s wagon-crate rolled through London’s streets on its way to the docks, tens of thousands of British citizens lined the route to wave goodbye. Of course, since Barnum had organized this event, Jumbo’s wagon-crate was being hauled by a dozen splendidly plumed and decorated horses, with a brass band following behind—and since Barnum’s salesmen were selling souvenirs all along the way, Jumbo’s caravan took an extra-long route to get to the docks.

But even after Jumbo was safely housed in the Assyrian Monarch’s forward hold, Barnum didn’t let up. Every day, an update on Jumbo’s health and activities was telegraphed to newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. These updates were reported with great fanfare and in great detail by British and American reporters on Barnum’s payroll. And every day, copies of these updates were stuffed into rubber bags, which were inflated and thrown over the ship’s side. Barnum announced that anyone finding one of these messages would win an entire day with Jumbo.

It’s not clear from the available records whether any people ever claimed this prize, but if they did, they may not have enjoyed it much. The truth about Jumbo was that, contrary to the lovely picture painted by Barnum’s splashy advertisements all over the United States (Jumbo—The New Darling of the American People!), Jumbo was actually an extremely cranky, smelly, badly behaved animal. That’s what many African elephants became after maturity, and it had been the main reason the Regent Park Zoo had sold him. At Regent Park he had once almost destroyed his heavily reinforced house, and twice ripped his iron chains right out of their cement footings. He had injured several of the zoo’s cleaning staff, and regularly trashed his feeding bin and drinking buckets.

To calm him down, his British handlers had come up with the idea of feeding him whisky—and it had worked. That was the good news. The bad news was that over the past two years, Jumbo had become a drunk. It now took several bottles of whisky a day to keep him quiet—bottles which his handlers poured, undiluted, straight into his mouth! If whisky was unavailable, Jumbo had no objection to beer—or port wine. In fact, just about any alcoholic drink was fine with him. Unfortunately, all this drinking made him bloated, which meant he passed a great deal of gas. Bill Newman once admitted to a newsman that Jumbo farted “like a hero” and advised the man to stay a good distance upwind of him at all times.

After 13 days at sea—a time Barnum used to the fullest to stoke Jumbo-mania in the United States—the Assyrian Monarch arrived in New York on April 8, 1882. A huge crowd had already been waiting patiently for almost a day, entertained by Barnum’s clowns and encouraged by Barnum’s agents to buy more Jumbo souvenirs. When 16 horses couldn’t drag Jumbo’s wagon-crate up the ship’s ramp, hundreds of men from the crowd joined in, and then the wagon moved slowly up Broadway, all the way to Madison Square Garden where the rest of Barnum’s circus had been playing all month.

During the next four weeks, over half a million circus patrons pushed and shoved their way into the Garden to ooh and ahh over “Jumbo—The Greatest Elephant in the World!” The box office earnings covered Jumbo’s entire purchase and transportion costs.

Over the next four years, and under Barnum’s careful guidance—not to mention his massive, ongoing advertising campaign—Jumbo did indeed become “America’s Darling.” He became the main draw for The Greatest Show on Earth, helping to pull in over 12 million paying customers from all over the United States. He was surrounded by so much hype that no one seemed to notice that he was really just a very ordinary African elephant, who didn’t even perform tricks like the other elephants in the circus. (African elephants were considered unteachable.) He just stood there, or walked in slow circles, while the band blared and the over-excited ringmaster bellowed out his star elephant’s many supposed abilities and virtues.

Jumbo died late one night in 1885, when he refused to budge off a railroad track running next to the one on which his circus car was parked. He’d been having an off day and his handlers had fed him a lot of whisky. He was hit and killed by a passing freight train.

But that didn’t mean he stopped making money for P.T. Barnum. The irrepressible showman immediately ordered a crew of taxidermists to take Jumbo’s wrinkly hide, stretch it as much as they could, and stuff and mount it. The taxidermists did a splendid job, and for the next several seasons a truly gigantic version of Jumbo kept touring with the circus, amazing American children and fattening Barnum’s bank account. Meanwhile Barnum published The Life, History and Death of Jumbo—a children’s biography of Jumbo so full of inventions, exaggerations, and outright lies that it might as well have been called pure fiction. It was—of course—a bestseller for years.

Although the Jumbo public relations scam was probably Barnum’s most famous, it certainly wasn’t his first. By the time he bought Jumbo, Barnum had been in the entertainment business for almost 50 years and had established a well-deserved reputation as a master of flare and humbug—two elements that often overlapped.

On the flare side, his crowning glory became P.T. Barnum’s Hippodrome, a spectacular $30 million amphitheater that he built in 1874. It could seat over 15,000 spectators and featured such extravagant pageants as The Sacking and Burning of Rome, a re-enactment of a true historic event that happened in 410 AD. It featured hundreds of actors dressed as Visigoths invading the ancient city of Rome, on foot and on horseback, killing and chopping up hundreds of Roman citizens and setting their entire city on fire. The realistic sets, and the smoke, flames, shrieks, and blood were so overwhelming that hundreds of spectators fled out of the hippodrome in terror.

It was the cost, and the entertainment value, of such expensive spectacles that allowed Barnum to claim that his “humbugs”—his scams—were justified. One of his earliest—the one that launched his entertainment career in 1835—was a scam involving a black slave woman named Joice Heth.

This was a time in American history when slavery was still legal, and Barnum purchased a very old slave woman whose owner claimed she had been George Washington’s nurse.

To make sense of this scam, it’s important to remember that George Washington was America’s most idolized historical figure. He was known as the Father of America, and had been its first president. To meet a woman who had actually nurtured and raised “little Georgie,” and who could tell first-hand anecdotes about his early life, would have been an experience that many Americans would have been willing to pay good money for.

The only problem was that George Washington had been born in 1732—and Joice was said to have been born in 1674. That would have made her a whopping 161 years old!

As astonishing as it seems today, people a century ago didn’t think that was totally unbelievable. It seemed a stretch, certainly, but Joice Heth really did look awfully old. Her limbs were withered, and she was blind, toothless, and weighed about 23 kilograms (50 pounds). But she was also lively, talkative, and loved to sing old hymns. Barnum decided to take the chance.

He started by doing what he later became famous for—flooding New York with advertisements and handbills: FOR ONE DAY ONLY!! JOICE HETH—GEORGE WASHINGTON’S NANNY! LAST OPPORTUNITY!! DON’T MISS IT!

He then went on to invent and exaggerate outrageously. Suddenly Joice Heth was the “mother of 15 children,” the youngest of whom had died several years earlier at the age of 116! The most “eminent and intelligent” physicians had examined her and pronounced her to be the age she claimed (a lie). Furthermore, the proceeds of this exhibition would be used to “buy the freedom of her five great-grandchildren” (a total lie). But tens of thousands of gullible New Yorkers took the bait.

Joice Heth, despite all her limitations, turned out to be quite a hit. She seemed to love performing (it certainly beat scrubbing floors!). She was supposed to answer questions from the audience, but mostly she just ignored them and entertained herself, telling jokes and laughing uproariously, singing hymns, and prattling on about things nobody could really understand (remember that she had no teeth).

When the crowds eventually began to thin out, Barnum doubled his ticket prices and paid reporters to announce that demand for tickets for the Joice Heth exhibition was now so high that a premium had been placed on them. That increased the size of the audience for a while longer.

Once that approach had worn out, Barnum came up with a real whopper. He began sending anonymous letters to New York’s newspapers accusing himself of being a fraud! His letters made the astonishing claim that Joice Heth wasn’t a live woman at all, but an automaton, a robot, made up of “whalebone, rubber and lots of springs ingeniously put together, made to move at the slightest touch of the operator!”

It sounds ridiculous, but Barnum was just making clever use of a recent event that had made newspaper headlines all over the city. A showman exhibiting a chess-playing robot (if you could beat him at the game you got your money back) had recently been exposed as a fraud when his “robot” turned out to have a dwarf hidden inside it. Now people who had seen the Joice Heth presentation began to wonder—had they missed something? Had the woman on the stage perhaps been a robot with a dwarf inside her, too?

If so, this was one amazingly convincing robot.

Thousands came back and paid another entry fee to check her out more closely.

And for Barnum, this meant more money in the bank.

Joice Heth eventually died peacefully in her sleep, about a year later. But just before giving her a very respectable burial in New York’s Bethel Cemetery, Barnum allowed the famous New York surgeon Dr. David L. Rogers to do an autopsy to prove that Joice Heth really had been 161 years old. The operation was attended by a very large crowd of doctors, medical students, clergymen, newspaper reporters, and undertakers—all of whom had to pay a hefty entrance fee for the privilege. Even in death Joice Heth was still making money for P.T. Barnum!

Unfortunately the autopsy didn’t turn out the way Barnum had planned. (Had he honestly thought it would??) Dr. Rogers announced that “there had to be some mistake” because this woman was only about 70 to 80 years old. Barnum protested loudly, but the damage was done. For the next several years, Barnum had to keep his name off the flyers and advertisements for various projects he undertook.

But that certainly didn’t slow him down. Take the Grand Hoboken Buffalo Hunt, which Barnum staged in New Jersey on August 31, 1843. He’d come across a notice announcing the sale of a herd of buffalo for a very cheap price. On inspection, he could see why. The animals were scrawny, mangy, and starving—but they gave Barnum an idea. He bought the herd and then placed announcements in all the New York papers that a grand, historical buffalo hunt would be staged in Hoboken, New Jersey, just a short ferry ride from New York City. The hunt would be conducted by a party of genuine warrior Indians, who would risk life and limb to chase and kill these most fearsome beasts in North America. Best of all, this event would be entirely free of charge to the public.

This offer amazed the 25,000 spectators who poured across the Hudson River to take in the free event—until they saw the buffalo involved. The sorry critters were so tame and confused that even the “warrior Indians” couldn’t seem to budge them, no matter how hard they whooped and leaped about. The crowd snickered and jeered—then finally gave up and went home, disappointed. Only Barnum ended up happy—he’d made a deal with the people who ran the ferries and the concession stands for a 50 percent share of their profits. The day had netted him a cool $30,000—and he’d been able to earn it without further risk to his reputation!

In 1869, some workmen near Cardiff, New York dug up what seemed to be a petrified giant. The body was over 3 meters (10 feet) tall and weighed 1250 kilograms (one and one-third tons). The man on whose farm the body was found—a William Newell—teamed up with his cousin George Hull to exhibit this startling discovery to the public. At first Hull charged every spectator 5 cents, but as more and more spectators arrived, he raised his price to 50 cents, then one dollar. The people just kept coming. That’s when P.T. Barnum heard about it.

It didn’t matter to Barnum that scientists who’d inspected the giant were already calling it a fake—nothing more than a statue hacked out of a big block of gypsum. Every cell in his showman’s body told him this could be a huge money-maker. So he offered Newell and Hull the astonishing sum of $100,000 to rent—merely rent!—their giant for three months.

Hull and Newell refused.

Barnum doubled his offer. Hull and Newell still refused.

There was no way Barnum was going to take no for an answer. It simply wasn’t his style. So he hired a New York sculptor to make him an exact replica of the Cardiff Giant. Then he began exhibiting the statue in his own museum in New York City.

When Newell and Hull finally ran out of audience in Cardiff, they decided to take their giant on a North American tour. First stop was New York—and that’s when they discovered that their giant had already preceded them.

They promptly took Barnum to court.

For a while it looked as if this time Barnum wasn’t going to get away with it. This time he’d gone too far. The Prince of Humbug was being sued for every penny he owned.

But then, just as the trial began, investigators discovered that George Hull had purchased a big block of gypsum in Iowa several years earlier. Then they found a stonecutter in Chicago who confessed to having fabricated Hull’s “giant.” Hull, the judge decided, was a scammer himself.

This discovery allowed Barnum to claim that all he’d done, Your Honor, was exhibit a hoax of a hoax!

Case dismissed.

To Hull’s chagrin, Barnum kept right on exhibiting his “authentic fake” Cardiff Giant in his museum, and people kept right on paying him to see it, for years, even though everyone knew that it wasn’t real.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” Hull said disgustedly when told of Barnum’s success.

It was a statement that could have been P.T. Barnum’s life motto. In fact, over the years, people began crediting Barnum for having said it.

Poor George Hull. It was the most memorable thing he ever said—and in the end, P.T. Barnum robbed him of that, too.