Pop Culture Text - St. Dominic High School

38 With Amusement for Allparty expected to be cheated. . . .” Barnum implicitly nudged viewers in therib and gave a wink; participants agreed to join the game, just as they haddone when they were purchasing goods from the general stores at which hehad worked: “Our cottons were sold for wool, our wool and cotton for silkand linen; in fact nearly everything was different from what it was represented.”Thus, later in his museum, the ballyhooed “Man-Eating Chicken”turned out to be a “man eating chicken,” and “the great model of niagarafalls, with real water!” (an exhibit that city officials initiallyfeared would demand a huge amount of water) was, in fact, only eighteeninches high and used a barrel of water per month. 76Such artful deception meshed well with the antebellum era’s celebrationof democracy—evident, for instance, in the leveling rhetoric ofPresident Andrew Jackson, whom Barnum warmly endorsed. John QuincyAdams could write, but Jackson could fight, as one poet observed in 1828.Similarly, the art of deception was open to common scrutiny, regardless ofwealth, privilege, or education. Any individual could try to figure out thepuzzle, solve the mystery, discover the hoax. In that spirit, at a time whenscience and technology were opening vast areas for inquiry, Barnum wasurging rank-and-file citizens to join the debate. A prime example was hisinfamous “Feejee Mermaid,” a manufactured curiosity with a monkey’shead attached to a fish’s body whose exhibition virtually tripled the museum’sreceipts in just four weeks. Barnum publicized it as the discovery ofLondon’s Dr. J. Griffin (actually Levi Lyman, Barnum’s advance man duringthe Heth exhibit). Spectators could reach their own conclusions aboutthe mermaid’s authenticity. The opinions of common citizens in effectcounted as heavily as did those of famous scientists, who, according toBarnum, were themselves deeply divided over whether the exhibit was afake. To entice people to view his “critter,” he contemplated an advertisementthat asked: “Who is to decide when the doctors disagree?” Barnum’smuseum thus encouraged a kind of cultural democracy; truth rested withthe majority. 77Even low-life Bowery residents were welcome at the museum and couldjoin the debates over whether exhibits were phony or genuine. Upper-classpatrons could take offense, “but I worked for the million,” wrote Barnum,which was also “the only way to make a million.” He admittedly greetedBowery types in part because he recognized that their dimes and quartersmatched in value those of everyone else. Moreover, he liked to tweak therespectable folks who sneered at him and his amusements, complaining, asone did, about “crowds rushing, ready to break their necks, to witness avile imposter, a gross humbug” who exhibited “stunted children, pasteboardmermaids, wooly horses, and other ‘wonderful inventions.’” 78But Barnum apparently also felt a kind of kinship with working-classtoughs such as the “Bowery b’hoys” and their counterparts in other cities.