but back then, i didn't know. all i knew is i had to try and do something. and the very next day the manager apologized and promised to make it accessible and they did. back then i was a vegetarian. it's much easier to eat vegetarian when you know what the choices are, when you know which of the stations is serving a vegetarian meal. i could finally bored easily eat vegetarian. the next year a new blind students camstudent came to thee addicted to fight for access to the menu. he had immediate access. the company when i advocate, i'm removing barriers for the entire community. that inspired me to become an attorney and continue advocating for people with disabilities.

good afternoon, everyone. i don't like to always shout people out at the very beginning that in walking right now is the great, great grandfather, eleanor and her husband. [applause] , it is always special to have them. welcome, everyone to the barnum museum. i know many of you have been here before. is this anybody's first time? welcome. we are delighted to have you on this beautiful day in downtown connecticut. this is the barnum museum.

it is in fact the last museum and as we all know he started the enterprise in 1842 and this is the last gift of just the city of bridgeport to the global community that we served. many of you are very familiar with the museum. in 2010, we were hit by a tornado because that is the kind of stuff that happened to barnum. and then a year after that it was hurricane irena and then super storm cindy. i want to also give a shout out to the state of connecticut indoor delegation who really supported the 7 million-dollar bond reappropriation because we are just about to embark on a major historic recap of the gorgeous barnum building from 1893 so that is a huge thing. and to add to that -- thank you. [applause] to add that also, our congressman has also been working very hard with us to get

the building on the national register. we are in the process of being reviewed to become a national historic landmark and there is only about 2500 in this country and that is a significant thing so we have been working on that for a long time. it's one of the reasons we are here today because we are still talking about p.t. barnum. he's still relevant in our lives today. we are here to talk about the fact you can context relies him in a way and it is something to be looked at and examined and re-examined. he's the father of the entertainment industry that he was a philanthropist and the doer of good deeds. enough about me. thank you all so much for coming to the museum.

the museum is open during the week a couple of days and even during the big historic construction project is going to be happening soon but with no further ado let me introduce you to bob wilson. he's been the editor of the american scholars fall of 2004 which won the national board for the best feature in may of 2006 in the digital nationa digital e award for commentary in 2012. bob is the editor of the 35 million circulation which i am now a member and he was also the editor of preservation magazine winning the national magazine award for general excellence in 1998 and i want to thank you for that because it is the national trust that got me into this field so i credited to

you. also something literary editor of civilization the magazine of the library of congress and 94 and 95 during the time there as the magazine received the award of general excellence and before this he did a few things he was the editor for usa today and happened to be the editor of the "washington post" for six years. he has a ba in english where he was inducted into phi beta kappa and m.a. in english from the university of virginia. he has taught at the university of virginia and programs at johns hopkins university, george mason university and the american university and is the author of the narrative on the adventure of clarence king and matthew brady portraits of the nation but today we are here to celebrate this book published by simon and schuster we are honored to have him speak today on an american life.

welcome. [applause] i have so many microphones going on here and now this one is on. thank you for the lovely introduction and everything that you do for the museum. thank you for having me here at the museum and everything you and the people that work with you to to hope and researching and writing this book. i also want to thank adrian, the

curator here and throughout the years working on the book who offered me encouragement, lots of good information and helped me a lot with the photographs in the book later on. i am pleased to be able to tell you the great barnum scholar at this time or any time, arthur saxon, is here in the front row. [applause] arthur could have been forgiven not being fully welcoming of someone that wrote a letter and said i'd like to write a biography of barnum he might have said i did not and i did

prettitpretty well, not pretty t very well. another person who's written very well about barnum wrote to me when i was setting out on this handset while i think barnum deserves a new book every generation and even though arthur did say that he must have believed it because he has been strong in his health, courage and good humor helping me to find things i didn't even know i was looking for. i probably could have written the book without him but it wouldn't have been nearly as good a book and it might have taken me years longer so thank you, arthur. he never blushes so don't worry about that. i'm in this funny position of i

don't know how many people in the world know more about barnum then i do at this point, maybe a lot but i do know three people that know more than i do are here in this audience so that's mildly intimidating to be standing before you. it was such a 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. he's a wonderful character to write a book about an anti-anime character in a sense of the character in a novel, a person of many parts. a person who would say that 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 and verbal skills. he had remarkable skills as a speaker and a writer. who knows where they came from if you want evidence that certain gifts are an eight i. don't think that these were learned skills particularly. but he just had something in this mode that was unusual. this is partly safer now -- to say for now he was a wonderful character. was he a wonderful man this is something we will get to in a few minutes and it's part of, that question is part of what made working on this book so interesting.

most of you know, i think a lot of you from here now the brief outline of his life. you probably know that he was born 22.3 miles from here. and in the village of bethel. early on he busied himself with a lot of sort of smaller and larger entrepreneurial activities. ..

>> and dozens of other acts and travelling shows. less well known today is that he was also a best-selling author, an inspirational lecturer on temperance and on success in business, a real estate developer, a builder, banker, state legislator, the mayor of the city of bridgeport, for 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 self-promoter without peer, a relentless

advertiser and unfailingly imaginative concocter of events to draw the interest often the feverish interests of potential patrons. i'm going to read one other just paragraph in a preliminary way just to sort of get you situated work barnum, for some of the things that come later. central to his 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", webster's definition is to deceive, to impose upon. definitions today include the words hoax, fraud, imposter, nonsense, trick. barnum's 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 it could be harmless even joyous. he claimed for him the generally accepted definition of humbug focused on this benign variety, what he defind 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 is that a person who attracted pay i don't knows in this way -- patrons in this way but then foolishly failed to give them a full equivalent for their money would not get a second chance from customers who would properly denounce him as a swindler, a cheat and imposter. i think this whole idea of humbug and his idea of humbug is

one of the things that distinguishes him from his reputation as you begin to look at him in more depth. and i'm 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 -- my third book -- a few things that have happened that have not happened to me before and probably won't again. and in addition to having you all here and c-span here, i was astonished to see that my publisher made an incredibly beautiful book. i can say that because i had nothing to do with the physical nature of the book. but it has i think a wonderful cover. it has wonderful -- a wonderful inside design, and it -- i know

i seeming to selling here, forgive me, but it has a 16 page color insert which adrian and elizabeth vantool from down the road helped me populate. it also has something called deckled edges. i don't know if you know what they are, but often a book is cut straight on the edge, and if it's cut rough on the edge, it is called deckled edges. to me it is something very elegant and wonderful, and i told my editor early on, i really want a book with deckled edges. [laughter] >> and he said, we can do that. i didn't really believe him. i thought no it will never -- until i opened the box and saw it, i didn't think it would happen. but i told this to my wife who is sitting right here, martha, and i said, yeah, i told him i've always wanted deckled

edges. and she said well, i have never heard the word deckled, in our 45 years of marriage. so my response to that is that every marriage that's successful must have its secrets. [laughter] >> and my secret was deckled edges. [laughter] >> another wonderful thing that happened that i will just mention briefly is it happened right here in this spot was that cbs news in its wisdom decided to do a piece about barnum, about the book, about barnum museum, about kathy, me, so i had this wonderful experience that as a small editor of a small magazine and somebody who spends a lot of time in his study at home. i don't spend a lot of time in front of national tv cameras, so that was something else. and 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 culvert 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 couldn't help noticing as an editor and a writer and someone who has tried to be, you know, to pay attention to the nuances of language that 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 the

present day and had not made any connections at all between them, that i was 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 -- did 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, there's that. and then some of that can be forgiven, but i felt there was a moment in her review where she really tried to sort of twist the knife, that she took her language and honed to a fine point. in fact, there's a sentence right in the middle of the review that's only three words,

and the words are wilson admires barnum. this was meant -- this was meant as a great -- a great critique, i think. it didn't win me as much as she thought it would because i do admire barnum. i think there's so much to admire about him. but you know, as i said earlier, one of the things that made it 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 his 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, here are qualities that are beyond the pale in whatever century or millennium you live in, and that to me gave me a -- gave me the chance to be kind of continuously engaged intellectually. one thing i tried not to do was to work from the assumption that we have achieved perfection in a given moment, which i think is an idea, the idea of presencism that's out -- presentism that's out there very much in the culture now that it is very easy

to dismiss people who are not -- who don't 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 didn't -- some of the things i did admire about barnum is 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 barnum's involvement with it, when he started the american museum on lower broadway, it had

essentially a theater, what you called a lecture room because the reputation of the theater was so low that he didn't want to call it that. and as i learned from arthur and others, the theaters in those days were often places where prostitutes worked the balconies, even in the -- you know, the expensive seats, the drunkenne drunkenness, rowdiness, one of the things that barnum and others did in that time period was to really commit themselves to moral entertainment buzz also to, you know -- moral entertainment but also to, you know, lack of drunkenness, to creating an atmosphere where families could safely come. as implied as him being the

mayor of bridgeport and many other things he did, he was truly civic minded. he was actually a fi philanthropist. there are certain people today who it turns out don't actually give money. his philosophy early on was one he called profitable philanthro philanthropy. if nothing else shows you his mastery of language to come one the phrase profitable philanthropy. what he meant by that in part was if you go down the road here and look at seaside 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 a chunk of it for himself so he built beautiful houses in the middle of a nice park with a great

view. that's profitable philanthropy. he helped develop east bridgeport and they had a very generous scheme for developing housing across the river but they held out every other lot for themselves, and as the price of land over there increased, as people build houses and stuff, their own holdings increased in value as well. but profitable philanthropy turned into real philanthropy later if his life, and he gave a great deal of money to his church, a local hospital in bridgeport, to what's new a university, other universities. -- what's now a university,

other universities. i think the thing that sort of sold me on barnum, i will get to the cons of his personality in a minute, but was this phenomenon of him becoming a better person throughout life. as i have gotten 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 it's 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

evolved. and that quality of kind of renewing himself and becoming a better person was another thing that really made me admire him. the cons are not small. i mean, the racism early on is despicable. you can justify it to some degree by the racism of the times, but it's also -- there are also people who were abolitionists from the day of the declaration of independence came out, there were many people who were not racist, so it is 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 ran he ran was so he

could be -- so he could vote for the 13th amendment. he gave a speech favoring giving the vote to the then freed blacks in connecticut. if you read the speech, you will not feel completely comfortable with the terms on which he said that blacks deserve the vote. but nonetheless, he did that. some of his humbugs were beyond the pale, often early. many of you probably know the story of joyce heff who was a slave woman who was being promoted as being 161 years old, and the nursemaid of george

washington as a baby, even barnum became embarrassed by that part of his life later on. his treatment of his wife certainly towards the middle and end of their marriage was not -- not acceptable, i think. part of it i think grew out of this -- he came from a culture that's very much into practical jokes into very rough humor. arthur pointed out when barnum took tom thumb to meet queen victoria, everything you read about it now is a wonderful impression both men made on the royal family, but arthur went and read victoria's diary for that day, her journal, and she was very troubled by the way

barnum spoke to tom thumb. i suspect it was partly that she didn't understand, you know, american humor, but there was a lot in barnum's humor that was rough, and a lot of it was directed towards his wife in ways that i think were pretty hard to forgive. you know, it must be said that barnum -- you know, that barnum was somebody who was unusually needy for wealth and for admiration. that's not a quality i -- you know, that i particularly admire. so the question in the book i think and a question that's come out of a lot of the reviews is, you know, was barnum admirable? was he not admirable? how admirable was he?

how justified -- my admiration for him? it makes me think that in barnum were in the situation, he would say gee, there's a dispute here. the atlantic says one thing. the new yorker says another. you must come and decide for yourselves by reading the book. that's what i would do if i were barnum. i'm going to read you just a few short passages of the book, from the book. two of them have to do with things that happened nearby, so i thought that might be appropriate. barnum was a sort of jeffersonian democrat. he was a member of the

universalist church. even as a youngish man, he was uncomfortable with the sort of energy and ferocity i guess the word you could say of the role of religion in public life. and he believed very strongly in the separation of church and state. so strongly that at the ripe old age of 21, he founded a newspaper called "the herald of freedom" in which he propounded this idea that, you know, that church and state should be separated, but he wasn't contented to do that. he also wanted to attack the people who felt otherwise, including his uncle among others. and barnum managed to get himself sued for libel several

times in the short period of time he ran this newspaper. but about a year after he started it, resulted in a judge ruling that he could either pay $100 for having libelled somebody or spend two months in prison -- or in jail, the danbury jail in effect. and he decided even though he had the money, to take the latter step. barnum wrote to gideon wells editor of the hartford times and later lincoln's secretary of the navy and others secretary of the navy. i chose to go to prison thinking that such a step would be the means of opening many eyes. indeed, he continued, because of the trial, the excitement in this and the neighboring towns was very great, and it will have

a grand effect. his purpose in writing wells was to tell him that another newspaper editor would be covering the matter at length, as would the herald of freedom of course and asked wells to make such remarks as justs his demands. his ability to marshall not just his own paper but also the goodwill of others was the harbinger of things to come. it was the first clear example of his flair for drawing attention to his beliefs, his enterprises and himself. in his memoirs, he writes that he was allowed to have his cell in the danbury common jail fitted out with wallpaper and carpet, which was surely a rarity in the imprisonment. while in jail, he was allowed to continue editing his newspaper, to write numbers of letters, and to receive so many friends that he found their ceaseless visits burdensome. these communications with the world beyond the cell also allowed him not to only stir up

local newspaper coverage but also to engineer what can only be called a local holiday to celebrate his release from jail. a group called the committee on arrangements was formed. they met him at the jail on the morning of his last day there, december 5, 1832 and strolled with him across the village green to the very room in the courthouse where he had been tried and convicted. the crowd was so large, barnum's paper reckoned it at 1500 souls, and even at half that size, it would have been immense. it was so large that those who could not fit in the building formed a parting sea for him to pass through. once settled in there, he was honored with an ode composed for the occasion and a speech defending freedom of the press, written and claimed by a prominent lecturer who was himself the editor of the new

haven examiner. after which a crowd of several hundred gentlemen barnum recalled retreated to the nearby hotel of one nichols and enjoyed a dinner, toasts and speeches. the 12th toast we're told described barnum a terror to bigots and tyrants a young man on the threshold of active life who neither bolts nor prison walls could intimidate. as if all of this were not enough to feed a 22-year-old who had not exactly suffered from the hands of the law, he stepped from the hotel in a coach. seated with him in the coach was a small band of musicians playing patriotic tunes and a parade in his honor had formed to take him to bethel. a marshall carrying the starrs and stripes led the parade followed by 40 people on

horseback. behind the coach was a coach carrying the master of ceremonies and the president of the day's proceedings followed by 60 more carriages, filled with local people. as this impressive got underway, cannon boomed on the village green and several hundred more people who were gathered there gave barnum three cheers. when the carriage reached bethel the band played home sweet home and three more cheers went up. thus a day begun in jail ended in well orchestrated and raucous triumph. neither barnum nor anyone else said were for certain who organized the many events of the day or who chose the members of the committee of arrangements and its president. barnum carefully did not give or take credit when he later described the celebration in detail in his memoirs. without doubt, it was in barnum's interest to imply that the day unfolded almost spontaneously, propelled by the

enthusiasm of his neighbors for his cause and indeed for himself. after all, he had grown up in the village and had many many relatives there and nearby. he had gone to church there, had clerked in its stores, still owned a store there, heavily advertised his lotteries, and now ran a newspaper from there. democrats, universalists and others who thought as he did would naturally want to support him. but odes and formal speeches do not occur on the spur of the moment nor do bands and coaches arrive by chance and even if the luncheon involved only dozens rather than hundreds of men, a hotel would fair warning to feed so many. of the various tactics barnum would master as he became a successful showman, one was to know when to stand in the wings and when to step to the foot lights to take a bow. it seems likely that in this case he was in both places at once. others might have thought to

sponsor an ode or an oration, engage a chorus or a band, plan a banquet or a parade, envision three cheers rather than three cheers twice, and might have forgotten the cannon salute all together. but not barnum. beginning on december 5th, 1832, more would always be more, keeping sympathetic newspaper editors close would always be useful, commissioning songs and poems and speeches would ever enhance an occasion, mixing serious and tensions with entertainment sure to draw a crowd would continue to be a good strategy for engaging the public. his own notoriety would never fail to be a calling card ready at hand, seemingly small but consequential details like returning to that courtroom, where he was convicted, or overlaying it all with patriotic zeal would never allude him. this day had all the earmarks of a barnum production.

it was the day when his career as a somehowman began. -- showman began. i'm going to read you one more because we're running a little long. barnum became -- as i said increasingly interested in abolition and he became a very ardent unionist as the civil war started. you may be shocked to hear that your part of connecticut was a sort of hotbed of anti-unionism. and barnum put himself out there very often on behalf of the union cause. after the first battle of bull run in july 1861, northerners who sympathized with secession began to hold peace rallies.

at these events, a white flag would often be flown above the stars and stripes. barnum's region of connecticut was especially active in this way, and so he decided to accompany about 12 20 -- 20 like-minded friends to attend one of the meetings happening ten miles north of bridgeport and hear for ourselves whether the addresses were disloyal or not. as they were leaving bridgeport, they came upon two omnibuses carrying about 25 three month militia volunteers who had just returned from the war. they and a number of other bridge porters were also headed there in a skeptical frame of mind. barnum's crew beat the slower omnibus to the very large gathering and were present when its preacher was delivering his benediction. the omnibuses appeared over a hill, filled with those soldiers, hollering pro-union cheers and displaying union

banners. in a later account written by someone who had been at bull run as a correspondent for the tribune and local divinity student and future journalist named john moses morris, according to them, the soldiers went straight to the flag pole where the peace flag white with a black eagle and the word peace had just been raised as well as an ancient jackson war flag. as the soldiers shimmied up the hickory pole and tore down the offending flag, the rally speakers fled from the stage in a panic and hid in a nearby cornfie cornfield. it was referred to in this account as bull run on a small scale. the soldiers raised old glory and carried barnum on their shoulders to the stage where he delivered a speech full of patriotism with the humor of the occasion. the loyalists in the crowd passed pro union resolutions and

sang the star spangled banner. among others who spoke was another member of the bridgeport contingent, the sewing machine magnate. some of those at the peace rally had somewhat betrayed the cause of peace by drawing weapons. but the soldiers managed to disarm a few of them, but not before at least one pistol was fired. in his speech, howe who despite his great wealth would soon serve as a private in the war, told the crowd if they fire a gun, boys, burn the whole town, and i will pay for it. before that was necessary, the bridgeporters decamped with what was left of the white peace flag dragging in the mud of one of the omnibuses. but the soldiers remained in a riotous mood, and when they returned to bridge port a crowd of several thousand people had

appeared in the streets of the evening, . barnum had wired several new york papers about the events of the day ending his first dispatch by saying the soldiers had been talked out of attacking the farmer offices but a short time later at 8:30 p.m., he sent a second telegram saying that the newspaper had just been gutted. the windows were smashed. the type all thrown into the streets and the presses destroyed. he wrote i did not approve of the suppression of the paper and offered the proprietors handsome subscription to enabling hem to renew the publication. these were journalists on the opposite side of his viewpoint. one of the editors escaped over rooftops during the riot fleeing to canada and ending up in

augusta georgia. the other did restart the farmer. less than a week later after the arrest of one of the principal peace meeting activists on orders of the secretary of state, barnum wrote to president lincoln from his house in bridgeport reporting that the arrest had rendered secessionists so scarce i cannot find one for exhibition in my museum. [laughter] >> and praising the effectiveness of the administration's strong arm. let's go ahead and turn to questions now. >> if anybody wants to come up here, or does everybody want to sit and ask questions? we will do it that way if that's okay with c-span? any questions? >> how do you think barnum would

have adapted to twitter? [laughter] >> it's funny that's a question i have been asked several times. barnum was somebody who really embraced new technology, and i think one of his -- the reasons for his success and one of his geniuses, one of the facets of his genius was that he knew how to use newspapers. he was a master as newspapers had become prevalent, there were 150 newspapers in the city alone, of barnum's early days of the museum. he was an avid advertiser in these papers. of the telegraph, he kept in touch with people all over the world to find acts for him. the railroad as he got involved

in the circus part of his life, in moving circuses around, so he was very interested in technology. so i mean, i assume he would have used it. he may not have used it in the same way as certain people do, but i think he would have embraced it. >> any other questions? you want to ask your? why don't you ask yours? >>i wonder if barnum had any relationship personal with abraham lincoln and if lincoln had an opinion about barnum. >> the one thing that strikes me as suggesting something about lincoln's opinion of barnum was that at one point after lincoln was president, he came to new york with his family, and barnum

went to his hotel and more or less begged him to come to the museum. the hotel was just across the street from the museum, and lincoln did not. at the time barnum's what is it exhibit was on display there, and there were some other things that were racially -- what is it exhibit is the display of a black man as a possible missing link, and there was also i believe a play on at the time that was somewhat controversial. so lincoln as a good politician stayed away. members of his family did go to the museum. lincoln did in 1863, i think it was, lincoln did -- mrs. lincoln welcomed tom thumb and mrs. thumb to the white house, right after their gala wedding

in new york city which barnum engineered. so -- and as i just read, there was -- barnum felt comfortable sending lincoln a telegram, and so i don't think there was a close relationship. it's interesting that people who were very close to barnum, such as forest greeley, very close, i mean spent many nights in barnum's house does not mention him at all in his memoirs. there's no mention whatsoever of barnum in greeley's memoirs, and there are other memoirs that i can't quite recall at the moment, where the same thing is true. and of course greeley ended up running for office too, and so it could be that he was just, you know, he was very aware of the negative sides of barnum's public reputation, and so he --

that's why he stayed clear in the memoir. >> could you explain, please, what the relationship was between barnum and the college? why was there some relationship there? >> well, the college is often described as a universalist institution. i think more properly it was an institution founded by universalist but not a universalist. that may be hair splitting, i don't know. but as a universalist himself and someone who did a lot to support his religion, he became very involved in giving money to that institution. the president there was very good at extracting money from

barnum. one of the almost enduring aspects of that relationship is that barnum had a building built on campus, similar to this one for a science building. and later in -- well, it wasn't later, but at some point after barnum brought jumbo the elephant to america and jumbo was killed after being hit by a freight train, barnum had him stuffed and also had his skeleton kind of rebuilt so he had two exhibits instead of one, but the one that was the stuffed jumbo ended up in the main hall of the science building. we have someone here who saw that. and the athletic teams at tufts

are to this day known as the jumbos. in 1955 that building burned down. >> [inaudible]. >> what is it? 75. oh okay, if it's in my book, i need to fix that. i'm sorry, you look very young. i didn't mean to imply -- it's 75. the building burned down anyway and the elephant carcass was destroyed. >> if you go to the website, it's still listed as a founding trustee, on tufts website. who was next? >> i should say he gave money to other universalists institutions too, st. lawrence college and one other, i think. >> barnum was quite the globe trekker from his time. could you tell us an anecdote from one of his uncommon adventures? >> i guess one of the -- one

sort of defining moment in barnum's life was he took tom thumb to england with the -- his sole plan for selling tom thumb in england was to introo intro -- introduce him to queen victoria. he had no reason to believe he would have access to queen victoria and indeed didn't have access to her for a while, but managed to work on various people and later met the queen. later he also took tom thumb to france and they traveled around the countryside. he brought charity his wife to england with him and then to france. she found the english to be immoral. you can imagine what she made of the french. and so she soon went back home and really never traveled with him much again.

barnum had quite a retinue with tom thumb and his carriage and ponies and stuff and often barnum would go in front and set things up in the next town, and he was kind of on his own. at some point he became very interested in the grape, both in its drinkable form and there's also one of his letters to a newspaper back home talks about, you know, his pleasure in squashing grapes with his feet, and that sort of thing, and there's a pretty clear undercurrent in that that he was a little too involved with the grape and all its forms. and indeed fairly soon after he came home, he began to sort of

strip away his interest in alcohol and eventually became as i said this great temp rant speaker. -- temperant speaker. i guess, i don't know, i think one of his veb churs abroad was -- ventures abroad was squashing those grapes. >> i wanted to know the role of disability that he had in the world -- >> the role of? >> [inaudible]. >> i mean, i'm not -- i don't really think i have an answer for that question. i clearly he understood the interest that -- even though i don't have an answer, i'm going to answer it. he understood the interest of

people -- in seeing people who were who were called -- had some sort of disability, people who were lacking pigmentation, people who were enormously fat, people who were enormously thin, the siamese twins. he did have -- i mean, i don't know if you know the movie, and i have tried to forget the movie, but i think there was a very, you know, 21st century hollywood take on, you know, he became great friends in all the people in his circus, and, you know, i think he had relationships with some of those people that were, you know, that were -- i think admirable, but i

think on the whole, we would not be very comfortable with the way he thought about people with disabilities. >> people that had disabilities too had no place else to land in the 1840s, 1850s, and the idea of freak show happens closer to the 20th century. any people that were part of his performance, his exhibits were a marvel of nature or natural wonder, so there was a whole different new sensibility to that. anyway, i'm not supposed to ask questions. anybody back here? yes, sir? >> thanks a lot. i grew up in bethel. i live here in bridgeport. and i have the nefarious distinction of being a politician here. i also went to the university of virginia. thanks a lot. you really brought to life a lot of what barnum, self-awareness i didn't know he had about him. i wondered in all of your research, were there things you started to get on to and wonder

about that you just are still today kind of hoping to find an answer to that you might find in some trove somewhere down the road? >> well, there's a wonderful collection of letters from barnum to a figure that i think of as sort of the boston barnum, a man named moses kimbel who was a close friend of barnum's, also had a museum very much like the american museum, also traded acts with barnum. they put on similar sort of moralistic dramas. like barnum, kimbel also became a politician later in life, and there's only -- there's one very intense chunk of their

correspondence that is in in the boston, all from barnum to kimbel, all concentrated really in about one year. i wrote to arthur who edited the selected letters and is a great collector of barnum letters and said, you know, since your book came out, have any of kimbel's letters turned up, he informed me they have not. i would love to see them show up. don't you think that would be wonderful? it would be nice to see a longer stretch of that correspondence too. >> [inaudible]. >> use the mic, arthur. >> a cache of barnum letters that came to light after my edition came out did turn up in bethel recently and was donated to the bethel public library, in

the manuscript. some of those letters are very interesting. yeah. >> so does anybody have any -- we have time for one more question. >> i have two things to say. thank you, first of all. the merciless and merciful presentation of joyce heff i'm fascinated by that and what it says about our birth as a nation and that kind of aspect of barnum but also that exquisite poetry of bringing the other to his audiences. i'm quite fascinated by that. do you know -- can you tell me more about his caring for her toward the end of her life and her passing? i know what happened with the

exhibition and everything afterward. i also got quite fascinated by pt barnum years ago and when the recent presidential election was happening, he kind of jumped into my brain and said no, no, no, no, you cannot compare me to this man. we are totally different because i had principles. and i made a piece dedicated to him kind of him coming back to earth to clear his name of that. i would love to hear what you have to say about joyce. >> bravo for that. he did -- joyce heff became ill i think as i recall two or three months before she died, and barnum hired a woman to take care of her as she was -- part of his time still being

exhibited, and then she was taken to barnum's half-brother's house here in bridgeport where she died. >> bethel, >> bethel, it was bethel, thank you, arthur, but i mean, you know, i guess you could say he didn't have to do that, but you could also say he was protecting his investment. so i don't know that he showed any beyond the whole concept of, you know, sort of exhibiting her, i don't know that he showed any particular cruelty to her or -- but i don't -- that's pretty much what i know. kathy and i are in conversation about the question of whether

barnum charged people to attend the autopsy of joyce. >> i'm yet to see any current document that says yes, he was charging anything, because in his autobiography and even the article that was written by the newspaper editor, at that time, doesn't talk about having 1500 people there and charging. that all comes later on so it becomes secondary sources to the original story where there were surgeons, there were students, and there was press invited to the autopsy. >> and clergy as well. >> and clergy. >> yeah, i'm going to keep -- i have to research this before the paperback comes out, but i believe that there were -- i think i would be able to find advertisements for --

>> we have. they are all secondary to the -- we've got -- >> -- saying that it was coming out inviting people to -- >> so that's the fascinating thing about barnum. there's just more to look at and more to look at. it is always going back -- at graduate school, go to the source, go to the source. that's one of those tricky things. we're so immersed in that because of the reenvisioning we're doing with the new barnum museum story. it is those hard stories that we have to lean into and not be afraid to analyze and discuss to really make barnum hue man -- human, in the context of his time. that of course is appropriate for audiences today, but it is fair to history, you know. so we will be telling the authentic story about barnum that really humanizes him, who he was, good and bad, and that's honest. that's our responsibility. >> i would like to just say, you know, the trump question is

something that always comes up, and you know, i think it's interesting that there's so many superficial ways in which they seem similar. you know, they have a slippery relationship with the truth. their name was their brand. they were in real estate. they went bankrupt. they were, you know, called themselves philanthropists, but i think that as you point out so well, i mean, the differences are, you know, so great that it is an insult to barnum. >> so with that, thank you. [applause] >> thank you very much. don't feel you have to rush out.

john and adrian and, marion, my staff, thank you all so much. there's tea, coffee and time. the books are being sold, you can get your book personalized. enjoy the rest of the afternoon. thank you all so much for coming. [applause] >> you are watching book tv on c-span 2. for a complete television schedule, visit book tv.org. you can also follow along behind the scenes on social media at booktv on twitter, instagram and facebook. >> good evening. and thank you all for coming out. welcome to the bookstore. we're really pleased