The True Story of 'The Greatest Showman'

P.T. Barnum, whose full name is Phineas Taylor Barnum, was born on July 5, 1810, in a small town called Bethel in Connecticut, USA. His father ran a small store. Barnum displayed remarkable marketing talent from a young age, selling lottery tickets and working as a newspaper editor when he was only 12.

He moved to New York City in 1834 and made a living selling hats and running boarding houses. While working at a grocery store, he learned about a woman named Joice Heth, who was rumored to be 161 years old and had been George Washington's nanny. Seeing a business opportunity, he quit his job and used all his savings and loans to buy the old woman, establishing a circus that specialized in exhibiting and performing oddities, thus beginning his career in entertainment.

He first placed various small and large advertisements about Heth in Penny Press to attract a large audience. The advertisements caused a sensation as expected once they were published. Barnum then took advantage of the momentum and had his subordinates use different pen names to frequently send reader letters to Penny Press to create an even greater sensation. Eventually, people even actively participated in the newspaper discussions.

Barnum made a lot of money from this, and at the time, ticket sales alone for visiting the exhibition reached up to $1,500 a week (in the 19th century, $1,000 could buy about 25 horses). However, after a year of being exhibited, Heth unfortunately passed away. The autopsy revealed that she was actually less than 80 years old, not the 161 years old that Barnum had claimed. After the scam was exposed, Barnum claimed to be shocked and repeated that he had also been deceived.

Barnum also once publicly claimed that his circus elephant Jumbo was the largest elephant in the world and had once saved a little girl attacked by a Bengal tiger. While promoting this, he also did international tours. To strengthen the impression, he hired some disabled children to ride the elephant for free and attract people's attention. As a result, thousands of people came to see Jumbo, and Barnum made as much as tens of thousands of dollars in just six weeks.

Due to the tremendous benefits of publicity, Barnum formed his own publicity team to help him fabricate various lies and create various rumors. He himself often personally participated and invented many unique and popular ways of publicity, especially good at making clickbait headlines, which helped his circus gain maximum exposure. He said, "In our country, almost everyone reads newspapers. The circulation of newspapers ranges from 5,000 to 200,000. It would be unwise if we don't use this channel to advertise to the public." Under Barnum's careful management, the circus thrived. To settle and make use of these people to make money, in 1841, Barnum bought an abandoned museum located at Broadway and Ann Street in New York City.

In the second year of buying the museum, Barnum discovered Charles Stratton, who was only 5 years old, in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He brought him back to New York and taught him to dance, sing, and tell jokes, and prepared multiple military uniforms for him. He also fabricated a miraculous experience for him, calling him General Tom Thumb. As expected, newspapers from all over became Barnum's propaganda platform, and within a week, more than 30,000 curious people from all over the United States lined up to watch.

In 1844, Barnum visited England with Tom Thumb, who became the new favorite of the British aristocracy. The London press was in a frenzy, and Tom Thumb frequently visited Buckingham Palace, dancing the minuet and imitating Napoleon before Queen Victoria. Later, he traveled to Paris and was immediately summoned by King Louis Philippe and Queen Marie Amélie. With the money Tom Thumb earned from his European and American tours, Barnum built a Persian-style palace called Iranistan worth $150,000 in Bridgeport.

Barnum sent someone to Europe to invite Jenny Lind to tour the United States to shake off his reputation as a promoter of vaudeville and slapstick. Lind demanded a prepayment of $187,500, which forced Barnum to mortgage Iranistan, his museum, and other property and borrow money from friends to put on the show. At the time, Lind was not yet well known in America, but with Barnum's publicity, 30,000 people had gathered at her hotel to catch a glimpse of her when she arrived in New York.

Barnum's careful planning and Lind's golden voice made the performance a huge success. The tour premiered on September 11, 1850, at Castle Garden in New York City and performed 95 shows in 19 cities, receiving rave reviews. The first show was so popular that tickets were in such short supply that an auction had to be held. Over the course of 95 shows, the tour earned a total of $710,000, with Barnum making a net profit of $530,000. Later, Lind terminated her contract with Barnum because she disliked his promotional tactics.

In 1855, Barnum invested heavily in a clock company in Connecticut, which went bankrupt due to poor management. Major newspapers ridiculed him for his lack of financial acumen. Two years later, still burdened with enormous debt, Barnum traveled to England and the European continent with Tom Thumb and 9-year-old prodigy Cordelia Howard (who had played Little Eva in "Uncle Tom's Cabin") to perform. They were a huge success, and the tour helped to fill the financial hole. The following year, while on tour, Barnum gave his first lecture on The Art of Money Getting in London, which was attended by thousands. A publishing company in London paid $6,000 for the rights to publish his lecture as a booklet.

After returning to the United States, Barnum bought and renovated his American museum, reclaiming many of the properties in East Bridgeport. He displayed a white whale captured off the coast of Nova Scotia, a hippopotamus, a group of Native American chiefs, and two new dwarfs - Commodore Nutt and Miss Lavinia Warren. Warren and Tom Thumb got married on February 10, 1863; even President Lincoln sent them a gift and invited the couple to the White House several times. Barnum offered $15,000 to delay the wedding for a month so that he could fully exploit this romance, but the couple refused. Tom Thumb disappeared when he became a millionaire and reached the peak of his reputation. Barnum said he needed to find out where Tom Thumb went.

In 1871, Barnum established the World's Greatest Show, calling his circus The Greatest Show on Earth, which is the origin of the name of the movie The Greatest Showman. The circus's performance included street performances and high culture and was one of the first circuses to perform by train rather than carriage. In 1874, Barnum rented an old train station on Madison Street and 26th Street in New York as the circus's home, which later became a holy place in American sports history, Madison Square Garden. He served as the mayor of Bridgeport from 1875 to 1876.

In 1881, he merged with his competitor, James Bailey, to form the Barnum and Bailey Circus. They bought two elephants from the London Zoo that were claimed to be the world's largest, but after the deal was made, Queen Victoria, Prince of Wales, Roskin, and the Thames in London jointly requested the contract to be voided. The elephant created $336,000 in six weeks after arriving in the United States. The circus toured the United States, and Barnum's train always arrived two weeks earlier than his circus, with his photo on the train.

Barnum died in 1891 and was buried in Mountain Grove Cemetery. It is said that his last words were, "How is the Madison Square Garden revenue today?" The circus was sold to the Ringling Brothers for $400,000 in 1907. Later, due to a continuous decrease in the number of audiences, high operating costs, and allegations of elephant abuse by animal protection groups (the Asian elephants owned by Feld Entertainment, the parent company of Ringling Circus, were the largest in North America), the circus was shut down after its final performance on May 21, 2017, in Long Island, New York. This circus, with a history of 146 years, has gone down in history after completing its final show.

P.T. Barnum became famous worldwide for his show featuring deformed people, using ruthless marketing tactics to gain public attention. The Barnum & Bailey Circus he ran was the most popular circus in 19th-century America, claiming to be the "largest circus performance group in the world." His ideas and actions represented the main features of the press campaign in the mid-19th century. Later generations referred to this period as the Barnum era.

Although he was always associated with gimmicks, people praised him highly for bringing joy to everyone. Even the London Times once affirmed him in an article:

"His death has deprived us of a classical figure, and his name has long been synonymous with joy and will continue to be so until humanity can no longer derive pleasure from the harmless comedy of show business managers, which is a good-natured deception and a harmless comedy for those who enjoy being deceived."

Because he introduced circus performance techniques into film and television programs, he caused a sensation in the entertainment industry. At the end of 2006, the authoritative American magazine The Atlantic Monthly rated him as one of the 100 most influential people in 20th-century America.