Barnum, bunkum and reality

Like many a good quote P.T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum never said "There's a sucker born every minute," one of his competitors did. It seems everyone knows about that ersatz Barnum quote, but what Barnum really did say should be memorialized instead.

Barnum said politics was distasteful to him but despite that he managed to win election to the Connecticut legislature twice. A Republican Barnum voiced his sentiments in many ways. He put on a stage production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp".

There was a lot more to Barnum than his collection of human & other oddities. Barnum once gave a speech where he said: "A human soul is not to be trifled with. It may inhabit the body of a Chinaman, a Turk, an Arab or a Hotentot - it is still an immortal spirit!"

It's true Barnum liked to hype his attractions with more than a little enthusiasm, even when they were clearly fakes. He didn't think hype, or humbug as he liked to call it, was wrong. He did think that an exhibitor should give good value for a patron's money, even if that value was entertainment value.

However, he disliked those who made money through fraudulent deceptions, especially the spiritualist mediums popular in his day. Long before Harry Houdini and James Randi Barnum publicly exposed the tricks of the trade used by mediums to deceive and cheat grieving survivors. In "The Humbugs of the World", he offered a $500 reward to any medium who could prove their claimed power to communicate with the dead without trickery. Like the later rewards there was never any successful claim on it.

Barnum was born on July 5, 1810, nearly 200 years ago. I'd like to see something done to really celebrate his life on his bicentennial. He deserves to be remembered for more than something he never said.