| |
This is P. T. Barnum, who might be called the Father of pop culture illusionism. Born in Connecticut in 1810, Phineas Taylor Barnum grew up working the counter at his Father's general store. "We are apt to believe that sharp trades, especially dishonest tricks and unprincipled deceptions are confined to the city," he later wrote of that work, but in the store "the customers cheated us in their fabrics; we cheated the customers with our goods. Each party expected to be cheated, if it was possible. Our eyes, and not our ears, had to be our masters. We must believe little that we saw, and less that we heard." Barnum also learned that people wanted to be cheated, or at least that they wanted the chance to test their wits. By 1850 he had become America's most famous showman, promoting musical and theatrical tours and exhibiting a promiscuous collection of wonders at his "American Museum" in New York. Barnum's museum included the world's largest and smallest man, the world's largest elephant, a genuine mermaid from Fiji, and a wide range of other curiosities that blurred the line between hyperbole and deception. The "feegee mermaid," for example, was made out of the bodies of a fish and a baby orangutan and the head of a monkey. It probably fooled only the most credulous viewers.
Barnum always insisted that he was not a con man:
he was what he called a "humbug." He never denied he was out to fool
people, and he argued that what he sold was spectacle, illusion,
and the opportunity to figure out the deception for your self.
|
