Barnum on Showmanship

In this excerpt from his autobiography Struggles and Triumphs, Barnum offers a fervent justification for showmanship as a dignified and necessary occupation that served an elemental human need. By describing his career as assuming the public "character of a showman," Barnum signals that his own celebrity was a major element of his success (historian Bluford Adams describes Barnum's fame as "his life's work and his prize possession"). Indeed, his autobiographies (which went through several best-selling editions throughout the second half of the nineteenth century) helped to promote Barnum himself and insure his continued celebrity.

From P.T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs,
"My Start as a Showman" 1869

       By this time it was clear to my mind that my proper position in this busy world was not yet reached. I had displayed the faculty of getting money, as well as getting rid of it; but the business for which I was destined, and, I believe, made, had not yet come to me; or rather, I had not found that I was to cater for that insatiate want of human nature -- the love of amusement; that I was to make a sensation on two continents; and that fame and fortune awaited me so soon as I should appear before the public in the character of a showman. These things I had not foreseen. I did not seek the position or the character. The business finally came in my way; I fell into the occupation, and far beyond any of my predecessors on this continent, I have succeeded.

       The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama, which entrances empires and secures for the gifted artist a world-wide fame which princes might well envy. Such art is merchantable, and so with the whole range of amusements, from the highest to the lowest. The old word "trade" as it applies to buying cheap and selling at a profit, is as manifest here as it is in the dealings at a street-corner stand or in Stewart's store* covering a whole square. This is a trading world, and men, women and children, who cannot live on gravity alone, need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the Author of our nature. If he worthily fulfils his mission, and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.

*A.T. Stewart opened the first department store on lower Broadway, not far from the American Museum, in 1846, an ornate five-story building nicknamed the "Marble Palace."