Book Review

Canada and the United States

Benjamin Reiss. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2001. Pp. x, 267. $29.95.

In these books, James W. Cook and Benjamin Reiss write the history of entertainment exactly as it should be written: as a sophisticated interaction between presenters and observers that reveals much about the values of the age. Cook traces this dynamic before, during, and after Phineas T. Barnum's time, while Reiss uses one incident—the public career of Joice Heth—to examine attitudes about race and gender. Both authors focus on the antebellum North, and both relate Barnum and his shows to the changes in society occurring while Barnum was a showman. Cook and Reiss emphasize that Barnum masterfully sensed the mood and concerns of his customers and carefully crafted his exhibits to titillate ticket holders and, more importantly, to spark debate about those issues uppermost in the minds of Americans. Journalists enthusiastically engaged in the collaboration, sometimes accepting hoaxes, sometimes promoting them, but always selling bales of newspapers. Through this process, Barnum, his audiences, and the popular press produced spirited discussions that reveal much about attitudes concerning historical memory, race, gender, death, religion, science, and business.	1
Cook explains the Barnum phenomenon in the context of the tremendous intellectual and social changes occurring in the nineteenth-century antebellum North. When Barnum began his career in 1835, the age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on gentlemen, science, and reason, was giving way to popular democracy, an emerging middle class, a market revolution, and technological innovations that were transforming everyday life. In this period of profound change, Americans often found it difficult to distinguish the real from the illusionary. Barnum sensed this and amassed a fortune by creating ambiguous attractions and challenging audiences to separate the real from the unreal in them.	2
To illustrate the rise of the "arts of deception," Cook begins with a non-Barnum attraction called the Automaton Chess Player, then focuses most of the book on Barnum's career, and finally moves to the modern age where such phenomena as professional wrestling demonstrate that "humbug" is still alive and well. In discussing Barnum, Cook looks at a number of exhibits, including the Feejee Mermaid, a strange, small, and unsightly corpse (actually the top half of a monkey fused to the back half of a fish) that audiences found irresistible and speculated about endlessly. Why did Americans appreciate such a deception? According to Cook, Barnum reflected his nation's acceptance of the new market economy that tolerated anything in business, except for outright fraud and thievery. In a time when forces were at work that would produce a bumper crop of robber barons, Barnum's swashbuckling style tested the limits of deception in regard to ethics and legality in the world of business.	3
Cook further demonstrates that Barnum understood his age by examining the What Is It? exhibit that raised questions about evolution and race shortly after the appearance of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). About the exotically clothed black man displayed, Barnum asked: might this dark-skinned little fellow with a sloping forehead captured in the wilds of Africa be the missing link? Some observers thought so, but most white onlookers saw proof of the subhuman qualities of blacks and evidence that they were unfit for participation in northern society or politics.	. . .