‘The Greatest Showman’ Revises the Dark History of P.T. Barnum
Erasing P.T. Barnum’s gleeful slave-owning legacy on the big screen.
Upon learning that a P.T. Barnum movie was coming out around Christmas, I originally intended to ignore the film in the midst of the busy awards movie season, as I do with most family films that have mediocre reviews.
Except for one difference: I was fully aware that P.T. Barnum was not some inspirational American hero as presented. He is responsible for the exploitation of human beings, and in equal measure, torture of animals. I knew this, but no matter, what harm could a movie do, right? It would pass.
Then I saw more Facebook statuses celebrating the ‘inspiration’ that was The Greatest Showman and an outpour of joy from my community online. Perhaps some twisted algorithm thought I would like the premise of this movie. My attempts to ignore it could no longer go on: this was a bubble that had to be popped. In the wake of exposing numerous men in Hollywood as abusers, pedophiles, and toxic misogynists, the embrace of this film and its protagonist is unbearably hypocritical. In an attempt to fully indict Mr. Barnum, I researched and found a rabbit hole of atrocity deeper than I ever realized. The true legacy of P. T. Barnum is a man who proudly enslaved humans, tortured animals, exploited his entertainers, manipulated the media in a Trumpian fashion, and much more. Here’s a look at Barnum and how the film The Greatest Showman grossly misportrays him.
Part 1: Joice Heth, “Freaks,” Slaves and Barnum’s Human Rights Legacy
I did exactly the thing I’m now telling you not to do: I paid money to see this film. I had to know everything that was on the table. Most of Barnum’s story is completely overlooked in favor of a simple, rags-to-riches, “be yourself” tale. Liberties are always taken with true stories, but I am surprised at the extent history is rewritten here. Let’s start with a small misreading the film has: Barnum portrayed himself as being a pauper that was a self-made American Dream success story. In his self-published biographies, he referred to himself as the son of a tailor, and his father did die when he was underage. What Barnum failed to mention is that his grandfather outlived his dad and was one of the richest citizens of Bethel, NY. While this is misleading and morally questionable, it’s the least of his vices.
A hallmark of The Greatest Showman is that Barnum is portrayed as welcoming to those with deformities and physical abnormalities, what would be known as “freaks” at the time. It’s meant to be a message of diversity and inclusion perfect for today’s audiences. The truth is uglier:
It was an era when the exotic sold, and Barnum embraced the bizarre as a means for profit to the curious eyes of 19th century public. Freak shows were by no means an opportunity to champion diversity. The scientific community, run entirely by white men, was looking for ways to affirm the superior traits of their own race. Barnum helped commercialize scientific interest in racial anomaly by using ‘freaks’ of all kinds, proposing they were the “missing links” in a Darwinian evolutionary chain extending upward from monkey, to black man, to white man. His shows were affirment in the now-dated scientific belief of racial hierarchy.
The film would have you believe that Barnum’s ‘humble’ beginnings of show business kicked off with his American Museum. In fact, this was not his first entertainment venture. In 1834 at age 25, Barnum came across Joice Heth, an elderly black woman who had gained local attention for two reasons: first, she was allegedly 161 years old. More intriguingly, she was allegedly the nurse who had raised George Washington. Barnum recognized a hit in the making and arranged to purchase Heth for the sum of $1000. Here’s how little the value of a black human life was to Barnum: in the same era he purchased an elephant for $10,000. Despite being from New York, where slavery was illegal, no one batted an eye at the transfer of Heth to a Northerner. In her entire run as a profitable tall tale for Barnum, Joice Heth was never paid.
It’s generally agreed that Barnum knew his act was a hoax but saw the opportunity to mislead audiences and pique their curiosity. George Washington’s historical exoneration was underway, and Joice Heth could tap into his popularity. Benjamin Reiss wrote an entire book on this venture that kickstarted Barnum’s career, aptly titled The Showman and the Slave. Barnum’s showmanship included the following:
- Since she looked “too vigorous” to be 161 years old, Barnum put Heth on a diet of strictly eggs and whiskey until she was brought down to “mere muscle and bone.”
- It was hard to imagine a woman that old would have any teeth left, so Barnum decided to remove them. According to Barnum’s own autobiography, Heth then lashed out in a tirade of swearing to keep her teeth. Barnum sedated her by getting her plaster drunk on whiskey, at which point she agreed to the procedure while intoxicated. A few days later, Barnum had all her teeth removed under the guise of “consent.”
- Barnum made $1500 a week off of Heth’s performances. The show was so successful that he enlisted a rigorous schedule for Heth: on a typical day, she would be publicly performing for 14 hours a day while Barnum reaped all the benefits. Eventually, the fatigue was so great on her he was forced to reduce the hours.
As Heth’s health began to visibly decline beyond the point of no return, Barnum, who was responsible for this increased aging, didn’t skip a beat: he announced her final tour as a premature Death Announcement and raised prices.
When Joice Heth did die, Barnum candidly describes his reaction in his own 1855 autobiography: “I shed tears upon her humble grave – not of sorrow for her decease, but of regret on account of having lost a valuable and profitable curiosity.” He made one last squeeze of profit out of the now-dead slave woman: a public autopsy which sold 1500 tickets for 50¢ apiece (an equivalent price to opera tickets). At the time autopsies were illegal due to the human right of resting in peace. However, black bodies were ‘property’ and frequent props for white scientists studying human biology. Barnum was able to get away with such a public autopsy was because she may be 161 years old, they viewed it as a scientific necessity to see why she had lived so long. Of course, this was made up. It will come under no surprise that it was revealed in a graphic public autopsy that Ms. Joice Heth was no older than 80 years old. Barnum’s fabricated story had successfully hoodwinked the entire American public: so began his career as a showman.
Back to The Greatest Showman for a moment, which can’t be directly compared here since it chose to entirely omit the beginning of Barnum’s story. Zac Efron’s character, a fictional Phillip Carlyle, is persuaded to work for Barnum, but in order to do so, he needs to get paid a percentage of the profit. After a song about it, the wealthy white character is given 10% of the circus box office to be in the show. In contrast, the troupe of ‘freaks’ in the film are presented as just happy to get an opportunity on the stage. They are recruited in a montage without any finances discussed. This is a common issue with movies: solving inequality is more complicated than ‘getting a shot.’ It’s also being properly valued monetarily. Freak performers of all races were in no position to negotiate an agreed upon rate in this time, and Barnum exploited this.
Efron’s character takes some roots from Barnum’s second venture after Joice Heth. Barnum found an Italian born “plate dancer” and was so won over by his talent he took him on tour under the stage name Signor Vivalla. Since he was a white performer, Vivalla was in a position to negotiate wages and earned $12 a week. Like Zac Efron, the only performer in Barnum’s early career to earn a profit was a white male.
Oddly enough, The Greatest Showman movie does introduce some conflict with this. In one compelling moment, Barnum refuses to let the “freaks” enter the party with all the rich aristocrats. They’re rightfully bummed out, so burst into song about how nothing should stop them (the song is nominated for an Oscar too). In a purely fictional film, it would be a nice character change for Barnum to finally realize at the end of the movie he was mistreating his friends, and then let them take center stage with aristocrats. But the movie knows Barnum never did such a thing, so, like an unfinished sentence, it simply avoids any follow-up. The next time we see Barnum with the troupe, they’re able to have a drink together and gleefully say the show must go on. Instead of addressing a legitimate historical conflict head-on, the movie has an Uncle Tom effect: it makes the circus performers look like all they ever want to do is serve Barnum.
Barnum had a few more ventures before his famous circus. He was instrumental in the birth of the minstrel show, a popular pastime among Northern whites that perpetuated the worst black stereotypes and long outlasted slavery, and managed many blackface acts prior to his circus. Despite their omissions from the film, Barnum’s show business ventures began with Joice Heth, Vivalla, a slew of minstrel shows, and a mermaid scam, all before the beginning of his American Museum, where The Greatest Showman chooses to begin the story.
Even once his beloved circus was underway, there is no sign that this man preached a message of diversity and inclusion. One of the freakshows included in his circus that The Greatest Showman fails to mention was called “What is it?” I’ll let Reiss’s passage on the subject explain what exactly it was:
Time and time again Barnum preached to the ill-informed audiences that black people are a less advanced version of people on the Darwinian scale, and therefore their natural state is to be controlled by a more superior race.
As if these morally outrageous shows weren’t enough to spell out white supremacist, Barnum himself did dabble in the slave market and bragged about it to The New York Atlas. Here’s Reiss’s look at what this story included:
Barnum returned to New York City triumphant, in having been a savvy businessman and displaying his dominance over the enslaved race. Despite the law, this was not questioned as unethical in his time. There is no mention of these career moments in The Greatest Showman.
Part 2: Media Manipulation
The Greatest Showman does address Barnum’s reputation of being a self-proclaimed scoundrel. He directly says in the film there’s no such thing as bad publicity, reminiscent of the current U.S. President. Throughout the film, Barnum’s show has protestors: a villainous lot of creepy-looking drunk men carrying pitchforks and torches like extras from Oliver Twist. An antagonist theater critic, James Gordon Bennett (played by Paul Sparks) writes scathingly negative reviews of the circus. He is dismissed by Barnum as being arrogant and narrow-minded. All critique of Barnum is dismissed as people who don’t believe in magic and are out of touch. Despite proclaiming there is no such thing as bad publicity, the film refuses to acknowledge any dark sides of Barnum’s legacy.
Barnum lived when newspapers were taking shape: it was the beginning of paid advertising and selling to the working class. In the wake of Joice Heth’s autopsy and the reveal that Barnum had duped countless customers, you would think his career as a confidence man would be over. But Barnum only gained more from this deceit. Joice Heth was a blockbuster and the print media saw her as instrumental in selling papers, so ran countless stories on both sides of the debate, resulting in record sales. Barnum knew the quantity of press was what mattered most, and fanned the flames of uncertainty. Sometimes, Barnum would portray himself as being unaware of the truth and that she had tricked him too. Other times, he used it as proof that he was a great businessman: he had been able to take a worthless old slave and spin her into profit. Generating wealth was extremely appealing, and he reinforced his folk hero mythos as a master capitalist with an autobiography he re-published annually, occasionally updating his own life story to what best suited the times. It seems to me that The Greatest Showman has taken his self-published autobiography at face value.
One quick oddity of the film transparently shows its own disconnect from the truth. I have never seen more drinking in a PG-rated film. One song between Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman has them downing shots to the beat of the song. One song has all of Barnum’s troupe at a bar drinking with him. There’s nothing overtly wrong with this, except that Barnum was known for his stance in favor of prohibition and was widely known for speaking about temperance (or sobriety as we’d call it today). It frankly seems baffling to include this as a part of his story.
Part 3: Barnum’s Animal Rights Legacy: Elephants and more
Early in The Greatest Showman, young Barnum gets slapped for making a joke in front of an aristocratic character. The full audience I saw the film with gasped in horror. I can only imagine how they’d feel seeing how Barnum and Co. treated his elephants and other animal performers.
P.T. Barnum was not the first American to import elephants to the United States for the purpose of entertainment, but in 1850 launched an expedition in modern-day Sri Lanka and stole 10 elephants straight from the wild. In 1882, his biggest spectacle was Jumbo, an African elephant, who became the circus mascot. Jumbo was killed in a train accident – most elephants in captivity meet premature deaths.
Capturing elephants from the wild for the purpose of entertainment is horrifying in its own right even if it wouldn’t be considered so then. Their near-extinction today is entirely due to numerous forms of human greed. However, the capturing is nothing compared to the conditions they were given once in the circus. From Barnum’s era until now, circus trainers aim for total control over their elephants. The breaking process involves removal of infants from their family units, followed by “body immobilization, beating, and starvation or other deprivation until the elephant accepts the trainer as his or her ‘master.’
- The tool of choice of circus trainers handling elephants is something called an “ankus.” Quoting G.A. Bradshaw, “it is a wooden pole with a curved metal hook at one end used to inflict pain on sensitive points, including the genitals, mouth, and anus of an elephant being broken.”
Bradshaw’s book later describes how with every generation of training elephants, the demands of speed increase and less care is put into any sort of humane treatment.
The most well-known entertainment Barnum brought to the world was his use of exotic animals in his shows. It’s clear that in a biography film about P.T. Barnum, this would need to be included. Yet for most of the movie, there are no animals. The circus is portrayed with every performance as a stage full of human dancers. The Greatest Showman has learned from the cautionary tales of Sea World and A Dog’s Purpose: animal rights violations don’t sell tickets. So they largely ignore this key element. At the end of the movie when the circus is at its peak, there are approximately 5 shots with CGI elephants and tigers doing tricks you’d expect to see them doing in a circus. The CGI here looks intentionally bad, probably so that PETA could clearly see no animals were used in the film, a polite way to avoid controversy through more revisionist history.
In this brief end montage, supporting character Tom Thumb is seen riding an elephant. A little person riding an elephant is probably the least harmful atrocity committed by Barnum but has an insidious effect. Elephant tourism is notoriously awful to these creatures and still prevalent today – most animal tourism is deceptively harmful. (Let it go on the record: if you go to a place where you can ride an elephant, you are part of the problem. Ask Forbes, Peta, Dodo, or VICE). Even in an attempt to cutely include Barnum’s elephants, they’re still promoting a concept that’s insulting to anyone who remotely cares for animals. You can find the Ringling Brothers legacy of harming animals and following lawsuits on their Wikipedia page. Most of these atrocities that turned into lawsuits happened within the last 20 years, under a more scrutinous public. Animal treatment in the days of Barnum himself was far worse.
In spelling all this out, my issue is less with Barnum himself and more with those that chose to repurpose him. Barnum was a horrific opportunist and exploiter, but in the end, he’s a product of a different era without today’s morals. I do have a serious problem with revisionist history. I abhor that a brand new movie is being sold to the masses as inspirational and progressive builds upon the legacy of someone disgustingly antithetical to those morals. As the movie continues to gobble up family-friendly money, Barnum’s legacy is continually rewritten. Perhaps even more painful is that the filmmakers (many of whom are extremely talented and responsible for phenomenal films such as Logan and La La Land) seem to rely solely on Barnum’s self-fabricated biography to tell the story. In his interview with MovieMaker magazine, we get a clear idea first time director Michael Gracey did not care to fact-check the film’s script: “Gracey responded not only to the opportunity to make a large-scale musical but to the idea that Barnum was a visionary similar to men like Steve Jobs and Jay-Z today; he loved the idea of telling a story about transcending everyday life through a dream and changing the world.” Barnum has more in common with a slave trader than with Jobs or Jay-Z. IMDb’s first bit of trivia on the film claims Jackman read three dozen books on Barnum, which raises more questions about knowingly selective history. I have yet to see any publications ask the film’s talented cast and crew about Barnum, nor have I seen any of them address this yet.
For future filmmakers looking to spin history into family-friendly fun, I recommend picking figures who didn’t commit heinous atrocities. Last year, Ringling Brothers Circus shut down permanently in the face of decades of criticism. Barnum would have you believe people have lost their magic. I’d argue maybe they can find it somewhere that doesn’t need cruelty to achieve it.
I’ll end with a quote taken directly from The Greatest Showman that Hugh Jackman’s Barnum says to Zac Efron’s character: “Comfort is the enemy of progress.” Seeing movies that make history inspirational is comforting. It’s easier to think of people as showmen than as human & animal rights abusers. But the era for those types of films is over. Instead of settling for a sugar-coated version of history in film, my preference is to embrace movies that are authentic in their message of progressive values: The Greatest Showman is not one of them.
Notable nonprofits that support elephant or human rights:
Further reading:
For an investigative expose of Barnum’s early career, the book I recommend is this one. It largely helped me understand the realities of Barnum:
- The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America by Benjamin Reiss
For a better understanding of the painful relationship between elephants and their captors, and their true emotional intelligence, I recommend this book:
- Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity by G.A. Bradshaw
Other articles:
https://www.peta.org/blog/greatest-showman-cruel-racist-history/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-pt-barnum-greatest-humbug-them-all-180967634/
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/p-t-barnum-and-alcohol/
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/may/22/ringling-bros-barnum-bailey-circus-final-show
http://www.elephantsdc.org/circus.html
Footnotes:
The Showman and the Slave, by Benjamin Reiss, page 13
Ibid., page 42
Ibid., page 28
Ibid., page 163
Ibid., page 164
Ibid., page 38
Ibid., page 135
Ibid., page 135
Ibid., page 129
Ibid., page 111
Ibid., page 170
Ibid., page 26, page 169
Ibid., page 150
