4. P. T. Barnum left his mark on the circus and the entertainment business in general
By the time P. T. Barnum entered the traveling circus business he was already in his early sixties, with a long resume of various promotional exaggerations, unsupportable hyperbole, and outright falsehoods when promoting his various ventures and shows. Barnum was possessed of a flexible conscience which allowed him to rationalize to himself that even if the customer wasn’t given exactly what he was promised when he purchased a ticket, there was no fraud committed if he had been entertained. “The noblest art is that of making others happy”, he was purported to have said, and it was his belief that the public was happy to be deceived, which to his mind explained America’s political system.
Over his storied career, Barnum entertained the public by presenting a “mermaid”, which was, of course, a complete fraud, with the head of a monkey combined with the tail of a fish; the aforementioned Jumbo; Siamese twins, which were legitimate in their condition but presented fraudulently; and a woman he claimed was Joice Heth, 161 years of age and a former nurse of none other than George Washington. When she died, Barnum sold 1,500 tickets to her autopsy, which revealed she was about half the age he had claimed. He once acquired a black dwarf named William H. Johnson, taught him a gibberish language which Barnum created, and presented the fellow to the public as a man-monkey. America’s greatest showman was in reality one of America’s greatest frauds.