At the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, which plans to market a Barnumesque Connecticut twofer of Barnum’s 200th birthday year and Mark Twain’s 175th next year, the executive director and curator, Kathleen Maher, said the best comparison was to Walt Disney. “Like Disney, he was interested in every kind of entertainment,” Escort she said. “In his day, he’d bring people from countries around the world to New York in their traditional clothing, like a human exhibition. Today we call that Epcot.” So from Michael Jackson’s career to the endless marketing of Woodstock to the weird, truth-challenged theatrics of summer politics (“Step right up and see the amazing panel of death! Watch, if you dare, as it unplugs Grandma!”), there’s a reason why the term “Barnumesque” survives more than a century after his death.

uyeuh911 In his day and beyond, Barnum was more admired than reviled, and even the critics often saw him as a rough-hewn transitional figure, reflecting the raffish sensibilities of his fledgling country. So, The Times of London, which often depicted him as an uncouth defiler of the cultural landscape, on his death in 1891 saw him as almost a classical figure and “a typical representative of the age of transparent puffing through which modern democracies are passing.” He made money on museums, theater and lectures, promoted acts like Jenny Lind and also served as mayor of Bridgeport and in the state legislature, after crusading as a fervent abolitionist. He wrote an autobiography that sold over a million copies, becoming perhaps the first American entrepreneur to extend his brand across numerous platforms. He realized that Americans were more interested in being entertained Escort than in being certain that every bit of what he presented was entirely accurate. And in the process, he proved that marketing and promotion — he got 30,000 people to greet the arrival of Lind, whom almost no one in America had ever heard sing — were as important as the product being sold. Barnum created the first reserved seats and the first matinees, transformed entertainment from rowdy male-oriented spectacles to ones that also attracted women and children, created the first public aquarium, the first celebrity marketing campaigns, the first venues with national audiences.

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