Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [515]
Joice Heth died within a year, and Benjamin Day reported in the Sun that an autopsy showed her age to be half what Barnum claimed. By then the showman was on the road. For much of the next four years he traveled the country with a blackface dancer and a juggler, ran an entertainment steamboat on Mississippi, and sold Bibles. Then he abandoned itinerancy, returned to New York, and launched his career as impresario.
In May 1840 Barnum leased Vauxhall Gardens. Rather than assemble the usual (and costly) summer stock company, he brought in performers by the night. His “variety shows,” like those up and down the Bowery, drew on popular plebeian entertainments (“grand Trials of Skill at Negro Dancing”). They featured familiar city types (“the Fireman,” “the Fulton Market Roarer”). They redeployed street activities (like amateur slack-rope walking). In effect the self-styled Director of Amusement’s variety show had appropriated the natural (and low-budget) theatricality of the street and market and made it pay.
The format proved popular. Its zestful novelty and continual change suited an audience quickly and easily jaded, and its miscellaneity mirrored metropolitan diversity. An ad in the Herald noted the performances “are exceedingly various, and full of life and merriment. This is what we want. The public have enough to groan and sigh about at home these times, they go out to such places as Vauxhall to ‘laugh and grow fat,’ and Barnum is determined they shall not go in vain.”
“Blackness” remained central to Barnum’s formula, though the tricky conventions of popular racism could present problems for a fledgling cultural entrepreneur. In 1841 his star performer, a white blackface dancer who specialized in “negro break-downs,” struck out for greener pastures. Barnum (as editor Thomas Low Nichols of the New York Aurora later remembered) scouted the dance houses of the Five Points. He soon found a lad who could do the dance even better, “but he was a genuine negro; and there was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” Barnum rose to the occasion. “He greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face,” Nichols recalled, “and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burnt cork, painted his thick lips with vermillion, put on a wooly wig over his tight curled locks, and brought him out as the ‘champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ Had it been suspected that the seeming counterfeit was the genuine article,” Nichols chuckled, “the New York Vauxhall would have blazed with indignation.”
By 1841, when Barnum was ready for a grander venue, he learned that the old Scudder’s Museum was up for sale. Scudder’s had a great location, on Broadway at Ann Street, near to both plebeian quarters and patrician precincts (the Astor House Hotel and City Hall were just across the way). Barnum took over the building and its collections, renamed it the American Museum, and made it the nucleus of New York popular entertainment.
Barnum stocked his American Museum, as he had Vauxhall, with jugglers and ventriloquists, curiosities and freaks, automata and living statuary, gypsies and giants, dwarfs and dioramas, Punch and Judy shows, models of Niagara Falls, and real live American Indians. (Barnum advertised the latter as brutal savages, fresh from slaughtering whites out west, though privately he groused that the “D——m Indians” were lazy and shiftless—“though they will draw.” Animal acts had their problems too: when his orangutan got sick in 1843, Barnum pinned his hopes on a goat but soon realized that “he shits so I can do nothing with him.)” After 1842 attendees could also see a two-foot, one-inch midget named Charles Stratton, better known as General Tom Thumb, whom crowds adored (especially after Barnum took him to Europe in 1844,