Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [516]
One key to Barnum’s success was his mastery of the art of imposture. Hoaxes had been a staple of the penny press since 1835, when Benjamin Day’s Sun had run its series reporting life on the moon. The failure of so many oversold speculations during the panic and the subsequent exposure of deceptions by swindling businessmen had lessened the public’s appreciation for plausible rogues, to be sure. But Barnum’s brand of humbug was neither malicious nor costly. In offering up such forgeries as the Fejee Mermaid he sold his audiences the sheer fun of debating truth or falsity, of outmaneuvering the hoaxer, of discovering how the deception was done. “The public,” as Barnum observed, “appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived.”
Barnum was also a brilliant promoter. “It was my monomania to make the Museum the town wonder and town talk,” he wrote in his autobiography, and he developed merchandising into a daring new art form. Barnum deployed all the familiar tactics—extensive ads in the papers, lithographs, pamphlet biographies, posters, flags, bright banners—and a slew of new ones. He installed the first “Drummond lights” in New York City, which illuminated Broadway with limelight “from the Battery to Niblo’s.” He stationed a band on his balcony. He covered the entire building with five-foot-high transparencies depicting over a hundred species of animals. He hired street performers and sent “bulletin wagons” with their sides plastered with ads rolling through the metropolis. Barnum imposed his institution on New York City with much the same flair and fanfare Thurlow Weed had used to hawk William Henry Harrison. And with even greater success, for by the mid-1840s, Harrison was in his grave, but P. T. Barnum’s Museum had become the boast of city guidebooks, a shrine for visiting tourists. More than anyone else, Barnum had realized and seized upon the essential compatibility of hard times and high times. His triumph would stand as an inspiration to countless successors in New York’s world of entrepreneurial entertainment.
PART FOUR
EMPORIUM AND MANUFACTURING CITY (1844-1879)
Currier and Ives lithograph, city of New York, 1876. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
38
Full Steam Ahead
Just before noon on April 23, 1838, the Sirius, a small paddlewheel steam packet nineteen days out of Cork, limped across the Upper Bay, its coal supply all but exhausted, and made landfall to the cheers of a great crowd gathered at the Battery. A scant four hours later, a second steamer, twice as big and half again as fast, hove into view, belching black smoke. This was the Great Western, fourteen days out of Bristol. She had been chasing Sinus across the Atlantic, and the sight of her churning toward the city touched off even more exuberant rejoicing, as it was now doubly clear that New York had established a maritime steam link to Europe.
Over the next twenty years, a growing fleet of transatlantic steamers would nourish the city’s economic revival, but the newcomers would be English ships, which boded ill for the future of the port’s merchant marine. More disturbing, when Samuel Cunard began twice-monthly steamer service out of Liverpool in 1840, he chose Boston as his line’s terminus. Cunard was heavily subsidized by the British government, and New York editors and lobbyists bombarded Washington with appeals for equivalent support. In 1845 Congress grudgingly agreed to provide subsidies for steamships that carried the mail (and could be used by the navy in time of war). Still, no New York competitor materialized, and though Cunard did extend service to the Hudson, he built his piers in Jersey City.
Finally, in 1848, a city champion emerged. Edward Knight Collins, a well-connected New York packet operator, promised to build the biggest and fastest steamships afloat. Collins won a mail contract from the government, raised over a million dollars from New York