Robert wilson is with us today courtesy of paul and heather hamilton. Bob is the author of Matthew Brady, portraits of a nation and the explorer king, a biography of Clarence King. He is the editor of the american scholar, former editor of preservation and the founding literary editor of civilization. A former book editor and columnist for u. S. Today and a former editor at the Washington Post book world. His essays reviews and fiction have appeared in numerous publications, including the american scholar, the american short fiction, the atlantic monthly, the new republic and the smithsonian, Washington Post magazine and the wilson quarterly. And on the oped opinion and book review pages of the boston globe. The New York Times, u. S. Today and the Washington Post. He lives in manassas, virginia. Please give a warm savannah welcome to robert wilson. [applause] thank you, chris. I appreciate that introduction. Im hoping your app works better than the app that was done for. He Iowa Caucuses [laughter] i trust it will. You probably actually tested it. Thanks to all of you for coming this morning on this cold morning. Init its very pleasant to see so many of you here and its very pleasant to see cspan here and i want to thank cspan for all it does to support book culture in america and im tempted and i am would be tended to say normally what remains a book culture in america but on a day like today is very optimistic about the state of course. I love being in savannah and my wife martha and i come often as we can. We live outside of washington dc and we have a place on the panhandle of florida and we used to dread the 15 hour drive until we decided that we could stop off in savannah on the way and go to the gray for dinner and so now we look forward to the trip very much. This is as chris said the third biography ive written and this is not really a trilogy at all. All three books are related to 19th century figures figures whose careers were at the height of in the middle of the 19th century in the first one was a book about and explore named Clarence King who was an eastern who went out west and explored, explored health in the early days and climbed the major peaks in the sierras and named some of them including mount whitney. Later, he did a survey of the great basin, one of the Great Western surveys of the 19th century and one of the people who accompanied him on that survey was a very fine photographer named timothy osullivan. Osullivan had worked with Matthew Brady, the civil war photographer who was also a portrait photographer in new york and i started reading about brady and thinking there was a not really a good book about brady perhaps for a good reason and i thought well, i will write one for it brady turned out to be kind of a hard subject because he did not leave a lot of written material and he may have been illiterate actuallyy. But brady had a studio on Lower Broadway in manhattan and catty corner across the street from barnums american using a pretty barnums American Museum was the biggest tourist draw in the city of new york at the time. Barnum took over what was a very dusty old museum that had mineral specimens and things like that and completely to swarmed it. He started, he had flags flying from the roof and lights going up and down broadway and he had a van that was out on a balcony overlooking the street and the musicians were handpicked to be so bad they would drive people into the museum. [laughter] it was quite a lively place. Brady, the photographer, was very successful but i cannot help but think of him as looking kind of longingly across the street at the museum were so much was going on and after a while i began looking longingly across the street to partly because barnum was, in a way, a, subject was everything that brady was not in that he wrote a wonderful autobiography and was a lovely writer and was an exuberant fellow. Brady was thought to be or have a certain charm and his charm was bringing people in and sitting them for portraits and making him comfortable but he was nothing like the buoyant largerthanlife character that barnum was and so Clarence King led me to brady and brady led me to barnum and one other reason to think about possibly trilogy is i think its probably my last biography for the very reason that i just dont think theres a better subject than barnum. Ive had so much fun spending, you know, years with him. Ive been thinking about or talking barnum now for six, seven years. This may be the last time i do that becauset i want to move on. But one thing, one other thing that led me to brady or that led me to barnum when i was working on brady was i went around and talk to maybe 25 different venues about brady and i always had a picture, a slideshow showing this photograph and one of them was as. Photograph of barnum and whenever i introduce the photograph i would be sure to save barnums full name, Phineas Taylor barnum which has a certain, phineas has a slightly amusing name. I hope no one here is named phineas. But, there was also, i think, just something about the way barnum looked in this photograph and it p was taken, it was midde aged and he was rather handsome man early in his life and his wife, for one, thought he was very handsome, older man but at midlife maybe not so much and im just going to read a very brief story that barnum tells about himself in his autobiography which is he lived in bridgeport, connecticut and he was very much a or became very much a republican pro lincoln man but even douglas came through bridgeport to speak during the president ial campaign against lincoln and one of his friends said what do you know about douglas to which barnum replied, he is a rednosed blearyeyed drunk in a swaggering chap looking like regular barroom loafer. Toig which his delighted friend responded, that that mornings paper has said that douglas was the very image and personal appearance of p. T. Barnum. [laughter] i think the other reason that i showed the photograph of barnum with his various audiences would be this kind of titter or chuckle, i think people feel like even to this day that they know barnum on some level and obviously the name Barnum Bailey, ring them circus we dont brought her lifetimes and as you know in 2017 but theres that name has carried on in our knowledge of barnum to some nktent but i think we also think we know him because of one thing from his, the early part of his career as a museum owner, the famous sign of this way to the egress, did you all learn that story in School Connect the gross being the exits of people thought the grass was some fantastic beasts and so they would follow the sign and find themselves out on the street and have to pay another quarter to get back into the museum. That story is probably true. The other story, the other thing we all think we know about barnum is that he said the phrase, theres a sucker Born Every Minute. That story is almost certainly false. It is hard to prove that something did not happen. But barnum wrote, i would say, hundreds of thousands of words themselves and the least that many andst probably many more words were written about him and there is no sign anywhere that he ever said it or even thought it. To me, the most persuasive argument against his having said that is the relationship he began to develop with his both his museum goers and inside his museum was a theater and so there were people that would come to go to sort of melodramas to be putut on there and later n his circus career which was just the last quarter of his life he was always very, very careful about his relationship with his audience and he did not ever overtly exploit them in the way that this a sucker Born Every Minute would suggest. After he bought the museum he just spent in normas amounts of money to bring things in from all over the world, wild anima animals, objects, people of interest and he continues to charge only a quarter, maybe a quarter twice if you follow the egress sign and half that, 12 enough sense it was possible to spend half a cent in those days for children. His whole philosophy of this centers on a word that he is called humbug because he called himself the prince of humbug. Todays in todays world the world humbug tends to mean somebody who exploits or tricks other people but in barnums usage he used the word or defined the word to be what he did which is he thought of humbug is creating a store or finding something to get publicity and get people in the building but the crucial part of the idea of humbug was once you got them in the building or in the tent they had to get much more than they had bargained for. If you brought them in under pretext, say to see the remains of a mermaid, which was one of his famous exhibits, once they came in they had to feel thatfe when he was in the museum that maybe this wasnt really the remains of a mermaid but all these other things here that we can see and so people would go away happy. That is to me one of the really crucial things about how we should be thinking aboutng barn. Barnum was not perfect, however. I have to say that and balance, i mean, he was Wonderful Company always. Y for me reading him his writing was always witty and he could turn of phrase so well that i always enjoyed being in his company and often won over by him but one of the things that made him a great character to write about was that he wasnt perfect, unlike the rest of us he was very imperfect. One of the challenges and one of the things that made the job interesting day by day for i me was to think about the things he did in various contexts. One is well, he may have done this but then everybody did it that day, this was the sort of historical characteristic. You might think of his treatment of animals which you know, he was very, very dedicated to bringing exotic animals to exhibit his museum and it was often a grisly process to capture these animals to ship them. The understanding of how to care for them when they got to the museum was limited and they were learning all the time. Barnum did often bring handlers for the animals or people that were familiar with how they lived but it was a process that involved the death of lots of animals. In fact, the Smithsonian Institution benefited from the thing that happened so often that in barnum would often send the carcasses or bones to the smithsonian and they have an amazing collection of such things as a result. This is to date unsavory at best and its the direct reason why, i mean, its one of the primaries reasons why the circ circus, the Barnum Bailey ringling circus went out of business when they stopped exhibiting elephants, people basically stopped going to the circus so this is an example of we have certain values and there were other values of the time and how do you weigh that into whether you think what you think of him. Im not a person who feels what i guess is called or believes and when i called is called presentism that we have now reached a sort of state of perfection that we can look condescendingly on everyone who came before us and there are hbviously ways in which our opinions about things like grace have evolved and even if they are far from the state of protection they are honestly better than they were so i have tried as hard as he could to give him a break on the things that i felt were related to the way people thought of in his time. I also try to think of him as a man and well, was he ever cruel to people and as a rule i think he was, he loved people. He treated people very well and many of the people who work forr him, the socalled freaks, often were very devoted to him and very grateful to him. He wasnt very nice to his wife. I dont think that is something that we could forgive out of any sort of historical perspective. He came from a culture in new england that was very much about practical jokes and plaintiff jokes on people and making people look silly and he often played jokes like that on his wife. Once after he had been in england for several years he came home unexpectedly and had a wife and two, three kids of the time and in fact, one of his daughters had died and in the interim and he had not come back and he came back without announcing that he was coming and he sent somebody to tell his wife that she must come to the museum to have or to find out some information about barnum and it was clear that she would think that he had died. That someone had gotten notice of this and he came she came and there was barnum to greet her and this was his great practical joke on her. I think the cruelty of that is selfevident. It was really a matter of when going through his life to think through these things and maybe because im a journalist and im soon to be focused on the negative here he was a person who brought incredible amount of joy to millions of people and was dedicated to that as well. As i say he was such great company. One of the things i would being a journalist and wanting to focus on the negative i would like to talk a little bit about his attitude towards race. One of the things interesting to me about barnums career and his life as a whole he lived, by the way, from 18101891 so he spanned the century almost and so i buy one of the things i wanted to say is that i really admired and he came to admire about barnum was that he changed throughout his life i felt that he became a better person which is remarkable because he had the lot of success early on in his life and he became notorious and he had a lot of or he became a sort of character in the newspapers and everything he did people were interested in and he made a lot of money and he lost a lot of money at one point but made it back and he was or he became quite famous but i think about how few people have success early in life dont feel elat it is a reward for their own perfection as human beings. How many people like that actually change and become better through their lives . Barnum had a bit of a problem with the great, as they say. He began to notice that people around him that he respected were similarly inflicted and he eventually gave up drink with this is at the age of, i would say his late 30s. He became, and like all performed people he became a great advocate for temperance and one thing that is really not known very widely about barnum is that he became one of the really most in demand temperance speakers of his day, a kind of on par with carrying nation. Urgave hundreds of free temperae speeches. Later in his life when he would go out for the circus when the circus was on the road he would often schedule temperance speeches, you know, say because he was in town he never had been in before and finally his partners asked them to please stop doing that because some of the people were going to his speech rather than going to the circus that was hurting the intake there. That was one way in which he changed. His religious he was a universalist and he was very opposed to hardcore religion very opposed to, i mean, this was the day of sort of a great revival and very opposed to any Movement Towards confusing the roles of o church and state andt is very much, at the age of turning when he started the newspaper for the very purpose of fighting the idea of religious party developing in his part of connecticut at the time. Im getting pretty far away from race but im will get back to it and but as a result of his temperance is speaking he got to know a lot of the famous preachers of the day and they became great friends of his and many of those were also abolitionists and so they had an effect on t his growth. One of those first acts that got barnum into the public eye and in some ways healed the reputation that barnum has to this day one of the other ways that we know the name barnum is that often if say an unscrupulous see me in person and i wont name any such person who achieved high office in this country and there would be people would immediately slap the barnum label and say, it would not be a compliment to relabel. I think it can trace back to his first act that he became involved in and he did a lot of things, in his teens, 20s and 30s and started this newspaper and ran lotteries and had dried good scores worked in dry good stores and when he was in his early 30s he he felt that his lifes work should somehow have to do with being a showman and with exhibiting acts and he, at the time, ran a boardinghouse and a store in new york city but he read in the paper about an act which was on display in philadelphia and indeed, a Person Associated with the act came into the store and talked to him about it in the act was a blind slave woman who purported to be 161 years old and who further claimed to be the nursemaid of george washington. She would go around and she would tell stories about Little George and she would also sing sort of ancient hymns that no one had reallyea heard before. By the way, i love this perspective. I feel like i went in to the wrong business. [laughter] but anyway, barnum hurried up to her hurried down to philadelphia from new york to see this woman whose name was [inaudible] and he was favorably impressed with the possibility that she could be quite old and he never admitted throughout his life as he often did about other things he did that he suspected that she was not 1621 years old. The Life Expectancy for a white woman at that time was about 40. I would dare say firstly woman it was less. Anyway, she was blind, she was crippled in one of her arms would not move but her tongue moved very well and she was a very good talker, spoken a strong voice. One of decided to and the people who she was supposedly owned by a person in kentucky, some other people had paid him for the right to exhibit her but they wanted to get out of that business so barnum made an offer and brought her to new york after creating a buzz in the newspapers and began to exhibit her and it went over very well. He took her onto her through new england and at one point when he went or when he got to boston he became acquainted with a man who was famous for having displayed automatons, you know, creations that were mechanical because somebody would maybe be in a box under the stage and would seem to talk and respond to questio questions. It occurred to him because the crowds had begun to fall off for her to plant a story in the newspaper saying she was actually an autonomous him that she had been made out of indian rubber and gadgets and things like that. This sort of became a typical ploy for barnum when he had an act, he would either create a kind of counterargument about the person or whatever was on display and then sort of challenge audiences to common see for themselves. If it was something in his Museum People may have paid wants to go in and see this act or whatever it was and then he would, of course, be encouraging to come back again. I do think sort of if you look at the length of his career one of the things he knew that he was doing wasin, he was not only bringing people and who had lived lives that were pretty isolated and you know, this was when he was born the telegraph had not been invented in the photograph, the railroads were not running. Lifetime, people who lived in small villages like the one he was from, bethel, connecticut, began to have more access to the world at large. I think one of the things that barnum did through the museum and exhibits was bring that world to people eager to know more about it. And one of the ways, he was challenging people to use their critical sense to say the site for your self, make the decision. So, that is the part of this and in the case it seemed pretty awful. Joyce was exhibited for a few more months became sick and died. Bar mom had an arrangement with a surgeon in new york to do an autopsy. The surgeon had been eager to sort of show that it had been a hoax. So he rented a big venue, advertised and charged admission for this autopsy, pretty awful. He invited people to come and as it turned out, the preacher, not the preacher but the surgeon found that the sheet, all of her organs were in good shape except for her lungs. She died of tuberculosis and felt she couldnt have been any more than 80yearsold. This he continued to see wasnt at all suga chagrined that thiss the case and continued to get various kinds of publicity. So, this is barnum at his worst. There are other instances where he had racial views that were terrible. But as i say, in connection with these preachers and the temperance move, his wife was unitary and very much against slavery and became more and more of an abolitionist and a republican lincoln supporter, veryry pro union and there was n exhibit of the hero of charleston whose name i am forgetting. [inaudible] anyway, he did a lot of things to support the union cause and then after the war, he ran for the legislature in connecticut and he said that he wanted to do that for the purpose of voting for the 13th amendment which abolished aslavery and he did as one of s first acts as a legislator he also gave a sort of dramatic and widely publicized speech in favor of giving the vote to africanamericans in connecticut which he argued that we wouldnt but he was very much in favor of that. Eventually the 14th amendment superseded that anyway. I make the case in the book that he became more enlightened about race. People have pointed out that in 1860 at the point where he was becoming more enlightened he exhibited a little person for feet tall black man who weighed about 50 pounds as the missing link between the Charles Dickens book that had just come out in 1859 and this was in 1860 started exhibiting. It was just awful. One of the things that was interesting is they would be a man out front telling the storyy of how he had been founded and in thell background he would sot of be mocking and saying dont really believe this. This isnt really whats going on. The. He clearly encouraged or permitted it and ended up building a house for this man in bridgeport. They. Were friends for the remainder of his life and he went on to be seen by 100 Million People into the around 1920. So thats another one that sort of hard to sort out think about. I will just leave you with one click image. Late in barnums life, he got involved in a circus about late 1870s. The late 1880s he and james bailey who was the genius behind the circus took the circus to england and they exhibited or showed a big building in kensington. It was a huge building that had room for the rings and a track thatrackthat went around and eah performer, there were two performances a day, barnum were to get into a fancy. She and match team of horses and go slowly around the ring, stop every often and stand up and say you want to see barnum . Line mr. Barnum, he is supposed to have said. He wouldnt tip his hat and everyoneveryone but waved their handkerchiefs and th demand woud tip their hat to back. It looked very much as was pointed out by a member of the royal family, it looks a lot like a who didnt turn off his phone. [laughter] and it was a sort of triumphal moment. He was much loved. At the ende of his in the 1860s, early 70s after Ulysses Grant left the presidency and went on a two word of the world as word of promoting the united states, when he came back, barnum saw him and said it must have been wonderful for the most beloved american to go through the world andri he said no, barnum. Everywhere i went, people asked me do you know barnum . [laughter] so i will stop, and if there are questions. [applause] what was the most surprising thing that he learned about barnum . You know, to learn that he really waser a better person thn his reputation, and i guess that is the thing. Yes. You touched on how many simplistic pictures were to label certain proper and political figures. Id like to turn that around and hear from you how the current status of american politics and american Popular Culture might have been formed with your view of barnum. That is a great question. Nee of the reviews, there was a piece of the new yorker about my book that made the case that i had apparently been completely unaware of what was going on politically in the country while i was writing the book because i tried very hard not to do that. One of the people that wrote a very good book about barnum called humbug kind of gave me his blessing and said you know, every generation, barnum deserves a new book in each generation. Little did he know i wasnt that much younger than he was. So im aware that my political beliefs, informed b the book. Its the only time in the book when i said that the modern sensibility has to struggle to understand barnum in this situation. So, i tried to sync my way into the century in many ways and to apply my own judgment. I do think one of the things that came out of the review is this question of i know i had been kind of negative here today, but in the course of the book whether i gave him too much credit in fact the New York Times t book review referred to me as his wing man. [laughter]. I understand after he married a 23yearold, did you have something to do with that . [laughter] even married 40 some years to his wife and i think that they were very much in love early on. Barnum spent an incredible amount of time on the road. I think later maybe to get away from her, i dont know. Early on they were separated a lot and she decided to travel and one of the ways they made fun of her when she did travel and imagined a disaster was is t to happen or would be terribly seasick or whatever. So i think that they had grown apart. She did made this marriage which actually happened on valentines day i cant even think what a year would have been. He brought her back and following september they had a Church Wedding and it was announced, but it was still pretty soon his wife died in november. Thank you for your question. One question people tend to asko me is what barnum would hae thought of twitter. [laughter] ive had time to[l think about t and not just blurt out an answer. I think that he would have loved it. He was a genius at using newspapers. He was an enthusiastic advertiser in that way got the attention of editors that became bhis friend and also one of the ways he put kind of replenish they had a couple major fires in the museum and the next day he would get up and start telegraphing around the world. He was in touch with people all around the world to bring new exhibits and then of course later the genius of moving a circus which essentially a small city in the setting it up elsewhere in a matter of a couple of days was all baileys genius but barnum embraced it so i think that he embraced the new technologies of his day such as they were and i cant imagine that they wouldnt be all over twitter making as much publicity as they can. I think im allowed to ask a question, too. What prompted you to start writing books and can you tellbo us more about clarence and matthew. I was interested in that and never got the chance toto ask y. Ive been an editor in newspapers and magazines and ive done some writing, but i wanted to there is a certain point i decided i either needed to write a book or stop thinking about it. And he was a subject that id come to know truly wonderful boothrough a wonderfulbook by aa otoole which is about Clarence King and henry adams and theyre very interestinghe lives. The five of them had a kind of social group. In the book, they were all very intellectual people, very much people from the east and king what sort of come in from the west and a very handsome guy. Everybody seemed to be in love with him, both male and female. And i thought this is a really interesting subject there should be a book about him. So i kept telling my writer friends need to write a book about Clarence King. Hes a really great character. A friend of mine that used to work for the New York Times said he las a last thing that ie never forgotten which is you just cant give away a goodou idea. And part of w what makes it good is your own enthusiasm for it so she said im going to write it myself and i did that. As i said at the beginning, that have led me to Matthew Brady and with both i was very lucky that there had been very good academic biographies about the figures so they helped me out. In fact the biographer of barnum is still alive and extremely generous to me and i wrote him a text yesterday that said after today it will be his again. [laughter] but he was a brilliant to be a different character. There wasnt a lot of paper on him and so a lot of it had to do with looking at the photographs and with then theres the question of what is a brady w photograph. He sent other people love to actually take the photographs. So it was a very different kind of challenge to write about. I was wondering if you saw the greatest showman movie and what you thought about it. I did see the movie and agreed to write something for the daily beast about the little ways in which it didnt quite get him right. But i came out of the movie so enraged i felt i couldnt write a lighthearted piece, so i didnt fulfill fat. It struck me that there were so many ways and this question of the presentday sensibility versus the sensibility of the times. The what offended me the most its like hollywood does the movie and doesnt get the history right. Thats never happened before of course, but it just struck me being perverse because he was so much more interesting than the character that came out in the movie. And then just the whole thing he had to dance whereas one of the people he exhibited was a famous opera singer who traveled around the country together and at one point, jenny lind on new years eve said i dont dance and she said barnum come on you can dance. After he tried for a little bit, she said i do believe you are the worst answer ive ever seen, so i feel quite sure he never danced again and hugh jackman is always dancing. Then anytime anything good happened in the movie, there they are having a drink to celebrate since he was a great temperance person that wouldnt have happened. Those are small things but anyway, my wife liked the movie. [laughter] thank you very much. [applause]