I dont like to always shut people out at the very beginning that walking in right now is the great, great granddaughter eleanor and her husband. [applause] its special to have them but welcome everyone to the museum. I know many of you have been here before but is this everybodys first time . We are delighted to have you on this Beautiful Day in downtown connecticut. It is in fact the last museum for the community that we serve many are familiar in 2010 we were hit by a tornado because that is the kind of stuff that happens and then the year after that was hurricane irene and super storm sandy so thank you to the delegation who support the bonding appropriation because we are just about to embark on a major historic rehab of that building from 1893. To add to that also the congressman has been working very hard with us to get the building on the National Register of. We have been working on that for a long time and the reasons for why we are here today because we are still talking about pt barnum relevant in our lives today. Robert wilson is here to talk about the fact you can contextualize him in a modern way and its something to be looked at and examine and reexamine and brought into modern culture. He is the father of the Entertainment Industry that he was a philanthropist. The doer of good eats many tim times. But enough about me. Thank you for coming to the museum. Please support us. We do programming all year the museum is open during the week the couple of days even during the big historic construction project thats going to be happening soon but with no further ado let me introduce you to bob wills. The editor since 2004 that won the National Award for the best feature in may of 2006 and Digital National magazine for commentary and 2012. For the aarp bulletin of which i am now a member and also the editor of preservation magazine. I want to thank you for that because it is the National Trust that got me into this field so i am credited to view and the founding literary editor of civilization. The magazine and the library of congress in 1994 and 95 during the time that the magazine received the award of general excellence and before civilization he did a couple things. He was the editor for usa today he holds a ba in english from washington and Lee University where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and m. A. In english from the university of virginia. Now shes taught at the university of virginia and a writing program at Johns Hopkins university, George Mason University as well as American University and he is the author of the narrative on the inventor of Clarence King and portraits of a nation that today we are here to celebrate his new book published by simon schuster. We are honored to have him speak today on foreign and american life. Welcome. [applause] i have so many microphones going on and now this one is on. Thank you for the lovely introduction and everything you do for the barnum museum. Thank you for everything you do and the people that work with you have done to help me in writing this book. I also want to thank adrian the curator and just throughout the years i was working on a book that offered me encouragement and lots of good information and helped me a lot with the photographs in the book later on. Im also pleased to be able to tell you that the great barnum scholar at this time or any time arthur is here in the front row. [applause] he could have been forgiven for not being welcoming of someone who wrote a letter and said id like to write a biography of barnum. He said i did that and i did it pretty well, not pretty well but very well. But another person has written very well wrote to me when i was setting out on this and said while he is somebody that deserves a new book every generation. Arthur must have believed it because hes just been stalwart and has held courage and good humor helping me to find things i didnt know i was looking for. I probably could have written a book without arthur but it wouldnt have been nearly as good of a book in it might have taken me years longer so thank you, arthur. Arthur never blushes so dont worry about that. Im in this funny position of i dont know how many people in the world no more about barnum than i do at this point. Maybe a lot but i do know for sure three people who know a lot more than i do are here in this audience so its mildly intimidating to be standing before you. It was a great pleasure to work on this book not only because of these three people and others who were very helpful to me but because of barnum himself. Hes a wonderful character to write a book about and i mean in the sense of a character in a novel, a person of many parts, a person who lets say had his dark side as well as his bright side. As someone who just never failed to engage me intellectually, emotionally. I was drawn to his wit and verbal skills. He had verbal skills as a speaker and writer. Who knows where they came from if you want evidence that certain i dont think that these were learned skills particularly. They may have been selftaught but he had something in that mode that was unusual. This is partly to say for now that hes a wonderful character. Was he a wonderful man this is something we will get to in a few minutes, and the question is part of what made working on this book so interesting. Most of you know the brief outline of his life. You probably know that he was born 22. 3 miles from here at least according to google this morning, in the village of bethel and early on he busied himself with a lot of smaller and then larger entrepreneurial activities. I thought i would read a paragraph from the book where i talk a little bit about the arc of his career. Hes known today primarily for his connection to the circus that came in the last quarter of his life. His principal occupation before that occupations were running the American Museum and being the impresario behind the talent, the evangelic soprano who created a sensation in america in the early 1850s and dozens of other acts of traveling shows. He was also a bestselling author and inspirational lecturer on temperance and success in business and a real estate developer, builder, banker, state legislator, the mayor of the city of bridgeport near or in which he lived most of his adult life. He was even a candidate for congress losing a contest to the cousin also named barnum. In all of these endeavors he was a promoter, relentless advertiser and imaginative concocted of events to draw the interest often feverish interest of potential patrons. Im going to read one other paragraph in a preliminary way just to sort of get you situated with some of the things to come later. Central to the philosophy of success was the relationship to the audience that he developed during the decades as a showman. That centered on the single worst disassociated in his lifetime. Huge self wrote in the 1865 humbug of the world, websters definition is to deceive, to impose upon. Definitions today include folks, fraud, imposter, nonsense, trickery debate coach rick. His book is a survey of such practices intended to save the rising generation from being bamboozled by the unscrupulous other religion, business, politics, medicine or science. But not all forms of this wonderful. Sometimes it could be harmless. He claimed for him generally the accepted definition focused on the des moines variety that he defined as putting on appearances to suddenly a arrest public attention and attract the public eye and ear in other words, what he did. A person that attracted patrons in this way but then foolishly failed to give them to equivalent for their money wouldnt get a Second Chance from customers who would denounce him as a swindler to the swindler and imposter. I think that this whole idea is one of the things that distinguishes him from his reputation as an indepth, and im going to get to that in a second but i want to tell you since the book has been published, a few surprising things have happened that havent happened to mhasnthappd probably wont again and in addition to having you all here and cspan here, i was astonished to see that my publisher made an incredibly beautiful book. I had nothing to do with the physical nature of the book but i think it has a wonderful cov cover. It has a wonderful insight design, and i know i seem to be selling here, forgive me, and it has a 16 page color insert which adrienne and elizabeth from down the road helped me to populate. It also has something called double digits. I dont know if you know what that is often a book is cut straight on the edge and if it is cut rough on the edge it is the voltages and its something very elegant and wonderful. I told my editor early on i really want a book with those edges. He said we can do that. I didnt really believe him until he opened the box and saw that i didnt think it would have been. I told this to my wife, that i said i always wanted those edges and she said ive never even heard the word in our 45 years of marriage. My response to that is every marriage that is successful must have a secret and mine is these edges. Another thing that happened that i will mention briefly it happened right here in this spot cbs news and its wisdom decided to do a piece about barnum, the museum and me. I had a wonderful experience as an editor of a small magazine and somebody that spends a lot of time in his study at home i dont spend a lot of time in front of national tv cameras so that was something else. The third thing is the new yorker of all places in its wisdom did a major piece on the book. They gave four pages by one of the most prominent writers who won the Pulitzer Prize for the book extinction and it was unexpected most of all by my publisher and one of my friends now refers to me as four pages because i got four pages in the new yorker so it was deeply exciting and something that made me very happy although i couldnt help but noticing as an editor and writer and somebody who is trusted to Pay Attention to the nuances of language she seemed to be implying i spent six years writing a book about barnum in the era of trump and havent made any connections between them that i was somehow living in a complete bubble. So this raised a further puzzle about the review which is how did this dimwitted person, meaning me, managed to write a book that did i mention four pages in the new yorker [laughter] and with very little attribution to my doc. Anyway, so theres not a. Some of that can be forgiven, but i felt like there was a moment in the review she tried to twist the nice tomato knife, she took the language and twisted it. There is a sentence in the middle of the review with only three words and the words are wilson admires barnum. This was meant as a great critique. It didnt win me as much as she thought it was because i did admire him. I think there is so much to admire about him. But as i said earlier, one of the things that made it interesting for me to write about him is he wasnt continuously admirable so as i went through his life, i found myself constantly looking at things in the context of his own time is this something he did, the display he was able to bring himself to make because it was generally accepted that the time . But i also tried to look at him as a man coming as a human being and say here are qualities beyond the pale and whatever century or millennium that you live in. That to me gave me the chance to be kind of continuously engaged intellectually. One thing i tried not to do is to work from the assumption that we achieved protection in the given moment which i think is the idea out there very much in the culture now that its easy to dismiss people that dont represent everything we and ourr great wisdom have achieved. One could easily proved to be kaput holes into to the notion of presentism but that is something i did not do. Some of the things i did admire about barnum, the eagerness to make other people happy, his commitment to larger ideas, tempered and eventually to abolition, his commitment to make public entertainment safe for families and children, arthur has written a lot about that in a definitive way to get the stagthestage in the early yf involvement when he started the museum on Lower Broadway it had essentially a theater, you can call it a lecture room because the reputation was so low he didnt want to call it that. As i learned from arthur and others, theaters those days in most places is where prostitutes worked the balconies. Even in the expensive seats there was drunkenness and rowdiness so one of the things they did in that time period was to really commit themselves to moral entertainment and also to lack of drunkenness to create an atmosphere where families could safely go. His philosophy early on is avoiding what he called a profitable philanthropy and the mastery of language to come up with the phrase profitable philanthropy and what he meant by that in part. It was a large chunk of property that barnum gave to the city to create that part but he kept a chunk of it for himself so he pulled the four houses in the middle of the nice park with a great view so that is profitable philanthropy. He helped develop east bridgeport and they had a very generous scheme for developing housing across the river. But they held out every other law for themselves as the price of land over there creeps up as people built houses. But profitable philanthropy turned into real philanthropy in his place and he gave a great deal of money to his church, local hospital in bridgeport, to what is now tubbs university of and others. What sold me and i will get to the commons in a moment, but it was this phenomeno phenomenon ig a better person throughout life as i got to know him better and better i was so impressed with the idea here was a man that had a lot of success early on in life and i think that how many people do you know that are very successful early in life and are not convinced that its because of their perfection as a human being that someho but somehow td everything right and so good things happen to them. He had success and get throughout his life he thought his beliefs on race, philanthropy, and of that quality of kind of renewing himself and becoming a better person was another thing that really made me admire him. The columns are not small. The racism early on this despicable. You can justify it to some degree by the racism at the times but theres also people that are abolitionists from the day the declaration of independence came out and there were many people who were not racist and so its not something that you can dismiss. He did become an abolitionist himself and run for the Connecticut Legislature after the war saying one reason he ran his so he could be, so he could vote for the 13th amendment. He gave a speech favoring giving the vote to the then freed blacks in connecticut. If you read the speech you will not feel completely comfortable with the terms of which he says blacks deserve the vote but nonetheless, he did not. Some of us were beyond the pale often early many of you probably know the story of choice was a slave woman being promoted as being 161yearsold and the nurse made of washington as a baby. Even barnum became embarrassed by that part of his life early on. His treatment of his wife certainly towards the middle and end of their marriage was not acceptable i think. Part of that he came out of a culture thats very much into practical jokes and gruff humor. Parts are pointed out when he took to meet queen victoria. Everything you read about it now is what a wonderful impression they made on the royal family, but he went and read victorias diary, the journal, and barnum spoke to tom and i suspect its partly shthats partly she didnt understand american humor, but there was a lot in barnums humor that was rough and a lot of it was directed towards his wife in ways that i think were pretty hard to forgive a. And it must be said that she was somebody who was unusually needy for wealth and admiration. So, the question i question in d its a question that has come out of a lot of the reviews is was he admirable or was he not, have justified is my admiration and it makes me think that if he were in this situation, he would say there is a dispute here. The atlantic says one thing, the new yorker says another. You must decide for yourselves by reading the book. So thats what i would do if i were barnum. Im going to read a few short passages from the book two of these have to do with things that happened nearby so i thought that might be appropriate. He was a sort of jeffersonian democrat, a member of the universalist church. Even as a young man, he was a uncomfortable with the sort of energy and ferocity of the role of religion in public life and he believed very strongly in the separation of church and state, so strongly that at the age of 21, he founded a newspaper called the heralded freedom, in which he propounded this idea that church and state should be separated but he was not intended to do that. He also wanted to attack the people that felt otherwise including his uncle among othe others. He managed to get himself sued for libel several times in the short time he ran the paper. About a year after he started it resulted in a judge ruling he could either pay 100 for having labeled somebody or spend too much on prison or jail and he decided even though he had the money to take the latter step yet heres how he talked about that. I chose to go to prison, editor of the hartford times and later the lincoln secretary of the navy. I chose to go thinking it would be the means of opening many eyes. Indeed he continued because of the trial, the excitement of this and the neighboring towns is great and it will have a grand effect. His purpose was to tell him another newspaper editor would be covering the matter at length as word of the heralded freedom and to ask them to make such remarks. His ability to the goodwill of others was the harbinger of things to come. It is the first example of drawing attention to his debates come and represent himself. In his memoirs, he writes that he was allowed to have a cell in the denver area jail fitted with wallpaper and carpet, which was shortly a rarity in the imprisonment. While in jail he was about to continue editing his newspaper to write members of letters received so many that he found a seems this visit to burden some. The communications were beyond the cell and allowed him not onlallow him not onlyto strip lr coverage but also to engineer what can only be called the locaa localholiday to celebratee from jail. A group called the committee on arrangements was formed. They met him at the jail on the morning of his last day, december 5, 1832 and a struggled with him across the village street by the courthouse where he had been tri