Barnum, P.T.: Automata

P. T. Barnum et al.: 19th-c. Automata.

In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962), Daniel Boorstin acknowledges Barnum as one of the creators of advanced American-style hokum, with a genius for understanding what would fool people and make them even happier when they learned they'd been fooled (and fooled again, which many wouldn't catch). His career is highly important for that of Donald J. Trump, an American President, but relevant here as an illustration what an expert thought would interest large numbers of Americans of his era.

The successful American advertiser knows how to make news. A notorious pioneer was P. T. Barnum (1810–1891), whom advertising textbooks still treat as the first large-scale practitioner of many modern publicity techniques. He was a genius at making pseudo-events, although they were often so crude that they could not titillate us today. [...] In 1835 he exhibited Joice Heth, an aged Negress whom he advertised as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. For a while he made fifteen hundred dollars a week from her. Showing his mastery of the art of compounding pseudo-events, he then increased his publicity by attacking the whole exhibition as a hoax. “The fact is, Joice Heth is not a human being,” he wrote the newspapers, “… simply a curiously constructed automaton, made up of whalebone, india-rubber, and numerous springs ingeniously put together and made to move at the slightest touch, according to the will of the operator. The operator is a ventriloquist.” (Kindle copy, ch. 6, pp. 160-61)

RDE, finishing, 31Aug25