The Celebrated Showman Unmasked

Benjamin Reiss. The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii + 267 pages. Halftones, notes, and index. $29.95.

In July 1835, a sometime clerk, lottery agent, and grocer from Connecticut ventured into the entertainment business. He did so by exhibiting a blind, withered, and partially paralyzed African-American women, first in New York City, and then, over the subsequent eight months, throughout New York State and New England. The exhibitor was Phinneas T. Barnum, soon to become the country's foremost purveyor of commodified culture. The elderly woman he put on display was Joice Heth, a Kentucky slave whom Barnum advertised as "The Greatest Natural and National Curiosity in the World": ostensibly a deeply religious 161-year-old wonder who had served as George Washington's nurse in his early years of life. At almost every stop on the tour's itinerary, throngs of visitors paid to hear, examine, question, prod, and converse with Heth. This touring exhibit, the relationships among its key participants (chiefly Barnum and Heth, but also Barnum's confederate Levi Lyman), and its place in nineteenth-century American culture receive Benjamin Reiss's detailed attention in The Showman and the Slave.

Embracing the interpretive methodology of cultural studies pioneered by the British scholar Stuart Hall, Reiss's book primarily follows a chronological organization. Relying heavily on Barnum's autobiographical writings, Lyman's fictional promotional pamphlet about Heth's life, newspaper accounts, and a handful of memoirs by audience members, Part I tracks the Heth exhibition's pivotal episodes, including a public autopsy after her death in February 1836, which had the professed goal of determining her actual age. Part II then analyzes later representations and recollections of Heth, beginning with the duelling newspaper exposés about Heth, Barnum, and the autopsy that filled the pages of New York City newspapers through a good part of 1836, and moving on to Barnum's periodic autobiographical reflections, penned over the next several decades. In both of these sections, Reiss focuses predominantly on the perspective of Barnum and the urban white northerners who visited or read about the exhibit. A brief final chapter speculates on the pre-exhibit life of Joice Heth, on her responses to and understanding of the tour, and on her contributions to Barnum's strategic vision as a cultural promoter.

In some regards, The Showman and the Slave is reminiscent of Paul Johnson's and Sean Wilentz's The Kingdom of Matthias. Like Johnson and Wilentz, Reiss uses out-of-the-ordinary events and atypical historical actors to explore cultural norms and social tensions. Unlike Johnson and Wilentz, though, Reiss does not seek to embed his analysis within a resolutely narrative framework. Instead, each key episode in the Heth exhibit and aftermath serves as a launching pad for ruminations about antebellum culture and society, mostly in the antebellum urban northeast. (As such, the book should have included a chronology of key events to assist readers in situating themselves.) Those ruminations take numerous directions and work on several interconnected levels. To make sense of Joice Heth on tour, Reiss declares, is to "catch a slice of mid-nineteenth-century America off guard," providing entry to that society's "unspoken assumptions" and its "underlying and competing fictions of national, racial, regional, class- and gender-based, religious, and individual identities" (p. 5). In Isiah Berlin's terms, Reiss is a scholarly "fox," who seeks out multiple meanings and untidy associations, rather than a "hedgehog," who pursues one over-arching idea or argument. ¹

One of Reiss's analytical preoccupations is biographical, focusing on Barnum and Heth. Reiss offers a revisionist interpretation of Barnum's rise to prominence, placing his embrace and manipulation of the era's virulent racism in stark relief alongside his more well-known innovations for getting, keeping, and wringing profits from public notice. In so doing, he both builds on and quarrels with the growing corps of...