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The Greatest Showman has great music but makes the life of an interesting man far less interesting than it actually was
His theater wasn't burned down because people thought the theater was immoral.
It was burned down by Confederate sympathizers during the civil war ticked that Barnum was publicly pro-union in a South-sympathizing city (NYC).
It was burned down by Confederate sympathizers during the civil war ticked that Barnum was publicly pro-union in a South-sympathizing city (NYC).
He wasn't a proto-progressive celebrating diversity. He was a Republican teetotaler and abolitionist who advocated for "all souls which Christ has saved."
He loved a good hoax to entertain people and also testified against spiritualists in fraud cases and published debunkings of public frauds.
He ended his career as an elected official and civil servant, and the reason he invited Jenny Lind wasn't that she could get him into "classy" theaters but that she was a famous advocate of moral reform and temperance who would donate proceeds to educational charities.
The Greatest Showman leans hard into "Barnum the proto-progressive" and "Barnum the businessman" and misses the fact that the moral scolds the movie mocks...
.... are also PT Barnum!
.... are also PT Barnum!
PT Barnum built a theater called the "Moral Lecture Hall" because he thought that would sound family friendly and fun.
Jenny Lind was famous for singing in plain dress with little fanfare, and she was not known as particularly pretty, and accounts of her interactions with PT Barnum suggest professional collegiality but personal distance.
We like to paint history in our colors but the reality is the landscape of moral reform, entertainment, human rights, and respectibility in 19th century America was just not the one we know today.
Also, this account can always be counted on to remind you of the erasure of temperance as an important movement for moral reform and political issue. The great forgetting of temperance clouds our view of American history.
(says the now-Lutheran guy literally named after a prominent early temperance activist)
Also lowkey the reason PT Barnum's life is framed as "rescuing the people prudes see as deviants and minorities and giving them dignity through theater" instead of "crusading moral reformer sticking it to the south and practically inventing an industry" is.... Disney!
Disney likes the former framing and not the latter. It irritates the right people.
omg I totally forgot the scene where Jenny Lind gives a toast with champagne
THEY WERE ALL TEETOTALERS
THEY WERE ALL TEETOTALERS
THEY
WERE
TEETOTALERS
WERE
TEETOTALERS
Also the movie makes it seem like he had 2 daughters but actually he had 4 daughters and one of them died, and that one was kinda traumatic, woulda been a good plot point
