St. Phineas.

• Author: Mueller, John
• Position: Review

How P.T. Barnum helped invent business ethics

The Life of P.T. Barnum: Written By Himself, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 404 pages, $14.95 paper

The legendary impresario P.T. Barnum (1810-1891) is best known as a consummate charlatan whose perspective on life and business is summed up in the contemptuous contention, "There's a sucker born every minute." It is testimony to the power of first impressions that this popular image persists even though it is very substantially wrong. In fact, not only did the great showman never make the statement, but it would have been wildly out of character for him to have uttered it.

Contrary to his popular image, Barnum generally conducted his business enterprises in a virtuous manner, respecting his customers and making sure they were satisfied. Indeed, he was among the first to appreciate fully--and to articulate--that an honest approach was the most reliable path to long-term wealth. He was, in other words, one of the pioneers of business ethics.

As A.H. Saxon points out in his superb biography, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (1989), much of the fault for the showman's lasting reputation lies with Barnum himself. In 1854, at the strikingly early age of 44, Barnum penned the first edition of his autobiography. In it, he frankly and exuberantly exposed the various deceptions and "humbugs" of his early business life. Notorious among these was his managership of a mentally agile, if physically decrepit, 80-year-old black woman who claimed convincingly not only to be 140 years old but to have been George Washington's nurse. Then there was his exhibition of the absurd and disgusting "Feejee Mermaid" that seemed upon examination to be the head and upper torso of a dead monkey crudely sewn to the body of an equally dead fish--which is exactly what it was.

That early autobiography has now been reprinted by the University of Illinois Press with a lively introduction by Terence Whalen, a literary scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago who specializes in 19th-century America. Both the reprint of the autobiography and Whalen's introduction will probably serve to perpetuate the image of Barnum as a con man.

In his Life and other writings, Barnum attempted to defend himself from the negative image with two stratagems. First, he insisted that his book performed a public service by exposing deceptive business practices. For example, at the age of 19, he engaged in the lottery business and was shocked to discover...