The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum

Abstract

These two books are much alike: Both are thick descriptive cultural histories of Barnumesque humbug and even share a common publisher and origins as University of California, Berkeley, dissertations. Still, they are not at all redundant and are worth reading together. James W. Cook's The Arts of Deception draws on the well-known theme of the nineteenth-century urban confidence man to explore commercial exhibits based on outrageous deception. He focuses on several features from P. T. Barnum's traveling shows and museum, including the presumably 161year-old nurse of George Washington, the Feejee Mermaid, and “What is it?” (a racially stereotyped, half man-half beast). But Cook actually presents a much wider analysis of playful deception. He roots the modern fascination with the unbelievable in the Renaissance curiosity cabinet; it was elaborated in the eighteenth-century European deception of the Automaton Chess-Player, a mechanical Turk figure that (with the manipulations of an elaborately hidden expert player) defeated human opponents at chess. Early interest in the uncommon but seemingly real fruits of nature and science, displayed by Charles Willson Peale and others, was transformed by the 1830s into more openly commercial spectacles culminating in Barnum. Following Neil Harris and others, Cook finds not a duped and manipulated audience, but a subtle interaction between a storytelling showman and an amused urban America that enjoyed the deception. Barnum's crowds used his spectacles to work out their fears and fascinations surrounding issues of race, modern commerce, and self-control. An especially central concern was the uncertain line dividing the confidence man from the self-made man in the emerging cities of the nineteenth-century United States. Although Barnum gradually “uplifts” his shows with moral and educational themes to please a new middle class, Cook finds other examples of commercial deception that flourished in the late nineteenth century. He explains how magicians in a secular, skeptical age prospered by adapting to the demands of bourgeois theatricality and by winning admiration for their skillful display of illusion. He ends with a discussion of the trompe l'oeil ultrarealistic painting of William Harnett, a seemingly archaic art form but still a powerful expression of the popular imagination.