Barnum’s Law
There’s a sucker born every minute.
The saying is irredeemably associated with the great nineteenth-century American showman Phineas Taylor Barnum, despite efforts by Robert Pelton curator of the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport Connecticut to pin it on one of P.T.’s friends, a con man by the name of Joseph ‘Paper Collar’ Bessimer. Mr. Pelton may well be right, but Barnum gets popular credit for the remark because of his skill at roping in the credulous by the thousand. And he also knew how to get rid of them when he wanted to - as in his American Museum in New York City where he is said to have posted the sign ‘This way to the egress’ which led unlearned crowds along to the exit thereby making room for new ‘patrons’.
P. T. Barnum also has been credited with the observation that “You can fool most of the people most of the time”, which is better known as Lincoln’s First Law. All of which tends to give Barnum a blacker character than he deserves. The attractions that he staged were immensely popular and people didn’t seem to mind if he occasionally put one over on them - ‘humbugged’ them, in the parlance of the time. Thus the public forgave him after an autopsy indicated that Joice Heth, billed as George Washington’s nurse, probably wasn’t over 80 when she died in 1836, not 161 as claimed. (Barnum insisted that he himself had been taken in.) He also survived the admission that the famous Feejee Mermaid was a hoax apparently manufactured by a Japanese fisherman who joined the top half of a monkey to the bottom half of a fish. On the other hand, Tom Thumb Jenny Lind and Jumbo were equally marvelous - and real.
Barnum, then, did not necessarily adhere to what commonly is regarded as the natural corollary to his law: “Never give a sucker an even break.” (This has been embellished into “It’s morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.”) The corollary dating from the 1920s has been attributed to various authorities of that era including Edward F. Albee, the circus-ticket seller who helped form the 400-theatre Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit; Wilson Mizner, celebrated wit of the 1920s; Mary Louise Cecilia ‘Texas’ Guinan, the entertainer and nightclub owner who frequently welcomed patrons with “Hello Sucker”; and W. C. Fields, the nonpareil who may have ad-libbed the quip in Poppy a play by Dorothy Donnelly that was produced in 1923. Any one of them was perfectly capable of coming up with the line or of stealing it and pretending to be the originator.
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