Word: barnumism
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Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Through Oct. 24. Boston Garden, Causeway St., Boston. Tickets $9.50-$27.50. Call (800) 828-7080 for more information...
Hucksterism is a deeply American trait. P.T. Barnum was a truer man of his time and place than Henry James, and sharpies' 19th century land-promoting broadsides sucked more settlers west than any high-minded exhortations to manifest destiny. If England is a nation of shopkeepers, the U.S. is a land of pitchmen; it is part of the national charm...
While the Jane Addamses of the country gasped, the public poured millions of dollars into the hands of the men who knew that the working man and woman craved to have their passions excited, not their minds informed. P.T. Barnum was filling the halls and making money off it. While Andrew Carnegie was endowing public libraries that most of the public never used and Olmstead was building public parks the public never...
Today, television news is the P.T. Barnum, the Coney island the dancing lady and the diving horse, step night up, ladies and gents, it's live, it's true, it's too disgusting to believe. The viewer can release his or her passions, desires in the comfort and safety of a half-hour, non-interactive, for your-pleasure-only freak show...
...remember him being aggressively on thecutting edge of left wing action, butsympathetic," Richard Barnum '69 says...