Word: barnumism
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Like many popular zoologists, the author is sometimes tempted to play the Barnum of biology, and then he runs an occupational risk: to demonstrate that nature is not merely a catalogue of forms, he is tempted to set it up as a sideshow of freaks. Naturalist Wendt is preserved from this pitfall by his almost religious feeling for the mystery of life and its stupendous labor of evolution-a feeling perhaps most plainly and profoundly expressed by Spinoza: "The more man understands individual objects, the more he understands...
...dead of night, vandals sneaked into a Bridgeport, Conn, cemetery, made off with a marble statue of "General" Tom Thumb (1838-83), whom P. T. Barnum glorified as the most exhibited midget of all time. Swiping the grave marker was quite a feat: the stone Thumb stood atop a 3O-ft. pedestal, weighs...
...original Abe Minsky (1888-1949), the Barnum of burlesque...
...patent-medicine hawker, he learned song-and-dance routines to help sell the family product: Bailey's Gypsy Liniment. At 120-proof, the stuff worked like magic. Later, in vaudeville, Bill hoofed up with a singer named Dave Hodges, who changed his name to Barnum so the pair could work their way around the country as Bailey & Barnum. They were a sort of circus minimus until a Manhattan impresario gave them a five-minute spot in Fred and Adele Astaire's Lady, Be Good. The playbill did not mention their act, Bailey says airily, but "it stopped...
From the circuits and the speakeasies, Bailey & Barnum began picking up about $900 a week. But as Bill tells it now, in 1929 he saw the stock-market crash coming at him one way and talkies the other, so he broke up the old act and left the country. With his wife, he drifted east via South Africa and Australia, did routines in Peking, Tsingtao, Manila, Java and Shanghai. Then he put in two weeks at Singapore's famed Raffles Hotel, looked over the city and decided: "This is the place...