A Different Bridgeport, A Different Connecticut

For Throwback Wednesday, the Park City's salad days

P. T. Barnum was a white supremacist.

Who knew?

I’m still working my way through “Saving America’s Story: How Ideological Capture at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History Erases Our Heritage,” recently released by the Domestic Policy Council. But the report’s mention of how the Entertainment Nation exhibit bashed the legendary circus impresario caught my attention. Had to do some digging, but I knew that many years ago, I reviewed a book that included a profile of the native Nutmegger. Here’s the column — from 2009.

Enjoy!

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There was another Connecticut.

Runaway government, rampant welfare dependency, declining household income, disappearing private-sector jobs, and a dwindling young-adult population have led many Nutmeggers to conclude — probably accurately — that the state doesn’t have much of a future.

But within the lifetimes of our oldest citizens, Connecticut was a very different place. Government was frugal. As a result, rivers of investment flowed into the state. Maniacal, profit-seeking individualism was the norm, making innovation and wealth-creation widespread. Jobs with good wages were plentiful.

Eric D. Lehman’s Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City, published by The History Press, recounts a portion of the Connecticut that once was. Lehman, who teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Bridgeport, has penned a revealing, if slim, glimpse backward to an era that bears very little resemblance to ours.

Phineas T. Barnum, born in Bethel, was a retailer and newspaperman before he found his true calling as a promoter of all things — and animals, and people — unusual and/or spectacular. The man who made Barnum’s career, Bridgeport native Charles Sherwood Stratton, was born of normal size. But as Lehman writes, when Barnum met Stratton in 1842, “the four-year-old boy was only twenty-five inches high and weighed only fifteen pounds.” The “showman’s dream” suffered from a “faulty pituitary gland [that] caused Charles to keep this very small size but left him without bodily deformities. In fact, the boy … was quite striking, with fair hair and complexion.”

“General Tom Thumb” turned out to be a natural performer, and with his hamminess and Barnum’s business sense, the two made fortunes. After conquering America, a European tour followed. The “general” was granted audiences with Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington. (Stratton dressed as Napoleon.)

When Barnum returned from the Continent, a then-unknown Walt Whitman asked if the trip had weakened the promoter’s appreciation of America. Barnum’s response was unambiguous: “No! Not a bit of it! Why, sir, you can’t imagine the difference. There, everything is frozen — kings and things — formal, but absolutely frozen, here it is life. Here it is freedom, and here are men.”