satire upon all of us”: The Self-Made Man as Confidence Man in P.T. Barnum’s America

Abstract

In this essay Thompson considers P.T. Barnum’s simultaneous inhabitation of the seemingly antithetical roles of self-made man and confidence man in his autobiographical and semi-autobiographical writings. Barnum’s profit-motivated self-satire implies a broader social critique of America’s celebration of the self-made man. By highlighting his own hypocrisy in satiric productions published in popular media, Barnum neutralizes his critics by controlling, via preemptive embodiment, negative depictions of himself. But Barnum reserves a space for himself within the dominant mythology by elevating himself to the venerable positions of American success stories even as he demeans self-made men. In this way, he both mocks and claims respectability, exposing himself and others as frauds while attempting to justify or account for his own fraud as within the bounds of middle-class social norms. Barnum’s self-fashioning as a self-made con man exposes moral and cultural élites as themselves caught up in an economy of false confidence and slippery appearances, and thus no different than other two-bit operators.