The Greatest Showman has great music but makes the life of an interesting man far less interesting than it actually was
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His theater wasn't burned down because people thought the theater was immoral. It was burned down by Confederate sympathizers during the civil war ticked that Barnum was publicly pro-union in a South-sympathizing city (NYC).
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He wasn't a proto-progressive celebrating diversity. He was a Republican teetotaler and abolitionist who advocated for "all souls which Christ has saved."
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He loved a good hoax to entertain people and also testified against spiritualists in fraud cases and published debunkings of public frauds.
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He ended his career as an elected official and civil servant, and the reason he invited Jenny Lind wasn't that she could get him into "classy" theaters but that she was a famous advocate of moral reform and temperance who would donate proceeds to educational charities.
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The Greatest Showman leans hard into "Barnum the proto-progressive" and "Barnum the businessman" and misses the fact that the moral scolds the movie mocks... .... are also PT Barnum!
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PT Barnum built a theater called the "Moral Lecture Hall" because he thought that would sound family friendly and fun.
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Jenny Lind was famous for singing in plain dress with little fanfare, and she was not known as particularly pretty, and accounts of her interactions with PT Barnum suggest professional collegiality but personal distance.
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Lind's life was also more complicated than that, though. Consider her relationship with Mendelssohn.
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