"Not How Easy It Was to Deceive the Public, but Rather, How Much the Public Enjoyed Being Deceived"

"It's a story that The Greatest Showman, which presents Barnum as a smooth-talking Harold Hill-type lovable con, doesn't address. Hugh Jackman's Barnum would never be a person comfortable purchasing an enslaved woman to turn a tidy profit. 'Rewrite the Stars,' indeed, to quote a song from the new movie.
"As Benjamin Reiss, professor and chair of English at Emory University, and author of The Showman and The Slave, of Barnum, explains in an interview with Smithsonian.com, Barnum's legacy has become a sort of cultural touchstone. 'The story of his life that we choose to tell is in part the story that we choose to tell about American culture,' he says. 'We can choose to erase things or dance around touchy subjects and present a kind of feel good story, or we can use it as an opportunity to look at very complex and troubling histories that our culture has been grappling with for centuries.'"

Jackie Mansky at Smithsonian casts a wary eye toward P.T. Barnum.