At 15, P.T. Barnum showed what he was made of. He shrewdly traded some trash for a peddler’s wagon full of green bottles. Then he opened a lottery, sold a thousand tickets, and handed out the empty bottles as prizes.

Barnum eventually grew rich with his museum, his circus, and his spectacular coup in bringing the singer Jenny Lind to America, but he longed for something else. As his biographer Neil Harris put it, Barnum sought “approbation”—

Swindlers had existed for a long time, but none had the effrontery to call themselves philanthropists or to make money from revelations of their own cunning and deceit.

The public loved his spectacles but a certain class of people deplored his ethics.

I am not sure why contemporary higher education hasn’t more forthrightly claimed P.T. Barnum as its true progenitor. His influence surely outshines Thomas Jefferson, Mark Hopkins,…

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