TAC        

Bringing  History to Light

WHO IS JOICE HETH?

In 2017, audiences were delivered a breathtakingly false gospel: The Greatest Showman, a musical biopic that transforms the notorious exploiter P.T. Barnum into a heroic champion of the "misfits and freaks." This film is the ultimate example of cultural whitewashing—a work that doesn't just ignore history, but actively inverts it, turning an unredeemable predator into a patron saint and his victims into willing beneficiaries. It is a dangerous, seductive lie.

THE CINEMATIC LIE: A SONG OF ACCEPTANCE

The film’s central thesis, encapsulated in its anthem “This Is Me,” presents Barnum as a visionary who gave “unique” people a family and a stage where they could be proud of who they are. Hugh Jackman’s Barnum is portrayed as a man of boundless optimism, a dreamer who fights for his performers against a cruel, elitist world.

THE HISTORICAL REALITY: THE ARCHITECT OF HUMAN ZOOS

The real Phineas Taylor Barnum was a man who looked upon human suffering and saw a business model. His “museum” and circus were not sanctuaries; they were carceral exhibits designed to gawk at, ridicule, and dehumanize those he displayed.

Joice Heth: The Grandmother He Tortured and Autopsied Publicly for Profit.

The film completely erases Barnum’s foundational crime, the one that launched his career:

• The Purchase: In 1835, Barnum purchased an enslaved, blind, and partially paralyzed Black woman named Joice Heth, who was believed to be around 80 years old.

• The Lie: He cynically marketed her as the 161-year-old nursemaid to George Washington. He chained her to a chair and displayed her 12 hours a day, forcing her to tell fabricated stories about "little George."

• The Final Indignity: After becoming rich by exploiting Heth while she was alive when Heth died in 1836, Barnum did not mourn her or give her a decent burial, he sold tickets to a public autopsy of her body, charging 50 cents admission to thousands of spectators who watched her be publicly dissected in a New York City saloon. He then claimed the autopsy proved his hoax, having cynically exploited her in life and in death.

This is the man the musical portrays as a loving father figure. This single act—the ticketed autopsy of an old Black woman he owned and exploited —should forever bar Barnum from being presented as any kind of hero.

The "Freak Show": Exploitation, Not Empowerment

The film’s core celebration of the “freak show” is a profound historical perversion.

• In the Film: The performers are a cohesive, happy family who find strength and community on stage.

• In Reality: Barnum’s performers were indentured attractions, often locked into brutal contracts. They were not partners; they were products. He exploited people with real medical conditions (microcephaly, gigantism, dwarfism, albinism) and fabricated others (“The Fiji Mermaid” was a monkey torso sewn to a fish tail). He gave them degrading stage names ("Zip the Pinhead," "The Bearded Lady") and forced them to perform humiliating acts for a jeering public.

• The "Happy Family" Myth: The real-life "circus family" was built on control and financial dependence. Any sense of community was forged in spite of Barnum’s exploitation, not because of his benevolence.

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The Disney-Doublethink: Erasing the Erasure

The most insidious aspect is that this film exists under the Walt Disney/20th Century Studios banner. This is the same corporation whose founder’s racist archives we have just exposed. The cycle is now complete: Disney first pioneered the sanitization of American history through animation, and now, it uses its vast resources to sanitize the sanitizers, transforming one of history’s most cynical exploiters into a symbol of human triumph.

This is not an innocent mistake. It is a calculated, commercial decision to prioritize a marketable message of empowerment over the inconvenient truth of exploitation. It tells the audience, “Feel good about this,” when the only morally defensible response is to feel revulsion.

“The Greatest Showman is the most successful propaganda film of the 21st century. It doesn't ask you to forget history; it asks you to celebrate its exact opposite.”
— Dr. Benjamin Reiss, author of The Showman and the Slave

The Moral Crime of Feel-Good History

The Greatest Showman is more than a bad biopic. It is a cultural crime. It launders the reputation of a monster, erases the suffering of his victims (particularly Black women like Joice Heth), and provides a sentimental, musical justification for the very exploitation it claims to condemn. It is the final, polished product of the Disneyfication process: a world where every dark past has a dramatic sanitizing, and every villain can be rewritten as a hero if it sells enough tickets.

This is the ultimate destination of the cultural engineer’s work: not just to hide the truth, but to make us applaud the lie.  Literally almost nothing in the movie was based on historical fact in the manner in which it was portrayed. 

The violence of sanitization is not a bygone historical relic, but an ongoing, profitable enterprise blatantly practiced today. It disconnects the unspeakable sins of the past from the propaganda of the present.  It encourages an unsuspecting, unknowing public to applaud and praise a man of dark and insidious actions while Disney pockets billions of dollars in the process.  In actuality, Disney has supplanted the criminal P.T. Barnum and gorged itself on the sufferings of untold millions whom the world has tossed in the trash bin of erasure.

As I researched more of Joice Heth’s sad and painful life, realizing that however terrible her life might have been before PT Barnum, even in such a wretched condition as he found her, a poor debilitated slave, he had no compassion whatsoever and took pleasure in increasing her agony.  And finally, when I think of Joice Heth, I see my mother or my grandmother being tortured even to the point of an autopsy table as a money making display; and then tossed away like unwanted trash. That’s why this coalition was established.  That’s why it will be successful even if only in resurrecting her name into the memory of we her descendants.

The Day of Reckoning has arrived.

Yahoshuah Israel