Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Not long before, the editor of a Connecticut newspaper had received a letter from a local teenager warning about the larger, ongoing part of the Great Delirium—his “fears” of “the evils resulting from undue religious excitement” going on around him. After the newspaper declined to publish it, the boy started his own newspaper. As he recalled the fervor years later, “by means of systematized effort, large numbers of people of all ages, but especially the young, were converted” to born-again Christianity. “So great was the alarm awakened in the minds of some of these converts, that they became victims of religious frenzy.… Many thousands of our citizens were influenced by the religious enthusiasm which was sweeping like a tornado through our land.” That young man was Phineas Barnum, known as P.T., who by his early twenties was earning a living in Connecticut selling lottery tickets.