Mark Twain was a complex, sometimes infuriating, easily duped genius. He made many disastrous business alliances based on misplaced trust in men who were essentially conning him for his money, so it's tempting to think he might have been taken in by the orange bunco artist, but ... naw ... Mark Twain was too genetically alert to pompous windbaggery and loved deflating it. After all, it was Mark Twain who coined the defining term for the times -- "the Gilded Age" -- and attacked the robber barons savagely.
I found this passage in Chernow's book most enlightening for understanding Mark Twain's politics and for guessing how he would have viewed Jethro in the White House:
After campaigning for Rutherford B. Hayes in the 1876 and James Garfield in the 1880 presidential races, Mark Twain seemed, at least outwardly, to have become a stalwart of the Republican Party .... But, an iconoclast to the core, he was not cut out for strict party allegiance, telling a reporter between those two elections: "I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat -- for any length of time. Vacillation is my particular forte." He identified with the Liberal Republican wing of the party, which detested political bosses, favored civil service reform and free trade, and endorsed clean government. These Republicans stressed morality rather than ideology in political matters and clung to the belief that character was the foremost criterion for public office, not a candidate's partisan agenda.
Needless to remind readers that both the Democratic and the Republican parties of the 1880s were very different animals than they are now. The Democratic Party was harbor for white supremacists who either excused slavery or actively defended it. The Republican Party was the party of Lincoln and on the whole the liberals of their day.
Mark Twain was born essentially a Southerner in Missouri, in a family -- let alone a region -- where slavery was the practice, never seriously questioned after the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The future writer's own father owned at least one slave, but Mark Twain was bright enough to see the humanity in people of all stations and conditions. After all, he created the character Jim, the runaway slave that Huck Finn teams up with and who is the noblest character in that book. Huckleberry Finn was banned all over the South because of its dangerous liberalism (and then -- different story -- it got banned all over again in the North in recent years because of its dangerous use of the n-word, and thereby hangs the alluring and sweetly stuffed pinata of opinion about how most white men, even one as smart as Mark Twain, will never be completely shed of their racism).
Mark Twain's transformation into a Yankee Republican did not kick into high gear until he married a rich Connecticut girl from an abolitionist family. He always wanted to please Olivia, and she ruled him (at least while he was at home). He even gave up his whiskey and 15-cigars-a-day habits when he and Olivia first set up housekeeping, but that abstemiousness didn't last. He once admitted to a friend that he couldn't write without a cigar in his hand to steady his concentration. So seems pretty obvious that his "liberal" attitude toward Blacks after the Civil War was maybe also strategically cosmetic, to please the wife he loved and doted on, and that he was always essentially just a rough country boy who used the n-word without thought or -- in fact -- ill will.
I like complicated people.
2 comments:
You forgot to say about Sam Clemens being opposed to US imperialism and
colonialism. He only saw the Spanish American War in 1898 (died 1910),
and that was enough for him.
Yes, my memory of previous reading is that Mark Twain fell out with William Howard Taft, who was the governor general of the Philippines, for the brutality the US was dealing out to Filipino rebels. (Haven't got to that episode yet in the Chernow book.) Twain's view of race -- and his undeniable baked-in racism -- are very complicated topics. He said many nasty things about American Indians, and never publicly repented them, like he repented being a Confederate when he married and went north to Connecticut and became enormously famous. Mainly, he was a cynic, saw most humans and human behavior as uproariously absurd. Otherwise, it's hard to pin a firm BELIEF on him. He seems only to believe in the joke of human life. And also -- not so incidentally -- he chased filthy lucre. He was always seeking a path to becoming a mogul among moguls -- made tons of money on the lecture circuit and spent tons on a lavish lifestyle, building possibly the biggest house in Hartford and employing platoons of servants. The same man who gave us two poor humans seeking freedom adrift on the Mississippi. The same man. Human nature is always a circus of contradictions, ambiguities, and irony. Don't you love it!
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