What Would Mark Twain Say about Donald Jethro Trump?

 

I've been reading and savoring Ron Chernow's new and massive biography of Mark Twain. The book's so fat and heavy it's made reading in bed, which I favor, almost impossible. Dropping the book on my face could be fatal, or at least disfiguring.

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.

 

For Pete's Sake, Just Stop It

We see this morning that a high school in Philadelphia will stop using "Huckleberry Finn" because a tiny fraction of its accurate-to-the-19th-Century language makes students uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable with contemporary school systems that allow the students to determine the curriculum based on what makes them uncomfortable.

The statue of "Silent Sam," the Confederate soldier, on the campus of UNC-Chapel Hill gets repeatedly vandalized because he's a symbol of the Old South, slavery and all. That's right. An historical artifact inspires the emotional use of spray paint, and we're supposed to wink at that.

Controversy erupts at Yale University because a residence hall is named for John C. Calhoun, a big defender of slavery (not to even mention "nullification") before the Civil War. If we start abrading the names of former vice presidents for beliefs that offend us now, may we pulverize the marble busts of Spiro Agnew and Dick Cheney, who now occupy plinths in the U.S. Capitol? Or simply deal with the curiosity of their particular moments and ironies in our American political history?

The sand-blasting of history will not change history. The United States was an avid promoter and utilizer of slavery. We should remember that fact, not attempt to efface it from the built landscape and squelch its artifacts from the schoolroom.

When we start purifying the past by erasing its presence in the present, where do we stop? No public figure in American history, whose monument or likeness or mere name (fer Gawd's sake) might offend someone with its embedded memory of wrong-doing or wrong thought, would ever be sufficiently free of civic sin.

Christopher Columbus? How does removing his name from a national day for post-office closings cleanse his and the collective Conquistedores' genocide against the Indians? Making ourselves feel satisfied that we've somehow taken revenge for the past by erasing a memory in the present is a fool's game.

The Age of Exploration was full of greedy jerks. The U.S. presidency, let alone the vice presidency, attracted ambitious jerks. The history of religion is replete with pious jerks. Some of those jerks are actually famous now for occasionally rising above their jerkhood. Thomas Jefferson was a trainwreck of contradictions, yet we honor him for the light and not the darkness.

The American university is now sometimes terrorized by pious anti-historians. I'm actually proud of them for learning that there's a dark side to almost every era, every "advancement," every public figure. Hell, Margaret Sanger, who brought us women's liberation via birth control, has been outed as a racist. But to join the wrecking crew that thinks pulling down statues changes hearts and minds puts young people in the same league with the dudes that "purified" their world by blowing up an ancient giant statue of Buddha.

Mammon in America

I've been reading the 40-lb. Volume One of the Mark Twain Autobiography and can not avoid the comparison between our Age of Koch-suckers and Pope-lickers and the Gilded Age of robber barons that Mark Twain witnessed up close. Prophetic, this passage on Jay Gould, composed in 1906 (Jay Gould's unscrupulous financial speculation made his name a byword for ruthless greed. He looted the assets of the Erie Railroad and in his attempt to corner the gold market in 1869, he triggered the panic of Black Friday by which thousands of people lost their life savings):

Jay Gould had just then reversed the commercial morals of the United States. He had put a blight upon them from which they have never recovered, and from which they will not recover for as much as a century to come. Gay Gould was the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it. They had respected men of means before his day, but along with this respect was joined the respect due to the character and industry which had accumulated it. But Jay Gould taught the entire nation to make a god of the money and the man, no matter how the money might have been acquired. In my youth there was nothing resembling a worship of money or of its possessor, in our region. And in our region no well-to-do man was ever charged with having acquired his money by shady methods.

The gospel left behind by Jay Gould is doing giant work in our days. Its message is "Get money. Get it quickly. Get it in abundance. Get it in prodigious abundance. Get it dishonestly if you can, honestly if you must."

What would Mark Twain have said about Goldman Sachs? About 21st century corporate greed? About Citizens United?

Campaign Promises?

A headline on the ConservativeNC website caught a reader's attention (hattip: GAW):

Christianity is alive and well in Union County, NC

It's an article about the swearing in of three new county commissioners in Monroe, NC. It doesn't say exactly what went on at the swearing in, or what was said, but it does document this:

"...Christian values run deep in these 3 families. Union County's residents and visitors witnessed one of the most respectful 'Christian' expressions in local government of my entire lifetime....

Hmmm.

Has Jesus Christ become a third party lien-holder of Union County?

Mark Twain:

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.

100 Years Later, the Real Mark Twain Emerges

Big news in American letters ... the unexpurgated autobiography of Mark Twain is being published by the University of California Press in three volumes.

You know what "unexpurgated" means, right? All the naughty bits are back in.

In the case of Mark Twain's autobiography, the naughty bits are passionate political and social observations, which (bless his heart) Mark Twain's original editor thought too radical for tender, late-Victorian ears. Mark Twain's daughter Clara, who lived until 1962, also had a big hand in keeping the real man sanitized for public consumption.

Compare Mark Twain's opposition to the Spanish-American war to Ron Paul's opposition to the Iraqi/Afghanistan wars. From the NYTimes review of Volume 1:

Twain's opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines ... were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers.

In a passage removed by [the author's first editor], Twain excoriates "the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish War" and Gen. Leonard Wood's "mephitic record" as governor general in Havana. In writing about an attack on a tribal group in the Philippines, Twain refers to American troops as "our uniformed assassins" [whoa] and describes their killing of "six hundred helpless and weaponless savages" as "a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory."

"Mephitic"? New word for me. It means "foul-smelling," which pretty much sums up a government and a culture that comes to depend on conquest for its economic well being and its self-image as only the bestest God-blessed people on earth.

Compare Mark Twain also to a progressive populist of 2010:

He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. "The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars," Twain observes. "He pays taxes on two million and a half."

This is stuff that was cut out of the original publication of the Autobiography in 1924 and in subsequent censored editions. Makes him sound like a contemporary of 2010, not a fossil from a century ago.

Mark Twain's "Letters from the Earth," a series of stories about the state of organized religion on earth purportedly written by Satan himself, was published in 1960 (with daughter Clara's reluctant blessing, incidentally), and Mark Twain's hilarious critique of the pious became my great secret reading while I was a freshman at Wayland Baptist College in West Texas. Subversion of the self-righteous was always Mark Twain's great contribution to our American literature.