_——I—
_————-
___-——-
._————
__———
_—_———
__——

.————-
_._————-
__.——
—————
_———-——
————
___————
_———D
——

 

RACIAL MINORI'HES 1N MARK TWAIN

Thesis for 9h. Degas of M. A.
MICHIGAN STATE COLLEGE
Mary Edwards
1949

 

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

“Mark Twain and Racial Minorities"

. I presented by

Mary P. Edwards

has been accepted towards fulfillment ‘
of the requirements for

3 mdegm mm .

Major professor

Date June 27. 19119

 

 

 

 

 

'q-f‘..

' ‘. “er- «9+

 

 

 

 

 

.APR1'853

 

 

 

 

no I tL z«.;n\zo:zmme 11-: “a 1131

by

Mary Edwards

m

Submitted to the uraduete School of fiichigen state
College of Agriculture and Applied Science in
pertiel fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

Me 2:13 01“ mars

Department of English

1949

'; E1 .1015

Table of Contents

Pages
Chapter I The Prob lem ]_
Chapter II The Defense of the Underdog £0
Chrpter III The Noble Red Man . 38
Chapter IV The Friend of a Race 61
Chspter V Concerning the Jews 94
Chspter VI Conclusion 112
Chrpter'VII Bibliography 117

 

Chapter I

The Problem

With the vigor and energy of expression characteristic of him, Hark
Twain once appraised himself concerning his racial prejudices. The pes-
simistic, sardonic twist of his later writings rounds off his remarks but
they:may still be taken as a sincere statement on Mark Twain's part of
what he believed to be tgue of himself. As every student of Mark Twain's
soon learns, however, his remarks about himself cannot often be taken as
literal turth.

I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices

nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know

it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is

that a man is a human being -- that is enough for me; he

can't be any worse.

mark Twain would have been genuinely surprised to have his self-an-
alysis challenged. than he wrote it in Vienna in 1899, he believed it to
be true that his only racial dislike was for the French (his reference in
the phrase "bar one"), because he had always admitted that dislike and had
aired it Openly in his writings. Yet all his life Twain had harbored an-
.other prejudice, a contempt for the American Indian which he had nursed at
least since his days in Nevada. Here in Vienna in his old age there was
no occasion to remind him or interest him in the subject and so.he forgot
it. but who can doubt that if the occasion h§g_arisen, if his interest
had been rekindled, he would have given vent to a heated tirade against
the "noble red man"? He had done so years before, when he was in Palestine

and some ragged urchins had reminded him of the western Indians he had

known, back in America. Consistency was not one of mark's virtues and any

 

1..S. Clemens, "Concerning the Jews," Literary Essays, p. 251.

analysis of his work must allow for his lack of it.

Contrary to his belief, and it was a sincere belief, Twain could
not be and never was objective or impartial in his point of view about
any racial group. His comment, ”I can stand any society" indicates that
he meant racial prejudice in the usual sense of an antagonistic feeling
toward a particular group. For the purposes of this study, however, the
term will be used in the sense of a disposition.£2£_as well as against a
particular group. This is because Mark Twain never in his life took a
middle-of-the-road stand on any issue he discussed. In the case of the
Jewish race, he was as prejudiced in their favor as he was prejudiced a-
gainst the American Indian. And as his lapse of memory about his senti-
ments concerning the Indians demonstrates, hark Twain had no reasoned ap-
proach to the problem of racial minorities as a whole. Sporadic remarks
on a particular group when the impulse seized him or literary character-
izations of an individual such as Nigger Jim were as far as TWain pursued
the subject. There was no conscious pattern, no intentional crusade. Yet
to examine those remarks and literary characterizations seems to be a pro-
ject worthy of attention. Such attitudes are one expression of a magnif
icent and complex personality -- a personality recognized by Twain's coun-
trymen as well as by the rest of the world as a superb expression of the
American character -— and a personality, therefore, deserving of thorough
and exhaustive exploration. To understand his attitude toward certain ra-
cial groups is to throw light upon the manis mind as a whole. To analyze
his literary expression of that attitude is to illuminate further, Mark
Twain, the artist.

It was as a humorist that Mark Twain's reputation was made and as a
humorist that he is primarily remembered. But he was more than a mere

humorist and shrewd satirist of human nature. He was as capable of serious

thought as he was of broad humor. he was always concerned with the a-
buses of individual liberty and the violations of human dignity and on
occasion considered them in connection with racial minorities in America.
The purpose of the present study is to examine all of his remarks about
and literary characterizations of four racial groups, Chinese, Indian,

Negro and Jewish. With the exception of the Jewish, all of his consid-
erations are in respect to the groups as minorities in America. The am-
phasis must necessarily be upon his view of the individual groups, and
not upon his view of racial minorities in general, since a sustained,
conscious pattern and development of thought on the whole problem cannot
be demonstrated. As Stephen Leacock has aptly phrased it:

He never came out as a champion or protagonist against any-

thing -- or never for long. The mental fatigue of being a
champion was contrary to the spirit of his genius.2

The first and most important factor influencing mark Twain's atti-
tude toward racial groups, as in any opinion he ever held, was his own
emotional temperament. "His reactions to experience were always emotion-
a1."3 He was an extremely volatile personality, subject to quick changes
of mood and sudden whims -- often an indication of the artistic tempera-
ment:

The humorist like the poet is sensitively responsive to life

and the scars multiply fast. Endowed with a nature not un-
like Swift's in its fierce rage at inhumanity, not unlike

 

2. Stephen Leacock, Mark awain, p. 13.

3. Vernon L. Parringtion, main Currents in American Thought, III, p. 88.

 

Sir Philip Sidney's in its romantic chivalry, he was not
a stoic to endure with equanimity.

Constance Rourke says of Twain:

Thin-skinned, so sensitive that he could hardly endure a

joke turned against himself, he showed the quick revul-

sions, the neurotic explosiveness which for long had bro-

ken forth into a longawinded comic vein.5

Such a disposition was bound to affect Twain's intellectual proces-
ses. It conditioned in him a completely subjective point of view and fos-
tered a desire for self-dramatization and theatrical effect which he was
never able to subdue for very long even when absorbed in serious discus-
sion. A thorough examination of these aspects of the emotional factor is
therefore necessary to understand hark Twain's attitudes in general and
his attitude in particular toward racial minorities.

Granting an impatient and remarkably sensitive disposition, and ad-
ding to it tremendous mental energy, it is not to be wondered that Mark
Twain seldom stopped to consider all the factors and all the implications
of a question. Instead, he plunged in and attacked or defended according
to his immediate reaction. He habitually concentrated on one aspect, one
facet of a problem, driving that home with devastating accuracy, but some-
times wearing it a little thin with repetition. This is especially evi-
dent in his writings about the treatment of Chinese in San Francisco, the
bulk of which are found in a series of satiric letters written for his
column in the Galaxy Magazine in 1871 and 1872.

Those same letters illustrate in another way the subjectivity of
mark Twain's point of view. They are a thinly disguised account of cer-

tain indignities he saw inflicted upon innocent Chinese in San Francisco.

 

4. Ibid., p. 89.

5. Constance Rourke, American Humor, p. 218.

The same indignities are described in another essay written slightly
earlier than the Calagy letters and there is reference to them, too, in
Roughing It. They were the source of mark Twain's attitude toward the
Chinese in this country; in fact, his reaction to those episodes E§§_his
attitude. Over and over again in his writing, Mark Twain reverted to in-
cidents of his past life and people he had known, illustrating how depen-
dent he was upon the world of his own experience. most of his judgements
were formed in the light of it. To quote Stephen Leacock again:

Yet let it be noticed that all the basis and background
of his work was and remained the mississippi and the West,
and EurOpe as seen therefrom; from his setting in Elmira,
nothing; from his life and surrounding in Buffalo, nothing;
from Hartford, nothing, ... To get vision, he must shut his
eyes and look across the prairies and the mountains to the
sunset over the, Golden Gate. Such was the genesis of Tom
Sawyer and Roughing It and Huckleberry Finn and Life.on the
_§ississippi and‘all the splendid work that 26 wrote in the
years that followed his return from Europe.

 

 

 

 

The important phrase here is "to get vision." Mark Twain could de-
vastatingly expose the injustices accorded the Chinese in San Francisco
but that was as far as he pursued the question of a Chinese minority in
America. He had raised the issue of civil rights for racial minorities,
and the inequalities present in American democracy but he was never again
interested in the problem of the Chinese in America beyond what he him-
self had witnessed in one city at one time. This was true of Twain's
general attitude toward life. If he could reduce things to personal terms,
to terms within his experience, then he was vitally interested. Earring-

ton has expressed this point well:

 

6. Leacock,‘gp, cit., p. 62.

Hamlin Garland in a bleak Dakota shack found help and

comfort in the philosophy of Taine, but mark Twain

could not get outside his own skin. He could not break

a path through the provincialism of his environment. He

was held prisoner to his own thoughts, and his only re-

lease was through the window of imagination.

Twain's first successful book, Innocents Abroad, illustrates this.
In this delightful account of adventures in Europe and the Near East,
Twain continually reduced the sights he saw to terms of his own exper-
ience. The lakes of Switzerland reminded him of Lake Tahoe (which he
maintained was infinitely superior); the great paintings of Italian mas-
ters and the cathedrals of France bored him exceedingly because there
was nothing comparable to them in his America and he had never been ed-
ucated to their value; the ragged and dirty people in Ralestine reminded
him of the flashes Indians in Nevada.8 Mark Twain's use of his own back-
ground and his constant remembrance of it was an integral part of every-
thing he wrote and as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn denonstrate, he was
at his best when he devoted himself exclusively to it.

One important manifestation of IWEIH'S subjective point of view was
his attitude toward the Negro race. Hannibal, missouri, the village of
his childhood, was a blend of the small slave-holding community and the

semi-frontier settlement. In Mark Twain's America Bernard De Voto sums

up the significance of Twain's early contact with Negro slaves:

 

7. Parrington, 22, cit., p. 89.

8. This of course needs qualification. "While it is true that he was un-
historical in his approach to nuropean culture ... at the very least,
there was in Twain a healthy sense of democratic feelings, a hatred of
oppression and injustice, a deep-seated feeling that men were more im-
portant than the rags and cloth of the past, the trumpery, the show,
the color, the glitter attached to outmoded historic institutions.
(J.T. Farrell, "Twain's Huckleberry Finn and the Era He Lived In," New
York Times Book Review, December 12, 1943, p. 6.)

 

Sam Clemens grew up among wegroes: The fact is important
for Mark Twain. Mark TWain became, in his way, an artist.
In his books the negro is consistently a noble character,
and much that is fruitful in his art springs from the s1aves.9

Slavery existed in Hannibal in a form quite different from the plan-

tation system described in uncle Tom's Cabin. hark Twain, reminiscing in

 

his Autobiography, reveals how deep an impression his earliest years made

 

upon him:

As a rule, our slaves were convinced and content ... however,
there was nothing about the slavery of the Hannibal region to
rouse one's dozing humane instincts to activity. It was the
mild, domestic slavery, not the brutal plantation article.
Uruelties were very rare, and exceedingly and unwholesomely un-
popular. To separate and sell the members of a slave family to
different masters was a thing not well-liked by the people, and
so it was not often done, except in the settling of estates. I
have no recollection of ever seeing a slave auction in that town,
but i am suspicious that that is because the thing was a common
and commonplace spectacle, not an uncommon and impressive one.

I vividly remember seeing a dozen black men and wcmen chained to
one another, once, and lying in a group on the pavement, await-
ing shipment to the Southern slave market. Those were the sad-
dest faces I have ever seen. chained slaves could not have been
a common sight, or the picture would not have made so strong and
lasting an impression on.me. I

Supporting mark Twain's memories of the kind of slavery he witnessed
is a statement in Brashear's, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri:

Above all else, the region was proudly southern -- but south-
ern with a difference. Instead of large plantations with swarms
of slaves to support its social fabric, it had a simpler -- at
best, an idyllic -- type of farm life, where slaves lived for the
most part happily, their only fear being that a turn of fortune
might make it necessary for them to be "sold down the river."
These farms supported country towns as centers of the social life
of that region. Their social traditions came down mainly from
Virginia by way of Kentucky.11

Twain's father at one time owned two slaves, and his uncle, John Quarles,

on whose farm Twain spent his summers until he was twelve years old, owned

 

3. Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain's America,_p. 66.

10. S. Clemens , Autobiography, I, 123-124.
11. Minnie Brashear, Mark Twain, Son of Missouri, p. 259.

thirty slaves. In his.Autobiography, Mark Twain.wrote, referring to one

of the Negroes, ”Uncle Dan'l":

It was one the farm that I got my strong liking for his
race and appreciation of its fine qualities. I know the
look of Uncle Dan'ls kitchen as it was on the privileged
nights, when I was a child, and I can see the white and
black children grouped on the hearth ... and I can hear
Uncle Dan'l telling the immortal tales which Uhcle Re-
mus Harris was to gather into his book ... I can feel a-
gain the creepy joy which gathered through me when the
time for the ghost story was reached.

Of such vivid memories was Mark Twain's attitude toward the Negro
formed. His lifelong tenderness for the race and his deep understanding
of its nature was a result of those early years. As one of his biograph-
ers has commented:

All unfair discriminations notwithstanding -- the South-

erner did, even in slavery days, often understand the negro

better and love him more than the northern abolitionists who

were so untiring and so vociferous in his defense. It is ale

ways a comparatively easy thing tobecome enthusiastic about

the rights of a race we do not have to live with.13

Mark Twain retained this affection and understanding for the Negro

although he lived to repudiate the system of slavery as many southerners
were unable to do. as became what Howells called "The most desouthernized
southerner"l4 he ever knew. rrobably Howells' explanation that this was a
result of his later Western training replacing his original Southern in-
heritance is an accurate estimate, though it must not be forgotten that

Twain's oarly.friendship with negroes was in an atmosphere more democratic

than the majority of southerners knew. The western, frontier element in

 

12.0% 22'. Cite, 100-15-

13. Edward Wagenknecht, Mark TwainJ The Man and His Work, p. 238.

14. De Lancey Ferguson, Mark Twain,_Man and Legend, p. 213.

Hannibal softened the aristocratic tradition associated with the slavery
system of the south.

So Twain's attitude toward the negro race was a reflection of his
early experience, of the problems of the negro in American society after
the Civil War, he had no conception. He was concerned that the negro have
a fair deal and he himself sent two negro students through Yale as his
part of the reparation due every black man frcm.every white man for the
wrong done to his race.15 But further than that he was not interested.
Just as his attitude was a result of his personal experience, so his lit-
erary treatment of the Negro was confined to the slave type he had known,
and one of his greatest characterizations became the runaway slave, "Nig-
ger Jim".

Since consistency was not one of hark Twain's virtues, we may expect
to find an exception to the general rule that his point of view was always
subjective and that he was never vitally interested in a subject unless he
could reduce it to personal terms. In his attitude toward the Jewish race,
Mark Twain seems to have had no personal bias. He once attempted an ob—
jective, impartial discussion of the reasons for prejudice against the Jew,
in an essay titled "Concerning the Jews." It was an admirable attempt and
the only time he ever discussed a racial minority in general terms without
his personal reaction and experience obviously flavoring his Judgement.

As a result of his emotional temperament, mark Twain possessed an in-
curable love of the dramatic. He delighted in dramatizing himself, whether
on the stage or in his home. His mastery of the art of telling a story on

the platform (as his rendition of "The Golden Arm" for example), reflects

 

15. R.E. Spiller, et. al., Literary History of the United StatesJ II, p. 932.

10

the flair he had for self-dramatization. He knew the secret of playing

a role. He created a separate and unique personality symbolized by the
pen-name "Mark Twain" and that personality'became a real individual in

the mind of America, far more real than Samuel Clenens. His famous deci-
sion in his old age to wear nothing but white was another example of his

delight in the dramatic effect. One cannot read the reminiscences of his
daughter, Clara, without retaining an impression of mark's joy in the at-
tention some of his volcanic tirades and antics brought upon himself. He
was, in one sense, a perinnial Tom Sawyer, willing to venture anything for
a hearty laugh or even for disapproval, so long as he could surprise a re-
action of some sort. His wife understood this irrepressible trait of his
and nicknamed him "Youth." As one writer has commented:

It should be borne in mind that Mark Twain was not only

a genius with the pen, but also with the buskin. Many of

Mark Twain's moods were simply histrionic. He could not

resist an opportunity to take the limelight, and any sub-

ject that absorbed him raised his temperature immediately

to a point where it became necessary for him to walk to

the center of the stage and sweep the house before him. 6

So one must often weigh Mark Twain's remarks for the element of the
theatrical in them. This is not to doubt his sincerity but merely to be
certain that an opinion has not been uttered primarily for effect, likely
to be contradicted in a later remark.

A final word about the effect of Mark Twain's emotional temperament
upon his attitudes and the literary expression of them is found in this es-
timate by Quinn:

hark Twain's career had to an unusual degree an effect up-

on his fiction. It was not only that he used his own ad—
ventures as a basis, but his interests, his sympathies, even

 

16. Cleveland Rodgers, ”The Many-Sided Mark Twain," The Mentog; XII, (May,
1924), 34-5.

 

11

his prejudices colored the selection of his material.
This subjective quality is a source of the vitality of
his best work and of the extravagance and even dull-
ness of his worst.17

It 4‘ III

Equally important with his emotional temperament as a factor in shap-
ing Mark Twain's attitude toward racial minorities was the democratic ele-

ment in his makeup.

Mark Twain was both a genuine democrat and a cynic.

As a democrat he defended the Jacobins. Democratic i-
deas seemed to be part of his very blood and flesh.

His individualism, and consequently, his sense of the
worth of human beings, is a direct product of democra-
tic ideas. And he expressed these magnificently when
he made an unschooled boy and a runaway slave the he-
roes of what is truly an American odyssey. His cyni-
cism is related to the many disillusioning observations
of the failure of democratic ideas. In his most buoy-
ant and productive periods, this cynicism is not sharp-
ly contradictory to his democratic feelings. Rather,
it suggests something of the healthy cynicism of the
sansculottes. In his latter days he witnessed the tri-
umph of industrialism and the rapid expansion of Ameri-
cancapitalismu His conscience was disturbed ... then,
he became a bleak determinist ... his cynicism concern-
ing "the damned human race" became corrosive.18

 

Mark Twain's formative years were spent on the semi-frontier of mis-
souri and the real frontier of Nevada in the days of sliver mining fever.
violence and injustice were always present but so, too, was the opportunity
of success for everyone who was energetic enough to seek it. There was
room for all, and every man was indeed the equal of every other man in that
respect. There were the petty class distinctions brought along from the

East and the South, but there was no landed aristocracy and no established

 

17. Arthur Quinn,.American Fiction, p. 245.

 

18.Farrell,.gp. cit., p.6.

12

institutions. Any man could rise to a position of prominence and power
through his own efforts. A man had to be hardworking and quickwitted to

survive in the competition; those were the virtues, along with honesty,
that they admired and recognized, and a man could cut across the class
distinctions if he had them. it was democracy in the most elementary sense
of the word and its values and standards were mark Twain's all his life.

In his Autobiography Twain remembered the democratic qualities which

 

mingled with the aristocratic in the village of Hannibal:

In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a
boy, everybody was poor but didn't know it. And there
were grades of society -- people of good family, people
of no family. everybody knew everybody, and was affable
to everybody, and nobody put on any visible airs; yet
the class lines were quite clearly drawn and the fami-
liar social life of each class was restricted to that
class. it was a little democracy which was full of
liberty, equality and Fourth of July, and sincerely so,
too; yet you perceived that the aristocratic taint was
there. It was there, and nobody found fault with the
fact, or ever stopped to reflect that its presence was
an inconsistency. 9

The democratic element in mark Twain's character accounts for his
hatred of sham and hupocrisy. in the worlds of hannibal, oarson City and
virginia City, Nevada, there were hypocrite, of course, but they were de-
spised whenever exposed. Pretense smocked of snobbery and aristocracy,
and there was no place for that on a frontier where everyone was judged
. by what he produced through hard work. Much of Twain's humor was a piti-
less revelation of human sham and hypocrisy and it was due in large part
to his early background on the western frontier. He not only wrote about

it, he practised it himself:

 

19. a. cumw.. 93. Cito’I’ 119-20.

13

mark Twain was a radical, resolute, and rather un-
critical democrat, committed to the principles of the
Preamble to the Constitution. He did not and could
not give a "square deal" to the South or to Scott or
to Europe or to the Arthurian realm. He refused all
recognition to aristocratic virtues which retard the
complete establishment of the brotherhood of man. He
was not ... a democrat in his study and a snob in his
drawing room; he was of the people and for the peeple
at all times. 0

Frontier values were simple and fundamental, there was no compromise,
no blurring of judgement in a land where existence was composed of harsh
and stern realities. (No extenuating circumstanceswere considered by vig-
ilante committees.) Dishonesty was asrife there as anywhere else, but it
went hard for the man who was caught in it. So Mark Twain's standards of
value were uncompromising and basic. Leacock says of Twain, regarding his

repudiation of slavery:

It ran counter to the simple principles of right and
wrong, of equality and fairness, on which his mentality
was based. Mark Twain always tried to think in elemen-
tary terms, to reduce everything to a plain elementary
form.and to judge it so. By this process much of his
humour was formed, and all of his philosophy. as knew
nothing of relativity, of things right in one place and
wrong in another, righteous in one day and wicked in an-
Othero d

Mark's democratic nature explains why he always defended the under-
dog. In this he verifies the statement quoted earlier that he was an "un-
critical democrat." Wagenknecht discusses this trait of Twain's in his
biography:

... Temperamentally, he was always on the side of the

underdog. He might or he might not admire the people in-
volved, but let him once be convinced that an injustice

 

20. S.P. Sherman, On Contemporary_Literature, p. 41.

21. Leacock, pp, cit., p. 12.

””5 being CT¥Cti€ed, and he would immediately con-
stitute himself counsel for the defense. “

It will be seen later that there was one notable exception to this
otherwise consistent habit of his, that was in the case of the American
Indian.

herk's official biographer, nlbert ieine, describes his work on the

Buffalo Expres§_in terms of his defense of the underdog:

 

His sympathy had been always with the oppressed, and
he had now become their defender. His work on the
paper revealed this more and more. He wrote fewer
sketches and more editorials, and the editorials were
likely to be either savage assaults upon some human
abuse, or fierce espousals of the week. They were
fearless, scathing, terrific. Lark Twain on the EL-
press was what he had been from the beginning, ami‘
would be to the end -- the zealous champion of jus-
tice and liberty; violent and sometimes wrong in his
viewpoint, but never less than fearless and sincere.
InVariably he was for the oppressed. He had a nat-
ural instinct for thenright, but, right or wrong, he
was for the underdog.“o

To summarize, then, Mark's early years in the West where he encoun-
tered and lived with every type of human nature and where every.man was
respected and considered equal if he proved his worth through hard effort,
rude him despise petty discrimination and injustice-wherever he saw it.

The democratic instinct was fundamental in iwain's character, even re-
placing his Southern inheritance and it was inevitable that he should un-

hesitating be on the side of almost every racial minority.

* * *

The emotional and democratic factors in Kerk Twain's habits of thought

conditioned his attitude toward racial minorities. It remains only to

 

'7

22. Wagcnknecht, Op. cit., p. 707.

F\

23. Albert B. Paine, hark lasinJ i Biography, I, p. 400.

15

to discuss briefly the style of his literary expression of those attitudes.

 

Mark Twain was a product of the American frontier. His humor was the
supreme expression of the frontier spirit.24 TWain's humor, as a product
of the American frontier, contained certain characteristics which extended
into his serious writing. Chief among these was an anecdotal framework.
Frontier humor consisted of anecodotes, or yarns, usually gross exaggera-
tions of the truth. Hence the "tall tale," exemplified by the legends of ‘
Davy Crocketts' and Paul Bunyon's exploits. Twain was acquainted with the
crude examples of this folk humor in the newspaper sketches and cheap books
of the time. Iarrington provides a summary of this native anecdotal humor

and its influence on Mark Twain:

Since the first crossing of the Allegheny Mountains a
swaggering extravagance of speech had been a hallmark of
The Westerner. In part this swagger was an unconscious
defense-mechanism against the drabness of frontier life;
and in part it was the spontaneous expression of new ex-
periences in an untrammeled world, the spirit of wilder-
ness-leveling. Its procreative source would seem to have
been the Ohio River where the rough flatboatmen bequeathed
the Mike Fink legend to literature; and it expanded in the
huge Davy Crockett hoax ... It developed further in Gus
Lonstreet's Georgia Scenes ... and in Joseph Baldwin's
Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi ... It was this hu-
mor that Mark Twain inherited, and he enriched it with a
wealth dug from his own large and generous nature.

 

Not only was Twain familiar with the anecdote of exaggeration in folk

literature but as Ferguson points out:

For one specimen of this humor, moreover, which he read in
print, Sam Clemens must have heard dozens by word of mouth.
The American was anecdotal, and on the frontier the anecddte

 

24. cf. Farrell, 22, cit., p. 6. "As Bernard De Voto has demonstrated in de-
tail in Mark Twain's America, Twain's source of inspiration was the fron-
tier. He is the literary summation of pioneer America.

25. Parrington,‘22, cit., 91—2.

16

served all purposes from laughter to sermonizing ...26

A specific application of this habit of exaggeration to his serious
writing is nade by one critic of Twain:

The readeerust allow for Mark Twain's Journalistic en-
largement in his writings on public questions. To at-
tract the attention of his common readers and audiences,

he made his expression more or less sensational. He used

a magnifying glass; he spoke through a megaphone. His ex-
aggerations worked in both directions -— humorous and pes-
simistic -- and between these two extremes there were many
kinds of sarcastic exaggeration in which sweetness and bit-
terness went together.27

Alongside Mark Twain's tendency to exaggerate must be placed an e-
qually western trait, anti-romanticism. The blunt realism in Twain's writ-
ing was a strong contrast to the romantic tradition which had persisted for
so long in American literature. As Parrington states:

Here at last was an authentic American -- a native writer

thinking his own thoughts,using his own eyes, speaking his

own dialect -- everything European fallen away, the last

shred of feudal culture gone, local and western yet contin-

ental. .A strange and uncouth figure in the eyes of Thomas

Bailey Aldrich, yet the very embodiment of the turbulent

frontier that had long been shaping a native psychology,

and that now at last was turning eastward to Americanize

the.Atlantic seaboardfi8 '

The importance of Twain's realistic treatment of racial minorities in
his writing needs to be stressed. In the case of the negro, his signifi-
cance has not been sufficiently acknowledged. bernard De Veto emphasizes
the point:

He was probably not aware that he was bringing to litera-

ture a theme it had refused to use. Apart from him the
institution of slavery had no place in the fiction of his

 

26. Ferguson, 22, cit., p. 27.

27. Masajiro Hamada, ”Mark Twain's Conception of Social Justice," Studies in
English Literature, XVI (October,1936), p. 615.

 

 

28. Parrington, _p, cit., p. 86.

17

century. Northern novelists may have been unable to under-
stand more than its propriety in reform: none went beyond
the exegesis of Mrs. Stowe and John T. Trowbridge. The
South had no realist before Mark Twain, except the humor—
ists who have been here examined and who ignored the theme
... After the war, a few thin talents did sometimes attempt
an objective picture of remembered slavery, but they were
submerged in the reveries of Confederate officers. Thomas
Nelson Page is this sentiment achieving full expression.

His example dominated his region until the next war. Cable
and Harris, although romancers, had meanwhile examined slav-
ery with less sentiment than Page, but they were ineffective
-- and, besides, had received instruction from Mark Twain.29

Referring to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Puddinhead Wilson and The

Gilded Age, De Voto concludes his remarks:

 

Slavery as an institution and Negroes as sharers of the scene

are organic in the community to which these novels are devoted.

It is a whole community: the effect is totality. Several gen-

erations of American experience, a race, an era, and a society

are enregistered.

Exaggeration and realism (often in the form of anti-romanticism), then,
are an integral part of Mark Twain's humor and are reflected in his serious
writing. "It is interesting to see exaggeration and anti-romantic irreverence
joining forces to give the typical American quality to mark iwain's work."3l

Returning to the anecdotal basis of Twain's humor, its most important
influence on his work was in his story-telling technique. It was extremely
difficult for mark iwain to work out a detailed plan for a book. his method
was to start with an episode and develop as he went along, piling on more ep-
isodes and letting the story work itself out as it progressed. in this way

he started many stories which he never finished simply because they faltered

and fell to pieces. with such a technique it is easy to understand why he

 

29. De Veto, 22, cit. p. 292.

30. Ibido, p. 294.

31. Sculley nradley, "Our Native Humor," North American deview, CCXLII (1937),
p. 360.

18

seldom attempted a novel based on social criticism. The Gilded Age and

 

A Connecticut iankee are, on one level, it is true, works of social crit-
cism, but the effect is spasmodic and unsustained. individual episodes
succeed but the incidents in a humorous vein obscure their effect. iwain's
humor was always Just below the surface, even when his righteous indigna-
tion was at white heat. Constance Rourke points out the effect Twain's
early schooling had on his attempts at social criticism:

It is a mistake to look for the social critic -- even manque

-- in mark Twain. In a sense the whole American comic tra-

dition had been that of social criticism: but this had been

instinctive and incomplete, and so it proved to be in Mark

Twain. Like the earlier humorists he was rich in notation.

... But as he turned toward the inconclusive or penetrative

view he was invariably blocked by some preposterous extrava-

gance that seemed to mount visibly before his eyes. He was

primarily a "raconteur," with an "unequalled dramatic author-

ity," as Howells called it. He was never the conscious ar-

tist, always the improviser.

I cannot entirely agree with this estimate because the social criti-
cism in Mark Twain was an importarm part of his contribution to.American

literature. True, he had no concrete plan for social reform, but does

this invalidate his observations? Mark Twain, himself, deplored the fact
that peeple would not take him seriously. His observations about injus-
tice and inequality in American democracy were as much a part of the man's
thought as his humorous stories and they deserve to be remembered. Hewever,
as an estimate of his literary technique and the effect his western train-

ing had upon it, the statement is valuable.

An emotional and highly democratic attitude, often inconsistent but

 

32. Rourke, 229 cit., p. 211. For an interesting letter by Mark Twain to an
unidentified minister, in which Twain analyzes his methods of writing,

see "My Methods of Writing," Mark Twain Quarterly, XIII (winter-spring, '49).

 

\

always realistic in literary treatment, then, characterizes Kerk
Twain's approach to the Chinese, Indian, Negro and Jewish races. The
following chapters present an analysis in detail of his writings about

each racial group.

19

20

Chapter II

The Defense of The Underdog

When Mark Twain left the mississippi in 1861 and accompanied his
brother, orion, to Carson City, Nevada, he anticipated great adventure
and quick success on the new frontier. Adventure he found, but after
two years of exciting and futile attempts to make himself a quick for-
tune in both gold and silver mining, he decided on a more practical
source of income. He accepted a position on the staff of the Virginia

City Enterprise, whose shrewd editor, Joseph B. Goodman, was to be the

 

first to encourage Mark's talent for literary humor. Virginia City was
a typically crude, rough and boisterous town of the Nevada frontier. "The
sidewalks swarmed with people -- to such an extent, indeed, that it was
generally no easy matter to stem the human tide," Mark wrote in Roughing
3;, He continued in typicallvaestern style, "the mountain side was so
steep that the entire town had a slant to it like a roof. Each street was
a terrace, and from each to the next street below the descent was forty or
fifty feet."33 Many nationalities thronged the streets of Virginia City,
Irish, Spanish, Mexican, Indian and Chinese. To go slumming on the "terrace"
known as "Chinatown? was a pastime Twain and his friends indudged in several
times. At one time, the occasion was.Artemus Ward's visit to Virginia City:

One night Den De Quille and Mark took Artemus to China-

town to show him the sights. They went to visit Hop Sing,

the head of one tong, and to old Sam Sifig, the champion of

the opposite tong. Food, drink, and cordielity always ac-
companied these festive events. As the trio visited each

33. Samuel Clemens, Roughing_It, II, 27-29.

 

21

head-quarters, they were treated to "blend ” -- rice

brandy -- and other kinds of fiery drinks. 4

Such occasional hilarious visits to Chinatown in Virginia City were
Mark Twain's principal contact with the Chinese race before he went to San
Francisco. Even after his arrival there, they attracted his attention for
a while only as sources of amusement. Paine describes how Mark's and Steve
Gillis' favorite Sunday aumsement was to sit on the hillside and bounce emp-
ty beer bottles off the tin roofs of the Chinamen's shanties.55 Eventually,
however, an incident did occur which aroused all of Twain's righteous indig-
nation at the white.man's injustice and cruelty to the yellow minority. He
saw a group of hoodlums stonning a Chinaman and setting their dogs on him
while an Irish policemen stood by and grinned. Mark was employed by the San
Francisco gall_at the time and Paine recounts what happened afterward:

He wrote an indignant article criticizing the city govern-

ment and raking the police. In Virginia City this would have

been a welcome delight; in San Francisco it did not eppearfi56

When the story did not appear TWain made inquiries and discovered that
the editor had killed it because the Irish were the chief supporters of the
.gall.and the paper couldn't afford to offend them?7 The incident renkled in
his mind for a long time and apparently it stimulated him to investigate fur5

ther the condition of the Chinese in San Francisco, because he was to refer

more than once in the next few years to that episode and others he witnessed

 

54. Effie M. Meek, Mark Twain in Nevada, p. 295.
35. Paine, 92, cit., I, 255-6.
56. Ibid., p. 258.

37. Ferguson, 22, cit., p. 98.

22

'while he was in California. Certainly what zest he had for his work

on the 9gl1_was gone when he discovered that he was not free to write

as he pleased. It was not long after that Twain resigned and sought ems
ployment elsewhere.38

Mark Twain's brief acquaintance with the Chinese minority in Vir-
ginie City and San Francisco fonns the background of his writing on the
yellow race. All of his remarks on the Chinese minority occur in his work
during the early 1870's, the decade following his stay in Nevada and Cal-
ifornie, and all of those remarks are a reflection of the western experié
ences. Apparently the memory of certain episodes remained in his mind and
he had to release the bitterness that renkled when he thought of them.

When he had done that, his interest was not absorbed again by the ques-
tions he had raised. Probably, too, the fact that he had not been allowed
to publish his account of one episode, in San Francisco, made him all the
more determinedt to do so somewhere else, and explains partially why he was
intensely interested in the problem of the Chinese minority in America for
a few short years after his return from the West, and then never again con-
cerned.

The tenor of all Mark Twain's remarks on the Chinese minority in Amer-
ica reveals a marked sympathy for them and a righteous indignation against
their mistreatment. Again and again he draws upon the episodes he witnessed
and heard about, as literary material in his newspaper work and in his se-
cond successful book, Roughing It. The repetition of one episode in partic-

ular becomes increasingly evident as these writings are examined in the order

 

38. The Washoe Giant in San Francisco, p. 15.; ed. Franklin Walker. "Only
the need of money could have made him.work for the Call as long as he did;

he went through a monotonous daily regime in getting local news, which
were de—humenized before printing; he was allowed to sign no articles."

23

in which he wrote them.

In May, 1870, Twain began the editorship of a column called WMemor-
ends” in a current New York Literary Magazine, The Galaxy. as was living
in Buffalo at the time with his bride of three months and managing the gaff.

falo Express. His column in The Galaxy was to be filled eech.month.with i-

 

tems of his own choice on aim subject that interested him. It was the kind
of assignment mark Twain enjoyed, allowing him tolindulge his whims freely.
The variety of subject matter he printed in each issue reflected many moods.
In his first column, May, 1870, alongside such subjects as "The Story of the
Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper," ”The Facts in the Case of the Great
Beef Contract,” and several humorous anecdotes, appeared what Paine cells "a
presentment of the Chinese situation in San Francisco, depicting the cruel
treatment of the Celestial immigrant."39 The article was satiricelly ti-
'tled "Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy" and in a note at the bottom of the
page, Twain informs his readers:

I have many such memories in my mind but am thinking just at

present of one particular one, where the Hrannan Street but-

chers set their dogs on e Chinaman who was quietly passing

with.e basket of clothes on his head; and while the dogs mu-

tilated his flesh, a butcher increased the hilarity of the

occasion by knocking some of the Chinamen's teeth down his

throat with half a brick. This incident sticks in my memory

with.a malevolent tenacity, perhaps, on account of the fact

that I was in the employ of a San Francisco journal at the

time, and was not allowed to publish it because it might ofé

fend some of the peculiar element that subscribed for the pa-

Per. --.".

Editor Memoranda4O

The article describes a newspaper item from San Francisco about e
”well dressed boy on his way to Sunday school" who was thrown into jail for

stoning a Chinaman. Twain writes ironically:

 

59. Paine, 22, cit., I, p. 404.

40. Samuel Clemens, "Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy," The Galaxy, IX (May
1870) , p. 723.

 

P4

Probably his parents were intelligent, well-to-do people,

with just enough natural villainy in their compositions

to make them yearn after the daily papers, and enjoy them

... in this way the boy could learn how Chinamen are treated.41

Through the rest of the essay Twain repeats the idea that "in this
way" (i.e. his parents' example) the boy had learned how to abuse Chinamen
and he was therefore not to be blamed for stoning one of them. In fact he
was being unduly persecuted because he had never seen any kindness or jus-
tice dealt to them and was merely imitating his elders. The essay is an
example of’Twain's by then well deveIOped journalistic style, an editorial
crusading for a worthy cause. It reveals a control of the subject matter
despite the extravagance of the language. Indeed, the extravagance is re-
sponsible for the sharp satiric effect, and a few exerpts will demonstrate
how well Twain had mastered his technique at this early point in his liter-
ary career:

It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of

the vast Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free love of

justice in the hearts of the people, that whenever any secret
and mysterious crime is committed, they say,”Let justice be
done, though the heavens fall," and go straightway and hang

a Chinaman.42

Continuing with the phrase, "in this way,” Twain writes:

It was in this way that he found out that by studying one

half of each day's "local items" it would appear that the

police of San Francisco were either asleep or dead, and by

studying the other half it would seem that the reporters

were gone mad with admiration ... of that very police-mak-

ing exultant mention of how "The.Argus-eyed officer So-and

-so captured a wretched knave of a Chinaman who was stealing43
chickens, and brought him gloriously to the city prison ..."

 

41. Ibid., p. 722.

42. Ibid., p. 722.

43. Ibid., p. 7230

25

In a later essay Twain was to refer to the habit of the newspapers
of slanting any mention of Chinaman, increasing the prejudice against them.
He was to develop more thoroughly, too, his contempt for the San Francisco
police force and to satirize bitterly the corruption he witnessed there.

In the following quotation from ”Disgraceful Persecution," Twain al-

ludes to a fraud which had impressed him greatly. It, too, would appear a-

gain in his later essay:

It was in this way that the boy found out that the Legis-
lature, being aware that the Constitution has made America
an asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations, and
that therefore the poor and oppressed who fly to our shel-
ter must not be charged a disabling admission fee, made a
law that every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated
upon the wharf, and pay to the States appointed officer
ten dollars for the service, when there are plenty of doc-
tors in San Francisco who would be glad enough to do it for

him for fifty cents.4

 

Twain gathers all his fury for the summary of his case in favor of

freeing the "persecuted" boy:

It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman
had no rights that any man was bound to respect; that he had
no sorrows that any man was bound to pity; that neither his
life nor his liberty was worth the purchase of a penny when
a white man needed a scapegoat; that nobody loved Chinamen
nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when it
was convenient to inflict it; everybody, individuals, com-
munities, the majesty of the State itself, joined in hating,
abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers.4

In the issue of The Galaxy for September, 1870, Twain wrote a short
humorous sketch titled "John Chinaman in new YOrk" which reveals him poking
fun at the very attitude he had been expressing in the article "Disgraceful

Persecution of a Boy." It is a typical example of the kind of literary hoax

 

44. Ibid., p. 723.

45. Ibid., p. 723.

26

Twain loved to do -- the careful buildup of a misleading situation which

is destroyed by the last sentence. it is burlesque plus. the anti-cli-
max technique and was written for the sheer fun of playing a joke on his
readers. iwain begins on a supposedly serious note, describing a bent
over whinaman he had seen sitting before a large.American.tea company in
New York, acting in the capacity of a sign for the concern, a sort of lo-
cal color advertisement. He continues in an indignant tone:

Isn't it a shame that we who prate so much about civili-
zation and humanity are content to degrade a fellow-being
to such an office as this? ... Men.calling themselves the
superior race, the race of culture and of gentle blood,
scanned his nuaint Chinese hat with peaked roof, and ball
on top; and his long queue dangling down his back; his
short silken blouse, curiously frogged and figured ... his
blue cotton, tight-legged pants tied close around the an-
kles ... and having so scanned him from head to foot,
cracked some unseemly joke about his outlandish attire or
his melancholy face, and passed on.46

Twain then relates how he stopped and conversed with the Chinese:

In my heart I pitied the friendless mongal ...

"Cheer up -- don't be down-hearted. It is not America
that treats you in this way -- it is merely one citizen,
whose greed of gain has eaten the humanity out of his heart.
America has a broader hospitality for the exiled and oppres-
sed. America and Americans are always ready to help the un-
fortunate. Money shall be~raised -- you shall go back to
China -- younshall see your friends again. What wages do they
pay you here?4

and the ”Oriental" replies:

"Divil a cint but four dollars a week and find meself; but it‘s
aisy, barrin' the bloody furrin clothes that's so expinsivel48

The sketch illustrates some qualities of Mark Twain's humor. It is

first of all an anecdote polished to just the right length for proper effect.

 

46. Samuel Clemens, "John Chinaman in New York," The Galaxy, I (Sept. 1870),
p. 426.

47. Ibid., p. 426.
48. Ibid., P. 426.

27

Burlesque of a virtuous attitude, in this case, tolerance for another
race, is the keynote. The anti—climax of the last sentence is a tech-
nique that Mark Twain achieved to perfection. The ridiculous position
in which he places himself was a role he was fond of playing, as many of

the episodes in Roughingglt and Innocents Abroad demonstrate.

 

 

With the last sentence, Twain throws a satirflalight on the noble
sentiments he has previously expressed, illustrating the fandliar fact
that he could never resist an opportunity for humor. This habit of his

is the principle reason that readers have never been able to take him
seriously. One never knows just when the unexpected joke will turn up.
His delight in building up a misleading situation and catching his audi-
ence off guard makes his serious remarks suspect, something which mark
Twain never seemed to realize. Readers of Mark Twain, now as well as dur-
ing his lifetime, have never wanted to take him seriously. he has been
unique as an American humorist, and his readers always wait hopefully for
the unique Twainian phrase which will explode the serious tone of his ob-
servations. It was a bitter disappointment to TWEin in his later years,
wheh pessimism grew in him, to realize that his serious thoughts were not
appreciated by his audience. He characterized himself to George W. Cable,
his co-partner on one of his lecture tours, as a mere buffoon. Yet in the
early days, when he himself had refused to take his own thoughts too ser-
iously, when his writings had reflected his buoyancy and youthful irrever-
ance, he had established the pattern of his humor and the result he deplor-
ed later was merely an inevitable conclusion.

Albert Paine says in his biography of Mark Twain that TWain was al-
ways the champion of the Chinese as long as he lived. He writes:

In the October number of 'BeGalaxy he began a series of let-

ters under the general title of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad.A-
gain," supposed to have been written by a Chinese immigrant

in San Francisco, detailing his experience there. In a
note the author says: "No experience is set down in.the fol.
lowing letters which had to be invented. Fancy is not
needed to give variety to the history of the Chinamen's
sojourn in.America. Plain fact is amply sufficient."

The letters show how the supposed Chinese writer of them
had set out for America, believing it to be a land whose
government was based on the principle that all men are
created equal, and treated accordingly; how, upon arriv-
ing in San Francisco, he was kicked and bruised and beat-
en and set upon by dogs, flung into jail, tried and con-
demned without witnesses, his own race not being allowed

to testify against Americans -- Irish.Americans -- in the
San Francisco court. They are scathing, powerful letters,
and one cannot read them, even in this day of improved
conditions, without feeling the hot waves of resentment and
indigzgtion which Mark Twain must have felt when he penned
theme

Paine's estimate of the letters is an accurate one. Mark Twain's
pen was its most devastating and merciless when applied to a subject with—
in his personal experience. He conveys a bitter irony through the gentle,
uncomplaining naive Chinese as he recounts episodes of shocking fraud and
brutal treatment. In these letters Twain details the things he had wit-
nessed and investigated while he was in San Francisco. "Disgraceful Per-
secution of a Boy” had dealt with the matter briefly; the "Goldsmith” let-
ters cover it thoroughly and give him an opportunity to release the indig-
nation he had harbored since his stay in California.

Twain derived his title and pseudo-letter form from a series of let-
ters written by Oliver Goldsmith, 1760—1761, "a series of one hundred and
twenty-three mellow potboiling essays contributed twice a week to hewbury's
Public LedgerJ’ Goldsmith's letters, titled "The Citizen of the World; or
Letters from a Chinese Philos0pher, Residing in London, to his Friends in
the East," were written ”to discuss and expose the political intrigues and

moral opinions of the English; advocating, for example, the reform of the

 

49. Paine,.gp. cit., I, p. 406.

'I

5..

.9

29

laws of marriage and divorce ..."50 Since Twain's purpose was to expose
the political corruption and unjust treatment of the Cninese minority in
San Francisco it is easy to see why he was reminded of GoldsmithNS essays,
familiar to him from his piloting days on the Mississippi when the co-pi-
lot, George Ealer, used to read aloud to him.51

The first letter in "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again" is headed Shang-
hai, 18--, and reads in part:

Dear Ching-Foo:

... I am to leave my oppressed and overburdened native

land and cross the sea to that noble realm.where all are

free and all equal, and none reviled or abused -- America:

America, whose precious privilege it is to call herself

the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave ... and we

know that America stands readytowelcmeil other Oppressed

peoples and offer her abundance to all that come without
asking what their nationality is, or their creed or color ...

. 52
Ah Song Hi
In the second letter Twain repeats the phrase, "Land of the Free and
Heme of the Brave,” the device he had used with the words "in this way" in
"Disgraceful Persecution." The letter was supposedly written on the boat
and Ah Song Hi describes the conditions under which he traveled to America:
We are far away at see now, on our way to the beautiful land
of the Free and Home of the Brave. We shall soon be where all

men are alike, and where sorrow is not known.
... We are in that part of the vessel always reserved for

 

50. Otis and Needleman, A Survey - History_of English Literature, p. 377.

ii. Wagenknecht,.gp,lgi£,, p. 46. ”The Goldsmith of the'Vicar of Wakefield
was, as we already know, anathema, but the essayist was another story.
Mark Twain first came to know him well from George Ealer's readings ...
His most direct imitation of Goldsmith.was in the essay, "Goldsmith's
Friend Abroad.Again," that noble protest against inhumanity toward the
Chinese on the West Coast."

 

52. lamuel Clemens, "Goldsmith's Friend.Abroad Again," The Galaxy, X (Oc-
tober, 1870), p. 569.

 

‘30

my countrymen. It is called the steerage. It is kept

for us, my employer says, because it is not subject to

changes of temperature and dangerous drafts of air. It

is only another instance of the loving unselféshness of

the Americans for all unfortunate foreigners.”3

Twain concludes the letter wdth a description of the fraudulent prac-
tice of charging every Chinese immigrant $2.00 at the dock for a "certifi-
cate." His irony this time is directed at making the officials look ridic-
ulous:

my employer tells me that the Government at Washington

knows of this fraud, and are so bitterly Opposed to the

existence of such a wrong that they tried hard to have

the extor-- the fee, I:mean, legalized by the last Con-

gress; but as the bill did not pass, the Consul will

have to take the fee dishonestly until the next Congress

makes it legitimate. It is a great and good and noble

country, and hates all forms of vice and chicanery. 5

*Pacific and Mediterranean steamship bills 4

Ah Song Hi's habit of praising the Americans'who have wronged him is
at times a little too naive to be convincing. Twain, in his enthusiasm,
sometimes overdid his satire and took the edge from it. In these letters
he often cane dangerously close to satirizing the Chinese immigrant by mak-
ing his gullibility seem ridiculous.

Letter III once more reiterates the theme, "Land of the Free":

I stepped ashore jubilant: I wanted to dance, shout, sing,
worship the.generous Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.

Twain describes in this letter how Ah Song Hi was beaten and kicked by
policemen, and how he was forced to have a vaccination for small pox and pay
a fee even though he protested that he had had the disease: With this last
episode, Twain puts a clever twist on a practice whose corruption he had at-

tacked in "Disgraceful Persecution of a boy."

 

53. Ibid., p. 569.
54. Ibid., p. 569.
55. Ibid., p. 570.

31

Letter IV, the last in the October issue, is based on the incident
which Twain had witnessed and written up for the gall, After describing
how acme young men set a fierce dog on a passing Chinese and an Irish po-
liceman stood by and watched, leaving it up to a passerby to rescue the
unfortunate victim (one wonders if the passerby was mark Twain?), Twain
has one of the young men say:

"This Ching divil comes tell Ameriky to take the bread out

o' decent intilligent white menfis mouths, and whin they

try to defind their rights there's a dale o' fuss made about

it!56 ’

Mark Twain had grasped the fundamental reason for the prejudice a-
gainst the Chinese minority, who were willing to work for such low wages
that they crowded out other foreign groups. it is significant that he
makes the speaker Irish; they were often the object of his satire. thn
Ah Song Hi is thrown into jail it is an Irish policeman who tells him, in

words heavy with irony:

“Rot there, ye furrin' spawn, till ye lairn that there's
no room in.America for the likes of ye or your nation?57

The second series of "Goldsmith" letters appeared in the November,

1870, issue of The Galaxy. Letter no. v details the crowded jail condi-

 

tions and describes how two drunken women in the cell next to an Song Hi
fall on him.while he is dozing against the grating and batter him. They,
too, are Irish and reveal the source of the prejudice against the Chinese
in San Francisco:

...because they discovered l was a Chinaman, and they

said I was "a bloody interlopin' loafer come from the
divils own country to take the bread out of decent

 

56. Ibid., p. 570-1.

57. Ibid., p. 571.

.52

people!s mouths and put down the wages for work whin
it was all a christian could do to kape body and sowl
together as it was."58

In letter vI Twain gives a picture of the courtroom and summarizes
the discriminations which were freely practised there. His dislike for
the Irish and their control over local government and his wrath at the
abuses of justice are the principle themes. Clearly, he must have been
present at court sessions when he was in San Francisco:

Pretty soon I was compelled to notice that the culprits'
nationality made for or against him in this court. Over-
whelming proofs were necessary to convict an Irishman of
crime, and even then his punishment amounted to little;
... negroes were promptly punished, when there was the
slightest preponderance of testimony against them; but
Chinaman were punished always, apparently.

... I found that any succored and befriended refugee
from Ireland or elsewhere could stand up before the judge
and swear away the life or liberty or character of a refu-
gee from China; but that by the law of the land The China-
man could not testify against the Irishman. I was really
and truly uneasy, but still my faith in the universal li-
berty that America accords and defends, and my deep ven-
eration for the land that offered all distressed outcasts
a home and protection, was strong within me ...59

In the January, 1871, issue of The Galaxy Twain concluded his "Gold-

 

smith” series with one letter in which Ah Song Hi describes his "trial" and
thereby exposes the complete denial of his basic rights in a corrupt court:
I had no lawyer. In the early morning a police court law-
yer (termed in the higher circles of society, a "shyster")
had come into our den in the prison and offered his services
to me, but I had been obliged to go without them because I
could not pay in advance or give security.6

Ah Song Hi asks that four Chinese witnesses be called to the stand

and the interpreter informs him:

 

58. Ibid., p. 750.
59. Ibid., P. 730.

60. Ibid., XI, p. 156.

33'

"That won't work," said he. "In this country white men
can testify against Chinaman all they want to, but China-
men aren't allowed to testify against white men!"61

Up to this point, Twain has maintained a bitter satire of the abuse

of judicial procedure, but his inability to avoid humor whenever an oppor-

tunity arises, overcomes him and for a moment he pokes fun at ancient Or-

iental traditions. Ah Song Hi relates how, in cases between two Chinese,

the rule of the court is that preponderance of testimony should determine

gult or innocence:

... There being nothing very binding about an oath ad-
ministered to the lower orders of our people without

the ancient solemnity of cutting off a chicken's head
and burning some yellow paper at the same time, the in—
terested parties naturally drum up a cloud of witnesses
who are cheerfully willing to give evidence without ever
knowing anything about the matter in hand.62

Finally, two officers (Irish) take the stand and report that Ah Song

Hi was making a disturbance and the judge fines him.$5.00 or ten days in

jail:

Then the trial so unspeakably important to me, and
freighted with such prodigious consequence to my wife
and children, began, progressed, ended, was recorded in
the books, noted down by the newspaper reporters, and
forgotten by everybody but me - all in the little space
of two minutes!

,Ah Song Hi is taken back to prison with some of the others and every-

one departs:

... and left the uncomely court room to silence, solitude,
and Stiggers, the newspaper reporter, which latter would

 

61. Ibid., p. 157.

62. Ibid., p. 157.

63. Ibid., p. 157.

34

now write up his items (said an ancient Chinaman to me),

in the which he would praise all the policemen indis-

criminately and abuse all the Chinaman and dead people.64

The "Goldsmith” letters contain passages of superb irony. At times,
it is true, these are marred by Twain's habit of overdoing a point. They
reveal his intense hatred of corruption and fraud and his constant attack
on the abuse of democratic principles. Ah Song H1 is a conventionalized
type and never emerges as a convincing individual.‘ His is the underdog,

the unfortunate and innocent victim of despiccable human beings. Twain's
knowledge of actual Chinese is obviously cursory and his attitude uncon-
sciously condescending at times as he portrays the naive and gullible re-
action of the immigrant, the superstitious customs solemnly accepted by Ah
Song Hi. But Mark Twain's championship of a mistreated racial minority and
his impassioned defense of their right to equality and justice are an ex-
pression of the finest qualities in his character.

Only once again did Twain turn his attention to the Chinese minority
in America. This was in Roughing It, published in 1872, and dealing with
his life in the Nest. Chapter thirteen in volume II is devoted to a dis-
cussion of Chinatown in Virginia City, which he had visited under conditions
described earlier in this chapter. Twain's admiration for the race and a
sympathy for them as towards a misused child is clearly evident:

They are a harmless race when white men either let them

alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact, they are

almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of

resenting the‘tilest insults or the cruelest injuries.

They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunken-
ness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A

 

6!. Ibid., 157-8.

35

disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist
... He is a great convenience to everybody -- even to the
worst class of white men, for he hears the most of their
sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment f
for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white
man can swear a Chinamen's life away in the courts, but no
Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the "land
of the free" -- nobody denies that -- nobody challenges it.
Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify. As
I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco,
some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and
that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no
one interferred.

After an account of living conditions in Virginia City Chinatown,
Twain again attacks the frauds practised on the defenceless Chinese:

In California he gets a living out of old mining claims that
white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless -- and
then the officers come down on him once a month with an ex-
orbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad,
general name of "foreign" mining tax, but it is usually in-
flicted on no foreigners but Chinaman.66

Later in the chapter Twain refers once more to the practice which had
so incensed him in San Francisco:

There was another bill -- it became a 18W'-- compelling ev-
ery incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay
a duly-appointed quack (no decent doctor would defile him-
self with such legalized robbery) ten dollars for it. As
few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like
that, the lawmakers thought this would be another heavy blow
to Chinese immigration.6

Concluding the Chapter, Twain sums up his contempt for the petty types
of the human race who take advantage of defenceless minorities:

They are a kindly -disposed, wellemeaning race, and are re-
spected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the

 

65. Clemens, Roughing It, II, 105-6.
66. Ibid., p. 107.

67. Ibid., p. 109.

36

Pacific coast. ho California gentleman or lady ever a-
buses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances,
an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East.
Only the scum of the population do it —- they and their
children; they, and naturally and consistently, the po-
licemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust
-- licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as
elsewhere inAmerica.68

 

Thus, the remarks in Roughing It, written a year after the "Gold-
smith" letters, are a restatement of Twain's attitude in the earlier es-
says. He describes in detail some of the customs and habits he observed
on one of his visits to Chinatown in such words as ”He offered us a mess
of bird's-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swal-
lowed several yards if we had chosen to try, bum we suspected that each
link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore refrained."69

In later years Twain interceded to General Grant on behalf of the
Chinese Educational Mission for aid in the internal affairs of China, but
he never again took up his pen to champion the rights of the Chinese minor-
ity in.America. His life in the East brought no contact with the race, and
new ideas and new surroundings absorbed his attention. His defense of their
tights demonstrates his emotional reactions in the intensity and inevitable
subjectivity of his literary expression. Certain episodes he had witnessed,
particular abuses legal and otherwise with which he was personally familiar,
were referred to again and again. his skillful satire of the abuses exposes
them in all their shameful reality and shows a mark Twain fearlessly devoted
to the destruction of non-democratic processes, stopping momentarily to in-

dulge in humor but never forgetting the real purpose of his essay. His

 

68. Ibid., 111-12.
69. Ibid., p. 110.

70. Samuel Clemens, Autobiography, 1, 20-4 for a detailed account of the ep—
isode.

 

3?

defense of the Chinese minority is a defense of basic principles -- the
Chinese happen to be the race involved but it could be any race because
he is crusading for the rights of minorities abused by unscrupulous au-
thorities and vicious types of civilians. It is not, as in the case of
the negro, a result of his deep affection for another race because of
close contact with some of its members. It is, rather, a result of sym-
pathy for the underdog, in this case the unfortunate foreigner who is not
accorded the canal rights and the respect that mark Twain believed was

due to all decent peoples in American democracy.

38

Chapter III

The Noble Red Man

The village of Hannibal in the year of Mark Twain's birth, 1855,
was still sufficiently near the frontier so that Indians were a common-
place sight. hark Twain's acquaintance with the Indian race began in
his childhood and one of his most famous characters was to be based on
a half-breed he had known in Hannibal. Bernard De Voto writes, in mark
Twain's America, of this influence on Twain's attitude toward the Indian:

Half-breeds were common to their experience and, being

of the dispossessed, were charged with crime as a mat-

ter of course -- and some accuracy. Revenge, a motive

of infrequent validity for most people, was axiomatic

in the Indian nature. Where Injun Joe addresses Dr.

Robinson across the blanketed corpse and alludes to an

affront put upon him, his language comes close to the

thrillers of the itinerant stage, but his emotions are

genuine.

hark Twain would have been unicue, indeed, if he had not looked upon
the American Indian as a no-good, dangerous individual, for that was the
universal attitude of the residents of any settlement on the semi-fron-
tier. It was the attitude of pioneers throughout the long development of
the West, a natural result of the clash between the red man and the white
man in which treachery and murder were freely exchanged. The Indians in
Lannibal and the surrounding country were, by Twain's childhood, half-

civilized, and for small boys they held, also, a certain romantic fascin-

ation. In his Autobiography Twain reminisces about this quality in Injun

 

Joe:

Once he Twain's father tried to reform "Injun Joe." That
also was a failure and we boys were glad. For Injun Joe,

 

71. De Veto, gp. cit., p. 506.

drunk, was interesting and a benefaction to us, but In-

jun Joe, sober, was a dreary spectacle. we watched my

father's experiments upon him with a good deal of anxi-

ety, but it came out all right and we were satisfied.

Injun Joe got drunk oftener than before, and became in-

tolerably interesting.

Mark Twain's next encounter with the Indian race came in Nevada and
here he saw a type even more recently subdued by the white man. These

were the Goshoot, the Ii-Ute and the washoe tribes, the latter occupying

the area around Carson City:

From the year when history is black the red man has eked

out only a slender living in this land of little rain and

limited food supply. It was so difficult to get a living

that each tribe had its well-defined food domain. The has-

hoe Indians claimed the land on the immediate eastern s10pe

of the mountains. And after this tribe, the mountains, the

lake, the valley, and the surrounding land to the east was q

named, from the days of rorty-nine, "The land of the w’ashoes."7U

War with the Indians in nevada Territory had been concluded only a
short while before Twain arrived there. The last skirmish, in which a large
force headed by regular Army officers routed the final warring tribes, took
place in march, 1861, a few months before Mark and his brother Orion set
out for the West. Mark, no doubt, heard the stories of these recent bat-
tles; at any rate he often referred to the cruelties inflicted by the In-
dians on captured white peeple.

In Virginia City, one of the "terraces" below the level of Chinatown
was inhabited by remnants of two of the tribes mentioned earlier:

And far down the mountainside, and also down the town's

social ladder, a few ragged huts and wickiups scantily
sheltered the raiute and Washoe Indian families. These

 

72. 3. Clemens, Autobiography, II, p. 175.

73. Mack, 22. cite. p. 4e

40

poor vagabonds -- once lords of the soil, who had been

the proud possessors of all the mountain -- were now

forced to live on the refuse of the human strata above

them, or to wander among the back allevs in search of

rotten food thrown out by the markets. 4

Mark Twain's contact with the American Indian was limited to these
few experiences in Nevada and to the few individuals, particularly Injun
Joe, he had known in Hannibal. His writings about the Indian, with the

exception of one or two brief reminisences about Injun Joe in the £322:
biography, occur in the first five years of the 1870's. As in the case
of the Chinese, those were the years of recording his western experiences
and making literary capital out of them.

Mark Twain's many remarks about the Indian show a degree of contempt
seldom surpassed by him in his observations on any other subject. He de-
spised the Lmerican Indian for certain traits which he enumerated time and
again, never tiring of emphasizing them. his ranarks reveal a conscious
attempt at theatrical effect and the inevitable tendency to inject humor
even into the most biting condemnation. he was thoroughly prejudiced a-
gainst the Indian and never gave him the benefit of a doubt, always ridi-
culing and denouncing him in the most scathing terms.

The first remarks that mark Twain made about the Indians are contained
in a long letter he wrote to his mother, shortly after his arrival in Car-‘
son City. The letter, not included in the official volume of his letters,
is cuoted in part by Lorch in an article in the Twainien:

If you want a full and correct account of those lovely In-

dians not gleaned from Cooper's novels ... but the result

of personal observation ... you will find that on that sub-
ject I am a fund of useful information.75

 

74. Ibid., p. 184.

75. Fred T. Lorch, “mark Twain's Early Views on western Indians," Thainien,
IV (April, 1945), p. l.

41

The tone of the letter is clearly indicated by Lorch in his ap-
praisal:

While the letter is obviously intended to be humorous, there

is but little doubt that his observations are approximately

accurate. he notes their childish ignorance and vanity,

their personal filth, their unashamed begging, and love of

gambling. Their poverty is implied but not raised into par-

ticular prominence. Nothing is said to indicate that they

are treacherous or unusually depraved. They are presented

chiefly as harmless savages, interesting as curiosities to

the traveler.

The difference between this attitude and the contempt so manifest
in all of his published writings about the Indian will easily be seen
in the quotations following. That the Indians in Nevada did thoroughly
disgust him is unquestionable but the element of theatricality, of con-
scious dramatic intent, and the ever-present vein of humor must not be
overlooked. hark Twain had found an appropriate subject for his devel-
oping style and he made the most of it. Then, too, he was writing for
an Eastern audience and he played up their vague conception of the West
as a wild and romantic land.

One other point must be mentioned. It is stated that in the letter
to his mother Twain did not refer to the Indians as treacherous or depraved.
This was a trait he was to dwell on repeatedly in his later writings. Most
likely he had not yet heard the tales of Indian treachery and cruelty which
were current around Carson City as a result of the late Pi-Ute and Washoe

wars, and when he had heard them he could not refer to them often enough.

In his first successful book, innocents Abroad, published in 1869,

 

Twain indulged in several tirades against the Indian. The first occurs in

a discussion of Lake Tahoe in Nevada. He had been reminded of it by the

 

76. Ibid., p. 1.

42

sight of Lake Como in Switzerland:
Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup.
It is Indian and suggestive of Indians. They say it is
Pi-ute -- possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was
named by the Diggers -- those degraded savages who roast
their dead relatives, then mix the human grease andeshes
of bones with tar, and "gaum" it thick all over their
heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about
the hills and call it mourning, These are the gentry
that named the lake.7/
Warming to his subject, Twain continues to vent his contempt for
the american Indian as he has seen him exemplified in Nevada. The fol-
lowing passage is the first in which he attacks the literary concept of
"The noble savage" in the novels of James henimore COOper. It was a pet
antagonism of Twain's all his life and many years later he was to give
full expression to it in an essay titled "The Literary Offences of Feni-
more Cooper." Twain's dislike for COOper's portrayal of the Indian is an
example of his anti-romanticism and he spared no details in his many at-
tempts to prove that Cooper's Indians were completely unrealistic. The
passage also contains Twain's first use of the phrase, "the noble red man,"
an expression he employed many times with the deepest sarcasm. It should
be noted that the expression illustrates his generalized attitude toward the
Indian because in Twain's mind "the noble red man" was the Indian he knew
in Nevada. as far as he was concerned all Indians were like the degener-
ate Pi-utes, Goshoots, and Hashoes and he seldom bothered to explain that
he was thinking in terms of those particular tribes:
It isn't worthwhile, in these practical times, for people
to talk about Indian poetry -- there never was any in them

-- except in the Fenimore Cooper Indians. But they are an
extinct tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man.

 

77. Clemens, Innocents Abroad, I, 204-5.

43

I have camped with the Indians; I have been on the

war-path with them, taken part in the chase with

them -- for grasshoppers; helped them steal cattle;

I have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for

breakfast. I would gladly eat the whole race if I

had a chance. 8

Deliberate humor and extravagant language to achieve that humor dom-
inate the passage but a contempt soon to be more savagely expressed is
there also.

In volume II of Innocents abroad Twain breaks off in the middle of a
description of the miserable poverty he has witnessed in Jerusalem to draw
a pointed comparison:

They reminded me much of indians, did these people ...

They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched

our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impolite-

ness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white

man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants

to exterminate the whole tribe.

These people about us had other peculiarities, which

I have noticed in the noble red man, too: they were in-

fected with vermin, and the dirt had caked on them till

it amounted to bark.79

Twain's description of a nervous, uncomfortable and savage reaction
to the Indian trait of stony impassiveness, so freely credited by him to
all white men, is actually a confession of his own personal reaction. It
explains, in part, the exasperation so evident in everything he wrote a-
bout the Indian. His contempt for their unclean condition was another rea-
son for Twain's dislike of the race and he was to dwell on it many times.

In 1869, two years after his return from the Jest, Twain accepted the

position of editor of the Buffalo Express and in the same year he wrote an

essay for the Express titled "Last Words of Great hen" in which he poked fun

 

78, Ibid., I, p. 205.

79.Ibid., II, p. 199.

44

at the Indian. hfter attributing ridiculous dying statements to such
men as :enjamin Franklin, Lord Chesterfield, voltsire, and others, iwein
writes the following:

And Red Jacket, the noblest lndian brave that ever wielded

a tomahswk in defence of s friendless and persecuted rsce,
expired with these touching words upon his lips, "HAWKANAM

PnNOUSUC, WIHIEEKGA -- fifiLLRfiSAGA ROBE 'LS KATCHEfiFI."

There was not a dry eye in the wigwsm.80

The passage illustrates the kind of humor Twain vms to use on the
Indian many times and is interesting for the use of the phrsse "a fréend—
less and persecuted race." It was one of two times he ever pretended to
sympathize with the red men, and of course he mesnt it satiricelly.

fwain's column, "hemoranda," in The Gslsxy for oeptember, 1870, con-

 

tained (slonsside the humorous sketch "John Chinaman in Kew York"), an
essay titled "The Noble Red men." It begins with e pe ephrsse of the
Indian in romantic fiction, and though he does not name cooper it is ob—
vious he has that author in mind:

In books he is tall and tawny, muscular, straight, and of
kingly presence; he has a beaked nose and an eagle eye ...

His language is intensely figurative. he never speaks
of the moon, but always of "The eye of the night;" nor of
the wind as the wind, but as "the whisper of the Great
Spirit;" and so forth and so on ...

he is noble. he is true and loyal; not even imminent
death can shake his peerless faithfulness ... eith him
gratitude is religion; do him a kindness, and at the end
of a lifetime he has not forgotten it ...

he loves the dark-eyed daughter of the forest, the
dusky maiden of faultless form and rich attire, the pride
of the tribe, the all—beautiful ...81

having listed these attributes, Twain proceeds to tear down in terse,

forceful langusbe:

 

80. 5. Clemens, "lest horde of ureet men," Buffalo Express, oept. ll, 1869,
in The Curious fienublic of oondour and Other whimsical sketches, p. 139.

 

 

81. nxflomens, "The Noble med hen," The Galaxy, X (Sept. 1870),pp. 426-7.

 

45

Such is the noble ned man in print. put out on the
plains and in the mountains, not being on dress par-
ade, nor being gotten up to see company, he is under
no obligation to be other than his natural self, and
therefore:

he is little and scrawny, and black, and dirty; and
judged by even the most charitable of our canons of
human excellence, is thoroughly pitiful and contemp-
tible .f.

There is nothing figurative, or moonshiny, or sen—
timental about his language. it is very simple and
unostentations, and consists of plain, straightforward
lies ...

his heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery,
and of low and devilish instincts ... the scum of the
earth! ...

Such is the genuine noble Aborigine. I did not get
him from books but from personal observation.

 

* This is not a fancy picture; I have seen it many a
time in sevada, just as it is here limned. 82
Ed. "Memoranda"

With scorching realism.Twain has described two of the traits which
disgust him most in the Nevada Indian, uncleanliness and treachery. Fur-
ther on in the essay he details some of their cruelties:

By Dr. Keim's excellent book it appears that from June, 1868,
to October, 1869, the Indians massacred nearly 200 white per-
sons ... Children were burned alive in the presence of their
parents. wives were ravished before their husband's eyes.
Husbands were mutilated, tortured, and scalped, and their
wives compelled to look on. These facts and figures are of-
ficial, and they exhibit the misunderstood Son of the Forest

in his true character -— as a creature devoid of brave or gen-
erous qualities, but cruel, treacherous, and brutal. During
the Pi-Ute war the Indians often dug the sinews out of the
backs of white men before they were dead. (The sinews are used
for bow-strings.) But their favorite mutilations cannot be put
into print.80

In contrast to this grim portrait of the Indian,Twain's next essay,

'written in 1871, develops fully the satirical possibilities of the lndian

 

82. Ibid., 427-8.

 

83. Ibid., p. 428.

 

46

brave in Fenimore Cooper's novels, a theme first mentioned in Innocents
Abroad and hinted at again in the paraphrase in "The hoble fled Man."

The essay, "A VkflttDNiag‘a," which appeared in Sketches Lew and Old

 

(1875), is reminiscent of "John Chinaman in New York." Twain begins with
a misleading statement, resorts to the device of an Irishman disguised,
this time as an Indian, and then explodes the whole situation.witn broad
burlesque. The essay has the double purpose of ridiculing the American
Indian and Fenimore COOper's romantic portrayal of him. After a few
humorous remarks on his tourist tour of niagara Falls, Twain says with
his tongue in his cheek:

The noble Red han has always been a friend and darling of
mine. I love to read about him in tales and legends and
romances. I love to read of his inspired sagacity, and
his love of the wild free life of mountain and forest, and
his generous nobility of character, and his stately meta-
phorical manner of speech, and his chivalrous love for

the dusky maiden, and the picturesque pomp of his dress and
accoutrementfi4

He goes on to describe his first encounter with one of the Indians:

When I found the shOps at Niagara Falls full of dainty In-
dian beadwork, and stunning moccasins, and equally stunning
toy figures representing human beings who carried their
weapons in holes bored through arms and bodies, and had feet
shaped like a pie, I was filled with emotion. I knew that
now, at last, I was going to come face to face with the noble
Red hen.

A lady clerk in a shop told me, indeed, that all her grand
array of curiosities were nade by the Indians, and that they
were [sic] plenty about the Falls, and that they were friend-
ly, and it would not be dangerous to speak to them. And sure
enough, as I approached the bridge, leading over to Luna Is—
land, I came upon a noble Son of the Forest sitting under a
tree, diligently at work on a bead reticule. Ne w re a slouch
hat and bragans, and had a short black pipe in his mouth.

Thus does the baneful contact with our effeminate civilization
dilute the picturesque pomp which is so natural to the Indian

 

84. S. Clemens, "A Visit to Niagara," Sketches New and Old, p. 74.

asks

47

when far removed from us in his native haunts.85

Addressing the Indian in a heavy burlesque of cooper's style, Twain
him:

Is the Wawhoo-wang-Wang of the Hack-a-Uhack happy? Does
the Great Speckled Thunder sigh for the war path, or is
his heart contented with dreaming of the dusky maiden,
the rride of the Forest? ... Speak, sublime relic of by-
gone grandeur -- venerable ruin -- speak.

The relic says:

"An is it,mesilf, Dennis Hooligan, that ye'd takin'
for a dirty Injun, ye drawlin', lantern-jawed, spider-
legged divil!" 85

Departing hastily, Twain meets another "Indian":

By and by, in the neighborhood of the Terrapin Tower, I
came upon a gentle daughter of the Aborigines in fringed
and beaded buckskin moccasins and leggins, seated on a
bench with her pretty wares about her. She had just carved
out a wooden chief that had a strong family resemblance to
a Clothespin, and was now boring a hole through his abdo-
men to put his bow through.87

Their encounter follows the same pattern as the meeting with the

"Indian" brave. Twain asks her:

"Is the heart of the forest maiden heavy? Is the laughing
Tadpole lonely? Does she mourn over the extinguished coun-
cil-fire of her race, and the vanished glories of her ances-
tors? Or does her sad spirit wander afar towards the hunting-
grounds whither herbrave Gobbler-of-the-Lightings is gone?"

The maiden says:
"Faix, an' is it Biddy Malone ye dare to be callin' names?

Lave this, or I'll shy ggur lean carcass over the cataract,
ye snivelin' blaggard!"

 

85. Ibid., p. 75.

86. Ibid., p. 76.

87. Ibid., p. '76.

88. Ibid., p. 76.

48

The conclusion of the essay is a long address purportedly delivered
by Twain to a camp of Indians whom he has come upon making moccasins and
wampum. It is a curious blend, attacking first the Indian and then the
white man. The satire this time is savage and powerful:

"Noble Red Men, nraves, Grand Sachems, war—Chiefs, Squaws,
and High Luck-a-hucks, the paleface from the land of the
setting sun greets you. You, beneficent Polecat -- you,
Devourer of Mountains -- you, Roaring Thundergusts -- you,
Bully Boy with a Glass Eye -- the paleface from beyond the
great waters greets you all. her and pestilence have thinned
your ranks, and destroyed your once proud nation. yoker and
seven-up, and a vain modern expense for soap, unknown to your
ancestors, have depleted your purses. Appropriating, in your
simplicity, the property of others, has gotten you into trou-
ble. .misrepresenting facts, in your simple innocence, has
damaged your reputation with the soulless usurper. Trading
for forty-rod whisky, to enable you to get drunk and happy
and tomahawk your families, has played the everlasting mis-
chief with the picturesaue pomp of your dress, and here you
are, in the broad light of the nineteenth century, gotten up
like the ragtag-and-bobtail of the purlieus of new York. For
shame, recall your ancestors. Recall their mighty deeds. Re-
member Uncas -— and Red Jacket -- and hole-in-the-Day -- and
Whoopde-doodledo. Emulate their achievements. Unfurl your-
selves under my banner, noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes."89

Uncleanliness, cruelty and drunkeness (which had fascinated Twain in
Injun Joe, as a boy), emerge again as traits that Twain despised in the In-
dian. At the same time, the white man is described as the "soulless usur-
per." Except for the phrase "persecuted race" in "Niagara," this was the
only time Twain ever admitted that the white man, too, might have been guil-
ty in the clash between the two races. The phrases, "appropriating, in your
simplicity, the property of others," and "misrepresenting facts, in your
simple innocence," are actually a scathing indictment of the white man's
treatment of the American Indian, as fierce and subtle a satiric thrust as

any written by Swift in his denunciations of the human race. with those two

 

89. Ibid., p. 77-8.

49

two exceptions, the passage is entirely anti-Indian, summed up in the
sharp juxtaposition of "noble savages, illustrious guttersnipes."

It was in Roughing It that Mark Twain revealed how much he despised

 

the American Indian, that is, the Indian specimens he saw in “evade. He

develops in Roughing It a savage comparison between the Nevada Indian and

 

one of the most despiccable of animals, the coyote. he had found in this
comparison the ideal terms for his violent antagonism and he explores it
fully. There is humor in his description but the prevailing note of dis-
gust overrules it:

The coyote of the deserts beyond the nocky Mountains has

a peculiarly hard time of it, owing to the fact that his
relations, the Indians, are just as apt to be the first

to detect a seductive scent on the desert breeze, and fol-
low the fragrance to the late ox it-emanated from, as he

is himself; and when this occurs he has to content himself
with sitting off at a little distance watching these people
strip off and dig out everything edible, and walk off with
it. Then he and the waiting ravens explore the skeleton
and polish the bones. It is considered that the coyote, and
the obscene bird, and the Indian of the desert, testify-
their blood-kinship with each other in that they live toget—
her in the waste places of the earth on terms of perfect
confidence and friendship, while hating all other creatures
and yearning to assist at their funerals.go

Chapter 19 of volume 1 is entirely devoted to the subject of the Gos-
hoot tribe Twain saw on his trip in the stage coach to Carson City.

On the morning of the sixteenth day out from at. Joseph we ar-
rived at the entrance of docky Canon, two hundred and fifty
miles from salt Lake. It was along in this wild country some-
where, and far from any habitation of white man, except the
stage-stations, that we Came across the wretchedest type of
mankind I have ever seen, up to this writing. 1 refer to the
Coshoot lndians. From what we could see and all we could
learn, they are very inferior to even the despised nigger In-
dians of California; inferior to all races of savages on our
continent; inferior to even the Terra del Fuegans; inferior to

 

90. Clemens, houching It, I, p. 35.

(L
y

the hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to
the hytches of Africa.91

Twain's description of the Goshoot Indians emphasizes the same
traits that were brought out in "The Noble Red Man" and the long speech
at the end of "Niagara," uncleanliness and treachery. He also depicts
again the animal-like existence that he had compared to the habits of
the coyote:

Such of the Goshoots as we saw, along the roads and hanging
about the stations, were small, lean, "scrawny" creatures;

in complexion a dull black like the ordinary American negro;
their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoard-
ing and accumulating for months, years, and even generations,
according to the age of the Proprietor; a silent, sneaking,
treacherous—looking race; taking note of everything, covertly,
like all the other "Noble Red Men" that we [do not] read about,
and betraying no sign in countenances; indolent, everlastingly
patient and tireless, like all other Indians; prideless beg-
gars -— for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian
he would not "go" any more than a clock without a pendulum;
hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a
hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline;
hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat
jackass-rabbits, crickets, and grasshoppers, and embezzle car-
rion from the buzzards and coyotes.92

Twain continues the description with a reference to the Indian's
th- st for liquor, indicating also his irritation at their habit of stony
impassiveness, mentioned in Innocents Abroad:

They are savages who, when asked if they have the common In-

dian belief in a Great bpirit, show a something which almost

amounts to emotion, thinking whisky is referred to.

Turning next to the Indian's treacherous instincts, Twain writes:

One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the Goshoots,

and yet they used to live off the offal and refuse of the sta-
tions a few months and then come some dark night when no mischief

 

91. Ibid., p. 131.
92. Ibido ’ I, p. 131-2.

93. Ibid., I, p. 132.

51

was expected, and burn down the buildings and kill the
men from anbush as they rushed out.94

His annoyance at Cooper's fictional Indians appears again in this
discussion of the Goshoots and Twain offers an explanation in tenns of it

for his dislike of the Indian:

The disgust which the Goshoots gave me, a disciple of Goo-
per and a worshiper of the Red Man -— even of the scholarly
savages in the Last of the hohicans,'who are fittingly as-
sociated with backwoodsmen who divide each sentence into two
equal parts; one part critically grammatical, refined, and
choice of language, and the other part Just such an attempt

to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer as a broadway clerk
might make after eating an edition of amerson Bennett's works
and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theater a couple of
weeks -- I say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an
Indian worshiper, set me to examining authorities, to see if
perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing
him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations
that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how
quickly the paint and tinsel fall away from him and left him
treacherous, filthy, and repulsive -- and how quickly the ev-
idences accumulated that Wherever one finds an Indian tribe he
has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances
and surroundings -- but Goshoots, after all.95

 

Twain's statement of his disillusionment cannot be taken as literal
truth. It has already been pointed out that he was vauainted with In-
dians, particularly the half-breed ”Injun Joe" in his childhood. The
prevailing contempt of the pioneer for the Indian was an inherent part
of his background and he could not have observed the remnants of the once
powerful Indian tribes in Missouri without absorbing some of that attitude.
True, the novels of Cooper probably fascinated him in his childhood, just
‘as the spectacle of drunken Injun Joe did, but by the time Twain reached
tJie West he was a mature man with travel in the East and four years on the

94. _I_b_i_d_., I, p. 132-3.

95- Ibid., I, p. 134.

kississippi steamboats behind him. with his satiric gift slowly ripen-
ing it is not likely that he still regarded Cooper's Indians as authen-
tic. The shock he received at sight of the Goshoot Indians, and later
the Washoes and Pi-Utes was one of degree. They were in worse condition
than the few he had known in his childhood. 80 his explanation becomes
an example of Twain's habit of exaggerating the facts about himself.
There is an element of truth in it, of course, but one cannot accept lit-
erally his description of himself as a "disciple of Cooper and a worship-
per of the Red Man." His jeers at the language of the backwoodsmen in
Cooper's novels demonstrates that he never could have taken Cooper very
seriously because his own experience contradicted what he read in Last_

of the Mohicans, and the same must have been obvious to him in the case

 

of the Indian. Indeed, he had stated the same explanation of his disil-

lusionment in "Niagara," the year before Roughing It, and the conclusion

 

is inescapable that he was exaggerating the effect of COOper's novels on
himself in order to show how unrealistic he considered them.

The chapter ends with a supposedly contrite expression of pity for
the degeneration of the hmerican Indian. Actually it is double-edged sa-
tire, with someone else eoually an object of his ridicule. Twain develops
the idea that there is a rumor about many of the employers and employees
of the Baltimore and Washington Railroad being Coshoots. He states that
this is an error because there is only a plausible resemblance and deplores
the effect the rumor has had upon the Goshoots:

The necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class

who have had a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts

of the Rocky Mountains, Heaven knows: If we cannot find it in

our hearts togive these poor naked creatures our Christian sym-
pathy and compassion, in God's name let us at least not throw

53

mud at them.96

In analyzing Twain's chapter about the Coshoot Indians, F.T. Lorch

points out two obvious flaws:

In considering hark Twain's appraisal of Indians in "Roughing
It," two things should be noted: (1) that the many characteris-
tics which he ascribes to the Goshoots are generalized as true
of all Indians; and (2) that he is reporting more about the Gos-
hoots than he could possibly have observed of them while passing
through their country in a stage-coach. In view of his harsh and
sweeping condemnation of Indians on such passing acquaintance,
it is fair to question his competence to judge. ROW well, at
first hand, did he know Indians, and was he reporting the char-
acter and condition of nevada Indians in the decade of 1860-
1870 or was he reflecting certain popular conceptions with re-
gard to them that had sprung up in the early days of settlement
of the territory?97

Twain's remarks in Roughing It were written ten years after the events

 

described and they follow the same pattern as his other comments on the In-
dians written in the preceding three years. They do not represent the re-
sults of previous close personal contact with the Indians but, rather, cas-
ual observation embroidered for literary purposes from the distance of ten
intervening years. Lorch deveIOps further his point that mark Twain was

depending more upon popular report of the uoshoot Indians than he was upon

his own knowledge of them:

In his annual report for 1857-1858, Forney, the Indian a-
gent for the Territory noted the extreme destitution of

the tribe. "They were without exception the most miserable
set of human beings I have ever beheld ... In his book
"The City of the Saints," (1862) Richard Burton refers to
them as "mean and vile."

Thatever the truth may have been about the extraordinary
meanness and vileness of the uoshoots in the years preceding
mark Twain's arrival in Nevada Territory, later reports are
distinctly more favorable and go into causes of the difficul-
ties which Nevada Indians faced. In his annual report for

 

96. Ibid., I, p. 135.

97. LOI‘Ch, 22. Cite, p. 10

54

1865-1864 the Indian agent for the ferritcry described the
Goshoots as "peaceable and loyal, striving to obtain their
living by tilling the soil and laboring for the whites when-
ever an opportunity presents, and producing almost entirely
their own living, receive comparatively little help from
government appropriation ... i am satisfied, also, that not
half the depredations committed are the work of the Goshee
Utes, although they have name and blame.98

Lorch judges iwain severely for his portrayal of the indian in Rough-

ing It:

In dealing with the uoshoots in "Roughing It" it is obvious
that hark iwain was striving for literary effect rather than
historical accuracy. had he taken the trouble to examine the
official reports of the Indian agents and the secretary of

the interior for the period between 1863 and 1870 he could not
in good conscience have offered the public an appraisal based
merely upon observation and popular report no longer valid.
nor might his appraisal have ignored the economic difficulties
which were in large measure the cause of their low cultural
status. he would have learned what he himself should have ob-
served during his residence in hevada rerritory, that the ra-
pid influx of the white settlers had greatly decreased the in—
dians' means of subsistence by depriving them of their hunting
and fishing grounds and forcing them to seek their living in
portions of the country so barren that starvation was all but
inevitable.99

It is futile to argue that mark rwain should have written differently
than he did. he was not interested in historical facts; all his life he
was indifferent to them and it was a matter of coincidence when he was ac-
curate with them. As Lorch finally concludes:

In 1872 when he published nough'ng it he was still the lit-

erary showman, concerned with theatrical effects rather than
with the "naked truth."100

 

One other reference to the Nevada Indians in doughing it illustrates

 

a trait iwain loathed in the indian and the humorous jibe he never could

resist when an opportunity arose. Jokes like this one are a reminder of

 

98. Ibid., P. l.
99. Ibid., PO 1-2.
10). Ibid., p. 2.

55

the sort of humor Twain led his readers to expect and then wanted them
to forget when he was in a serious mood. The comment is inserted as an
excuse to make a pun:

A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it

is nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the

vicinity drink it sometimes, though. It is not improba-

ble, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.101

Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer (1875), one of the most familiar characters
in American literature, embodies most of the traits Twain despised in the
American lndian but to account for him solely in these terms is to over—
simplify him. It must be remembered that Injun Joe is seen through the
eyes of Tom and Huck and has, therefore, a certain aura of romantic fas-
cination about him. He is also, for literary purpose, the agent of.mel-
odramatic action. he has all the trappings of a villain on the stage; in-
deed, his first appearance is in a graveyard at midnight where his approach
is prepared by Buck's whisper to Tom, "that murderin' half-breed: I'd dru-

. . , 102

ther they was deVils a durn sight."

Injun Joe revengeful nature is established beyond a doubt in his threats
to the young Doc Robinson:

"Five years ago you drove me away from your father's kitchen

one night, when I come to ask for something to eat, and you

said I warn't there for any good; and when I swore I'd get

even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me

jailed for a vagrant. Did you think I'd forget? The Injun

blood ain’t in me for nothing. And now I've sot you, and

you got to settle, you know!"103
Twain develops the full extent of Injun Joe's revengeful and cruel nature
near the end of the book when he has Injun Joe reveal his plans for the

Widow Douglas to a companion. To the companion's plea that they abandon

the idea of robbing the widow, Injun Joe snorts that he doesn't want the

 

101. Clemens, Roughing It, I, p. 260.
102. Clemens, Tom Sagyer, p. 93.

103. Ride, p. 95.

 

56

money; he wants revenge for the horsewhipping once inflicted on hhn
by the widow's husband:

"He had me horsewhipped: -- horsewhipped in front of the
jail, like a nigger: -- with all the town looking on!
Horsewhipped: -- do you understand? He took advantage of
me and died. But I'll take it out of £333"

 

 

"Oh, don't kill her! Don't do that:"

"Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill

him if he was here; but not her. when you want to get

revenge on a woman you don't kill her -— bosh: You go

for her looks. You slit her nostrils -- you notch her

ears like a sowl"104

And for a final emphasis on the cruel and revengeful nature of the
Indian, Twain has the Welshman say to Huck:

"It's all plain enough, now. when you talked about not-

ching ears and slitting noses I judged that was your own

embellishment, because white men don't take that sort of

revenge. But an Injun: That's a different matter alto-

gather."105

Injun Joe's murder of Doc Robinson and shifting of the evidence to
the innocent huff Potter demonstrate his treacherous nature and Tom and
Huck reveal their awareness of it in their frightened discussion of the
events:

"Tom, we got to keep mum. You know that. That Injun devil

wouldn't make any more of drownding us than a couple of cats,

if we was to squeak 'bout this and they didn't hang him."

Another habit of the Indian which Twain often alluded to in the fore-
going essays also belongs to Injun Joe, drunkenness. (It will be remem-

bered that this was a fatal weakness of the original Injun Joe in Hanni-

bal). When Huck describes to Tom how he found Injun Joe in his tavern

__._

104. Ibid” p. 259.

105. Ibid., Po 267.

106. Ibid., p. 101.

57

hideout, he says that the half-breed was stretched out asleep on the
floor and that he "never budged, Drunk, I reckon."107

The reputation of half-breeds on the frontier which De Voto has

pointed out, the tales of Indian cruelty in Nevada and the requirements

of a villain in a melodrama are all reflected, then, in the cruel, treach-
erous, revengeful nature of Injun Joe. These habits of character, toget-
her with drunkenness, were repeatedly emphasized by Twain in his earlier
essays and comments on the red man. They represent the attributes he most
frequently described and ridiculed whenever he discussed the lndiens. Only
uncleanliness is omitted in his portrayal of Injun Joe.

The melodramatic effect of Injun Joe's presence is enhanced by IWain's
technique of presenting him in eery surroundings, first in a graveyard at
midnight, then in a deserted,supposedly haunted house, and finally in the
gloom of the underground cave. In the haunted house he appears even more
sinister because he is in disguise as an old Spaniard, "wrapped in a serape;
he had bushy white whiskers; long white hair flowed from under his sombrero,
and he wore green goggles."108 The shock of the boys when they realize that
this stranger whom they have noticed in the village for several days is In-
Jun Joe adds to their previous terror of the half-breed.

In his.Autobiography, written in his last years, Twain reminisced a-

 

bout the Injun Joewho had been a local character in nannibal. His re-
marks illustrate the extent to which he enlarged the career of the Indian for

literary purposes:

 

107. Ibid., p. 248.

108. Ibid., p. 23?).

 

 

t .3 ol ...

58

Injun Joe, the half-breed, got lost in there [Ehe cavE]
once, and would have starved to death if the bats had
run short. But there was no chance of that. There were
myriads of them. he told me all his story. In the book
called Tom Sawyer I starved him entirely to death in the
cave, but that was in the interest of art; it never hap-
pened.109

 

He may assume that much of Injun Joe's character was in the inter-
est of art, also, in view of Twain's habitual literary treatment of the
American Indian.

The passage in the Autobiography in which Twain relates his father's

 

attempts to reform Injun Joe is cited by Lorch as proof that in his old
age, Twain looked back on Injun Joe "with something of the same pity and
sympathy for the underdog that he displayed in his picture of the negro,

'Jim,‘ in HuckleberrygFinnfifi Lorch states that "in later years mark Twain

 

learned to look beyond the passing show of human misery and cry out against
the causes which produced it."110 That Mark Twain did explore human mis-
ery much more thoroughly and sumpathetically in his mature writings than

in such early works as Roughing_lt is true but it is not the case with his

 

remarks about Injun Joe in the Autobiography. They are reminiscences in

 

the spirit of nostalgia and do not contain the slightest suggestion of pity
or sympathy for injun Joe's condition or character. neither does it seem
to be the case that in his old age Mark Twain looked back on the Indian race
in general with either sympathy or pity. Paine tells in his Biosraphy of

some marginal notes Twain made in a copy of Old Regime that he was reading

 

at the time (1909). The book Old Regime by Francis Parkman was a history

 

of the brench colonization of Canada and contained descriptions of the

 

109. Clemens, autobiography, I, p. 105.

 

110. Lorch, 22, cit., p. 2.

59

tortures endured by missionaries in their attempts to convert the Indians,
especially the Iroquois. raine tells us:

In one place he wrote:

"that men should be willing to leave their happy homes
and endure what the missionaries endured in order to teach
pthese Indians the road to hell would be rational, under-

standable, but why they should want to teach them a war to

heaven is a thing which the mind somehow cannot gras : 11

It was, of course, the cruelty and barbarity again which mark iWain
was holding against the Indian, even though he was referring to incidents
of two hundred years before, but his comment reveals that even in the last
year of his life mark Twain was still nursing his comtempt for the Indian
and keeping alive his old antagonism.

hark Twain's writings on the nmerican Indian and his literary crea-
tion of Injun Joe demonstrate, then, that he was violently prejudiced a-
gainst the red man, and that he never felt anything but contempt and re-
vulsion at the sight of him. his reaction was characteristically intense
and emotional, and completely subjective, based almost entirely on a few
brief contacts in Hannibal and Nevada and the popular reports circulated
by local residents.

unlike the Chinese minority, iWain did not consider the lndian in
the role of the underdog, despite his one reference LU the "soulless u-
surper." Wagenknecht says on this point, quoting from the essay "The No-
ble Red Man":

Mark Twain's tendency to champion the underdog would seem

to have failed him, however, in connection with the Gos-

hoot Indians, whom he came in contact with in Nevada, and
whom he denounced as "scum o' the earth," and of whom he

 

111. Paine, op, cit., IV, p. 1538.

6O

declared that to exterminate them would be a charity "to

the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles." He denoun-

ces as sentimentalists those who sympathize with the In-

dians and rejoices that "the inquiry his always got to come

after the good officer has administered his little admoni-

tionl' “But it is clear that he hates the Indian for his

cruelties to women and children.112

It is also clear that Twain hated the Indian for his uncleanliness,
his revengeful instinct, his frequent drunkenness and his anhnal like ex-
istence. The Indian trait of imperturbability irritated him, perhaps be-
cause, having an emotional temperament himself, he could not understand
an unemotional response or, what seemed even worse, no response at all:

Mark Twain obviously did not consider that the Indian deserved any
place at all in American democracy. his usual democratic urge was not
aroused and the.miserab1e condition of the Indians he saw in Nevada a-
roused only antipathy in hhn. He could not consider them as humans even
when they were living as harmless residents of Carson City and Virginia
City.

His remarks about the Indians were often a reaction against the con-
cept of the "noble savage" in Cooper's novels. Twain.could not resist the
opportunity of satirizing Cooper's literary style and romantic portrayal
of the Indian, and in so doing he exaggerated the intensity of his feelings.
The desire for theatrical effect and for humor also colored many of his com-
ments on the Indian, but when all these allowances have been made, it is
still evident that Twain could not consider the Indian objectively, and
that in spite of his statement in his essay "Concerning the Jews" that he

believed he had no racial prejudices, he did have a most positive antagon-

ism toward the "noble red man."

 

112. Wagenknecht, _p, cit., p. 277.

61

Chapter IV

The Friend of a Race

Mark Twain's childhood years in the small semi-frontier slaveholding
community of Hannibal profoundly influenced his attitude toward the negro
race. It has already been pointed out that the kind of slavery in Hannibal
was not the large plantation variety which formed the economic basis of so-

ciety in the deep South. Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson furnishes a vivid ex-

 

ample of the difference between the life of the slave on the small farms

and in the villages of hissouri and the life of the slave on the large cot-
\_ '4 -

. ton plantations:

The horror of being 'sold down the river,’ which forms the

leading motif of Puddflnhead ailson, and the description in

the novel of the cruel methods of the overseer on an hrkan-
sas plantation, make the contrast between the nissouri sys-
tem and that of the large cotton plantation apparent.

In his Autobiography, Hark Twain makes some observations about the

 

slavery system that was a part of his childhood, revealing the complacency
with which it was accepted:

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was
not aware that there'was anything wrong about it. No one
arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing
against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved
it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need
only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind --
and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the mat-
ter sure.114

 

113. Brashear, op. cit., 58-9. Also Mark Twain's statement, ” ... to our
whites and blacks alike, the Southern plantation was simply hell; no
milder name could describe it. If the threat to sell an incorrigible
slave "down the river" would not reform him, nothing would -- his case
was past cure." (Clemens, Autobiography, I, p. 124.)

 

114. Clemens, Autobiography, I, p. 101.

 

Twain justifies the complacency of the slave holders in tannibal,
and of most Southerners, by saying that the slavery system did not make
them hard hearted but rather, merely stupified their humanity.115 John
Marshall Clemens owned two slaves, Jenny, and "Uncle Ned" who were trea-
ted kindly according to TWain's memory, but who were nevertheless subject

to the restrictions of the system.

Twain's Autobiography which contains many reminiscences of the slaves

 

he knew, though colored by the nostalgia of remembering a golden past,
still offers a clear picture of the impression made upon him by those early
relationships. some of the memories are grim, such as the time he saw a
slave struck down by a chunk of slag because he had committed some small
offense. He watched the slave die.116 Others are delightful, such as the
description of the old bed-ridden negress whom the children visited every
day and looked upon with awe because it was believed she was 1,000 years
old and had talked with moses.117 Twain recalls the nature of his relation-
ship with the negro slaves on his Uncle John Charles' farm, the paradoxical
relationship that children recognized early:

All the negroes were friends of ours and with those of our

own age we were in effect comrades. I say in effect, using

the phrase as a modification. as were comrades, and yet

not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line

which both parties were conscious of and which rendered com-

plete fusion impossible.118

Of such ingredients was mark Twain's knowledge of the negro race

formed. An understanding of the particular kind of relationship he experi-

enced is essential to an understanding of his attitude toward the negro and

 

115. De Vote cites a case in point about Twain's father. "The Clemens slaves
would have been given their freedom, except that would have entailed a
loss of money." (De Vote, op. cit., p. 65).

116. Clemens, Autobiography) I, p. 132. Also the account of the negro boy,
Sandy, whose singing made Jane Clemens rejoice because she knew then that
he was not remembering his mother, a slave in maryland. (Clemens, Autobio-
graphy, I, 102-3).

117. Lbid., I, p. 99. 118. Ibid., I, p. 100.

 

63

the portrayal of him in his writing, because mark Twain drew upon his
memory of those years and translated it into art. As De Veto has written:

The boy Samuel Clemens entered wholly into the slaves' world.

It was a much more developed, much more various world than

is ingeniously believed. Abysses of horror it contained were

to have their share in the soul of Samuel Clemens, but his

shaping soul: was to bear other impresses of that world.

mark Twain's experiences among negro slaves in his formative years
conditioned in him a lifelong sympathy and understanding for the race. he
had, always, a deep affection for negroes because he had lived close to
them and had known them as friends. lrue, he had to overcome an occasion-

al tendency toward the complacent, superior attitude described in the above

passage from his Autobiogralhyj a tendency natural to one raised as he was;

 

but he did in time overcome it, and at all times it never influenced him to
say an unkind word about the negro race. his life was filled with many ex-
amples of his genuine affection and tenderness for the negro. rains writes
that he never missed an opportunity to pay tribute to them and that "he
would go across the street to speak to an old negro, and to take his hand."120
Paine quotes also in the collection of iwainfls letters edited by him, a let-
ter to william Dean nowells that illustrates mark iwain's enjoyment when he
lectured in a negro church. raine's comment and the 1etten,in part, fol-
lows:

Clemens would go out of his way any time to grant favor to

the colored race. His childhood associations were partly

accountable for this, but he also felt that the wnite man

owed the Legro a debt for generations of enforced bondage.

he would lecture any time in a coloured church, when he

would as likely as not refuse point-blank to speak for a

white congregation.

nartford, reb. 27, 1881
... 0n the evening of'Nkrdthth, I am going to read to the

 

119. De Voto, op. cit., p. 37—8.
120. l)aine, OE. Cite, II, p. 700-10

12

64

colored folk in the african Church here (no whites ad-
mitted except such as I bring with me), aifl.a choir of
colored folk will sing jubilee songs. I count on a
good time, and shall hepe to have you folks there, and
Livy.l21

One important namifestation of mark Twain's appreciation of the ne-
gro race was his delight in negro spirituals, which he often sang with
deep feeling. The family servant of the Clemens family for many years,
Katy Leary, in the book dictated by her to Mary Lawton, gives a moving

description of an evening when Twain sang spirituals. Preserved in her
speech, the scene reveals a Lark Twain stirred by memories of long ago
slavery days:

"They was just settin' there in the music room, lookin

out at the moonlight. And suddenly Kr. Clemens got right
up without any warning and begun to sing one of them negro
spirituals. a lady that was there told me he just stood

up with both his eyes shut and begun to sing kind of soft-
like-a faint sound, just as if there was wind in the trees,
she said; and he kept right on singin' kind 0' low and
sweet, and it was beautiful and made your heart ache some—
how. ... Twas somethin' from another world, she said, and
when he got through, he put his two hands up to his head,
just as though all the sorrow of them negroes was upon him;
and then he begun to sing. 'Nobody knows the Trouble I
Got, Nobody Knows but Jesus' ... and when he come to the'
end, to the Glory Hallelfliah, he gave a great shout -- just
like the negroes do -- he shouted out the Glory, Glory Hal-
leluiah3"133

Clara Clemens"My_Father, hark Twain, also mentions Twain's love of
the old spirituals and the family occasions when he was persuaded to sing
them. "He sang them with much spirit and played his own accompaniments

o ‘ "123
on the piano, as well as he could remember tnem.

There are other examples of Mark Twain's affection for the negro race.

 

121. Paine (ed.), Mark Twain's Letters, p. 594-5.

 

122. Mary Lawton, A Lifetime With hark Twain, p. 212-13.

 

123. Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch, hy FatherL¥Kark Twain, p. 72-3.

 

65

Paine tells of the servant, George, who was with the family for eighteen
years and was ”precisely the sort of character mark Twain loved.” George
was "typically racially Southern, with those delightful attributes of wit
and policy which go with the best type of negro character."124

In the year 1881, Twain wrote to President Garfield on behalf of the
negro, Frederick Douglass, who was Marshal of the District of Columbia and
who, according to rumor was about to lose the position. Twain respectfully
asked "as a simple citizen" that Garfield retain Douglass in office. He
closed his letter with these words:

I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong de—

sire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless

character, and so admire his brave, long crusade for the

liberties and elevation of his race.

He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to

the point, his history would move me to say these things

without that, and I feel them, too.125

These and other examples from the life of mark Twain verify his af-
fection for the negro as a consistent and sincere feeling all his life and
as the principal source of his literary treatment of the race. Twain often
indulges in humorous characterization of the negro but there is no malice,
no desire for theatrical effect as in the case of the Indian. His humor
about the negro is an expression of his rich enjoyment of the traits found
in the racial character. It reveals a tolerance and generous appreciation
which could only come from such close association as Twain had had. There
is respect in his humorous portraits of the negro and characters like Nigger

Jim and Roxy emerge under his pen as convincing individuals, not convention-

al stereotypes. That he was unique up to this time in the literary tradition

 

124. raine, Hark Twain, A Biography, II, p. 575-4{

125. Ibid., II, p.“ 70]..

66

of the negro in fiction will be seen later in this chapter.

Twain's early relationship with negro slaves was also responsible,
as De Voto has said, for much that was fruitful in his art. his novels
in which slavery is part of the background are rich in the lore of the
slaves —- the superstitions, the weird tales (such as "The Golden Arm,"
which became a standard feature of Twain's lecture repertorie), the fears
and beliefs of an African race transplanted to a new continent. De Veto
has explored thoroughly the nature of this influence in hark Twain's work,
of which the following quotation gives a small indication:

Thus the lore of slaves. The world was ominously corrupted

with malevolence looking toward the terror of death, but

time had heaped up a variety of defences and forewarnings

in which the slaves were always busy. They were vigilant

to inform the children and the boys who lived with them whol-

ly shared their dread. Childhood was thus seasoned in mir-

acle and terror.126

Farrell has assigned a special significance to Twain's recording of

slave lore in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn:

 

The institution of chattel slavery always exists as the back—
ground against which these boys live. It forces itself into
the very content of consciousness, not only of Tom and Huck,
but of all the members of their village. As Bernard De Voto
has pointed out, the existence of slavery explains the role
which superstition plays in the minds of Tom and Huck. Here
Mark Twain made a neat social comment. He told us, in effect,
that if you preserve the institution of slavery it will per‘
meate your entire culture and become an important bar to pro-
gress. Just as it produces meanness and brutality, so does
it perpetuate magic. briefly, the backwardness of the slaves,
treated as property rather than as human beings, will blunt
the moral and intellectual development of the masters.127

The significance certainly exists in Twain's books but it is question-
able if he himself was intentionally pointing it out especially in a book

like Tom Sawyer which was written as a story of perennial boyhood, and not

 

 

126. De Vote, op. cit., p. 73.

127. Farrell, op. cit., p. 6, 37.

57

with any serious purpose of social comment. In Huckleberry Finn the in-

 

clusion of negro superstitions and folklore is given a deeper'meaning by

Mark Twain than in Tom Sawyer because it is connected with the tragedy

 

of Nigger Jim. Still, it is dopbtful if hark Thain intended it as a war-

~_ .4

ning that its continued existence would demoralize white men. Lark Twain
was not inclined to prObe a question so deeply; he was more interested in
the simple issue of right or wrong, and in painting a realistic picture of
conditions as he knew them. '

De Voto also relates two of Mark Twain's most famous stories, "The

Jumping Brog of Calaveras County" and the Bluejay Yarn from.A Tramp Abroad

 

to the negro folklore familiar to Twain in his childhood. He tells of a
negro variant of the Jumping Frog story and points out that both versions
are tales of shrewdness, or outwitting, a favorite theme in negro folklore,
as well as frontier lore. he does not seek to establish the negro version
as the original or even to claim that Lark Twain.hsd heard it, but merely
points out its existence "in the vein that composed Mark Twain's finest
ore."128 Of the Bluejay Yarn De Voto writes that it likewise is in the
tradition of negro folklore, this time the fables of animals who talk. The
Uncle Remus stories, of course, represent the literary expression of these
old tales.129 Dc Voto links the Bluejay Yarn directly to the influence of
negro folklore:

Its material comes from the Negro's bestiary, interstitial

with the life of his boyhood in Hannibal; and in this way

the humor rises from fantasy, from the imaginative myth-
making of the slaves ane the frontier.130

 

128. De Voto, op. cit., p. 174.

129. "And at Hannibal his own childhood had understood animals which talked
and kabolds and enchanted folk, desirable in the stories that Uncle Dan'l
told before the fire and Uncle Remus repeated, or dreadful in their dar-
ker traffic across new graves. do he is not surprised when a raven be-
gins to caw at him derisively. 'However, made no reply; I would not

130. Ibid., p. 251.

68

Another phase of the influence of negro lore and superstitions on

I

Mark Twain's writing is evidenced by the element of melodrama in his
work. as De Voto says: I

One reason why melodrama is constant in Mark's bobks is that
his imagination had fed on actual melodrama since infancy.

A child who was educated by Negroes and had witnessed a dozen
or so mob murders ... was not likely to impose in his fiction
the minute psychological hesitations of Hepry James.131

Not only was Mark Twain's early association with negroes responsible
for the inclusion of their folklore and for the element of melodrama in
his work, but also it contributed to his realistic portrayal of the ne-
gro race. He recorded their speech as he remembered it, not as a false
literary tradition had disguised it for a gullible public:

From 1835 on the melodrama was amplified by the discovery that
the stage Negro was laughable ... the discovery that Sambo was
funny was, in the main, a northern one; for the writers of
Southern humor preferred the poor white. This observation may
account for the atrocity of negro dialect, or coon talk, that
fastened itself on literature. mrs. Stowe merely lifted it
from Christy's minstrels ... Christy in turn had got it from
northern broadsides and newspapers ... much later it worked
back into the South, nelson Page presenting it with a spuri-
ous nicety that passed as realism. Samuel Clemens and George
w. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris, meanwhile, had written Ne-
gro speech, but the convention ignored them, and of late, trans-
ferred to Harlem and the Caribbean, has avain been accepted as
realsim.132

The negro slave types hark Twain had known are drawn with accuracy in
his books. They are convincing as individuals and as representatives of a
whole race. Because they are based on experience they have an authenticity
which has secunaithem a permanent place in American literature.

So Mark Twain's childhood in the company of negro slaves conditioned

in him a lifelong sympathy and understanding of the negro race. The imprint

 

131. Ibid., p. 270.

132. Ibid., p. 33.4.

69

of this attitude is found in his humorous treatment of the negro, which
is good natured and tolerant, and in the strengthening of his habitually
realistic style by a personal knowledge of the pre-Civil war slave. Au-
thentic negro folklore is reproduced in his books as he remembered it
from childhood and the element of melodrama in his writings may also be

traced, at least in part, to the influence of that folklore.

* * * * * *

It is possible to trace a development in the attitude of Mark Twain
toward the negro race, as it is not possible to do in his attitude toward
the Chinese, lndian or Jewish races. he had, always, sympathy and affec-
tion for the negro but in the beginning his attitude also contained an el-
ement of superiority. me still reflected the Southern idea of the negro
as an inferior race, of the negro as a child second in intelligence to
the white "parent" race. mark Twain's attitude changed in tine and he came
to look upon the negro in a more democratic spirit, as an equal. In the
files of the Hannibal Journal, the newspaper operated for a time by Orion
Clemens, a letter has been discovered that antedates those published in
raine's volume. The letter was written by Twain after his arrival in New
York in 1853 and was apparently printed in the paper by Orion as being of
interest to the readers. It reads, in part:

New'York, August 24, 1853

" ... When I saw the Court House in Syracuse, it called to mind

the time when it was surrounded with chains and companies of sol-

diers, to prevent the rescue of he Reynold's nigger, by the in-

fernal abolitionists. I reckon I had better black my face, for

in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than

white peeple.138

This easy sarcasm reveals the complacency of the Southern attitude which

 

133. Brashear, Op. cit., p. 154.

'70

Thain learned, much as Huck Finn does, to overcome. His Southern tra in-
ing provided a solid basis of affection but as the democratic influence
of the frontier grew upon him it gradually erased the unconsciously con-
descending attitude bequeathed to him by his Southern inheritance and he
developed a more thoughtful appreciation of the negro race. An instance
of this sharpened awareness of the negro is found in his hotebook in a
paragraph jetted down in 1867 during his travels in the Near Ea st. The
entry is dated June 22, 1867 and reads:

Many of the blacks are slaves to the floors: -- when they

can read first chapter of Koran, can no longer be slaves;

~- would have been well to adopt educational test for nig-

ger vote in nmerica,134

In his first novel, The Gilded Lee (1873),? fivain's attitude tovard

 

the negro race reflects the Southern point of view. The anusing chapter
in which Uncle Dan'l, seeing for the first time a steamboat churning up
the river out of the darkness, believes it to be the Lord, illustrates
this. Describing Uncle Dan'l, his wife and the three white children,
Twain writes:

The little company assembled on the log were all children,

(at least in simplicity and broad and comprehensive ignor-

ance, ) and the remarks they made abcnt the river were in

keeping xvith the character. 135

Uncle Danl's terrified shout, "It's dc Almighty: Git down on yo'
knees.," is followed by his eloquent prayer in which the negro slave's
superstitious and childlike nature is movingly drawn:

... O Lord, we's been mighty wicked, an' we knows dat we
'zerve to go to de bad place, but, good Lord, deah Lord, we

ain't ready yit, we aint ready -- let dese po' chil'en hab
one mo' chance, jes' one mo' chance. Take de ole niggah if

134. Paine (ed.), hark Twain's Notebook, p. 65.

135. S.L. Clemens and C.D. Warner, The Gilded Age, p. 30,6.

7i

you's got to hab somebody."136

Later in the novel a conversation occurs between the hypocritical
demogog, Senator Dilworthy, and the ebullient Colonel Sellers, about the
merits of educating the negro. Since both are targets of hark Twain's
satire, the Senator treated with subtle contempt and the Colonel with
goodhumored indulgence, the remarks of neither can be taken as expressing
Lark's attitude. However, in view of the portrait of the slave, Uncle
Dan'l, Colonel Sellers' Opinion is probably closest to Twain's at this
time. It is primarily, of course, a recording of the two points of view
which were being hotly debated after the Civil war when the free negro
was still a relatively new addition to American democracy. hark Twain

was not yet the impassioned defender of the negro's rights that he was

 

to become in huckleberry Finn, and he never did discuss the particular
cuestion of education for the negro beyond the brief notation Quoted a—

bove. He was here, in The Gilded Age, merely repeating the familiar ar-

 

gument,. poking gentle fun at Colonel Seller's easy complacency and sa-
tirizing fiercely the insincere platitudes of Senator Dilworthy. To the
Senator's recommendation that the negroes be educated, Colonel Sellers
replies, "You can't do much with 'em. They are a speculating race, sir,
disinclined to work for white folks without security, planning how to
live by only working for themselves." The Senator objects that when the
negro is educated he will be better able to make his speculations fruit-
ful. The rest of the conversation follows. The Colonel begins with:

"Never, sir, never. He would only have a wider sc0pe to

injure himself. A niggro has no grasp, sir, Now, a white

man can conceive great operations and carry them out, a nig-
gro can't."

 

55

136. id... p. 370

72

"Still, granting that he might injure himself in a worldly
point of view, his elevation through eduCation would multiply
his chances for the hereafter -- which is the important thing
after all, Colonel. And no matter what the result is, we
must fulfill our duty by this being."

"I'd elevate his soul, that's just it. You can't make his
soul too immortal, but I wouldn't touch.hgm9 himself. Yes,
sir: make his soul immortal, but don't disturb the niggro as
he is."137 ‘

In 1874, the year following the publication of The Gilded Age, Mark

 

Twain's first contribution to the Atlantic Kenthly appeared in that maga—

 

zine. It was an account, faithfully preserved in the original speech, of
the life story of the negro cook on the farm of mrs. Clemens' sister, Sue
Crane. Auntie Cord, as she was called, had been born in slavery, and had
had the harrowing experiences familiar to many slaves. Twain's article,
"A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," through the simple
device of allowing the old woman to tell her own story, catches all the
sorrow and humiliation of the negro slave. For dramatic effect, Thain
contrasts his own amazement that the jelly woman he knows could ever have
had trouble in her life, with the facts of her past as she reveals them.
However, one cannot but believe that essentially he was telling the truth
about his own attitude. He begins with a description of the scene when
Auntie Cord told her story, writing that they were sitting on the porch

of the farmhouse and auntie Cord "was sitting respectfully below our level,

138

on the steps -- for she was our servant, and colored." The company was
teasing the colored woman and she was enjoying it thoroughly when Mark
Twain suddenly asked her how it happened that she had lived sixty years and

never had any trouble. This sobered her so that she asked in amazement if

 

157. Ibid., p. 187—8.

138. Clemens, "A True Story," Sketches New and Old, p. 265.

73

he was in earnest. Twain's reply indicates his surprise:

"Why, 1 thought -- that is, I meant -- why, you.£3£:t_have

had any trouble. I've never heard you sigh and never seen

your eye when there wasn't a laugh in it."l‘)g

This brings forth Auntie Cord's story of her life, of how she and
her husband and seven children were sold at an auction and of how she
never saw any of them again until twenty years later when by a miraculous
coincidence she was reunited with her youngest son, now a grown man. The
old cook's description of the slave auction is intensely dramatic in its
simplicity:

"Dey put chains on us an' put us on a stan' as high as dis

po'ch -— twenty foot high -- an' all de people stood aroun',

crowds an' crowds. An dey'd come up dah an' look at us all

roun', an' squeeze our arm, an' make us git up an! walk, an'

den say 'Dis one too ole', or 'Dis one lame', or 'Dis one

don't 'mount to much.’ An' dey sole my ole man, an' took him

away, an' dey begin to sell my chil'en an' take dem away ...

Auntie Uord concludes her story with words, "Oh, no Misto C -, $.hain't
had no trouble. An' no joyl"l4l

One can readily see the impression this episode made on Mark Twain. He
considered it as suitable material for the Atlantic konthly_without any comp
ment of his own, and so he made no attempt to dress it up or to use it as a
starting point for further discussion. Certainly it was another step in his
slowly deepening perception of the tragedy of the negro slave. Jhen the ar-
ticle appeared the following year in Sketches New and Old, Howells commented
on the volume as illustrating "the growing seriousness of meaning in the ap-

parently unmoralized drollings" of the essays and pointed to a similar growth

in Dickens and Thackeray. He mentioned ”A True Story" as shaking "a gift in

 

159. Ibid., p. 266.
140. Ibid., p. 267-8.
141. Ibid., p. 272.

74

14
the author for the simple, dramatic report of reality." 3 Paine writes
in his Biography of hark Twain's affection for Auntie Cord and two other
negroes on the farm:

He wished to do more with auntie Cord and her associates of
the farm, for they were extraordinarily interesting. TWO
other negroes on the place, John Lewis and his wife ... were
not always on terms of amity with Auntie Cord. They disa-
greed on religion, and there were frequent battles in the
kitchen. These distressed the mistress of the house, but
they gave only joy to mark Twain. His southern raising had
given him an understanding of their humors, their native e-
motions which made these riots a spiritual gratification.

He would slip around among the shrubbery and listen to the
noise and strife of battle, and hug himself with delight.
Sometimes they resorted to missiles -- stdnes, tinware --
and dressed poultry -- ... how thiéireatest joker of the
age did enjoy that summer warfare:

In Tom Sawyer the folklore and superstitions of the negro slave re-

 

ceive supreme literary expression. The book is permeated with them and
their presence enriches it and contributes to the authentic picture of
an era in American history. Although the condition of slavery is gone,
much of the lore remains in the same or disguised form. fiducation may
eventually destroy most of it but the tendency to cling to the habits of
a race cannot be easely erodicated and in this sense hark Twain's recor-
ding of the beliefs and practises and superstitions of the negro slave is
as valid now as when it was written. be Voto makes this point when he says:

Tom and Buck, shuddering in the moonlight when a dog's howl

is the presage of death, are carriers of a truth struck from

a whole population. The dark world of the slaves has made this

De Voto provides a useful summary of the superstitious beliefs de-

scribed in Tom Sawyer and it is not difficult to recognize that echoes of

 

some of them survive today:

 

143. W.D. Howells, my Mark Twain, p. 124.
144. Paine, Hark Iwain, A Biography, II, p. 515-16.
145. De Voto, op. cit., p. 506.

..i.——-—-——-

75

On page 54 of Ion Sawyer, nuckleberry ninn wanders into im-
mortality svinaing a dead cat. no proposes to use it to
cure a wart, for which rain water in a hollow stump is also
efficacious, if employed with the proper ritual and incan-
tation. n been will magically dispose of warts, too, when
sprinkled vith blood and burried at a crossroads -- when
vampires cannot pass -- at the proper phase of the moon ...
The boys take to earth in the old tannery, where presently a
dog howls, a stray dog brouaht hither by his foresight of
death ... it tramspires that the auspice is not on the boys,
for the dog howls in the moonlight and he faces mef rotter,
who surely must die. nnd so must Gracie miller, for e Whip-
poorwill entered her house and sang ... and Huck has dreamed
of rats, a fearsome omen but tolerable since in this dream

they did not mam-.945

It has been indicated previously that the inclusion of negro folk-
lore in Tom Sawyer is not intended as social comment. The tone of the
book is proof of this since it is a story of American boyhood in an era
from the past and slavery is pictured solely as a part of that boyhood

and that era. later, in Huckleberry Finn, the portrait of slavery was to

 

have a deeper significance as Mark Twain examined it in the light of a more

profound social conscience.

Although Tom Sggyer is saturated with negro lore, there is only brief
mention of its source. When Tom reflects on the fact that Gracie killer has
not yet died, in Spite of the fact that a whippoorwill flew in her house
and sang, he tells Huck:

"She's a goner, just as dead sure as Muff Potter's a goner.

That's whet the niggers say, and they know all about these

kind of things, Huck.l47

Early in the famous episode of white washing the fence, there is men—
tion of a scene that must have been familiar to Mark Twain as a boy, and

illustrates the comradeship "in effect" which.white children enjoyed with

the negro slaves:

 

146. Ibid.’ p. 73-4.

147. Clemens, Tom Sawyer, p. 106.

76

Jim came skipping out at the gate with a tin pail, and sing-
ing Buffalo Gals. Bringing water from the town pump had al-
ways—been hateful work in Tom's eyes, before, but now it did
not strike him so. He remembered that there was company at

the pump. white, mulatto, and negro boys and girls were al-
ways there waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings,
quarrelling, fighting, Skylarking”148

 

Tom's attempt to coax the water pail away from the slave, Jim, and
set him to whitewashing the fence, contains a suggestion of the attitude
of Southern whites toward the negro, as being like a child. Jim weakens
under the promise of a white marble, and when Tom offers to let him look
at his sore toe, the temptation is too much for Jim. The amusing descrip-
tion of the absorbed attention of the two as the bandage is unwound also
subtly compares them, the boy, Tom, and the black man, Jim, who concen-

49

trate with equal fascination on the spectacle of Tom's sore toe.

Tom Sawyer is a prelude to the greater book, huckleberry Finn. Slav-

 

 

ery is a part of the background in Tom Sawyer; in Huckleberry Finn it emer—

 

 

ges as a principal theme, illustrating the developing concern of Mark
Twain in the humanity of the negro race.

In 1883, hark Tvain published Life on the LlSSiSSlflpi. He had writ-
ten a chapter for it in which he criticized harshly the nostalgic post-war
attitude toward slavery but in the published edition he omitted it, perhaps
out of respect for his Southern readers. Ferguson says of him that "he had
graduated forever from the roses-and-magnolia legend of the pre-war South."15O

His discussion in Life on the hiss'ssippi of the pre-Civil her South with its

 

slave economy is based on one of his pet fancies, i.e., that Sir Walter

Scott's novels were responsible for the South’s clinging to a slave system

 

14s. Ibid., p. 14.
149. Ibid., p. 15.

150. Ferguson, on. cit., p. 213.

77

because they glorified and romanticized a caste system. it is one of

his wildest assertions and reflects, of course, his personal antagonism
to the romanticism in Scott, much like his personal antagonism to the ro-
manticism in Fenimore COOper's novels. The castigstion is directed at
Scott more than at the Southern whites, so its value as social criticism
is blunted.

Life on the Mississippi contains a sympathetic protrayal of the ex-

 

slaves whom Twain saw along the banks of the great river:

We were getting down now into the migrating negro region.
These poor people could never travel when they were slaves;
so they make up for the privation now. They stay on a plan-
tation till the desire to travel seizes them; then they pack
up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for any particular
place; no, nearly any place will answer, they only want to
be moving.

Twain pictures the details of their poverty and bleak lives and the
tone of his renarks is quite different from the other pictures of the
Southern negro in the book. The other discussions are humorous. Some
are anecdotes, some, descriptions of scenes he witnessed. All of them are
goodhumored and reflect with no other intention, his affectionate under-
standing of the race. One example will speak for all. In/ccmmenting on

the crewman of the steamboats, Twain writes: ‘
It was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft
as the hleck Scott or the Grand Turk. Negro firemen, deck-
hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished
personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware

of that fact, too ... The barber of the Grand Turk was a
spruce young negro, who aired his importance with balmy com-
placency, and was greatly courted by the circle in wnich he
moved. The young colored pOpulation of New Orleans were much
given to flirting, at twilight, on the banouettes of the back
streets. Somebody saw and heard something like the following,
one evening, in one of those localities. A middle-aged negro
woman projected her head through a broken pane aid shouted

 

 

 

 

151. Clemens, Life on the Lississippi, p. 253.

 

78

(very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy),
"You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute: Stannin' out
dah foolin' 'long wid dat low trash, an heah's de barber
off'n de Grand Turk wants to converse wid you3"152

 

There can be no doubt that Lark Twain's revisiting of the old haunts
along the lississippi he had piloted twenty years before stimulated him

to take up again the idea for Huckleberry Finn, which he had started se-

 

ven years ago and then laid aside. The familiar scenes stirred him to re-
create that are now gone from the American scene and he did so faithfully,
at the same time with a perception deepened by the passing of years. He
brought to the picture of remembered slavery an increased awareness of the
negro as a human being, partly due to his democratic sympathies which had
crystallized under the shaping influence of the frontier and partly due to

his recent glimpses of the emancipated slave. huekleberry_Finn was published

 

in 1884 and it has become recognized since that time as imain's masterpiece.

Whatever he left out of Life on the hississippi Twain more than included in

 

Huckleberry Finn.

 

Leacock has written that in Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain has given a

 

"vision of American institutions -- above all, of slavery -- as seen through
the unsullied mind of little Buck," and that he has portrayed "the pathos and
charm of the Negro race shining through the soul of nigger Jim."153 This
brief estimate is not shared by Theodore Dreiser, who writes:

You are not to forget that slavery was a part of the daily life
of his boyhood town of Florida, hissouri, and of Hannibal; and
that, in his teens, he was eyewitness, as he himself reports,
to negro slaves, men slaves, women slaves, children slaves,
chained together and left on some levee walk of the Lissouri,
while they waited for the steamboat that was to convey them
south where they were to be resold. Yes, and there were men

 

152. Ibid., 121-2. See also pp. 291-2 and p. 303.
153. Leacock, op. cit., p. 86.

79

and women and children among them as he himself says, se-
parated from wives, husbands, and parents. Yet never once
in all of his American annals, apart from the foregoing note,
did he ever write bitterly of that, not even in his note-
book or in his Autebiograahy_... not, for instance, of any
phase of the war of the nebellion in which, except for one
attempt at organizing a confederate guerilla band whcaeactiv-
ities appear to have come to nothing, he did not take any
part. The best he did for the negro at any time was to set
over against harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom, the more or
less Sambo portrait of the Negro Jim ...154

 

A careful reader of mark 'vain's life and work could scarcely make
such a statement because, except for the point about mark Twain's never
taking part in the Civil War or writing about it (with the exception of
"The Campaign that hailed"), he would perceive that Dreiser's criticism

is wholly inadequate. The following analysis of huckleberry Finn should

 

refute Dreiser's charge that the only thing hark Twain ever did for the
negro was to draw a more or less Sambo portrait of negro Jim.

It has been said that Luckleberry Finn is a kind of American Gul-

 

 

liver's Travels with Muck and Jim, "puny in all strengths_ssve loyalty,

—~A

' r
as they wander among the Brobdingnagian boots of white adult supremacy."]")5

Certainly slavery is one of the principal themes of the book and rarrell

is correct when he says that it is through intimate association with the
runaway Nigger Jim that huck's moral landscape is broadened.156 The su-
perstitions and folklore of the race are this time uttered by the negro
himself, and so they become a poignant example of the slave's enforced ig-
norance. Jim's high moral character makes him deserving of respect and
points up his tragedy as a slave whose mind as well as body is held in bon-

dage. This much iWain intended but it cannot be assumed, as quoted ear-

lier, that he meant also a warning that the white race would absorb and be

 

 

154. Theodore Dreiser, "Mark the Double iWein," English Journal,XXIV(1955),622.
155. Spiller, Thorp, et. al., on. cit., p. 953. Tfiw‘gk ‘

.. “1;.
156. Farrell, on. cit., p. 6, 57.

80

demoralized by these beliefs. Jim frequently calls upon magic charms,
such as his "hairball as big as your fist, which h:d been took out of
F:
the fourth stomach of an 0):,"1‘J'7 to help Huck and himself out of danger
and he tells Huck many of the secrets of negro lore. His discussions
. 158 '

of witches, dreams and spells are a powerful revelation of the slave
mentality but it is reading more than is justified to interpret iwain
further.

The slave, Jim, is hardly a dambo portrait. He is an heroic char-
acter with dignity, loyalty and courage, superior to man of the white
men encountered on the voyage down the river. he Voto writes:

Nigger Jim is, of course, the book's heroic character -- ...

Jim has all the virtues hark admired. he is kind, staunch,

and faithful, a brave man, a friend who risks his life and

sacrifices his freedom for a friend. where is greatness in

him.159'

Perhaps thernodern tendency to consider nigger Jim as the sentimen-
talized, artificial type implied by the name "Jambo" is partly because he
i§_drawn in heroic proportions, in contrast to the low types of most of
the Southern whites in the novel. it is true that he is a man of many

virtues and no vices but he is still true to the racial type 1wain had
known, and the basic authenticity of his portrait Cannot be questioned.
He embodies the best qualities of the slaves mark Twain had known well.

1“

iernaps, too, the i;ct that since the era pictured in Huckleberry Finn a

 

new type of negro has emerged in this country who is both educated and
cultivated, has made some forget that the ignorant childlike Jim was the

only kind of negro Twain had seen in his childhood and that he must

 

157. Clemens, Huckleberry Finn, p. 24-5.

158. Ibid... Pp. 8'9, 65, 123.
159. De Vote, hark Twain at Work, p. 96.

 

81

necessarily be true to his own experience. Finally, perhaps the associ-
ation has been made between Jim and those other negroes of nineteenth
century fiction and the superiority of Jim's characterization not suffi-
ciently recognized at any rate, Jim is a strong, individualized charac-
ter, despite Mark Twain's tendency to emphasize his virtues because of
his affection for him. The personal basis for ‘main's characterization
of Nigger Jim is set forth in his Autobiography:

Ne had a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally, and
adviser in "Uncle Dan'l," a middle-aged slave whose head
was the best one in the negro quarter, whose sympathies
were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple
and knew no guile. He has served me well these many, Lany
years. I have not seen him for more than half a century,
and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good
part of that time, and have staged him in books under his
own mane and as "Jim," and carted him all around -- to Ben-
nibal, down the hississippi on a raft, and even across the
Desert of Sahara in a balloon -- and he has endured it all
with the patience and friendliness and loyalty which were
his birthright.l6o

De Voto analyzes the difference between Nigger Jim and the conven-
tionalized negro slave in other American fiction of the nineteenth century:

Jim talking about Sollermun and other kings, his specula-
tions about the stars, his arguments with buck which tri-
umphantly oppose his experience to the ideas and logic of

a better intelligence (but the best of these is in.ggm_§gflf
yer Abroad) -- such things are great fiction. To set the
scale of other achievement, recall Cable's honest but pe-
destrian sketches of Negroes, contemporary with Jim, or Un-
cle Remus, who, though he greatly tells the great fables of
his race, is himself false-face and crepe hair. Or think of
the faithful slaves whose function in literature has been to
croon in the honeysuckle while the Old South dies ... and re-
member that it is through the mind of Jim that Huckleberry
Finn imparts its perception of the tragedy of human life:161

 

 

Huck Finn's attitude toward Nigger Jim changes, as hark Twain's did

 

160. Clemens, Autobiography, I, p. 100-1.

161. De Voto, hark Twain at Work, p. 97.

C1)
to

toward the negro. From a thoughtless, superior feeling Huck learns to
appreciate Jim as a human being like himself. It is not that he intends
to be unkind, it simply has never occured to him that negroes have the
same feelings he has, or the same potential intelligence. Early in the
book, Huck says of Jhn's fears of being sold down the river:

Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an un-
common level head for a nigger,lbo

Again, the hilarious chapter in which Huck and Jim discuss Solomon
illustrates Muck's exasperation at Jim's patient, groping mind. huck con-
cludes, "I see it warn't no use wasting words -- you can't learn a nigger
to argue. So I quit."163 \

The first step in Huck's change of attitude comes as a result of his
making unkind fun of Jim's innocent credulity. Jim's gradual realization
that Huck has been laughing at him causes him to point to the leaves and

rubbish which have fallen on the raft and say, "without ever smiling":

"Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat
puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed."164

It is a powerful rebuke and one that is heavy with the sorrow and hu-
miliation of the hegro slave who must endure the abuse and thoughtless cru—
elties of the white race. Huck's conclusion of the episode reveals his strug-
gle to overcome his pride and his real surprise that a negro could be sensi-
tive like other people:

It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go

and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't

ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn't do him no
more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd 'a'

 

162. Clemens, Huckleberry Finn, p. 109.
163. Ibid., p. 115. 5

164. Ibid., p. 124.‘

83

knowed it would make him feel that way.165

The chapter in which Huck finally makes the choice between turning
the runaway Jim over to the authorities and helping him to escape is Mark
Twain's greatest affirmation of the negro's right to consideration as a hu-
man being. Perhaps the fiercest satire in all Mark Twain's writing is
found in Huck's struggle between his conscience, which tells him he must
‘ obey the law, and his affection for the companion who has shared his raft:

Jim said it made him all over trembly and feverish to be
so close to freedom. well, I can tell you it made me all
over trembly and feverish, too, to hear him, because I be-
gun to get it through my head that he was most free -- and
who was to blame for it? Why,ggg_...

Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to
myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when
he got to a free state he would go to saving up money and
never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would
buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss
Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two
children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd
get an ab'litionist to go and steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared
to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a dif-
ference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free.
It was according to the old saying, "Give a nigger an inch
and he'll take an ell." Thinks I, this is what comes of my
not thinking. Here was that nigger, which I had as good as
helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying
he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a
man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no
harm.

I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering
Of hlmo

But Huck's affection for Nigger Jim wins out over the law and after
outwitting the strangers who seek to investigate the raft, Huck concludes
not to betray Jim. It is a hard choice for him because the slavery sys—

tem was right and natural to minds of those raised in its midst. Huck

 

165. ibid., p. 124.

166. Ibid., p. 126-8.

84

sincerely believed that he was doing a great wrong but his friendship
with the negro had taught him that Jim was first a human being and se-
cond a slave. Later in the book, Huck ponders again his new perception
of Nigger Jim as he describes how the slave often moans to himself at
night when Huck is supposedly asleep. Huck says:

I didn't take notice nor let on. I knowed what it was a-

bout. He was thinking about his wife and his children,

away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he

hadn't ever been away from home before in his life; and I

do believe he cared just as much for his people as white

folks does for their'n. It don't seem natural, but I rec-

kon it's so.167

Jim's pathetic rememberance which follows, of his daughter, Eliza-
beth, expresses the mute grief he suffers when he realizes that he may
never see her again. The particular episode he recalls, of a time when
he punished her for something she was innocent of, is more than the sor-
row of a slave separated from his family. It is the experience of every
parent, regardless of race, and Twain's inclusion of it imparts to Nigger
Jim an equality with all men. Where is the Sambo-like portrait in this

account of Nigger Jim?

Equal to fiuck's struggle with his conscience in satiric power is the
passage in which.Huck's father rages against the idea of letting negroes
vote. Ferguson says of it that it "counterattacks the growing tendency

ardm.‘

’to séhtimentelize the memory of the South's 'peculiar institution' in a
way that makes hrs. Stowe and Simon Legree seem shrill and ineffective."108
In old man Finn's tirade the vicious and ugly nature of racial prejudice

is mercilessly exposed. It is as eloquent an attack on the evil of racial

 

16?. Ibid., p. 221.

168. Ferguson, OE. cit., p. 227-8.

85

prejudice as has ever been written and is eternally true as a searching
analysis of the mentality of those who are ruled by hate and bigotry.
The entire passage must be quoted to convey the total effect of Twain's

satire:

"Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. why, looky
here. There was a free nigger there from ohio -- a mulatter,
most as free as a white man. he had the whitest shirt on you
ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain't a men in
that town that's got as fine clothes as what he had; and he

had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane -- the
awfulest old gray-headed nobob in the state. And what do you
think? They said he was a p'fessor in a college, and could

talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. and that
ain't the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home.
well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a' coming
to? It was 'lection day, and I was just about to go and vote
myself if I warn't too drunk to get there; but when they told

me there was a state in this country where they'd let that nig-
ger vote, I drawed out. I says I'll never vote ag'in. Theu's
the very words I said; they all heard me -- I'll never vote a-
g'in as long as I live. And to see the cool way of the nigger
-- why, he wouldn't 'a' give me the road if I hadn't shoved him
out o' the way. I says to the people, why ain't this nigger

put up at auction and sold? -- That's what I want to know. And
what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn't be
sold till he'd been in the state six months, and he hadn't been
there that long yet. where, now -- that's a specimen. They
call that a govment that can't sell a free nigger till he's been
in the state six months. here's a govment that calls itsdh‘agov-
ment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment,
and yet's got to set stock-still for six whole months before it
can take a-hold of algsowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted
free nigger, and --”

The final episode in nuckleberry Finn in which mark Twain's satiric

 

gift is directed against slavery occurs when muck tells the kindly, bust-

ling Mrs. Ihelps that he has been on a steamboat which blew out a cylinder

head. Their conversation is brief but it is weighted with significance:
"Good gracious: Anybody hurt?”

”No'm. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”l70

 

169. Clemens, HuckleberrygFinn, p. 37-9.
170. Ibid., p. 317.

 

85

It is difficult to tnagine a more devastating revelation of the
preawar Southern attitude toward slaves. Huckleberry Finn is indeed
the highest expression of Lark Twain's defense of the negro race and
.his plea that they be treated democratically as human beings.

Nigger Jim appears again in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894),but in this
book he is only the happy-go-lucky companion of Tom and Huck. The books
is I pure adventure story, answering the public's demand for more of Tom
Sawyer. it was a part of iwain's artistic inconsistency that he could
create a character like Ligger Jim, present him in all the humanity and
tragedy of his slave condition and them drop back to a humorous sketch
of him in later books. True, the arguments between the boys and Jim
are a skillful depiction of Jim's slow, practical mind hampered by sup-
erstition, pitted against the logic of the partially educated boys, and

Jim emerges as an individual and not merely a type. But the conversa-
tions become tiresome and there is no great theme as in :uckleberry Finn
to lend deeper significance to the portrait of Nigger J32.

The negress, Roxy, in Pudd'nhead Wilson, is more realistically drawn
than Nigger Jim.171 There is affection in rwain's characterization of her
but her flaws are vividly presented whereas with Nigger Jhn only the vir-
tues are emphasized. Roxy is therefore a more complete representative of
the negro race. She is a racial type but like Nigger Jim, she also re-
tains her individuality. She is disappointingly subordinated to the other

characters, however, at times when she should be the center of interest.

An example of Thain's failure to carry through the artistic possibilities

 

171. Paine does not agree. "The negro character is well drawn, of course --
hark Twain could not write it less than well, but its realism is hardly
to be compared with similar matter in his other books -- in Tom Sawyer,
for instance, or Huckleberry Finn." (Paine, hark Twain,_h Biography,
III, p. 999).

 

8’7

of Roxy is cited by guinn. In the scene where Roxy's worthless son,
known as Tom Driscoll, accepts his freed mother's offer and re-sells
her into slavery to pay off his gambling debts, twain focuses on Tom's
feelings instead of Roxy's, and the dramatic opportunity is lost be-
cause Tom is an unconvincing character whom nobody cares much about.172
Roxy suffers also from melodramatic situations, yet, as De Voto points
out:

In outline and in detail she is memorably true. She lives:

her experiences and emotions are her own, and, being her own,

are faithful to the history of thousands. With new instru-

ments at its service and~a generation of writers far distant

from the reality, literature may make another essay of slavery --

but it is unlikely to go beyond the superstition, affection,

malice, and loyalty of this woman. In her exist, as nowhere

else, the experience, the thought, and the feelings of slaves.

Even in melodrama she retains her verity. flhen she forces

Valet de Chambre Essex to his knees, she is within reach of

the preposterous, but the scene is as true, as inevitable, as

her thieving and tippiing.l7v

Roxy, in contrast to Nigger Jim, is aggressive and high spirited. She
has a fierce pride and self-assurance among the other negroes, "a high and
'sassy' way," as Mark describes it. To one Jasper, who says he is coming
to court her, Roxy retorts:

"You is, you black mudcat: 'Yah-yah-yah! I got somep'n better

to do den 'sociatin' wid niggers as black as you is. Is ole

Miss Cooper's Nancy done give you de mitten?” 74

Unlike Nigger Jim, Roxy is part white. Twain describes her coloring,
an important factor in her aggressive nature:

Only one-sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did

not show. She was of majestic form and stature ... her com-
plexion was very fair ... her face was shapely, intelligent,

 

172. Quinn, op. cit., p. 253.
175. De Vote, Mark Twain's America, p. 293.

 

174. Clemens, Indd'nhead ailson, p. 646.

88

and comely -- even beautiful.]'75

80 Roxy represents the negro who could have passed for white but
was condemned to live as a slave. She is a strange combination of sel-
fish and tender qualities, of morality and immorality. Like Jim, she
is intensely superstitious. She is half afraid of David Wilson because
he keeps peOple's fingerprints under glass slides. 'I b'lieve he's a
witch,"176 she says to herself.

Through Roxy, the mind of the slaves is given a profundity and com-
plexity of expression not found even in nigger Jim. She lashes her son
with bitter words when she realizes that he is‘a coward:

"En you refuse to fight a man dat kicked you, 'stid o' jumpin'

at de chance! ... Thirty-one parts 0' you is white, en on'y one

part nigger, and dat po' little one part is yo' soul. 'Tain't

with savin'i'tain't with totin out on a shovel en throwin' in

de gutter." 77

Conversely, Roxy later informs her son that "day ain't another nigger
in dis town dat's as high-bawn as you is,"l'78 revealing the mixed feelings
of pride and humiliation in the heart of the negro slave.

Mark Twain himself comments on Roxy's character as typical of her race
in discussing her petty thievery:

Was she bad? Was she worse than the general run of her race?

No. They had an unfair show in the battle of life, and they

held it no sin to take military advantage of the enemy -- in

a small way ... They would smouch provisions from the pantry

whenever they got a chance; or a brass thimble, or a cake of

wax ... or a silver spoon, or a dollar-bill, or small articles
of clothing, or any other prOperty of light value; and so far

 

51

175. id., p. 647.

 

176. Ibid., p. 652.

 

177. Ibid., p. 697.

 

178. Ibid., p. 675.

89

were they from considering such reprisals sinful, that they
would go to church and shout and pray the loudest and sin-
. . . r0

cerest with their plunder in their pockets.l/J

Roxy is a character of magnificent vigor and reality and Twain's
treatment of her reveals how far he had developed in his attitude to—
ward the negro race. She is as objective a literary creation as he was
able to achieve fron the memories of his childhood and in these temns
she surpasses Nieaer Jim.

k)\4

Kevin's castigation of slavery in Pudd'nhead hilson revolves around

 

the theme of "being sold down the river." The slaves' dread of this pos-
sibility is repeated throughout the novel and reaches a climax when Roxy
discovers it is about to happen to her. Believing she is to be sold in
Kentucky where her lot would be easier, she is horrified when she real-
izes the boat is heading downstream:

... her practised eye fell upon that telltale rush of water.

For one moment her petrified gaze fixed itself there then

her head dropped upon her breast, and she said:

"Oh: d3 good Lord God have mercy on p0' sinful me _- Its
sole down de riverP'l‘~30

 

The aspect of slavery which makes rudd'nhead Wilson unique in nine-

 

teenth century fiction, however, is the theme of miscegenation. here
Tuain was handling literary dynamite, for the subject was taboo in lit—
erature at that time. Yet that it was a recognized fact in the institu-
tion of slavery, that white masters exercised a sort of "droit de seigneur”
over slave women, hark Twain well knew,181 and it was a part of his realis-
tic approach to slavery, a part of his attack on the sentimentalized post-

war attitude toward slavery, that he dared to use it in a novel. Perhaps

 

179. Ibid., Pp. 648-9.
180. Ibid., p. 708.

181. See Twain's account of Wales McCormick's gestures toward a mulatto girl
in the presence of her mother's mild protests. "She quite well under-
stood that by the customs of slave-holding communities, it was hales'
right to make love to that girl if he wanted to. (Clemens, Autobiorraphy,
II, pp. 276-277.)

 

90

he was not aware of what he was doing. rerguson writes:

The truly original element in the story mark Twain seemingly

overlooked. It had come naturally to him, as part of his

inheritance from slavery days in Missouri, and he presented

it simply, without heat or underscoring. Th moral overhead

of slavery, by which slave women became their master's con-

cubines and bore them slave children, was a dangerously rea-

listic theme to handle in the still prudish closing years of

the Victorian Age. But simply because he handled it without

heat, as a fact of nature, mark Twain got away with it. “

Roxy feels no bitterness about the fact that she has born a son to
.a white man. She is, in fact, proud of it because the father_is Uolonel
Cecil Burleigh Essex, and her son, therefore, has in his veins the best
white blood in the town. Her daring transfer of the two babies, so that
her child is raised as a white, reflects,the pride and unselfishness which
makes her determined that her eon shall never know the ignominy of slav-
ery. The tragedy of her futile attempt is two fold: the child grows up

to be en incorrigible wastrel and when his identity is proved, he is sold

down the river. iwein carries out the ending of Pudd'nhesd tilson in its

 

own terns, since by law the negro who had lived as a white was still a ne-
gro, and must live from then on as a slave. It is a grim comment on the
system and on the courage of the negress who tried to defy it.

ihere is a more subtle comment on the theory of white supremacy and
racial superiority in the situation of the two children who were transferred
in their cradles, but it is unsatisfactorily concluded. iwein seems to say
that it is training or conditioning that makes a slave or a free man, not
innate quality. This is clear in the case of valet de Chambre, the white
raised as a slave, who upon learning that he is not a negro, is still unable

to cast off the habits of years and is miserable in the presence of white

 

182. Ferguson, op. cit., p. 253.

91

people. On the other hand, the case of Tom Driscoll is not so clearly
drawn. He is given all the advantages of a high born white background

and is always a no good rascal. Through the words of Roxy, this is blamed
on the drop of negro blood in his veins. The result is that Twain's inten-
tion is somewhat blurred. He has made a powerful argument against the theo-
ry of racial superiority, starting with the two babies who cannot be told
apart. They are ecuel in their potentialities, he seems to say, and it is
only the accident of birth which will determine their future status. But

he defeats his purpose in Tom Driscoll and the effect of his attack on rac-
ial prejudice is lessened. Nevertheless, as one critic has written, Pudd'n-

head Wilson is one of the most realistic treatments of the negro race in A-

 

merican fiction:

... probably no white man ever dealt more justly with that
race than Mark Twain did in Iudd'nheed wilson, where all
its faults are so mercilessly revealed, yet so tenderly and
understandingly, so utterly without any sense of racial su-
periority.18:5

 

In Followingpthe Ecustor (1897), Mark Twain unwittingly expresses one

 

reason that he had no tendency to prejudice against the negro. He did not,
as many white men, consider the dark-skinned races to be inevitably ugly.
He writes:

Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beauti-
ful white skin is rare ... where dark complexions are messed,
they make the whites look bleached out, unwholesome, and some-
times frankly ghastly. I could notice this as a boy, down
South in the slavery days before the war. The splendid black
satin skin of the South African Lulus of Durban seemed to me
to come very close to perfection.184

It is an unusual attitude for a white men to have and must be due to

 

183. Wagenknecht, on. cit., p. 258.

184. Clemens, Jollowing_the Equator, p. 63.

{2

his childhood associations. It illustrates the sincerity and honesty
of Mark Thain's mind and is a valuable clue to his feeling for the negro
race;

Except for an unpublished essey written in 1901,185 the only remain-
ing comments by hark Twain on the issue of the negro's right to consider—
ation as a human being equal to his white neighbor, are found in the £252:
biography. Most of them have already been quoted but there is one yet to
be cited which expresses tersely his feeling about slavery. Mark Twain,
the Southerner by birth, describes the system of slavery as "a bald, gro-

tesoue and unwarrantable usurpation."186

* * *

Mark Twain's warm sympathy and genuine affection for the negro race is
mirrored in his literary treatment of them. He portrays the negro humor-
ously but at all times it is a respectful humor based on intimate under-
standing of the race. There is tolerance in the laughter, as there is not
in his humor about the Indian, and an appreciation and enjoyment of the rac-
ial peculiarities as there is not in his humor about the Chinese. Mark .
TWain's subjective approach to the negro at first prevents him from giving
a completely realistic picture (Nigger Jim) but eventually he achieves that
in the character of Roxy without diminishing her stature. Because he knew

from personal experience the type he was portraying he captured the essential

 

185. "In 1901 the disgraceful lynching of three negroes and the burning of
five negro households took place near Pierre City, no. This stirred
Mark Twain so much that he wrote an article called 'The U.S. of Lynch—
erdom,’ though for some reason or other it was not put into print."
(Ramada, op. cit., p. 598).

18 . Clemens, Autobiography, I, p. 123.

93

elements of the negro race and made an important contribution to Ameri-
can fiction. He was not interested in writing of the negro in American
democracy after the Civil Jar so his defense of the negro's rights was
always from the starting point he had known -- slavery -- but in his pri-
vate life lvain exerted himself many times on behalf of the freed negro.

His democratic spirit found one of its most intense expressions in
his writings about the negro race. An element of his habitual defense of
the underdog must be admitted, but for the most part Twain's championship
of the negro's humanity was due to his great affection for the race and
his passionate belief in the ideals of a democracy. He had to overcome
a tendency to look down on the negro —- a habit unconsciously retained
from slavery days —- and this he achieved successfully in his mature years.

Mark Twain's literary treatment of the negro race is a strong indict-
ment of racial prejudice. He never wrote an essay on the subject of pre-
judice‘against the negro, as he did on the question of anti-Semitism, but
that he was aware of the ugly nature of such sentiments is clearly demon-
strated in the tirade of Huck Finn's father.

hark:lhein's sincere defence of the negro race reveals him as a friend
of the negro all his life and no one has left a greater tribute to the race

than he did in the characters of Nigger Jim and Roxy.

94

Chapter V

Concerning The Jews

In his Autobiography Hark imein reminisces about his first encoun-

 

ter with the Jewish race. His remarks are not significant except for
their evidence of his first awareness of the Jews as a separate race,
and even then, his description of his romantic attitude must be taken

with caution:

In that school were the first Jews I had ever seen. It
took me a good while to get over the awe of it. To my
fancy they were clothed invisibly in the damp and cob-
webby mold of antiquity. They carried me back to Egypt,
and in imagination I moved among the Pharoahs.

Mark Twain had, always, a deep respect for the Jewish race.188 In-

deed, he was so prejudiced in their favor that it was difficult for him
to admit of their having any flaws. Iaine quotes from a letter of Twain's
which indicates, in the usual superlative language, Twain's feeling for

the race:

Mark Twain was always an ardent admirer of the Jewish race,
and its oppression naturally invited his sympathy. Once he
wrote to Twichell:

'The difference between the brains of the average Chris-
tian and that of the average Jew -- certainly in hurope.--
is about the difference between a tadpole's brain and an
archbishop's. It is a marvelous race; by long odds the most
marvelous race the world has produced, I suppose.‘

Yet he did not fail to see its fig%ts and to set them down
in his summary of Hebrew character. ‘

Paine's comment at the end refers to the essay, "Concerning the Jews",

which Twain wrote in 1898 in Vienna. With the exception of a few scattered

 

187. S.L. Clemens, Autobiography, II, p. 218.

188. "The Jews he did consistently admire as a people and considered the
most gifted race in the world" (Wagenknecht, 22, cit., p. 237.)

189. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, III, p. 1065.

95

remarks in some of his earlier writings this essay is Twain's principal
literary expression of his sentiment for the Jewish race. A statement
by De Voto to be quoted later provides the information that many of hark
Twain's unpublished papers contain expressions of his admiration for the
Jews.

In her book, Ky Father, Mark Twain, Clara Clemens testifies to the

 

fact that Mark Twain maintained a consistently high respect for the Jew-
ish race all his life. her account is also the only positive evidence
that Twain was well acquainted, at least in his old age, with many Jews:

Father had always been a great admirer of the Jewish race
and now had the opportunity in Vienna to test and prove the
soundness of his good opinion of that great peeple. For, in
every walk of life there were large numbers of successful
Jews, so much so, that one frequently heard the complaint:
'Everything in this city is owned by the Jews -- newspapers,
banks, high professional offices, and all the successful
ships.’ It was perhaps largely due to this fact that there
existed an extremely strong anti-Semitic feeling in Vienna;
because, aside from any religious prejudices, there were cer—
tainly evidences of much jealousy on the part of Christians,
and particularly of Catholics. Agruments as to the virtues
or or non-virtues of the Jews were often the topic of dis-
cussion in our drawing-room, and Father always grew eloquent
in defense of Christ’s race. Indeed, so often were his re-
marks on this subject quoted that it was rumored at one time
Father himself was a Jew.

About this time he wrote his article "Concerning the Jews,"
in which he states he considers them "the most marvelous race
the world ever produced." He used also to say that the dif-
ference between the intellect of a Jew and that of a Christian
was about the difference between a tadpole's intellect and an
archbiship's. Many of the talented and cultivated Hebrews were
invited to call on us, adding much grace of intellect to every
occasion.

It is interesting to notice that she has confused the source of Twain's
words, "the most marvelous race the world ever produced." The mention of

Twain's comparison between the tadpole's intellect and the archbishop's

 

190. Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch, my Father, hark Twain, 203-4.

96

suggests that this was either a favorite expression of hark Twain's or
that his daughter has forgotten its original source.

80 Mark Twain's only appreciable literary expression on the subject
of the Jewish race occurred in his old age. If we may accept his daugh-
ter's statement, he held a lifelong admiration and sympathy for the Jews.
He'uas never to publish his sentiments, other than a few brief remarks,
until events in Vienna while he was living there from beptember, 1897, to
hay, 1899, focused his attention on the subject of anti-Semitic prejudice.

The first comment Mark Twain made on the Jewish race in his published

works is found in Innocents Abroad. rains prints in the Biography the or-

 

iginal form of the paragraph which Twain later revised for publication.
This original version is as follows:

We are glad to have seen Egypt. We are glad to have seen
that old land which taught Greece her letters -- and through
Greece, Rome -- and through Rome, the world -- that venerable
cradle of culture and refinement which could have humanized
and civilized the children of Israel, but allowed them to de-
part out of her borders savages -— those children whom we
still revere, still love and whose sad shortcomings we still
excuse -- not because they were savages, but because they were
the chosen savages of God.1

 

Twain's characterization of the Jews in ancient times as savages car-
ries with it none of the sting of contempt found in his writings on the sav-
ages of North America, the Indians. The inference is that the Jews were not
to be blamed because of their savage state -- something mark Twain could
never bring himself to say about the red man. he reveals his own attitude
toward the Jewish race when he says that "we" revere them and love them.

Their shortcomings, significantly, are not despiccable, as in the case of

 

191. Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, I, p. 243.

 

97

the Indian, only "sad."

The version which appeared in Innocents Abroad makes no mention of

 

his personal attitude toward the Jews; otherwise, it is the same, except
for minor changes in the phrasing:

We were glad to have seen the land which was the mother

of civilization —- which taught Greece her letters, and

through Greece Rome, and through Rome the world; the land

which could have humanized and civilized the hapless child-

ren of Israel, but allowed them to depart out of her bor-

ders little better than savages.192

In Life on the nississippi, Twain refers to complaints he has heard
on his tour over the route he once piloted that Jewish store-keepers have
been growing wealthy by taking advantage of the ex-slaves who now have

193
money to Spend. Twain's account is matter of fact and gives no indi-
cation of his reaction aside from his one phrase, "thrifty Israelite,"
but later he was to cite this example again, in a spirit of criticism, in
"Concerning the Jews."

An exerpt from Twain's notebook contains the first discussion at any
length of the Jewish race. 'It was written during Twain's stay in Paris in
1879:

Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the

best average brains of any people in the world. The Jews

are the only race in the world who work wholly with their

brains, and never with their hands. There are no Jew beg-

gars, no Jew tramps, no Jew ditchers, bod-carriers, day-

laborers, or followers of toilsome mechanical trade.

They are peculiarl and comspicuously the world's intel-
lectual aristocracy.
In this comment, a random expression jotted down under the influence

of some momentary inspiration, awain reveals the reason for his high re-

gard of the Jewish race. it was the intellectual energy of the Jews that

 

192. Ulemens, Innocents abroad, p. 387.
193. Clemens, Life on the mississippi,pp. 290-1.
194. Paine (ed.), mark Twain's Notebook, p. 151.

 

98

he admired so much. he could minimize their "sad shortcomings" in his
contemplation of this one capacity, and when we remember that he himself
was possessed of a super-abundance of mental energy, it is not surprising
that he singled out that one trait (though not with his own similarity in
mind) and let it absorb his attention. with the emphasis on a single fact,
which was always his way, mark Twain fastened on the intellectual capacity
of the Jewish race and allowed it to become the focal point of his attitude.

"Concerning the Jews" was published in Harper's Magazine in September,

 

1899. about the article, iwain wrote to his close friend and financial ad-
viser, Hanry Rogers:

The Jew article is my "gem of the ocean." I have taken
a world of pleasure in writing it and doctoring it and
fussing at it. Neither Jew nor Christian.will approve
of it, but people who are neither Jews n23 Christians
will, for the~ are in a condition to know the truth when
they see it.1 5 '

"Concerning the Jews" grew out of an article that Mark Twain had pub-
lished in Harper's Magazine in March, 1898, called "Stirring Times in Aus-
tria." This latter article was a result of Twain's visits to sessions of
the City Council and the Parliament in Vienna:

A short time after his arrival Mark Twain attended a session
of the City Council of Vienna. He took a seat in the press
gallery from where he had a good view ... Dr. Karl Lueger,
then Mayor of Vienna, was at the same time President of the
City Council. He was the leader of the anti-Semitic Chris-
tian-Social Party, which had its supporters mainly among the
lower middle classes, and had come top0wer after brutally
smashing all resistance, even that of the Crown ...

It was here, probably, that Mark Twain received suggestions
for his essay "Concerning the Jews." Further material for
this study, as well as for his essay, "Stirring Times in Aus-
tria," was furnished by the sessions of the Austrian Parlia-
ment, which mark Twain henceforth repeatedly attended, lis-
tening with closest attention. On November 4, 1897, the Aus-
trian Parliament held one of those stormy sessions ... It

 

195. Paine, hark TwainJ A Biography, III, p. 1066.

99

was the time of one of the most violent parliamentary strug-
gles of the Germans of the Hapsburg Empire against the (Provi-
sional) Austro-Hungarian "Compromise."196

This stormy session of the Parliament was the one described by Mark

Twain in "Stirring Times in Austria." De Voto contributes further infor-

mation about the political background of the article:

Toward the end of 1897, while Mark Twain was living in Vienna,
there occured one of the periodic riots in the Reichsrath ov-
er the Ausgleich between Austria and Hungary. The government
put a stop to it with military force and, as a result, more
serious riots broke out in various parts of the country, es-
pecially in Bohemia ... certain elements used the political
agitation as a cover for attacks on the Jews. Mark Twain
wrote an account of the episode which, under the title of
"Stirring Times in Austria" was published in fiarper's Magazine
for March, 1898.197

 

 

Although there were various political parties involved in the riots,

they all had one point of agreement, is., that the Jew should be made to

suffer; a point which hark Twain had noticed a few years earlier in Ber-

lin when there was a fierce demand that all Jews should be expelled from

Germany.198 Twain wrote on this point, in "Stirring Times in Austria":

There was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna; there were
three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed

by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews and Car-
mans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed;
in other Bohemian towns there was rioting -- in some cases
the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs -- and in
alllgzses the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was
on.

 

196.

197.

198.

199.

Max Lederer, "Mark Twain in Vienna," Mark Twain Quarterly, VII (No. 1),
p. 5.

 

Bernard De Voto, "Mark Twain About the Jews," Jewish Frontier, VI
(:i'iay, 1939), P0 '7.

H.L. Stewart, "Mark TWain on the Jewish Problem," The Dalhousie ReviewJ
XIV (January, 1955), p. 455. "In Berlin, a few years ago, I read a
speech which frankly urged the expulsion of the Jews from Germany; and
the agitator's reason was as frank as his proposition. It was this:
that eighty-five per cent of the successful lawyers of Berlin were Jews,

 

 

 

and that about the same percentage of the great and lucrative business-
es of all sorts in Germany were in the hands of the Jewish race!” (S.L.
Clemens, "Concerning the Jews," Literary Essays, p. 263.)

 

Clemens, "Stirring Times in Austria," Harper's Magazine, EXXXXVI (March,

1898): p- 540'

100

This statement brought many letters to Twain from Jews in the United
States who read his article in Harper's Magazine. One letter in partic-
ular, from a Jewish lawyer, prompted Twain to write "Concerning the Jews."
In this essay, hark Twain tackles a delicate question with his customary
blunt and forthright approach. It is an admirable attempt to analyze ob-
jectively the reasons for anti-Semitic prejudice. It is peculiarly uneme-
tional to have come from the pen of mark Twain and yet his personal reac-
tions are clearly discernible. He attempts to examine both sides of the,
question but he is obviously biased in favor of the Jews. De Voto's es-
timate of the essay is an accurate appraisal:

The essay sets out to explain anti-Semitism. It is not,
in my Opinion, a very profound or very searching analysis,
but certainly it is extremely favorable to the Jews ...

"Concerning the Jews" is not, I have said, an exhaus-
tive analysis of the history of anti-Semitism. But cer-
tainly it is a warm-hearted expression of mark Twain's
lifelong liking and admiration for the Jews ... There are
in the Mark Twain Papers, of which I am now the custodian,
many unpublished expressions of this same liking and ad-
miration.200

"Concerning the Jews" opens with a quotation from the Jewish lawyer's

letter:

"The show of military force in the Austrian Parliament, which
precipitated the riots, was not introduced by any Jew. No
Jew was a member of that body. No Jewish question was in-
volved in the Ausgleich or in the language proposition. No
Jew was insulting anybody. In short, no Jew was doing any
mischief toward anybody whatsoever. In fact, the Jews were
the only ones of the nineteen different races in Austria
which did not have a party -- they are absolutely non-partic-
ipants. Yet, in your article you say that in the rioting
which followed, all classes of people were unanimous only on
one thing, viz., in being against the Jews. Now will you
kindly tell me why, in your judgment, the Jews have thus ever
been, and are even now, in these days of supposed intelligence,

 

200. De Voto, "hark Twain About the Jews,"pp. 7-9.

the butt of baseless, vicious animosities?'201

Twain begins his answer by saying that if he though himself pre-
judiced against the Jew, "I should hold it fairest to leave this sub-
ject to a person not crippled in that way. but I think I have no such
prejudicetzoz It doesn't occur to him that he is prejudiced in favor
of the Jew and that such an attitude can be just as crippling in a sup-
posed objective discussion.

Twain continues this theme with a remark that unintentionally stres-
ses one of the major qualities of Twain's writings:

A few years ago a Jew observed to me that there was no dis-

courteous reference to his people in my books, and asked how

it happened. It happened because the disposition was lackingfiaor5

Twain means that he had never made a discourteous reference to the
Jewish race because he had no unkind feelings toward the Jews. Actually,
it would seem safe to assume that had an opportunity arisen for satire at
their expense, hark Twain would have used it, as he did in the case of two
other races for whom he had great sympathy, the Uhinese and the Negro.

Twain defines his terms by saying, "In the present paper I shall al-
low myself to use the word Jew as if it stood for both religion and race,"204
and then he lists the six points which the Jewish lawyer had made in his
letter:

In the above letter one notes these points:

1. The Jew is a well-behaved citizen.
2. Can ignorance and fanaticism alg§§_account for his un-
Just treatment?

3. Can Jews do anything to improve the situation?
4. The Jews have no party; they are non-participants.

 

201. S.L. Clemens, "Concerning the Jews,"pp. 250-1.
202. Ibid., P. 2510

203. Ibid., p. 251.
204. Ibid., p. 252.

10?

5. will the persecution ever come to a
6. What has become of the golden rule?

The above listing is a useful summary of "Concerning the Jews" be-
cause in his essay Twain addresses himself to the answering of the points
and except for the fact that he answers no. 4 before no. 3, does so in the
order they are listed.

With the first point, Twain is in complete agreement:

Point no. 1. --'The Jew is a well-behaved citizen.’

The Jew is not a disturber of the peace of any country ...

he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high

crimes and brutal dispositions ... his family life is com-

mendable ... he is not a burden upon public charities ...

he is not a beggar ... in benevolence he is above the reach

of competition. These are the very quintessentials of good

citizenship. if you can add that he is as honest as the av-

erage of his neighbors -- But I think that question is affirm-

atively answered by the fact that he is a successful business

The sweeping generalizations are an example of Twain's customary ap-
proach to a problem. rositive statements without qualification were al-
ways his way of emphasizing his ideas. his notion of the incomparable
benevolence of the Jewish race he had expressed earlier in the essay307
and a few years afterward in the Autobiography, when discussing the Rus-
sian Revolutionists' cause with one of their leaders who was in America
to raise funds:

The Jew has always been benevolent. Suffering can always move

a Jew's heart and tax his pocket to the limit. He will be at

your mass meetings.2

The concluding statement in 1wain's discussion of the good citizen-

ship of the Jew,that success in business automatically means honesty, is

 

205. Ibid.,pp. 252-5.
206. Ibid.,pp. 253-5.

207. "His race is entitled to be called the most benevolent of all the races
0f man." (Ibid., P0 2530)

208. blemens, autobiography, II, p. 294.

 

103

one of the most amazingly naive remarks he ever uttered. he develops
the idea more thoroughly and in so doing,his usual cynicism about hu-
man nature (by this time a corrosive force in his thinking), fails hhn
completely. nis admiration for the Jews has apparently acted as a blind
spot or he would never be able to proclaim that the business success of
any man (not necessarily Jewish) is unmitigated proof of his honesty:

The basis of successful business is honesty; a business can-

not thrive where the partners to it cannot trust each other.

In the matter of numbers the Jew counts for little in the

overwhelming population of New York; but that his honesty counts

for much is guaranteed by the fact that the immense wholesale

business of Broadway, frgm the Battery to Union Square, is sub-

stantially in his hands.~09

Twain's discussion of the citizenship of the Jew contains a summary
of the charges traditionally lodged against the Jewish race:

He has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and

for practising oppressive usury, and for burning himself out

to get the insurance, etc. -— ... for smart evasions which

find him safe and comfortable Just within the strict letter

of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has

violated the spirit of it ... He is charged with an unpaélo

triotic disinclination to stand by the flag as a soldier.

Having paid recognition to these familiar attacks, Twain points out
that many Christians are guilty of the same offences and concludes:

... the merits and demerits being fairly weighed and measured

on both sides, the Christian can claim no superiority over the

Jew in the matter of good citizenship.

Turning to the second question raised by the Jewish lawyer, "Can fan-

aticism alone account for this?", Twain writes, "Indeed, it is now my con-

viction that it is responsible for hardly any of 1t."213 He proceeds to

 

209. Clemens, ”Concerning the Jews,"pp. 254—5.
210. Ibid., p. 257.

211. Ibid., p. 257.
212. Ibid., p. 257.

104

cite as proof the story of Joseph in Egypt who secured possession of
all the grain and cattle until the people came to him and offered them-
selves as slaves. His point in referring to the story is the intellec-
tual superiority of the Jewish race and their ability to get ahead of
other peoples. Putting his own interpretation upon it, he asks:

Is it presumable that the eye of Egypt was upon Joseph,

the foreign Jew, all this time? I think it likely, .Was

it friendly? We must doubt it. Was Joseph establishing

a character for his race which would survive long in Egypt?
And in time would his name come to be familiarly used to
express that character -- like Shylock's? It is hardly to
be doubted. Let us remember that this was centuries before
the crucifixionfiz13

 

As further proof that the Jews were persecuted as a race before they
were persecuted on a religious basis, Twain refers to a statement he once
read in a Latin historian:

It was alluding to a time when people were still living who

could have seen the Saviour in the flesh. Christianity was

so new that the people of Rome had hardly heard of it, and

had but confused notions of what it was. The substance of

the remark was this: Some Christianswere persecuted in Rome

through error, they being mistaken for Jews:

... May I not assume, then, that the persecution of the

Jews is a thing which antedates Christianity and was not

born of Christianity? I think 30.214

With these two proofs of pro-Christian persecution, the one theoret-
ical, the other sufficiently vague to make it unconvincing, Mark Twain in-
quires into the origin of anti-Semitic feeling. He reviews the times in
history when the Jew has been subject to mass banishment from a country be-
cause he has gained too much commercial power, as in England during the
reign of hing John or when his activities have been curtailed by law. He

mentions again the complaints against Jewish storekeepers, quoted earlier

from Innocents hbroad:

 

 

213. Ibid., p. 258.
214. Ibid., p. 259.

In the cotton States, after the war, the simple and ignor-
ant negroes made the crops for the white planters on shares.
The Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation,
supplied all the negroés wants on credit, and at the end of
the season was proprietor of the negro's share of the present
crop and of part of his share of the next one. Before long,
the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the negro
loved him.215

Twain concludes from the historical evidence he cites, that the rea-

son for anti-Jewish feeling since pre-Christian times is the Jew's super-

ior ability to make money:

Jews

I am convinced that the persecution of the Jew is not due in
any large degree to religious prejudice.

No, the Jew is a money-getter; and in getting his money he
is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are
on the same quest. I think that that is the trouble ... He was
at in Egypt thirty-six centuries ago; he was at it in Rome when
that Christian got persecuted by mistake for him; he has been at
it ever since. The cost to him has been heavy; his success has
made the whole human race his enemy.216

Thus does mark Twain explain practically all the persecution of the

throughout history as due to the inferiority and consequent envoy of

other races, who have resented the superior intelligence of the Jew which

has enabled him to make money faster than his neighbors and excel them at

\

(their trades. The Jewish ability to make money is always a result of his

superior intelligence, according to Twain. That he is sympathetic to the

Jewish side of the question is evident in his statement that:

Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able
to take from him -- his brain -- have made that tool singularly
competent; ages of compulsory disuse of his hands have atrophied
them, and he never uses them now. This history has a very, very
commercial look, a most sordid and practical commercial look,
the business aspect of a Chinese cheap-labor crusade.217

 

215.

216.

217.

Ibid., p. 260.

Ibid., p. 264-5.

Ibid., p. 261.

106

Twain next takes up point no. 4 and here a note of resentment, which

he has heretofore criticized, appears. he addresses the lawyer in accusing

terms:

Point no. 4 -- 'The Jews have no party; they are nongparticipants.'
It seems hardly a credit to the race that it is able to say

that; or to you, sir, that you can say it without remorse; more,

that you should offer it as a plea against maltreatment, injus-

tice, and oppression. who gives the Jew the right, who gives

any race the right, to sit still, in a free country, and let

somebody else look after its safety?

 

Twain urges that the Jews take upon themselves political responsibili-

ty, saying that "With all his splendid capacities and all his fat wealth he

is today not politically important in any country.219 his use of the ad-

jective "fat" in regard to wealth carries an unflattering connotation, a sug-

gestion of greed.

Twain's indifference to accurate use of statistics is apparent in his

discussion of point no. 4. he writes:

As to your numerical weakness. I mentioned some figures awhile
ago -- 500,000 -- as the Jewish.population of Germany. I will
add some more -- 6,000,000 in Russia, 5,000,000 in Austria, 250,
000 in the United States. I take them from memory; I read than
in the Encyclopedia Britannica about ten years ago, Still, I am
entirely sure of them220

Twain ends his discussion of point no. 4 with a reference to the large

Jewish pepulation in America which could, he feels, make itself felt polit-

ically:

Look at the city of new Yerk; and look at sostcn, and Phila-
delphia, and new Orleans, and Chicago, and Cincinnati, and
San Francisco -- how your race swarms in those places: --

and everywhere else in America down to the least little village.221

 

218.

219.

220.

221.

Ibid., p. 265.
Ibid., p. 266.
Ibid., p. 267.

Ibid., p. 268.

107

Again Twain's choice of words, this time "swarm", has an unflat-
tering implication. n8 is in danger of contradicting himself when he
points to new York as one of the places where the Jewisn race "swarms",
having previously written the "in the matter of numbers the Jew counts

‘79
for little in the overwhelming population of New York."2““

Taking up point no. 3, "Can Jews do anything to improve the situa-
tion?", Mark Twain offers some definite, practical advice, namely, organ-
113:

(1) In England and america, put every Jew on the census

book §§_a Jew (in case you have not been doing that). (2) Get

up volunteer regiments composed of Jews solely, and when the

drum beats, fall in and go to the front, so as to remove the

reproach ... that you feed on a country but don't like to fight

for it. (3) Next, in politics, organize your strength, band

together, and deliver the casting vote where you can, and where

you can't, compel as good terms as possible ... (4) And then

from nmerica and England you can encourage yourorace in AUStTiC,

France, and Germary, and materially help it ...‘23

Twain's suggestions about organizing remind him of a plan he has
heard of to get all the Jews together in Palestine, with a government of
their own. He objects to the idea, advanced by a Dr. Herzl, thus repudi-
ating the validity of his own suggestion to the Jews to organize. With
the inconsistency typical of him Twain fails to realize that Dr. Herzl's
plan is merely a logical extension of his own advice. His opinion on the
subject of a Jewish homeland, however, is extremely interesting in the

light of events which have taken place just thirty-eight years since his

death:

 

on

gr. Again later, he writes, "I may, of course, be mistaken, but I am
strongly of the opinion that we have an immense Jewish population

in America" (Ibid., p. 270), a remark that reveals once more his in-
difference to exact statistics.

223. Ibid. , p. 270‘1.

108

I am not objecting; but if that concentration of the cun-
ningest brains in the world was going to be made in a free
country (bar Scotland), I thirk it would be politic to stop
it. It will not be well to let that race find out its
strength. if the horses knew theirs we should not ride any
more. *‘

In answer to point no. 5, "will the persecution of the Jews ever come

to an end?", Twain writes that he believes italreedylwwscnia religious

basis (since in his opinion this was only a small factor), but that in

terms of race prejudice and trade, it will continue, at least among low-

er civilizations:

Among the high civilizations he seems to be very comfortably

situated indeed, and to he ve more than his prOportionate share
0

of th epmsperities going. “5

Twain's answer to the final point, "what has become of the golden

rule?" is phrased in his familiar humorous style:

It exists, it continues to sparkle, and is well taken care of.
It is Exhibit a in the Church's assets, and we pull it out ev-
ery bunday and give it an airing ... It has never been intro-
duced into business; and Jewish persecution is not a religious
passion, it is a business passion. 22

The conclusion of "Concerning the Jews" is a dramatic tribute to the

Jewish race, expressing the full measure of “wain's admiration:

To conclude. -- ... The Jews constitute but one_per cent of

 

 

the human race ... Troperly the Jew ought hardly to be heard
of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of ... He has
made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has
done it with his hands tied behind him. he could be vain of
himself, and be excused for it ... other peoples have sprung

up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and
they sit in Twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them
all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no
decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no

 

225.

225.

Ibid., p. 272.

 

Ibid., p. 273.

 

Ibid., p. 274.

 

109

slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and ag-

gressive mind. all things are mortal but the Jew; all

other forces pass but he remains.227

"Concerning the Jews" is unique among Lark Twain's essays as his
most successful atteumt to examine a question impartially. He does dis-
cuss both the points in favor of the Jewish race and those against it
but his interpretation is colored by his high regard for the Jews. His
habit of dwelling on one factor and viewing all the others in the light
of it (In this case, the Jewish race's intellectual superiority), over-
simplifies the question and makes it, instead of an objective study, a
vehicle for one of hark Twain's pet ideas. Despite this flaw, it is a
remarkable effort on Twain's part. The tine of his remarks is unusually
free from humorous asides or violent accusations. There is a methodical
handling of the various points, perhaps because he is replying to a law-
yer and wishes to prove his ability to discuss the matter in a clear and
logical way. Only once or twice does he indulge in criticism of the Jew—
ish race. Only once or twice does he suggest the resentment on which he
places the blame for prejudice and persecution and that seems to be an
unconscious repetition of traditional expressions.

It would be tempting to believe that the unemotional tone of the as-
say is because it was written in Mark Twain's old age, the supposition

being that he had mellowed enough to allow him to write without rancor.

Though his Autobiography_is proof that Twain had mellowed somewhat, still

 

there are sufficient passages in it and in other writings of the last years
which show Mark Twain as aggressive as ever. King leopold's Soliloouy

(1905) and "A Defense of General Funston" (1902) reveal him attacking with

 

227. Ibid., p. 275.

110

all the old powers the mistreatment of native minorities by conquering
white men. No, "Concerning the Jews" represents mark Twain in a rare
mood and re-emphesizes how unpredictable his moods were.

"Concerning the Jews" is not a comprehensive study; Twain does not

examine the many factors involved in the complicated question of race
prejudice but he believed he had the answer. His essay was not dashed
off in the heat of the moment; Twain wrote it thoughtfully and devoted
time to it, as his letter to Henry Rogers testifies, and it remains a
sincere expression of his almost unqualified admiration for the Jewish
race. De Voto tells us that Twain made many similar statements in his
unpublished writings, so "Concerning the Jews" may be considered a cry-
stallization of one of mark Twain's lifelong attitudes.

Mark Twain's attitude toward the Jewish race and his literary treat-
ment of it contains some of the sympathy for the underdog so marked in his
discussion of the Chinese minority in America. In common with his per-
sonal acquaintance with the negro, TWain had many friends among the Jews,
and so his remarks stem, in part, from a reliable source, and not,as in the
case of the Indian, from report and reputation.. Significantly, however,
his Jewish friends were representative of the cultivated, talented, well
educated members of the race, and so they increased his already profound
admiration for the intellectual energy of the Jewish people. He was right
when he said that he was not prejudiced against the Jews but he was pre-
Judiced for them and tended to view them solely in the light of abused,
unfortunate peoples. It is to his credit that he did not subscribe to the

prevalent antagonism against the Jew in Vienna, but rather sought, in his
own way, to understand the reasons behind the antagonism.

The emotional element, it has been noted, is surprisingly lacking in

lll

"Concerning the Jews." The tone is dispassionate throughout and there

is no attempt at theatrical effect. Twain's democratic nature compels
him to look upon the Jew as an abused minority, but over and above all,
Mark Twain pleads the Jewish.cause because of his tremendous respect for
their intellectual ability. This is the reason for'his bias in their
favor, far more than a personal affection (as in the case of the negro)
or a democratic sympathy for the underdog (as in the case of the Chinese).
It is the ultimate explanation of his relatively calm, unemotional treat- '
ment of the subject. he is able to assume the role of detached observer
because his attitude is based on an impersonal factor; his personal re-
action is not involved. It is one of the few times in his life when this
was so. "Concerning the Jews" offers a hark Twain unfamiliar to most rea-
ders, accustomed only to the humorous artist. He was a man of constantly
changing moods and "Concerning the Jews" is one of the best reminders of

the many facets which made up his complex and brilliant personality.

112

Conclusion

In Mark Twain's lifetime, the concept of racial minorities as a col-
lective group had not yet been formulated. A war had been fought in which
the rights of one racial minority was an issue, but Mark Twain, in common
with other.&mericans in the nineteenth century, was not thinking in terms
of the rights of racial.minorities as a whole. It is important to make
this distinction in considering his attitude toward racial groups; other-
wise there is a temptation to interpret him from the twentieth instead of
the nineteenth century point of view.

hark Twain's own particular attitude toward racial minorities was a
result of the emotional and democratic factors that shaped his point of
view on all subjects. 'He was not inclined to objectivity or impartiality;
temperamentally, he reacted according to impulse and momentary interest.

1 .
and his measure

He reduced everything to personal terms as far as possible
of judgement was the simple standard of right and wrong.that prevailed on
the frontier of his youth. He was predisposed to take the side of the un-
derdog whether he knew the facts involved or not. Twain's sympathy toward
the Chinese minorities in Virginia City and ban Francisco was for a group
unable to protect itself against abuses. it was the democratic principle

at stake, more than the particular minority, that he was defending. The de-

fense of the underdog was also a factor in his eloquent plea for the Negro

 

1. He once wrote in his notebook, "If you attempt to create a wholly imagin-
ary incident, adventure or situation, you will go astray and the artifici-
ality of the thing will be detectable, but if you found on a fact in your
personal experience it is an acorn, a root, and every created odornment
that frows up out of it, and spreads its foliage and blossoms to the sun
will seem reality, not inventions." (Paine (ed.), Mark Twain's Notebook,
p. 192-3).

113

race but here his intimate knowledge of the race combined with his fierce
espousal of democratic ideals to make his most successful statement of the
rights of a racial minority. His defense of the Jews again was based on
the championship of the underdog but admiration for one quality of the Jew-
ish people, their intellectual ability, was the keystone of his argument,
and the principal reason for his siding with them. These three racial mi-‘
norities Lark Twain defended. Sympathy for the underdog may be called the
unifying factor present in his attitude toward all three, but personal bias,
different in each case, made each defense take a different form. when it
came to the American Indian, the democratic factor in his makeup deserted
Train completely, and only the emotional remained. It is a perfect example
of how his personal reactions swayed his opinions and blinded him sometimes
to the facts.

So much for Mark Twain's attitude toward the four racial minorities.
His literary treatment of them, with the exception of the negro, exists
mostly in his essays and travel books. he invented a Chinese character,
Ah Song Hi, in the "Goldsmith" letters, but imain was not interested in
him as an artistic creation. He was merely a nmne; the important thing was
the description of abuses he endured. injun Joe has become a classic fig-
ure in flmerican literature and is a truly artistic creation. Drawn with
simple forceful strokes he is more convincing as pure melodrama than as an
example of type. hark Twain translated the negro race most fully into his
art. Uncle Dan'l, Nigger Jim and Roxy are the outstanding characters but
there are occasional glimpses of negroes all through his writing. Nigger
Jim is the better known because he is a principal figure in 1wain's greatest
book, but Roxy is the most perfectly realized racial type in all of his fic-
tion. mark Twain never created a Jewish character. his writings on that

race are the most thoughtful and the most objective in all his literary

114

treatment of racial minorities.

Inevitably, because he was above all else a humorous artist, much
of hark Twain's characteristic humor is present in his literary consider-
ation of racial minorities. It is least evident in the remarks on the
Jews and Uhinese, most evident in the comments on the Indian, and about

eoually present with th serious tone in his picture of the negro race.

It is possible to detect a pattern in hark fwzin's literary treat-
ment of these four groups, although as stressed earlier, this does not
indicate a conscious intention on his part. In the period of the early
1870's, when his literary career was just well launched, mark Twain wrote
mostly about his adventures in the nest and so the two racial groups that
impressed him in those early years figure in his work, the uhinese and the
Indian. ihey do not appear again, with the exception of injun Joe (and
he occurs as a memory of hannibal, not the far Lest), because “wain did

not write again about the environment that called them to mind. in the
middle period of his life, roughly 1875 to 1895, the most productive from
the standpoint of art, iwain turned often to the days of his childhood as

a subject for his fiction. negroes were a part of the era which was to be-
come his most successful raw material and as he repeatedly turned his en-
riched perception backward on that era his portrait of the negro slave type
he had known took on a profundity which his characterizations of the Chinese
and Indian never achieved. “wain's remarks on the negro and his artistic
portrayal of him extend over his Whole life and a gradual change from the
thoughtless, though still affectionate, attitude of the pre-war south to a

more discerning, democratic attitude as the aestern influence replaced the
Southern, may be discerned. Decause Negroes in his childhood vere almost

as close to him as white people, and were consequently an inseparable part

115

of the childhood he preserved in his best art, l sin was more concerned
with them as a mistreated minority than with the other three groups. Al-
most all of his writings about the Jewish race occurred in his old age.
Apparently Twain had never had sufficient contact with the race until

then to feel the urge to write about them. when he did turn his atten-
tion to them it vss a specific incident that inspired him to express the
admiration he had always felt for them. The fact that he had such a deep
respect for their intellectual powers must also have acted as a restrain-
ing influence. He had respect and sympathy for the Chinese and Negro, too,
but it was of a different kind, a kind which permitted him to make them the
object of his humor.

Although hark Twain's subjective point of view and emotional reactions
invalidate some of his observations on racial minorities, he was never less
than honest in the expression of his ideas. he was liberal in what he ad-
vocated (with the exception of his remarks on the Indianl), although his
personal reactions were sometimes of equal motivation with his demo ratic
idealism. he was naturally not concerned with how social injustice could
be eradicated. He was a great satirist of human nature and was therefore
concerned with the.£i££ of social injustice in.American democracy. The dem-
ocratic spirit in Mark Twain's writing has significance for our time and an
examination of his life and work compels the admission that were he alive
today he would be in complete accord with the civil rights movement which
has become so prominent in the thirty-nine years since his death. As one of his
critics has written:

we must take it for granted that he had little insight into

the objective state of society and tiat he lacked the contem-

plative faculty. but the weaknesses of 'the Great Youth' are
nothing but the weaknesses of young America. He was a typical

American; the characteristics of modern “mericans are seen

in him in a crude fonn. The popular advocate of social jus-
tice has been dead a quarter of a century, and among the A-
mericans of today, 'social justice' is becoming more and more
a catchword. His opinions against despotism, racial preju-
dice, the corruption of public men, and the formality of re-
ligious faith are of fresh interest in the light of the ex-
isting facts of the world.2

2. Ramada, OD. cit., p. 615.

117

Bibliography

Books

Brashear, hinnie h., hrrk intin, Son of hieeouri, Chapel Hill; University
of Nerth Carolina Press, 1934.

 

Clemens, Samuel L.,A Tr'mp hbro d, flew York: Harper and Brothers, 1921.

 

..... Autobiography, New York; Earner and Brothers, 1924. 2 Vols.

 

..... Following the Eeustor, New York; Harper and Brothers, 1899.
..... Life on the Lississippi, Lew York; herper and Brothers, 1874.

..... Pudd'nheed hilson, In The Complete Short Stories znd F nous 339333
of Lark ”vain, new York; P.F. Collier and Son, 19:8. pp. 642-738,

 

 

..... Roughing It, New‘York; Harper and Brothers, 1913. 2 Vols.

 

..... The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York; harper and Brothers,
192’.

 

..... The Advertures of Tom Sewyer, New York; Harper and Brothers, 1917.

 

..... The Innocents fibrocd, New York; Harper and Brothers, 1911.

 

..... Tom Sewyer Abroad, New York; Hrrper and Brothers, 1910.

 

..... and C.D. Werner, The Gilded £39, HFrtford; American Publishing Omn-
peny, 1874.

De Voto, Bernard, Kerk Twein's America, Boston; Little, Brown and Company,
193?.

 

..... hark Twain at “ork, Canbridge; Harvard University Press, 1942.

 

Ferguson, De Lancey, hark Twain, Men and Legend, New York; Bobbs-Kerrill
Company, 1943.

 

Gehrilowitsch, Clara Clemens, Ly Fether, he k Twain, New York; Harper and
Brothers, 1931.

 

howells, fiilliam Dean,_§y hark Twein, New'York; Harper and Brothers, 1910.

 

Lawton, Lary, A Lifetime hith Merk Twain, New'York; Hercourt, Brace and
Company, 1925.

 

Leacock, Stephen, Mark Twain, New York; D. Appleton and Company, 1933.

 

Meek, Effie Mona, Errk Trein in hevvde, New York; Charles dcribner's Sons,
1947.

118

Otis, w.B. end Needlemen, B.H.,.A Survey-History of Lntlish Literature,
New York; Barnes and Noble Company, 1958.

 

Paine, Albert B., hark Twain, A Biography, New‘York; Harper and Brothers,
1955. 2 Vols.

 

..... (ed.) Kerk Twain's Letters, hew‘York: Isrper and Brothers, 1917,
2 Vols.

 

..... (ed.) Kerk Twain's Notebook, New'York; Harper and Brothers, 1935.

 

Psrrington, Vernon L., rein Currents in finericsn Thought, New York; Her-
court, Brace and Comps y, 1950. Vol. III.

 

Pettee, rred L. (ed.). Representative selections, New'York; American Book
Company, 1955.

 

rhelps, killism Lyon, Esseys on hodern Novelists, New York; Nacmillan and
Compeny, 1910.

 

Quinn, Arthur H.,.Americen Fiction, New'York: D. Appleton Century Company,
1936.

 

Rourke, Constsnce, Americsn Humor, New York; Harcourt, Brace and Company,
1931.

 

Sherman, S:P., 0n Contemporary Literature, New'York; Henry Holt and Com-
pany, 1917.

 

Spiller, K.E., Thorp, W., Johnson, T.H., Csnby, H.S. (ed.), Literary His-
_tgry of the United Btetes. 1948. Vols. II and III.

 

Wagenknecht, Edward, herk Twein, The Men and His work, New Beveni Yale
University Press, 1935.

 

Walker, Franklin (ed.), The Weshoe Giant in den Francisco, San F‘encisco;
George Fields Company, 1938.

 

119

Articles

Bleersides, Oliver, "Mark Twain's Characters Come From Real Beople," M rk
Tyein :uerterlyJ IV (summer-fell, 1941), pp. 16-19.

 

Bradley, Sculley, "Our Native dumor," North American Review, CCXLII (Win-
ter, 1936-1937), pp. 351-362.

 

Clemens, Samuel L., "A True Story, Repeated gord Eo r Mord As I heard It,
Sketches New end 01d, heW'York} Eiarper and Brothe s, 1903, pp. 265—272

 

..... "A Visit to Nisrara, " Sketches New end Old, New York; Murper and
Brothers, 1903, pp. 70-80.

 

..... "Concerning the Jews," Literfry Beszys, New York; Harper and ATO-
thers, 1299, pp. 230—275.

 

..... "Disgraceful Persecution of 2 Boy," The Golvxy, IX (M y, 1870), pp.
722-724.

 

..... "Goldsmith's ”riend hbroad nguin," The Gr1:ky, X (Oct., LOV., 1870),
pp. 569- 571, 727-7? 1, XI (Jen.,1871), pp. 156-158.

 

..... "John Chinemen in new York," The GeLGy, X (Sept., 1870), p. 426.

 

..... "Lest Words of Crest Men," The Curious depublic of Gondeur And Other
Whimsicel SketchegJ New York, Boni end Liveright, 1319.

 

 

..... "My Methods of Mriting," Lzrk Thein {urrter1y, XIII (winter—sering,
1949).

 

..... "Stirring Times in Austria., " Brrpor's Lr;fzine, LXXXKVI (March, 1898),
pp. 5:50-540.

 

..... "The Noble Red Man," The Galaxy, X (Sept., 1870), pp. 426-429.

 

De Voto, Bernard, "Mark T"ein Mbout the Jews,‘ Jewish Frontier, VI (May,
1939), pp. 7-90

 

Dreiser, Theodore, "Mark the Double Ti:in,' 'English Journel, XXIV (Oct.,
1935), pp. 615- 627.

 

Ferrell, J.T., "‘wsin's 'Huckleberry Finn' and the Era He Lived In," New
York Times Book Review, December 12, 1943, pp. 6-37.

Fernstein, George, "Mark Twain's Regionalism in Fiction," Merk Trein Quer-
terly, VII (winter-spring, 1945-1946), p. 7, 24.

 

Bbmsde, Mesejero, "Mark Twain's Conception of Social Justice, " Studies in
English Litereture (Jepen), XVI (Oct., 1956), pp. 593-616.

 

 

120

Iederer, Mex, "Mark ”vein in Vienna," Mfrk Tnzin .Uerterly, VII (winter-
spring, 1945-1946), pp. 1—12.

 

Liljegren, S.B., "The Revolt Against Romanticism in nmerica as Evidenced
in the Works of Samuel L. Clemens," Studie Neophi0103ice, XVII (Nov.,
1945), pp. 207-258.

 

‘1

Lorch, Fred T., "Mark Twain's herly Views on Western Indians," Training,
I‘I (.fiipril, 19 ‘5') , pp. 1-2. .

Mesters, Edger Lee, "Kerk Twrin,"Son of the Frontier," American Mercury,
‘H‘SCJI (septa ’ 1935)) ’ pp. 67-74.

 

Rodgers, Cleveland, "The Many-Sided Kerk Twain," The iontor, XII (May,
1924), pp. 29-55.

 

Stewert, B.L., "Mark Twsin on the Jewish kroblem," The Delhousie He-
view, XIV (Jennery, 1935), pp. 455-458.

 

White, Edger, "The Old dome Town," The MentorJ X11 (May, 1924), pp. 51-53.

 

”2036 t.
F‘“ 3mm USE ONLY

16 Ma! 59‘

NW

Ma

 

 

‘h-‘_“ ___.A
I ~ I ... I _ __’WM

"7'1 1'11 111111111 111.17 I