A Lesson from an American Observer—Mark Twain

Mark Twain taunted 19th century America. His humorous and cynical observations cut to the quick, a lesson rarely addressed with students read Tom Swayer and Huckleberry Finn. The man embraced change, as Shelley Fisher Fishkin noted in a 2007 article in Stanford Magazine.

“Conversations with his father-in-law and other abolitionists—and with former slaves—helped prompt Twain to re-examine the moral underpinnings of the world in which he had grown up. And find them wanting. Yet no trace of the pain inflicted by slavery and or the injustice of racism had cast a shadow over the luminous happy “boy’s book” he had just published—despite the fact that Twain now knew just how deeply pain and injustice had infused the world in which he had lived as a boy. A decade after a bloody war that left the nation reeling in contradictions and confusion, Tom Sawyer evoked a prelapsarian Eden, a time when life was infinitely less complicated.

“When Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn he thought he was writing another boy’s book, a sequel to Tom Sawyer. But Twain soon found himself with several hundred pages of a manuscript like no book anyone had ever written before. It was about a child who grows up in a world in which no one—including that child—questions the God-given legitimacy of a society in which people who think of themselves as supremely civilized endorse a system that is uncivilized, illegitimate and inhumane.

“Twain wrote the book at a time when ex-slaves were subjected to economic exploitation, disenfranchisement and racially motivated lynchings, and the last third of the novel is increasingly understood as a satire of the many betrayals and indignities African-Americans endured after the breakdown of Reconstruction. Huckleberry Finn is a masterful satire not of slavery, which had been abolished a decade before Twain began writing the novel, but of the racism that suffused American society as Twain wrote the book in the late 1870s and early 1880s and which continues to stain America today. This theme is as integral to Huckleberry Finn as it is irrelevant to Tom Sawyer.

“The author of Huckleberry Finn had a clearer view than the author of Tom Sawyer did of the grim trajectory American race relations were likely to take as the 19th century closed. (Indeed, he had embarked on his own private affirmative action plan as one small step in addressing the problem, paying for the education of several black students. Recall his 1885 letter to the dean of the Yale Law School explaining his decision to pay for one of the first black law students there. Twain wrote, ‘We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.’)”

It’s time for all White Americans to follow Twain’s lead.