Mark Twain: Not an American, but THE American

The Guardian reflects on the United States' beloved icon on the publication of his new autobiography.

From the piece...

Twain was always a barometric writer, with a knack for registering contemporary social pressures in sharp-eyed aphorisms that weren't merely quotable, but often well ahead of their time. His indictments of imperialism in Following the Equator, for example, read like post-colonialist mottos avant la lettre: "The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice"; "There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages"; "Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." The autobiography adds some new aperçus: "Man is the only [creature] that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge [. . .] He is the only creature that has a nasty mind." The autobiography is driven more often than not by outrage – personal outrage at times, as at the malfeasance of Paige, or the hapless "Joan of Arc" editor, or the American countess from whom the Clemens family rented the Florence villa, whom Twain roundly abuses. But most of the outrage here is social and political, including startlingly contemporary denunciations of American military interventions abroad, and condemnations of a society increasingly dominated by corrupt corporations, greedy capitalists, and vested interests. Writing of gilded age monopolists and robber barons, Twain's prescience is remarkable: he denounces Jay Gould, the financier and speculator, for example, as "the mightiest disaster which has ever befallen this country". He is equally critical of American foreign policy, condemning its imperialist ventures in Cuba and the Philippines and calling its soldiers "uniformed assassins". He discusses with some pride his affiliation with the "Mugwumps", a faction of Republicans who voted Democrat in the elections of 1884 in protest against the corruption of the Republican candidate. They were derided as traitors in an age when party loyalty was at a premium, but the Mugwumps were reform-minded independent voters. In this respect, they might be held to anticipate the Tea Party movement, but although Twain would have sympathised with the Tea Partiers' anti-tax, small government agenda, he would have loathed their historical ignorance and their susceptibility to manipulation by the same corrupt corporate interests he was railing against.