Thanks to Jim Zwick for the new web sources on Huck Finn. I particularly
enjoyed David Gergen's interview with Shelley Fisher Fishkin about the
invisibility of Huck Finn in Hannaibal. At the risk of shamelessly
plugging my recent book, City of Dust: A Cement Company Town in the Land
of Tom Sawyer, published by the University of Missouri Press (reviewed
by Mary Christmas on this forum), let me note that I discuss why
Hannibal chose Tom rather than Huck in a chapter on the commercial
construction of Mark Twain. In brief, the campaign to shape the public's
understanding of Twain began immediately after his death by Hannibalian
George A. Mahan (now a local icon), who was an attorney for several
corporations in the area, especially the Pennsylvania-based Atlas
Portland Cement Company. In 1901, Atlas had built a huge cement plant in
the cave hollow region, swallowing up Tom Sawyer's cave. This led to the
overnight appearance of Ilasco, a new town (labor camp) just south of
the cave area in which about 2,000 southern and eastern European
immigrants and native-born residents soon lived. Ilasco brought many
cultural and class conflicts to Twain's cherished boyhood playground,
including a major strike that brought the Missouri National Guard to
occupy the community at the time of Twain's death in April, 1910.
        As a historian who grew up in Ilasco and Hannibal, I link the
promotion
of Tom at the expense of Huck to the campaign by Mahan and Atlas to
reinforce Atlas's political and cultural legitimacy in Little Dixie
after the 1910 strike, and to promote industrialization in the New South
by manipulating Twain's legacy. This required downplaying Twain's
stinging criticism of industrial capitalism. Atlas and Mahan (who soon
became president of the State Historical Society of Missouri) quickly
began to portray Tom, not Huck, as the symbol of the era. Even the
statue of Tom and Huck in Hannibal (commissioned by Mahan) reflects this
conscious effort to persuade local children to emulate Tom, the
ambitious, aggressive entrepreneur and trickster. Ron Powers has also
pointed this out in White Town Drowsing. In the world of Atlas and
Mahan, there was no room for restless adventurers with humanitarian
instincts and sympathies for workers at the cement plant.
        I certainly agree with Fishkin that Hannibal has tried to avoid the
legacy of slavery and racism. It is also true, however, that the town's
elites have tried to avoid confronting the deep class divisions that are
related to the legacy of slavery, racism, and nativism. These divisions
are all too apparent to tourists who walk even a short distance south of
the gift shops and restaurants. Ironically, Ilasco was destroyed in the
1960s so that the Universal Atlas Cement Co. could cut its labor force
in half by building a new, modernized plant there, to be serviced by a
new highway through Ilasco to shuttle tourists to the Mark Twain Cave
and pay further homage to the image of Tom Sawyer. For those interested
in Huck and Twain the social critic, I'm afraid that Hannibal doesn't
have much to offer. In my view, Twain would have found Ilasco to be a
much richer source of inspiration for that "pen warmed-up in hell." As I
see it, Hannibal leaders have treated both Ilasco and Huck Finn as two
of Hannibal's "dirty little secrets."

Gregg Andrews
Southwest Texas State University