_Mark Twain's Tale of Today, Halley's Comet Returns: The Celebrated Author
Critiques American Politics_. Donald Tiffany Bliss. CreateSpace/Hale &
Northam, 2012. Pp. 570. Softcover. $29.95. ISBN 978-1477405024.
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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac Donnell.
Copyright (c) 2010 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.
Mark Twain and others have commented that when great armies face each other
in battle each thinks God is on their side. In much the same way, whenever a
political battle is waged in America, some commentator eventually emerges to
say which side Mark Twain would favor if he were alive today. Name any
issue, or event, or personality, and some bumpkin will step out of the
shadows and confidently proclaim exactly what Twain would have thought about
it. Published during an election year when the battles were fierce, the
votes were often very close, and emotions ran high on both sides, the title
of this book seems to hint that Donald Bliss might be that bumpkin stepping
into the light. As if to make matters worse, Bliss is the great grandson of
Twain's publisher Elisha Bliss, and the possibility hangs in the air for a
moment that this might be his only qualification to write such a book.
Approaching this stout volume with extreme trepidation, the reader quickly
discovers that Bliss is exceptionally well-qualified to write a book on
Twain and politics. Bliss, a partner in an international law firm in
Washington D.C. served in the Federal government for thirteen years. He was
the U.S. ambassador to a Canadian aviation organization for three years, was
the Executive Secretary to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare,
and was acting General Counsel of the Department of Transportation. He was
also a registered lobbyist, appeared before the Supreme Court, worked on a
Presidential campaign, served on several nonprofit boards, and published
several books. So far, so good.
Twain scholarship has often benefited when experts in fields outside
literary studies have written on Mark Twain's relationship to topics within
their own field of expertise, but will Bliss prove the exception and fall
victim to the temptations of his subject matter and tell us where Twain
would stand on every issue, or which candidate Twain would support? In his
preface Bliss anticipates that concern and assures us that he has "sought to
differentiate between Clemens' views and [his] own views about how his
commentary remains relevant today. [He does] not mean to speculate as to
what Clemens would have thought about the changed circumstances that even
his most vivid of imaginations could scarcely have predicted…" (pp. xix-xx).
Bliss keeps his promise, and neither he nor Twain endorse any candidates or
tell us which side of any specific issue they stand.
Instead, Bliss traces the evolution of Twain's political views and
participation, culminating in a close examination of Twain (and Charles
Dudley Warner's) sweeping political novel, _The Gilded Age: A Tale of
Today_, and then follows Twain's political involvement and education to the
end of his life. It is a long and fascinating journey from Twain's early
days of enthusiastic immersion in the rough and tumble skullduggery of
Nevada's ethically-challenged legislatures of the 1860s to his bitter
denunciations of Presidents and Generals as they dishonored America's
principles before the entire world. Bliss acknowledges and frequently cites
Philip Foner's _Mark Twain: Social Critic_, Lou Budd's _Mark Twain: Social
Philosopher_, Paul Carter's 1939 Ph.D thesis on Twain's social and political
ideas, and Jim Zwick's writings on Mark Twain and imperialism, among others
who have written on Twain and politics. Although Bliss follows Foner in
discussing Twain's social criticisms of intolerance, tyranny, injustice,
cant, and pretension, and follows Budd in describing Twain's admiration for
free enterprise, capitalism, and the pragmatic side of political
participation, and covers much of the same ground covered by Zwick when
Twain was attacking American foreign policies the last decade of his life,
Bliss is the first to chart Twain's political outlook from his earliest days
to the end of his life, through every phase of his political thought along
the way, using his public writings, his private letters and journals, his
conversations, his lectures, and other sources that document the evolution
of Twain's changing and frequently contradictory attitudes. The result is an
expertly guided tour for the reader who seeks a unified theory of Twain's
politics.
In the first six chapters Bliss describes Twain's early exposures to
politics and the influence of his life's experiences on his reactions to
political events. Twain's childhood was filled with tragedies (the death of
his father and three siblings), conflicting religious dogmas, the financial
failures of his father, a fiercely independent mother, the human face of
slavery, and frontier storytelling. As a result, events in his childhood
planted the seeds of his sympathy for the down-trodden, his distrust of all
dogmas and the risks of unfettered capitalism, his admiration of
independence and strong women, his evolving views of race, and his love of
storytelling. His work on newspapers as a teenager brought him into daily
contact with local politics, and he quickly learned how the game was played
and gleefully joined in, frequently writing on political events. Bliss does
err when he cites the 1861 Quintus Curtius Snodgrass letters in the _New
Orleans Crescent_, saying "many scholars" identify Snodgrass as Clemens. The
consensus among today's scholars is that those letters attacking Lincoln and
commenting on local Louisiana politics (at a time when Twain was in St.
Louis) were not by Clemens.
By the time Twain was twenty-five he had been a "typesetter, tourist, river
pilot, erstwhile soldier, and journalist" and had visited "the cradle of
liberty and the nation's capitol." He was also a "rapacious reader" and had
"observed hypocrisy of established institutions--schools, churches, and
government." (pp. 33-4). When Twain arrived in Nevada he was ready and
willing to participate in the political process. He quickly learned that he
could influence legislation with his writings and use his position as a
reporter to manipulate the value of mining stocks, but he also joined local
campaigns for various reforms and when he became a reporter in San Francisco
he actively attacked local corruption and injustices--and thereby learned
how political retribution works. Twain got a first-hand look at government
corruption when he briefly clerked for Nevada Senator William Stewart in
Washington, D.C. in 1867.
At the end of chapter four, Bliss introduces the first of his highlighted
summaries showing the parallels between politics in Twain's day and today.
The parallels between the wasteful junkets, rampant self-dealing, bloated
bureaucracies, "message votes," and lobbyist influence of Twain's day and
today are striking. In the next two chapters Twain conducts interviews with
politicians who evade answering his questions, takes part in the debates on
Reconstruction, correctly predicts the impeachment of President Andrew
Johnson (contrary to the prevailing wisdom of his fellow journalists),
notices that different Congressmen often gave identical speeches written for
them by a single lobbyist, acts as a lobbyist himself on behalf of Langdon
family interests at the same time his contact with this family causes him to
return to his childhood instincts of sympathy for African Americans, and
meets Elisha Bliss, the author's great grandfather who became Twain's
publisher.
In chapter eight Bliss turns his attention to _The Gilded Age_, where Twain
puts to use his literary skills satirizing the political landscape he has
witnessed as both observer and participant. Because this novel focuses on
politics more than any of Twain's other fictional writings, Bliss examines
this story in depth for four chapters and frames the rest of his book around
this work which serves as a point of reference. Although this novel has been
the focus of lengthy studies, Bliss gives us the most concise and
politically informed explication of this novel to date. Unraveling and
understanding the events that underpin so much of the action and satire in
this novel is no easy task, but Bliss lays out the Credit Mobilier scandal,
the Whiskey Ring, the Salary Grab, the Belknap Affair, the Indian Ring, and
other events in a readable way. The work of lobbyists is a central focus of
the story-line, and the character Laura Hawkins's allure as a successful
"lobbyess" is better understood when Bliss explains how it was common
knowledge that female lobbyists in Twain's day were often prostitutes.
Perhaps Twain could not make this explicitly clear with Livy looking over
his shoulder, but a contemporary reader would have understood the context
even if Laura seems to accomplish her ends by other means (extortion).
Another character, Senator Dilworthy, flagrantly mixes private gain with the
public good, using the latter to justify the former, and Bliss connects this
common practice with political events in Twain's day and today. The greed
and the twisted behaviors of politicians, then and now, can be explained by
Twain's comment that "morals consist of political morals, commercial morals,
ecclesiastical morals, and morals." (p. 208). Thus, members of Congress who
would never steal their neighbor's money wouldn't think twice about
misappropriating taxpayer dollars to buy votes or for other illicit
purposes. Hence, Twain could at once admire Carnegie, Langdon, Edison,
Tesla, Bell, and Henry Rogers, and despise Jay Gould, Fisk, and Vanderbilt.
Likewise, despite the fact that Grant's second term as President ended in
scandals, a stock market collapse, real wages falling 25%, a doubling of
bankruptcies, and the failure of 43,000 businesses during the financial
panic that followed, he could still be admired for his personal integrity,
his progressive policies on race and civil rights, his conservation
initiatives (the founding of Yellowstone Park), his support of international
arbitration for peace, and the creation of the Department of Justice to
enforce new civil rights laws.
Before moving on to his chapters on imperialism, Bliss provides good
summaries of the underlying political philosophies expressed in _The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer_, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, _The Prince and
the Pauper_, and _A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_. He also
summarizes Twain's evolving views on race and female suffrage, and discusses
the political aspects of _Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_, _Is
Shakespeare Dead?_, _Following the Equator_, _The American Claimant_,
_Pudd'nhead Wilson_, and several shorter pieces like "A True Story," "Only a
Nigger," and "The Curious Republic of Gondour."
In chapters 13-15 Bliss demonstrates that it is a fool's errand to attempt
to pin Twain down as a conservative or a liberal, as he examines Twain's
political views and writings on upward mobility, censorship, copyright,
wealth and plutocracies, crime and punishment, Native Americans, women,
health care, insanity pleas, the size of government, welfare, the
importance of infrastructure, government waste, government pensions, labor
unions, the widening gap between rich and poor, free trade, protectionism,
and taxes (the government can tax everything except patience and prayer said
Twain). Bliss covers a lot of ground and only twice comes near breaking the
promise made in his preface: He twice speculates how Twain would have
reacted to modern events: applauding the civil rights movement (p. 343) and
chuckling at a Supreme Court ruling (p. 372). It is a trivial
infraction--never mind that most readers will tend to agree with his
speculations.
The next three chapters discuss Twain's numerous writings on imperialism,
his love-hate relationship with Teddy Roosevelt, and connect Twain's
attitudes about America's misguided foreign policy to his experiences in
Hawaii in the 1860s. Those who have read Susan Harris's _God's Arbiters_,
Philip McFarland's _Mark Twain and the Colonel_, or Jim Zwick's _Confronting
Imperialism_ will correctly anticipate treading on familiar ground, but with
Donald Bliss as your guide this time around you may notice things you missed
before.
Bliss concludes his work after presenting Twain as a man whose political
views were shaped by his "empathy for the low life and his aspiration for
the high life, his disdain for imperfect democracy and his contempt for
despotic autocracy, and his ear for the vernacular and his yearning to be
accepted by literary society." Over time Twain's views on race, female
suffrage, tariffs, the death penalty, and other issues often changed 180
degrees, and even at the end his mature views were often in ironic conflict:
he condemned greed even as he chased wealth through get-rich-quick-schemes,
he satirized lobbyists but acted as a lobbyist himself when his own
self-interests were at stake, he gave voice to the common man but cherished
acceptance by high society, wrote against war but made money publishing the
memoirs of military leaders and advocated the violent overthrow of czarist
Russia, opposed bigotry but made American Indians, the Irish and Mormons the
butts of his jokes, and while singing praises to democracy he also argued
that the country should be ruled by an educated elite whose votes would
count more heavily than the votes of those less educated. After covering so
much ground and so many themes, issues, and personalities, the major flaw of
this book becomes obvious--it lacks an index. For a book of such broad scope
that is destined to become a major source for anyone researching Twain's
political views and writings, this flaw is nearly fatal, and should be
remedied. Although the book is well organized and footnoted (it may be the
first work about Twain to cite a book by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff)
nothing can substitute for the practical utility of a complete index. A book
packed with nearly six-hundred pages of people, places, events, and topics
begs for easy access to its rich contents.
Twain, like the Bible, has been quoted by people of every political stripe
to support every side of any argument, but in this book Twain speaks for
himself. "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand" declared
Twain. Fortunately, Twain's literary progeny have repeatedly proven the
wisdom of his observation, and Bliss names a few of them: H. L. Menken,
Will Rogers, Christopher Buckley, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher,
et al. The tradition of political satire is alive and well, and it is no
wonder that Twain retains his relevance today. Bliss the barrister proves
his case beyond a reasonable doubt that politics is just as wicked and human
an enterprise now as it was in Twain's day, rendering Twain's political
observations timeless.
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