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