In light of my review The Singular Mark Twain, I thought I’d recommend some of the works of that quintessential American writer. I don’t know if Twain would have called himself a libertarian, but he certainly wrote many things that libertarians would find fascinating and rewarding.
Most obvious are his writings on slavery. Twain’s subtle and perceptive attack on slavery in Huckleberry Finn is quite famous. Less well known to most people is his great short novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, which contains a much more sustained condemnation of slavery and racism, as well as his most interesting female character, with the exception of Aunt Rachel in his wonderful short story “A True Story (Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It).” Pudd’nhead Wilson is one of Twain’s switched-twins stories (he loved those), in which a free white child is switched with a black child whose skin is practically white. The slave boy grows up free, and the free boy grows up a slave, and when the secret comes out years later—ah, but you’ll have to read the story to find out.
Twain’s nonfiction writings are wonderful. When he’s on the march, as in “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” he is a master tactician. Gently warming to his subject, by the end he is throwing lightning bolts. In one of his early, short essays, “The Disgraceful Persecution of A Boy,” Twain condemns the racist persecution of the Chinese in early California by coming to the defense of a boy who has been jailed for throwing rocks at a Chinese man:
[I]n many districts of the vast Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free love of justice in the hearts of the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is committed, they say, “Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” and go straightway and swing a Chinaman…. [B]y studying one half of each day’s “local items” it would appear that the police of San Francisco were either asleep or dead…. [T]he Legislature, being aware that the Constitution has made America an asylum for the poor and the oppressed of all nations, and that therefore the poor and oppressed who fly to our shelter must not be charged a disabling admission fee, made a law that every Chinaman, upon landing, must be vaccinated upon the wharf, and pay to the State’s appointed officer ten dollars for the service, when there are plenty of doctors in San Francisco who would be glad enough to do it for him for fifty cents. It was in this way that the boy found out that a Chinaman had no rights that any man was bound to respect; that he had no sorrows that any man was bound to pity…; that nobody loved Chinamen, nobody befriended them, nobody spared them suffering when it was convenient to inflict it; everybody, individuals, communities, the majesty of the State itself, joined in hating, abusing, and persecuting these humble strangers. And, therefore, what could have been more natural than for this sunny-hearted boy, tripping along to Sunday school, with his mind teeming with freshly-learned incentives to high and virtuous action, to say to himself: “Ah, there goes a Chinaman! God will not love me if I do not stone him.”
In his short story “Cannibalism In The Cars,” Twain parodies the highfalutin’ style of government officials who barter away things that are none of their business. In his most political novel, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court (about which I blogged here) Twain offers thoughts on several elements of libertarian political theory, particularly the importance of the separation of church and state, as well as economic theory, as in Chapter 33, when he tries futilely to explain to a 6th century man the concept of “buying power,” in words that would equally apply to labor unions today:
No, I had to give it up. What those people valued was high wages; it didn’t seem to be a matter of any consequence to them whether the high wages would buy anything or not. They stood for “protection,” and swore by it, which was reasonable enough, because interested parties had gulled them into the notion that it was protection which had created their high wages. I proved to them that in a quarter of a century their wages had advanced but 30 per cent., while the cost of living had gone up 100; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced 40 per cent. while the cost of living had gone steadily down. But it didn’t do any good. Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.
I know that feeling, Mark.
In the Connecticut Yankee, Twain even defends the French Revolution in terms no doubt disconcerting to conservatives:
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
Twain’s books are full of delight—his writing style is endlessly rewarding. But he had a keen eye for the absurdity of much of what government does to us, and a wide streak of idealism about him that made him often want to take up the crusade.
Previous entries of Libertarian Bookworm are here.
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