A response to Mark Twain, Indian Hater:

>> the times being what they were at that time, I suspect this was what passed for "gentle" humor. <<

Don't you mean biting sense of humor?

>> At any rate, I suppose this gives me an idea of what the dominant culture felt about my grandparents at the time. I guess we should be thankful for getting as far as we have when our ancestors had to live that type of environment- and this from Mark Twain who wrote several essays condemning racism. <<

Did he? His pieces on Indians were almost uniformly negative. Even with scholarly rationalizations, they're bad enough that I'm prepared to call him a racist.

>> I was referring to some stories M. T. wrote about his distress at the mistreatment of Asians. <<

Well, if you can identify them, I may link to them as countervailing evidence of Twain's beliefs. But an essay on the general equality of the races would be better. People can talk about their "distress" over the mistreatment of minorities without acknowledging their fundamental equality.

I think Twain's beliefs were fairly typical for the time: "They" are different from "us," but we should try to help them or at least patronize them with compassion. Except in the case of the Indians, perhaps, who are deservedly vanishing because they're so savage and uncivilized. These views wouldn't be remarkable except the public thinks of Twain as the first great beacon of racial justice (or maybe the second after Harriet Beecher Stowe). He was anything but.

>> However, we have to take these things written by Mark Twain and others as a sign of the times these authors lived in. It is not fair to judge people from other times by our present day standards. <<

I generally don't buy that excuse. Priests such as Bartolomé de las Casas knew the Spaniards were doing wrong and said so. Writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Helen Hunt Jackson had more enlightened views than their counterparts.

Sure, the racist majority may have drowned these voices out, but I don't think we can ever absolve people of making their own choices and decisions. No doubt citizens in Nazi Germany rationalized their behavior by saying "we just didn't know any better." Same with the people who string up gays like Matthew Shepard and feel sorry afterward—when they're caught.

I've addressed this point in the case of the "evil" Europeans and Mark Twain. It's necessary to address it because people are in great denial about this subject. Most people won't say, "Sure, Twain was a racist but he was a product of his times." They'll say, "His stories weren't racist compared to his contemporaries, so I don't think he was a racist at all."

I think we need to hammer home the message that Twain wasn't a great apostle of racial equality and justice as people seem to believe. That presenting stereotypical characters like Jim and Injun Joe was no great literary feat. And especially, that we should stop lionizing people like him as an excuse to congratulate ourselves for our enlightened attitudes.

>> Today, what was written by M. T. is seen as frankly evil by anyone. <<

Don't think so. I had a long online debate with a bunch of highly-educated academics, writers, and teachers in 1994-95 on the subject of Huck Finn and Twain. I've compiled and posted these arguments at Is Huck Finn Racist? The virtual consensus was that there was nothing racist about Huck Finn, much less about Twain. I was literally one lone voice against maybe a dozen rabid critics—people who were generally as thoughtful and broadminded as you or me.

I think Twain was patting himself and his contemporaries on the back to some degree for their "enlightened" view of race relations. They freed the slaves...and kept them down on the farm as more-or-less indentured servants during the Reconstruction period. Here's what someone named Marguerite Barnett wrote on the subject:

And I'd say we're doing the same thing by calling Huck Finn the greatest American novel. Twain labeled it a boys' adventure book and that's about what it is. Any resemblance between Huck and world-class literature is coincidence more than anything.

Twain was a Southerner who joined the Confederate Army briefly, after all. He may have been sympathetic to individual blacks—he apparently paid college tuition for a couple—but he said little or nothing about the systemic evils of slavery. Yet my critics claimed Roots—written by a black man whose ancestors were enslaved after extensive research using modern methods and sources—was probably less realistic than Huck Finn—based on a Southern sympathizer's admittedly romantic view of his childhood some 30 years after the fact. I'd say just the opposite.

De Mississippi ain't de only big river in this debate. Dere's also a big one called De Nile (denial).

>> At his time, though it was still evil, it was typical of the culture (again, ignorance, perhaps, rather than willful). He should have known better, but it was much harder then for someone of the dominant culture to have known better at that time (anti Indian Propaganda etc.) <<

Harder but not impossible, as some of Twain's contemporaries proved.

>> I don't think we can condemn him and his ignorant and evil writings with the same vigor we should rightly use for such actions committed in our time. <<

Yes. But I'd say I'm not condemning his writings so much as the people who continue to lionize him, to say little or nothing was wrong with his writing, to deny his palpable racism. I assure you they're out there.

In other words, I'm criticizing our attitudes today using Twain as an example. What Twain wrote is almost irrelevant today, but our attitudes toward what he wrote are still indicative of our cultural mindset.

>> Yes, I very much have to agree with you here. There is a lot of educating that can be done by this. People do love to generalize, don't they. Because Twain wrote good stuff, people try to claim that he is "without sin". <<

Right. I've finishing reading Satire or Evasion?, a book on Huck Finn written by black scholars. They reviewed most of his writings and experiences with black people. I think they even mentioned the article(s) Twain wrote about the Chinese in California.

I'll try to list the evidence for and against his racism on my site. But overall, the scholars arrived at a nuanced judgment. Twain grew up in a racist environment, so he shared many of his peers' views. As he matured, became more cosmopolitan, married, moved East, and hung out with liberal do-gooders, his views evolved. He struggled with racist attitudes most of his life; when he was old, he had more enlightened views than when he was young.

We might say that he was about as racist as a typical Missouri rube when he was young and about as a racist as a Connecticut Yankee squire when he was old. Maybe he was slightly better than his Yankee peers when he died in 1910. I don't know, since I haven't studied racist attitudes in early 20th-century New England.

Because his family had a slave in Hannibal and he grew up with blacks, he had a better attitude toward them than toward other minorities. I doubt he knew many Indians, so he thought they were savages like everyone else. In most ways, in short, he was a product of his time and environment.

The key point is that he hadn't reached his more enlightened stage when he wrote his masterpiece Huck Finn. Or when he wrote most of his screeds against Indians, which he did in the early-middle part of his career, during and after he traveled West. He was a barely-enlightened and mostly-racist man of his era then. He didn't think blacks were animals or subhumans, but he didn't think they were equal to him. And he certainly didn't think Indians were much more than barbaric killers, heathens, thieves, drunks, and good-for-nothings. (You know the stereotypes. Just fill them in.)

So I've noted his racist attitudes, as have the black scholars and others. The problem is his defenders who say, "He wrote this great book. He championed the humanity of black people. He must be a paragon of virtue." (Just the other day, in an article on the preparation of an authoritative Huck Finn manuscript, its editors said, "Twain was a strong foe of racism.")

To that I say, "No, far from it." Twain basically was a racist and so was his problematical Huck Finn. He was a racist who struggled his own racism and that of others, but he was a racist nonetheless.

Rob

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