What Would Mark Twain Think of America at 250? - The Atlantic

Listen−1.0x+<br>Seek<br>0:0010:09

So what would Mark Twain—a man never at a loss for opinions—make of America on the 250th anniversary of its birth? He wouldn’t be surprised to be asked, or bashful about answering. As he once wrote in his notebook, “I am not an American. I am the American.” Arguably a bit vain, but essentially correct, since he encompassed much of the best (and occasionally the worst) of our national character.<br>Twain was our shrewdest satirist of greed and corruption, and he would find plenty to be appalled about in today’s second Gilded Age. It was Twain who minted the term The Gilded Age—the title of his first novel, co-authored with his friend Charles Dudley Warner and published in 1873, when Twain was 37 years old—and he had scathing things to say about the wild carnival of greed that followed the Civil War, decrying the “incredible rottenness” and “moral ulcers” of an America in thrall to big business. He published a revised catechism for the rich: “What is the chief end of man? A. To get rich. In what way? A. Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” He castigated Jay Gould, the notorious Wall Street speculator, for fostering a greed-is-good mentality: “The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.” Today Twain would likely blanch at the billionaires congregating around President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. And in the euphoric greed of Wall Street, he would spot many latter-day examples of Colonel Sellers, the money-mad humbug in The Gilded Age who sees millions in every flimsy enterprise.<br>Twain’s critique had power because he was very much a product of the society he chastised. When he wasn’t satirizing plutocrats, he was trying very hard to become one. He amassed a sizable fortune from books and lecture royalties and from marrying a minor heiress, Livy Langdon, whose father had sold coal to Cornelius Vanderbilt’s railroads. The couple luxuriated in a 25-room mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, staffed by six servants.<br>He hoped to get even richer as an inventor. Like us, Twain inhabited an age enamored of new technologies and dazzled by gadgetry. In 1886, while presiding over a Fourth of July celebration in Iowa, he praised “the progress of these last few years—of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, and other great inventions,” saying, “There is more done in one year now than Methuselah ever saw in all his life.” Twain himself had one of the first private telephones in New England. He also dreamed up many gadgets of his own, such as a bed clamp that would prevent children from kicking off their blankets. More successfully, he marketed a scrapbook with adhesive paper, allowing users to dispense with glue pots.<br>Read: The not-at-all-funny life of Mark Twain<br>But he admitted that his speculative instincts made him “easy prey of the cheap adventurer.” The most notorious example was the smooth-tongued James Paige of Rochester, New York, the inventor of a newspaper-typesetting machine that promised to do the work of five or six men. It was a fiendishly ingenious machine with more than 18,000 parts and one glaring flaw: It didn’t work reliably. Still, Twain squandered his own fortune and Livy’s inheritance on developing Paige’s invention, even as the Mergenthaler Linotype became the industry standard, rendering Paige’s machine worthless. An embittered Twain growled afterward that if Paige were drowning, he would throw him an anvil. So dismal was the writer’s investing record that one newspaper joked that, to avoid a financial disaster, all you had to do was to learn that Mark Twain had gotten in on the ground floor.<br>Twain embodied the eternal American ambivalence toward money: He had a visceral desire to amass it along with a puritanical distrust of its corrupting effect. So while he would be excited by smartphones, AI, and other digital wonders coming out of Silicon Valley today, he would simultaneously fear our glorification of tech moguls and the excessive political influence of the superrich. In particular, he would likely have criticized Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative and its dismantling of federal civil-service protections, since civil-service reform was one of Twain’s favorite political causes. During the 1876 presidential campaign, he mocked the spoils system that distributed government jobs as a reward for how much “party dirty work the candidate has done,” rather than their actual qualifications. He said that federal-government jobs should be distributed based on “worth and capacity,” noting that teachers at least had to know the alphabet and plumbers the inside of a pipe.<br>Twain reserved his most mordant reflections on American politics for Congress, in his time the most potent—and corrupt—branch of government. “I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world,” he joked. Still more memorably, he wrote: “Reader, suppose...