How Woke was Mark Twain?

Once again, the works of Twain are being banned by people who have obviously never read them.  When I hear of book banning, I immediately envision puritanical zealot in Boston or a group of Appalachian hillbillies so poor the whole town shares a single set of teeth, but this time the books are being banned by an overly woke group of do-gooders in California.

Naturally, the offended/offending group is a school board—an institution whose universal nature was aptly summed up by Twain, himself: “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

Calling Mark Twain a racist is not exactly new.  (Okay, technically his name is Samuel Clemens, but brain patterns set by the age of ten are not easily overcome six decades later.)  Lately, calling anyone a racist is not even unusual:  the term is thrown around so liberally that it no longer has any context.  This blog receives a fair amount of hate mail.  I was once called a racist for a post about the history of a naval ship.  A more accurate term would be ‘shipist’.

It is amazing the number of fools who think Huckleberry Finn a racist novel.  I’ll admit to being somewhat biased, as I reread the work at least once a year.  I regularly refer to the book in my writings, and discover that it is almost impossible to check a reference without getting caught and reread the entire book.  Having read the book, I know that it is impossible to label the author as a racist.

There must be some minimum IQ level for someone to understand and recognize satire.  Below that, you have the religious fundamentalists, school boards, and the people who read the National Enquirer for the news.  These are the people who somehow read Huckleberry Finn and don’t realize that the star of the novel is Jim, the runaway slave, not Huck.  

Huck Finn has always been condemned by the small-minded, but not always for the same reasons.  Early on, some libraries refused to shelve the book because it supported racial equality.  The Brooklyn Library objected to the verb ‘scratch’, deemed offensive at the time.  When a New York librarian objected to the book as unsuitable material for the young, Twain promptly answered:

I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' & 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

If you have read the above paragraph and are unable to discern the satire in it, you probably work for the New York Times, the federal government, or the College of Education at Enema U.

Mark Twain seems to have known everyone.  He was a close friend of President Grant and he entertained General Sherman in his home.  Helen Keller devoted a full chapter of her autobiography to Twain (who coined the phrase ‘The Miracle Worker’ to describe Anne Sullivan, her teacher and companion).  Twain was one of the few people who were friends of both Edison and Tesla.  He knew Kipling, Stevenson, Bret Harte, Conan Doyle, and when Winston Churchill made his first speech in America, he was introduced by Twain.  (In addition, Mark Twain and Teddy Roosevelt both knew—and despised—each other!)

Perhaps those who are so quick to label Twain a racist might be interested in the story of Warner T. McGuinn, one of the first black attorneys in America.  McGuinn was born in Virginia in 1859, to free black parents—a relative rarity in the pre-war South.  Education for slaves was illegal, but as a free person, McGuinn was able to attend a small segregated school, then after the war, when educational benefits expanded slightly, McGuinn excelled as a student.  In 1884, he graduated from Lincoln University, an all-black college.  (Ashmun Institute, renamed Lincoln College in 1866, was the first degree granting college for blacks in America, and for over 100 years, was the alma mater of more than 20% of the nation’s black physicians and more than 10% of its black attorneys.)

McGuinn briefly attended a black law school before receiving an incredible offer:  he was accepted as a student by Yale University.  Though the cost of the tuition seemed impossible, McGuinn accepted.  Working as many as three jobs at once and living in a tiny room in the home of the school’s janitor, McGuinn struggled to raise the funds necessary to stay at Yale.

When Yale University conferred an honorary degree upon the famous author, he was escorted on a tour of the campus by McGuinn.  Impressed with the young man, the two began conversing and Twain learned about the varied jobs the student was working to pay for his tuition.  Weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Twain wrote a letter to the Yale Law School Dean, Francis Wayland, offering to pay McGuinn’s expenses for the year.  The author actually paid McGuinn’s expenses until he graduated in 1877.  Twain closely followed the well-being of the young student, regularly corresponding with Dean Wayland for almost two years.  Later, Twain would maintain a correspondence friendship up until the author’s death in 1910.

Relived of the necessity of working multiple jobs, McGuinn could concentrate on his studies, and graduated number one in his class.

As a lawyer, McGuinn had a distinguished career, working as both a lawyer and as an editor of a Black newspaper.  In 1892, he moved to Baltimore, where he opened a very successful law practice that, among other causes, worked to give the vote to women.  McGuinn’s most notable case was in 1917, when in a federal court, he successfully challenged the city’s segregation policy, setting a legal precedent that was used in subsequent court cases.  Elected twice to the Baltimore city council, McGuinn was also a director of the regional NAACP.

Working in the law office adjoining McGuinn’s was a struggling young lawyer, who was also a graduate Lincoln College.  McGuinn became a friend and mentor to the young man, helping him establish a successful private practice.  Eventually that young lawyer would prevail in his own landmark legal case, overturning segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education.  A decade later, that young lawyer became the first African American on the Supreme Court.

Justice Thurgood Marshall later said that McGuinn was one of the finest lawyers in the country, and that had he been white, he would have been a judge.