Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture
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Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture
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Overview
Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture focuses on an overlooked feature of the story of one of America’s most celebrated writers. Investigating Samuel Clemens’s often conflicting but insightful views on the roles of money in American culture and identity, this collection of essays shows how his fascination with the complexity of nineteenth-century economics informs much of Mark Twain’s writing.
While most readers are familiar with Mark Twain the worldly wise writer, fewer are acquainted with Samuel Clemens the avid businessman. Throughout his life, he sought to strike it rich, whether mining for silver in Nevada, founding his own publishing company, or staking out ownership in the Paige typesetting machine. He was ever on the lookout for investment schemes and was intrigued by inventions, his own and those of others, that he imagined would net a windfall. Conventional wisdom has held that Clemens’s obsession with business and material wealth hindered his ability to write more and better books. However, this perspective fails to recognize how his interest in economics served as a rich source of inspiration for his literary creativity and is inseparable from his achievements as a writer. In fact, without this preoccupation with monetary success, Henry B. Wonham and Lawrence Howe argue, Twain’s writing would lack an important connection to a cornerstone of American culture.
The contributors to this volume examine a variety of topics, such as a Clemens family myth of vast landholdings, Clemens’s strategies for protecting the Mark Twain brand, his insights into rapidly evolving nineteenth-century financial practices, the persistence of patronage in the literary marketplace, the association of manhood and monetary success, Clemens’s attitude and actions toward poverty, his response to the pains of bankruptcy through writing, and the intersection of racial identity and economics in American culture. These illuminating essays show how pecuniary matters invigorate a wide range of Twain’s writing from The Gilded Age, Roughing It,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to later stories like “The £1,000,000 Banknote” and the Autobiography.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817390877 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2017 |
| Series: | Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 312 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Lawrence Howe is a professor of English and film studies at Roosevelt University. He is the author of Mark Twain and the Novel: The Double-Cross of Authority and the coeditor of Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon through Critical Lenses.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Narrating the Tennessee Land
Real Property, Fictional Land, and Mark Twain's Literary Enterprise
Lawrence Howe
Property is the fruit of labor. ... [P]roperty is desirable ... is a positive good in the world.
— Abraham Lincoln, 21 March 1864, Collected Works
Most inhabitants of a democracy have property. And not only have they got property, but they live in the conditions in which men attach most value to property.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
In the center of Roughing It, Mark Twain gives a very prominent place to the episode of the "blind lead." With masterfully paced suspense, he recounts the moment when he and his partner — Calvin Higbie, the man to whom he dedicates the book — examine the rock from the Wide West mine. Observing something suspicious in the specimen, Higbie makes a clandestine descent into the shaft of the Wide West claim and confirms what his examination of the rock had suggested. The mine had more than one vein running through it, and the blind lead — a vein that remains hidden beneath the surface and, consequently, is discovered only by accident — contains ore of a character distinctly different from that in the Wide West vein, and thus it is not protected by the Wide West claim. In addition to the episode's artful composition, Twain's account alludes to peculiarities of the laws of mining rights; a special quirk of the rules enables Twain and Higbie to stake their own claim on the blind lead, but their subsequent neglect of their responsibility to perform work on the claim within a specified period results in the loss of their rights.
Before all goes wrong, though, the two men fantasize about the opulent lives that await them. They discuss their plans to visit Europe and the palatial houses they would build in San Francisco's posh Russian Hill neighborhood. Fueled by the fantasies of his imminent wealth, Twain reports, he wrote home instructing that his share of the family land in Tennessee be sold and the proceeds donated to charity. This is the first published reference to the Tennessee land, which Twain will deploy as a crucial plot element in The Gilded Age the next year. But, alas, after the disappointing loss of the blind lead, his unfolding narrative in Roughing It recurs to the memory of this elusive wealth, torturing Twain when other opportunities slip away from him in later episodes.
I rehearse this pivotal moment of expectation and disappointment because it denotes a shift in forms of property — from ownership of land in Tennessee to contract rights for mining valuable ore in the Comstock Lode. This shift reflects how the concept of property in nineteenth-century America was being reimagined. While the blind-lead episode condenses this change, the full text goes further to illuminate how Twain himself converted personal losses of property of various forms into literary success, earning him both wealth and cultural capital. Proceeding from the premise that Twain sought to cast himself as an exemplar of United States culture, I argue that his desire for property plays a significant role in his evolving self-portrait of American identity.
The overwrought though persistently motivating notion of the American Dream is founded on the readily assumed virtues of property ownership, which at its furthest extreme is magnified into fantasies of striking it rich. Although the phrase "the American Dream" is attributed to James Truslow Adams in 1931, the concept behind it has a much longer history (441). Clearly operative in texts like Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer and Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables, it arguably dates back as far as 1492. The extravagant version of this culturally formative concept had significant appeal to Samuel Clemens. However, in characteristic fashion, Twain's writings equivocate between the desire for property and misgivings about the uncertainties and obligations that ownership entails.
My argument about Twain's fascination with property unfolds in three stages. First, I examine the shift of property regimes in Roughing It, focusing on Twain's interest in the idiosyncrasies of how property relationships are maintained and forfeited. Next, I investigate the Clemens family's ownership of the Tennessee land, real property that the family expected would provide them with intergenerational security. The story of the Tennessee land encompasses multiple narratives within both the life of Sam Clemens and the career of Mark Twain, all of which reflect the complexities of property as tantalizing. Finally, I show how Mark Twain's writing becomes the means for converting Sam Clemens's personal disappointments into capital gains, both financial and cultural. The further reaches of my argument attempt to show how property consists not simply in objects themselves but in a relationship between owner and object that is codified in language, in a system that is as bound up in rhetoric as it is in material. The assertion and maintenance of ownership is thus enmeshed in a range of discourses and practices that are often abstract, making property, as Joseph Singer has noted, both "contingent and contextual" (10). Despite our commonsense conceptions of property as tangible and durable, property ownership is framed in narratives that rely on their ability to persuade others of their validity. As a writer who saw his life's work in both literary and commercial terms, Twain understood the problematic intersection of language and economics. His lifelong engagement with words, and especially with storytelling, attuned him to the narrative basis of property rights and the textual forms of the laws and contracts that governed them. To the degree that language is a flawed medium susceptible to misunderstanding, if not manipulation, the status of property is subject to interpretive variance.
The Lure of Ownership on the Frontier
The discovery of silver in Nevada Territory induced many fortune seekers to flock to the Washoe desert. But while Sam Clemens would also catch the prospecting fever that swelled the region's population from just a hundred to twenty thousand residents in little more than three years (Liebcap 39), his initial motivation for going west was to avoid the Civil War. The war indirectly headed in the same direction: to finance the war, the Lincoln administration encouraged settlement, mineral extraction, and ultimately formal entry of Nevada into the union as a state. The federal appointment of Orion Clemens as territorial secretary serendipitously presented his brother Sam with the opportunity to serve as the unofficial secretary to the secretary and thus remove himself from the likelihood of conscription in the national conflict. Although prospecting for silver was not initially part of his plan, an interest in property would take hold. Before he would become embroiled in the buying and selling of shares of mining claims, he wandered into a more conventional form of property claim.
His visit to Lake Tahoe, as recounted in Roughing It, is first an aesthetic experience. Twain recalls being overcome with delight upon glimpsing the beauty of the alpine lake. After twenty arduous days of overland stage travel and a sojourn of about the same duration in the desolate, desert landscape of Carson City, Tahoe's "noble sheet of blue water ... walled in by a rim of snow-clad mountains that towered aloft full three thousand feet higher still!" appears to him as "the fairest picture the whole earth affords" (148). Having choked on the dust that the Washoe zephyr raked across Nevada's bleak terrain, Twain marvels at the miraculous properties of the lake's restorative waters. After a brief reconnaissance of the lake by boat, he and his companion, Johnny, decide to stake their claim to a ranch of three hundred acres. They perform the requirements to validate their claim — fencing the boundaries with a few felled trees and establishing a shelter, first with logs, then saplings, finally settling for a pile of brush (humorously diminishing their labors as they successively downgrade their domicile) — and look upon their homestead with satisfaction: "We were land owners now, duly seized and possessed, and within the protection of the law. Therefore, we decided to take up our residence on our own domain and enjoy that large sense of independence which only such an experience can bring" (151). Invoking the American ideals of ownership and independence, Twain rhetorically situates his text within the founding ideology of the nation. But this opportunity to embrace the American ethos turns out to be short-lived; just one day later, their pride of ownership goes up in smoke, literally, when the campfire that Twain had neglected was fanned into a wildfire, making their once idyllic "ranch" an infernal scene. Lamenting their loss, he deadpans: "We were homeless wanderers again, without any property" (156).
In addition to the humor evoked by the swivel to disappointment, this episode reflects the terms and conditions of property ownership in land, reinforced in the otherwise redundant comment of being "homeless ... without any property." From the era of the early republic, homesteading was conceived as a way to make land accessible to citizens quickly and equitably in order to develop resources and spread prosperity. Lincoln signed the Homestead Act of 1862 into law, similarly, to encourage settlement in the West. But as Twain's experience illustrates, the security of a property claim is vulnerable to any number of threats. The first is from nature; the only thing that remains after the wildfire has ravaged his and Johnny's claim is the picturesque beauty of the unscorched portion of the Tahoe landscape. As Emerson notes in Nature, landscape is an aesthetic property, not a material one: "There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet" (9). Surveying the farms of his neighbors, the Concord sage judges the aesthetic property to be "the best part of these men's farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title." Twain's reaction to the scene of his erstwhile property is not as sanguine as Emerson's, but he expresses delight and awe mixed with his disappointment. For Twain, these aesthetic moments are not simply transitory experiences but also a means to access memory that enables him to recover in writing what was materially lost.
Property rights in minerals were a secondary interest not only for Twain but also in the nation's legal system. Despite the need for clear rules and protocols that arose with the California Gold Rush and again a decade later with the influx of hopeful arrivals to the Comstock region, individual rights to mineral claims on federal land were not officially recognized until 1866. Prior to the enactment of the Federal Mining Statutes, miners were squatters, technically trespassing, though the federal government had neither means of prohibiting encroachment nor a system for collecting rents from miners or royalties on the value of their strikes. In this ungovernable region, miners may have enjoyed unfettered access to the land, but they also lacked the means to secure their interests. Consequently, rules "devised for establishing, exchanging, and protecting private mineral claims" (Liebcap 30) were drawn up by consensus in the various mining districts, which functioned as voluntary self-policing property regimes in the absence of local, territorial, or federal law. These rules were recognized in courts throughout the region and were adopted later in state law. When the federal government finally acted to codify mining rights, the mining district rules were generally adopted without significant alteration.
Property rights in minerals functioned differently from rights entailed in homestead grants or other conventional real estate purchases. The land on which Nevada prospectors staked their claims was federal property (Anderson and Hill 116). Because the land had little value other than the ore that it might contain, mining prospectors were happy to have access to the potential mineral wealth without having to obtain ownership of the land. Their interests lay not in the surface features of the land or in improving it for permanent residence, but in extracting the ore that lay beneath the surface. Thus, homesteading and mining claims formed entirely different relationships to land. The work required of a homesteader, as seen in the Lake Tahoe episode, was understood as an improvement of the land: establishing a home and a livelihood for the owner and, in exchange, converting wilderness into productive, cultivated acreage that benefited the country as a whole. This improvement provision followed from Locke's principle that property rights are warranted by the mixture of one's own labor with nature, which was echoed in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, and later by American legal scholar James Kent: "The sense of property is graciously implanted in the human breast, for the purpose of rousing us from sloth, and stimulating us to action. ... The natural and active sense of property pervades the foundations of social improvement. It leads to the cultivation of the earth, the institution of government, the acquisition of the comforts of life, the growth of the useful arts, the spirit of commerce, the productions of taste, the erections of charity, and the display of the benevolent affections" (2:319–20). Kent's property theory implies a narrative trajectory with a teleological purpose: the natural desire for property gives rise to individual productivity, and government is formed to establish and protect the orderly recognition of property rights.
Legal theorist Carol Rose has argued that property rights in philosophy, legal codes, and individual claims of ownership take the form of storytelling in which a delineated plot embeds ownership within a validating narrative. For example, she shows that the durable influence of Locke's theory relies on a "story line, beginning in a plenteous state of nature, carrying through the growing individual appropriation of goods, then proceeding to the development of a trading money economy, and culminating in the creation of government to safeguard property" (Rose 26). Beyond the Genesis allusion of the story's origin in a "plenteous state of nature," Locke explicitly adopts biblical narrative by tracing property rights over nature to Adam and Noah. Locke's theory of the mixing of one's labor with nature as the act that establishes one's property claim is traced to Adam and Eve's banishment from Eden, which required them to live from the fruit of their labors rather than from the spontaneous bounty they had enjoyed in the garden. Blackstone goes even further, noting that Genesis, "the most venerable monument of antiquity, considered merely with a view to history," does not simply contain the general principles of Judeo-Christian property but "will furnish us with frequent instances of violent contentions concerning wells; the exclusive property of which appears to have been established in the first digger or occupant, even in such places where the ground and herbage remained yet in common" (2:5). Thus, for Blackstone, Genesis is not simply foundational myth but also case law.
Still further, Locke not only bases property-rights theory in biblical narrative but also analogizes that scriptural source to the condition of America while echoing the opening phrase of Genesis: "Thus in the beginning all the world was America" (145), where he locates the plenteous state of nature uncontaminated by an exchange transaction through the currency of money. Although Locke makes this association without ever having seen America himself, Tocqueville draws upon a similar, biblically inflected narrative about the property conditions of the America that he observed firsthand:
When the Creator handed the earth over to men, it was young and inexhaustible ...; and by the time that they had learned to take advantage of the treasures it contained, they already covered its face. ...
It was then that North America was discovered, as if God had held it in reserve and it had only just arisen above the waters of the flood.
There, there are still, as on the first days of creation, rivers whose founts never run dry, green and watery solitudes, and limitless fields never yet turned by the plowshare. In this condition it offers itself ... to man who has already mastered the most important secrets of nature, united to his fellows, and taught by the experience of fifty centuries. (280)
(Continues…)
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