Henry B. Wonham - Mark Twain and Money: Language, Capital, and Culture

Henry B. Wonham

In his September 1870 column for The Galaxy, Mark Twain took on a topic of unusual gravity. Political economy is the basis of all good government, the narrator begins (Political Economy 21). The wisest men of all ages have brought to bear upon this subject the[Here I was interrupted and informed that a stranger wished to see me down at the door....] The stranger is a lightning-rod salesman, whose aggressive sales pitch detains the author for half an hour, after which he resumes his unfinished sentence: richest treasures of their genius, their experience of life, and their learning. The great lights of commercial jurisprudence, international confraternity, and biological deviation, of all ages, all civilizations, and all nationalities, from Zoroaster down to Horace Greeley, have[Here I was interrupted again and required to go down and confer further with that lightning-rod man....] And so on, through a hilarious sequence of prose fragments, interrupted by heated negotiations, resulting in the narrators ill-considered purchase of three thousand two hundred and eleven feet of [the] best quality zinc-plated spiral-twist lightning-rod stuff, and sixteen hundred and thirty-one silver-tipped points (27). Needless to say, Mark Twains treatise Political Economy becomes a casualty of the authors absorption in an actual economic transaction for which his theoretical musings have left him unprepared.

The Galaxy sketch provides an intriguing point of departure for the volume Mark Twain and Money for several reasons, the most obvious of which is that, like the sketchs narrator, Mark Twain never got around to formulating a comprehensive statement of his economic views, much less a consistent theory of political economy. He certainly had no shortage of opinions about economic affairs. His early fame, after all, rested in large part on his matchless satirical portrait of the get-rich-quick spirit underpinning the culturehe and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the Gilded Age. In the novel of that name, as in Roughing It and countless other works, Mark Twain poked fun at Americas romance with the almighty dollar, a theme he never tired of, and yet no American writer has ever been more smitten with the dream of material wealth than Twain himself. He may have railed against the lust for money which is the rule of life to-day, but that rule largely governed his notoriously unsuccessful financial activities and, in important respects, his creative life as well (Villagers of 18403 100). One need only recall the dubious salesmanship of Tom Sawyer and Hank Morgan to appreciate that Mark Twain was as deeply invested in the critique of Gilded Age capitalism as he was in the possibility of its limitless extension. Robert Sattelmeyer conveys the same paradox more succinctly when he explains that, whatever Mark Twain may have said about the American economic system in satirical works such as The Gilded Age, his own practices constituted an uncritical endorsement of it (89).

Perhaps the reason Mark Twain never offered a coherent statement of his economic views is that, like the jack-leg theorist of the Galaxy sketch, he was too busy with real-life economic affairs. In fact, much like his Galaxy narrator, Mark Twain was thoroughly embroiled in business negotiations of various sorts throughout his long writing career, and their claims on his attention were a major distraction from literary work. The story of his business adventures apparently does not include a misguided investment in lightning-rod stuff, but many of its episodes are at least as outrageous, and some of them bear repeating in a brief overview of his financial preoccupations.

The first serious entrepreneurial scheme to ignite Sam Clemenss fiscal imagination took shape in 1859, when he learned about the surprising properties of a now-infamous South American leaf. Four years earlier, German scientists had learned to extract cocaine as the active agent in the coca leaf, and at twenty-four years old, Sam Clemens saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor of what he hoped would be a vast new industry by sailing to the Amazon basin in order to establish an American trade in coca. Within a decade, of course, Americans were ingesting cocaine in soft drinks, toothache remedies, and other household products, and Clemens might have been rolling in legal drug money by that time, except for the fact that no ships were scheduled to leave New Orleans for the Amazon in 1859.

This was a lucky break for American literature, for he next signed on with Horace Bixby to learn the riverboat piloting trade, and soon thereafter, with the outbreak of the Civil War, he accompanied his brother Orion Clemens to Nevada, where Sam Clemenss ambition was still to strike it rich, if not in coca, then in silver or gold. In letters home he claimed that in Nevada aman with initiative could expect to spend no more than six weeks to make $100,000, if he had $3,000 dollars to commence with (SLC to Pamela Moffett and Jane Clemens 25 October 1861, Mark Twains Letters). And this is what he expected to do as a mere beginning, for when Sam Clemens used the word rich, he had in mind names like Comstock, Carnegie, Frick, and Rockefellermassive industrial fortunes, not the sort of wealth that could ever be expected from piloting a steamboat or writing books (Wilson and Rees 109).

Probably the only jackpot he ever actually did hit was in marrying Olivia Langdon in 1870, but that certainly did not put an end to his relentless search for the scheme that would make him phenomenally wealthy. Throughout the 1870s he poured money into the projects of various inventers, and he dabbled with his own inventions, receiving his first patent in 1871 for a device called Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments. He received two other patents during his lifetime, one for Mark Twains Self-Pasting Scrapbook, the other for a memory-building history game. As his many biographers have detailed, the list of other inventions and gizmos he either dreamed up or invested in includes a fire extinguisher that worked like a hand grenade, a perpetual calendar, a bed clamp for keeping blankets in place, a steam brake for railroad cars, and a riverboat paddle wheel designed for icy conditions. At one point he considered purchasing a vineyard and invested $600 in the manufacture of a new type of grape scissors that had been invented and patented by the father of his close friend William Dean Howells.