One of the things that is important to note about Twain
and his views on politics and culture of the United States is that many people felt he
got deeper into the heart of things than many of his peers and thats why his opinion was
so valuable. William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly described him as
follows
It is
in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he [Mark Twain] pierced
to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world.
... Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages,
poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary
men, but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our
literature.
In terms of his
view of politics, in "The Edge" he wrote:
The political and commercial morals of the United
States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire
banquet.
He often was very
cynical about the way that the government operated and about most people in positions of
power.
He was pretty positive about the potential of
Americans and the early direction of the country but had grown somewhat cynical as
evidenced by the following quote from a speech he gave in
1890:
We are
called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its
loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human
liberty.
If you read his
novels and his short stories, he clearly has a belief in the goodness of the human
character and the ability of people to be good and to make good decisions and care for
each other, but he is also more than happy to point out their flaws and the fact that
often the most celebrated and famous cannot stand up to the actions of the good and
downtrodden people of the world and of the worlds of his
stories.
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