Reader, suppose you were an idiot
Shelley Fisher Fishkin on what Mark Twain would think of today's political predicaments
Every word of the text printed below was written by Mark Twain in novels, speeches, autobiographical dictations, interviews, letters, notebooks, manuscripts, and other sources. The material dates from 1867 to 1909, including material published posthumously — in some cases (by design) 100 years after his death. The objects of his barbs include the venality of so-called public servants, the hypocrisy of so-called Christian legislators, the dishonesty and corruption he saw in Congress and other governing bodies, the way that blind party loyalty sabotaged democracy, and the arrogance and self-importance of a politician like President Theodore Roosevelt, whose imperialist ventures in the Philippines at the beginning of the 20th century Twain abhorred.
It is hard to overstate the importance of Mark Twain to American literature and culture, both in his time and to this day. Born in 1835, Twain worked as a journalist and river boat pilot before becoming one of the most celebrated American writers in the world. He is widely credited (by Ernest Hemingway and others) with being the progenitor of modern American literature, best known for novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur; travel books such as The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator; and essays and speeches on an extraordinarily wide range of topics. From his 30s until his death, Twain railed against tyranny, injustice, corruption and stupidity wherever he found it, and was increasingly outspoken on political issues in his later years. Twain, who lived in England for significant periods of time, was elected an honorary member of the Savage Club in 1897 and received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1907. A prize for “the American voice” in literature and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor are awarded in his honor.
My “method” in editing this piece involved channeling the spirit of my dear friend, the late Hal Holbrook. Holbrook, who died in 2021, was one of the greatest actors America has produced. A truly brilliant scholar as well as a consummate artist, Holbrook performed his original one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” every year from 1954 to 2017, stitching together bits and pieces of Twain’s writings for each performance in ways that made Twain appear to be addressing whatever issues were current. His method was highly intuitive and associative — an art fueled by his encyclopedic knowledge of Twain’s work. Mark Twain died in 1910. But he continues to speak to our present moment in ways that are as startlingly prescient as they are witty, brazen, and bold.
An earlier version of this piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
I have often wondered at the condition of things which set aside morality in politics and make possible the election of men whose unfitness is apparent. We have never had a President before who was destitute of self-respect & of respect for his high office; we have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive keeper or a bully, and missed his mission by compulsion of circumstances over which he had no control.
We are by long odds the most ill-mannered nation, civilized or savage, that exists on the planet today, and our President stands for us like a colossal monument visible from all the ends of the earth. He is fearfully hard and coarse where another gentleman would exhibit kindliness and delicacy.
He became so expert in duplicity, and so admirably plausible that he couldn’t tell himself when he was lying and when he wasn’t. The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.
He taught them that the only true freedom of thought is to think as the party thinks; that the only true freedom of speech is to speak as the party dictates; that the only righteous toleration is toleration of what the party approves; that patriotism, duty, citizenship, and devotion to country, loyalty to the flag, are all summed up in loyalty to party. Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being "loyal" to a thousand iniquities.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting—the miracles which party-politics can do with a man's mental and moral make-up. In the interest of party expediency they give solemn pledges, they make solemn compact; in the interest of party expediency, they repudiate them without a blush. They would not dream of committing these strange crimes in private life. Where the party leads, they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals. Here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it & out of place—the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
We will not hire a blacksmith who never lifted a sledge. We will not hire a school-teacher who does not know the alphabet. We will not have a man about us in our business life, in any walk of it, low or high, unless he has served an apprenticeship and can prove that he is capable of doing the work he offers to do. We even require a plumber to know something about his business, that he shall at least know which side of a pipe is the inside. But when a representative of ours learns, after long experience, how to conduct the affairs of his office, we discharge him and hire somebody that doesn’t know anything about it.
Those burglars that broke into my house recently are in jail, and if they keep on, they will go to Congress. When a person starts downhill, you could never tell where he’s going to stop. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
People seem to think they are citizens of the Republican Party and that that is patriotism and sufficiently good patriotism. I prefer to be a citizen of the United States. If party loyalty was a form of patriotism, I was no patriot…If there is any valuable difference between being an American and a monarchist it lay in the theory that the American could decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn’t; whereas the king could dictate the monarchist's patriotism for him.
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
In this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That's the finest asset we've got—the ballot box.
In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. The citizen who thinks he sees that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.
The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor English and Professor (by courtesy) of African and African American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn’s Comrade, which was just published by Yale University Press