I agree that Mark Twain had contradictions, like all real people do, but is there anything to back this assertion from TFA?
> O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks.
"He had been a racist earlier"? I know about Twain's half-hearted stint in the Confederacy -- I've read the heavily fictionalized account he wrote about it, " The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" -- but I've never read he was fighting for any clear cause (neither slavery nor that "states rights" bullshit or anything). He probably was just caught up in it, and did no actual fighting, and got out of it soon enough (2 weeks!). Does this really qualify as "being a racist", even briefly?
Some random site I just googled, https://civilwarsaga.com/mark-twains-civil-war-experience, claims "It is not known exactly why Twain quit the militia. He defended his actions throughout the years by describing his confusion while enrolling and explained he was ignorant of the politics behind the war."
So confusion = racism?
From the same page:
> "Twain also described the Civil War in general as: “A blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.” Whatever the reason, Twain left the military and never looked back."
So why does it matter? Well, it does to me, because the article flings this random assertion, that Twain "had been a racist earlier in life", and now that assertion is out there for someone else to quote it without evaluating what evidence is there, or lack thereof.
I don't think there is much evidence for any early racism regarding African-Americans, although given his origins it would not be surprising, that said he does tend to wax nostalgic about his youth in a slave-owning town, and to deny any problem in that in his various writings focused on his own youth, so that is the kind of thing that is considered somewhat racism-adjacent in our understanding of such matters, at least.
As far as Asian racism he wrote articles against abuse of Chinese workers by police in San Francisco when he worked there as a journalist.
Right! I forgot about his writings on Indians. Not Twain's finest. I wonder why TFA doesn't mention this, instead of going on an irrelevant tangent about the Confederacy?
I have to say I do think Twain's writings about Indians are racist (so yeah, point taken) but always couched in ambivalence; some of it for example looks like exaggeration to ridicule the poetic "Noble Savage" of Fenimore Cooper and others, which is also bullshit (and unfortunately, lives on to modern age, "Dances With Wolves" et al).
I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim. It is true that he fought for the Confederacy, and it is also true that he held racist views, by his own admission.
In an essay called Concerning the Jews, which was probably ahead of its time in defending Jewish people, he wrote:
> I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices
That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate. You can read his full thoughts in another essay called The Noble Red Man: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/redman.html. It's pretty short, but a shorter summary is that he advocates for all-out genocide and says they are the "scum of the earth" and inferior to insects.
Side note: if written today, Concerning the Jews would definitely be considered racist, because he defines Jewish people as basically a separate species with inherent traits not shared by other "races". That is the definition of racism, even if the traits you're calling out are considered positive. You can't say "I have no racial prejudices, I just think all Asians are good at math". This would maybe be an unfair standard to apply to someone writing in the 19th century, but I just want to point out that it would be reasonable to say that Twain was racist but in a much more benign way than most of his contemporaries (except when it came to Native Americans).
> I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim [...] It is true that he fought for the Confederacy.
I think it does imply it [1], and it's also an unfounded claim. Twain himself seems confused about why he joined, and deserted after two weeks without firing a single shot (his farcical account of it claims his unit killed a single man, but this has been proven false). Hardly the actions of a convinced racist.
> That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate
Yeah, I concede this. Twain framed his "Noble Red Man" as ridicule of the "noble savage" stereotype so common in literature, but even then, it's hard to find a positive example of an Indian in his writing. So I concede this point.
Though... why didn't TFA mention this instead of going on a tangent about the Confederacy?
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[1] Because TFA qualifies this as "earlier in his life", which wouldn't make sense if this was about Twain's opinions on Native Americans. It clearly links his racism "earlier in life" to his joining the army of the Confederacy.
> O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks.
"He had been a racist earlier"? I know about Twain's half-hearted stint in the Confederacy -- I've read the heavily fictionalized account he wrote about it, " The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" -- but I've never read he was fighting for any clear cause (neither slavery nor that "states rights" bullshit or anything). He probably was just caught up in it, and did no actual fighting, and got out of it soon enough (2 weeks!). Does this really qualify as "being a racist", even briefly?
Some random site I just googled, https://civilwarsaga.com/mark-twains-civil-war-experience, claims "It is not known exactly why Twain quit the militia. He defended his actions throughout the years by describing his confusion while enrolling and explained he was ignorant of the politics behind the war."
So confusion = racism?
From the same page:
> "Twain also described the Civil War in general as: “A blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.” Whatever the reason, Twain left the military and never looked back."
So why does it matter? Well, it does to me, because the article flings this random assertion, that Twain "had been a racist earlier in life", and now that assertion is out there for someone else to quote it without evaluating what evidence is there, or lack thereof.
So it bugs me.