Recently, I’ve been reading “Mark Twain – Social Critic” (by P. S. Foner, 1958). Always angry at injustice, when Twain discussed the aristocracy and political parties he became extremely resentful. Particularly interesting were his views on the politics of his time as illustrated in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” In looking at the current administrative direction of our nation, we might learn something from his writings (below):
Centuries of inherited rule had exalted the nobility as a species above and apart from the general run of mankind and had instilled in all classes of society the belief that the lower classes were the mere property of the upper. This was the ideology of slavery in all places and at all times: “a privileged class, an aristocracy is but a band of slaveholders under another name. One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below him to recognize — and in but indifferently modified measure — the very air and tone of the actual slave-holder, and behind these are the slave-holder’s spirit, the slave-holder’s blunted feeling.”
Not only was the caste system of the “gilded minority” degrading to the lower classes, but it was in contradiction to the real interests of the nation. For the commoners were the real nation and the only part of it worthy of respect: “To subtract them would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of use or value in any rationally controlled world.”
The above two paragraphs were essentially quoted from Mark Twain, written in 1899! Compare his 125-year-old opinions to today’s general political landscape and find the difference … if any. Think about it, can our nation justify an aristocratic order (even a king?) that can keep us shackled to production for the exclusive benefit of the wealthy minority? Does that really serve all of us no matter what our economic designation and color of our skin? An optimistic future is needed for everyone.
Dr. Stephen Frantz
South Hadley