C.J. Pieffer explains why Mark Twain, the American author and humourist, is her Humanist Hero.

Mark Twain

As a teenager, I was introduced to one of the world’s most beloved authors, Mark Twain.

I loved Twain’s humor, but I admired the humanism in Twain’s fictional characters. Huckleberry Finn rejects the notion that it is better to obey the law and go to heaven than betray his friend Jim, a runaway slave. Huck decides, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” In 1885, Jim was one of the first black characters depicted as a three-dimentional person, with thoughts, emotions, and desires, just like everyone else.

Yet, I don’t think I met the real Mark Twain until I read Letters From the Earth and some of his other social commentary.  That was when I fell in love with Twain and his reverence for humanity rather than supernatural matters.

It was then that I realized that Twain had been singing my tune. He had thought what I was thinking. He had written what I wish I could have put into words as eloquently and with as much humor as he did.

Although he was a great humorist, Twain was dead serious about the underlying messages in his social commentaries. He said,

“Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” (Mark Twain in Eruption)

He blew away hypocrisy with his pen. He cut through the rhetoric to tell the truth about war, race, imperialism, religion, government and a myrid of other subjects. His thoughts had such a universal quality that they are as relevant today as when he wrote them.

Twain’s War Prayer is recycled each time the United States becomes involved in another war, for it makes us realize that when one prays for one’s own army, one is also praying for the destruction of one’s enemy. The unsaid prayer includes:

…Help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells;… help us to lay waste their humble homes…

A religious skeptic, Twain frequently mocks man’s thoughtless acceptance of religion. In his autobiography he wrote:

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

One of my personal definitions of a humanist is one who overcomes upbringing and convention to arrive at a more humane stand on issues. Twain grew up in a slave-holding state (as chronicled in Searching for Jim Slavery in Sam Clemens World by Terrell Dempsey.)  In his autobiography, Twain told how the church used scriptures to condone slavery in Hannibal. However, he married into a northeastern abolitionist family and lived next door to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who Lincoln described as “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great [civil] war.” Gradually, Twain changed the opinions he had accepted in his youth.

Twain’s United States of Lyncherdom rails against mob mentality and the cowardness of spectators at the frequent southern lynchings of his day, perpetrated by religious white men. He appeals to missionaries to “come home and convert these Christians!”

Upon paying the tuition of a black student, he wrote in an 1885 letter to Francis Wayland:

I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.

Twain suffered great personal tragedies, losing four of his six siblings and his father in his youth. He lost three of his four children and his wife before his own death in 1910. Some paint a picture of him in his last years as an embittered curmudgeon. Yet, in his final years, he enjoyed super-star status and wallowed in his notoriety. He became friends with other celebrities of the time, includiing Ethel Barrymore and Teddy Roosevelt.  Less than three years before his death he decided to wear white year-round because it represented life to him. He enjoyed making comments on every issue of the day, creating an aura of humor, purpose, and meaning in every matter. For Twain knew that the way to fight injustice in any field was to poke fun at it.

For humanity “in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon–laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution–these can lift at a colossal humbug –push it a little–crowd it a little–weaken it a little… but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

– Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

Twain was never just a funny man. Nor was he ever totally serious. In a meeting of the Twains, so to speak, he found a way to become both at once, allowing us to see the shortfalls of our own species, yet simultaneoudsly laugh at ourselves and — perhaps with the weapon of laughter — improve the fate of mankind.

What could be more humanistic than that?

This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Artist C J. Peiffer served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Brazil, followed by 30 years of teaching art in public schools in the U.S.  Besides her interest in Mark Twain, she enjoys film, Brazilian culture, cats, Nordic walking with her husband, and reading.