Mark Twain and Money by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780817390877
Publisher: University of Alabama Press

7

“Drop Sentiment, and Come Down to Business”

Debt and the Disintegration of “Manly” Character in “Indiantown” and “Which Was It?”

Susanne Weil

It is impossible to discount the number and effects of bankruptcies caused by the Great Recession in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. USCourts.gov reports an average of 1,314,697 bankruptcies per year since the fiscal meltdown of 2008. In 2013, some 2,960 Americans a day filed for bankruptcy (“It’s in the Numbers”), despite legislation to stem the tide of filings (United States). Studies have shown that those who struggle with debt are three times more likely to suffer from mental illness (“Debt Linked,” par. 1): one international meta-analysis controlling for the effect of mental illness on fiscal decision making found that among the indebted, suicidal thinking and risk of self-harm increased by a factor of two to three (Fitch et al., par. 35–36). A new wave of organizations and counselors, like the Financial Therapy Association, has risen to help debtors handle their psychological as well as economic stress: these emphasize that to recover, bankrupts must move through shame’s debilitating effects (Bortz).

When Samuel Clemens’s publishing company and typesetter venture failed in the Panic of 1893, he and myriad fellow bankrupts could not turn to such social networks.1 Clemens had succeeded as a self-made man; his father and older brother Orion both had failed. Though his marriage to Olivia Langdon, with her connections and coal inheritance, certainly aided his rise, Twain earned their living through writing, lecturing, and, essentially, managing his own business. However, as Michael Kimmel argues in Manhood in America, linking one’s “identity as a man” to the rollercoaster marketplace during the post–Civil War era of panics risked not only one’s financial autonomy, but the self-respect it bolstered: “The flip side of this economic autonomy [was] anxiety, restlessness, loneliness. Manhood [was] no longer fixed in land or small-scale property ownership or dutiful service. Success must be earned, manhood must be proved—and proved constantly” (22–23). Losing autonomy through bankruptcy was crushing and shaming. In Born Losers: A History of Failure in America, Scott Sandage notes that “stock imagery of individual moral blame infused the culture of American capitalism”; as one contemporary newspaper commentary argued, “‘men succeed or fail . . . not from accident or external surroundings’ . . . but from ‘possessing or wanting the elements [of manly character] in themselves’” (92). Failure drew “contempt, misery, and disgrace,” and only redoubled work demonstrated that bankrupts deserved redemption (Rotundo 180–81).

Twain did that work, writing his way out of much of his debt, showing strenuous effort by undertaking his round-the-world lecture tour, past sixty and suffering gout. Yet despite moral and practical support from Standard Oil vice president Henry Huttleston Rogers, a loving family, and an adoring public, as well as the talent and determination to write his way out of much of his debt, Twain’s post-bankruptcy letters are branded by the excruciating shame, depression, and feeling of lost manhood that he, like other bankrupts, suffered. Further, they show him uncertain whether he could still write to his own standards.

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