"Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite--but they all worship money. "
- Mark Twain's Notebook
In his short stories, Mark Twain frequently addresses money. In "A Canvasser's Tale" he remarks upon the ability for the government to make "taxable" something as abstract as an echo. A simple piece of paper in "The 1,000,000 Pound Bank Note" with an absurd amount of money written out on it allows for Henry Adams to become a celebrity in England and wins him the heart of his love in a very round-about manner. He relies on loans and incurs debt, knowing the risk, but buys into the "now-ness" of credit. The lure of $40,000 in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" makes the whole "incorruptible" town greedy; all nineteen citizens and their wives, quite a feat. Twain himself fell into the various traps of money when he invested $300,000 into the Paige typesetting machine. After losing so much of his wealth, he himself became enslaved to creditors.
It is so intriguing that even though these stories and Twain's personal experiences occurred in the late 19th Century, money still has such natures in the current society. Winning the lotto is anticlimactic when one considers the amount of gift tax they have to pay upon receiving the money. Futhermore, considering estate tax the winner is wise to spend the money smartly and urgently if they want the amount to be stagnant, let alone, accumulate.
Like Henry Adams, many people become the victim of purchasing expensive items like cars and houses on credit. However, in such a society houses and cars are a necessity, not a commodity. We become the victims of our own standard of living and strive to have the basic commodities and then some. This can be elaborated into the evils of consumerism and the ability of items to make a person a member of "community." And how many times does it occur that a family is broken apart by the greed of their share in a will? Just like the people of Hadleyburg, strong and close families become sworn enemies and the toss of a coin.
Money and greed are constantly the theme of songs, movies, plays, literature, poetry, art, television, etc. Twain was both satirizing his era and the eras to come. The echo of money, money, money still reverberates today.
youtube: Notorious B.I.G. "More Money More Problems"
youtube: Aloe Blacc & Wu-Tang Clan - I Need A Dollar (Bakija Remix)
Forbes: Top Ten Movies About Money
This theme of greed goes well with Twain's frequent use of salesman and swindlers (often one in the same) [Political Economy, A Canvasser's Tale, and to a lesser extent A Medieval Romance]. Not to mention the frequent use of gambling (Science vs Luck, The Notorious Jumping Frog...). It's also important to note Twain's own problems with finances and credit. Would he have written his stories this way had his entrepreneurial ambitions panned out better?
ReplyDeleteThe connection between his stories and what his own problems with credit were. This makes me wonder if he wrote The 1,000,000 Pound Bank Note before his credit problems or after, since it has a happy ending. Or maybe that was the point; since the narrator in the story never overstepped his means and knew what was truly important to him, everything ended up working out in the end, unlike the citizens of Hadleyburg, who could only think of increasing their own wealth.
ReplyDeleteI wonder what Twain would say if he was alive today and surrounded by our modern methods of credit. Would he have agreed to the use of credit cards? And would he support people having so many cards just to themselves? He seems to make credit an essential part in many of his stories, and he has mixed outcomes in these works. It's interesting that he has his characters gather so much debt when he has had a personally bad experience. I think that he uses his characters to teach a lesson about not spending outside of your own means or becoming greedy because he can personally see the harm in it.
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