Curious Sympathies Between Adam Smith and Mark Twain

Curious Sympathies Between Mark Twain and Adam Smith

Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, cannot be classified as a friend or foe of Adam Smith. Indeed, it is uncertain whether he ever lost a wink of sleep or a moment of distraction bothering himself with the Glasgow Professor. The research for this brief entry uncovered no scholarship connecting the two, and Twain himself rarely invoked famous intellectuals except for the satiric purposes of puncturing the pomposity of scribblers and orators who trotted them out as garnish for half-baked ideas. It seems probable, if not certain, that Twain did intentionally reference Adam Smith once in a comic piece, “Political Economy,” published in the newspaper Galaxy in 1870, writing with fustian erudition of economics that “Washington loved this exquisite science; such names as Baker, Beckwith, Judson, Smith, are imperishably linked with it; and even imperial Homer, in the ninth book of the Illiad, has said…”¹ Besides Smith, none of the names in the pantheon of Twain’s economists register as known economists at all. Twain knew a Harvey Beckwith, a superintendent of a Nevada mine, and had two years before poked gentle fun at him in a comic letter recommending him for a government position investigating illegal whiskey distilleries.² Judson has been identified as Colonel Ezra Zane Carroll Judson, a dime novelist who wrote such edifying fare as The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main: or, the Fiend of Blood (1847) under the penname Ned Buntline, and who had lectured in support of a private American-led coup of Cuba in Hannibal, Missouri when Twain was a boy.³ The list is a joke—rifling his mind for grand economists Twain can only think of traveling tub-thumpers and friendly acquaintances, and Smith, who may or may not be the author of The Wealth of Nations.

At times, however, Twain appears to have owed something of a debt—direct or indirect—to Smith. Twain devoted most of a chapter of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court entitled “Sixth Century Political Economy” to the subject of trade and labor.⁴ In the chapter, the hero, Hank Morgan, an American who has traveled back in time to medieval England, tried unsuccessfully to convince a blacksmith and other villagers that free trade creates more wealth than protective tariffs. The medieval villagers pointed out that they enjoyed higher wages, owing to their tariffs, while Morgan, standing in for Twain, repeatedly objected that their high wages were more than offset by the rising price of commodities. But the idea that the cheapness of goods (i.e., purchasing power) was worth more than nominal high wages seemed an unfathomable oddity to such medieval minds. Morgan resigned himself, “What those people valued was high wages; it didn’t seem to be a matter of any consequence to them whether the high wages would buy anything or not. They stood for ‘protection,’ and swore by it, which was reasonable enough, because interested parties had gulled them into the notion that it was protection which had created their high wages” (373-374). Morgan still had another card to play to win over the reluctant villagers, however: free labor. He began to describe “an unwritten law of wages” that provided wages would increase over the centuries, and then turned to the coming era of free wages, when the magistrate would no longer fix wages, when the laborer would negotiate his wage, sometimes with unions, and the employer would be able to hire and fire employees on negotiated terms and at-will (374-376). “Will there be no law or sense in that day?” came the response of the villagers (377), and not long after, when Morgan pointed out that his antagonist blacksmith had even confessed to violating the magistrates’ wage laws himself, incited the villagers to attack the newcomer as a mob.

Hank Morgan’s modern economics is recognizable as, in the main, that of Adam Smith. Morgan’s argument that free trade will lead to the cheapness of goods—corresponding to the real, not nominal value of money—could not be more in keeping with the Wealth of Nations. But Morgan’s humane argument for free labor, against the employers’ and magistrates’ wage-fixing collusion resembles Smith’s worldview no less. Smith argued in the Wealth of Nations that “Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate,” but that sometimes they go further to combine to depress wages, “with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution.” The workers also combine, either defensively to avoid pay cuts or without provocation to increase their wages. The result, Smith thought, rarely favored the worker “partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence…” (I.viii.13) Smith thought the combinations of “masters” particularly would be broken by a high rate of increasing wealth—a growing economy was better for the worker even than a static if wealthier economy--which would create enough demand for labor to force masters to negotiate on wages (I.viii.17). Smith had little faith, however, in labor laws—he clearly disliked the use employers made of magistrates in fixing wages in his own day, and he remarked of wages that “experience seems to show that law can never regulate them properly, though it has often pretended to do so” (I.viii.34).⁵

Ultimately, Morgan’s description of the nineteenth-century economy, the culmination of centuries of income growth, and which finally arrived at free negotiation of labor between employer and employee, resembles something like Smith’s belief that growing wages, arising from increasing wealth, would eventually create something like the conditions of free labor negotiation. Both Morgan’s arguments on labor and trade are sometimes a little too pat—Smith did not recognize an “unwritten law” that wages would inevitably rise, for example—and contain nineteenth-century developments that Smith could not foresee—the growing legal recognition and popularity of trade unions. But overall the chapter depicts a nineteenth-century man trying to convince deeply traditional medieval villagers that their economic lives would be improved under an economic framework similar to that urged by Adam Smith.

Perhaps an even more uncanny resemblance exists between Smith’s moral psychology and Twain’s attempts late in life to grapple with the moral and political foundations of human nature. Smith’s moral psychology, contained in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, rested on the sympathetic instincts in human nature, observing others, not only in their plight, actions and circumstances, but also their praise and condemnation. “Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren,” Smith wrote, “She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard” (III.2.6). But morality lay not merely in the currying of the approval of others, but being worthy of that approval, even when others are not looking. (III.2.1.) To this end, Smith introduced the idea of an “impartial spectator,” a “much higher tribunal” whereby a person judges his or her own actions by an inward observer, free of interest and with all the information of fact and motive that public opinion often lacks (III.2.32). Moral psychology involved an upward growth, then, from sympathy to sociability to an internalization and perfection of sociable moral standards.

In his later years, Twain presented a form of moral psychology analogous to Smith’s, but stunted from taking the inward turn to the “higher tribunal” of the impartial spectator. Twain’s posthumously-published 1901 essay, “Corn-Pone Opinions” tells the story of a slave who would lecture Twain from a stump, telling him “You tell me whar a man gits his corn-pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is” (92).⁶ Twain took the slave’s message to be that people must consciously share in the opinions of the community that provide their bread, a viewpoint Twain accepted with the caveats that he did not believe people had original ideas before receiving them from the community and that their conformity was not usually as intentional or mercenary as the slave suggested (93). Twain instead argued that the first need a person must fulfill is “self-approval,” but that “a man’s self-approval, in the large concerns of life, has its source in the approval of the people about him” (95). Twain invoked the parlance of the Scottish Enlightenment on sociability and sympathy. “We know it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination,” Twain wrote, “that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.” (95-96). The result was a “Conformity” that arose from “the human being’s natural yearning to stand well with his fellows, and have their inspiring approval and praise . . . (96)” Even economic opinions fell under this same scrutiny. Despite the earlier confidence he showed in the free trade position in A Connecticut Yankee, Twain confessed that he studied the question of free trade “and didn’t arrive.” What people thought about that issue, or the gold or silver standards, came down to feeling with others, not thinking the matter out (97).

Twain mildly tempered his strident position in an essay, What is Man?, begun before “Corn-Pone Opinions” but revised after it and privately printed in 1906. In the essay, a wise Old Man in dialogue with a Young Man uttered an invariable law that “From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one—to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF” (136). Almost immediately, the Old Man went down a similar path as “Corn-Pone Opinions”—the soldier went off to war, Alexander Hamilton went to his death in a duel, not from principle, but because public approval or fear of disapproval paradoxically made the heroically daring or even morally objectionable option the most comfortable to their peace of mind (137-138). Pressed by the Young Man to consider the genuinely altruistic actions of people risking and sacrificing when others were not looking, the Old Man conceded that such people existed “here and there,” but argued that they did what they did because to watch another suffer “would give them pain. They would save the fellow-being on that account. They wouldn’t do it otherwise” (142). All was, in the end, this “spiritual comfort.”

In many ways, however, the foundation of the Old Man’s position—for all appearances Twain’s own—was roughly the same as Smith’s. Morality rested on sympathy—deep attention to circumstance, the natural bonds of feeling that commiserated with affliction or shared joy. Human beings learned from the approval or disapproval of others, but that was not the final consideration for Smith, or, at bottom, Twain either. There are important differences. Smith’s “Impartial Spectator” provided something more like a moral regimen, whereby people took pains to morally regulate themselves even when no one else was looking on. Twain’s “spiritual comfort” or “self-approval” had more of the character of a stiff drink to get through a hard day—boozy with partiality, rationalization and sweet half-truths. But for both morality rested not in the usual philosophical or religious preoccupations with arriving at and following ultimate truths, but rather learning to live—and act so as to live—with the swarm of sympathies and fellow-feeling that that made up life.

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1. Mark Twain, “Political Economy,” Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays (New York: Library of America, 1992), 1:434-439.↩

2. Mark Twain to Stephen J. Field, January 9, 1868, in Mark Twain’s Letters, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Richard Bucci (Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press, 1990), 2:150-151.↩

3. Mark Valentine, “Mark Twain’s Novels and Ned Buntline’s Wildcat Literature,” Mark Twain Journal 48 (2010): 37, 39.↩

4. Citations come from Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979).↩

5. All citations to Adam Smith in this essay come from The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 8 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982).↩

6. Citations for “Corn-Pone Opinions” and What is Man? are taken from, Mark Twain, What Is Man? And other Philosophical Writings, ed. Paul Baender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973). For publication information on What is Man? see ibid., 11-15.↩