Thoughts on Becoming a Civilization

In a speech delivered in Boston in 1890, Mark Twain attempted to define what a true civilization is. Finding the task difficult, he proposed a simpler method: list everything that civilization is not, subtract those elements, and “call the remainder ‘real’ civilization.” Any society marked by human slavery, despotic government, entrenched inequality, brutal punishments, widespread superstition, pervasive ignorance, and the universal presence of dirt and poverty, he argued, could not claim the title. Only a society free of all these could. Twain then made a bold claim: that no real civilization had existed anywhere in the world before the abolition of slavery in the United States. Looking at our own country today, I am not sure we qualify even now. By the 1890s, former slaveholders had already succeeded in creating a system that returned Black Americans to conditions alarmingly close to those they had endured before emancipation. The constitutional amendments guaranteeing their rights were ignored, circumvented, or violently suppressed.

We have come a long way since Reconstruction and the terror of the Ku Klux Klan. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, led by courageous individuals who risked everything, reshaped the nation’s moral landscape. Yet in recent years we have witnessed an erosion of many of those hard-won gains. A politicized Supreme Court has weakened protections that once ensured fair representation, and legislators guided by the prejudices of an earlier age have drawn congressional districts designed to dilute the voting power of Black citizens. They insist these decisions are political, not racial. The effect is the same: disenfranchisement. Many young African Americans now watch the work of their parents and grandparents — those who marched with Dr. King and John Lewis — being undone by cynical redistricting. Fortunately, some of these efforts have been checked by the courts and by legislators committed to democratic principles.

Still, racism remains a persistent undercurrent in American life. Efforts to deny or sanitize our history continue in schools, colleges, and museums, often under the banner of protecting students from discomfort. As we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence, it is essential that we confront our past honestly. Our national motto, E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — has always been more aspiration than reality. The founders spoke eloquently of human equality, yet many were unwilling to relinquish their own slaves, and their definition of “human” excluded entire groups. We fought a war more than 160 years ago to challenge that contradiction, but for some, that war has never truly ended.

Those who most loudly proclaim their religious devotion often seem to overlook the Bible’s fundamental teachings about the unity of humankind — all created in the image of God — and the obligation to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger. These values are not peripheral; they are central.

One of the foremost scholars of Mark Twain, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, explored these tensions in her 1990s book Lighting Out for the Territory. In her opening essay, she returns to Twain’s boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, to see how the town commemorates its most famous son. What she found was a perpetual celebration of youth: Tom Sawyer’s fence, Becky Thatcher’s house, Huck Finn’s island, the cave where Tom and Becky were lost. Restaurants, shops, and hotels bore the names of Twain’s characters. But something was missing.

There was no mention of slavery. No acknowledgment of Jim, the enslaved man who is one of the central figures of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. No recognition that Hannibal had been a station on the Underground Railroad. No reference to the abolitionists who ferried enslaved people across the Mississippi to freedom — or to the fact that several were captured and convicted by a jury that included Twain’s own father. Even the bullwhips sold in the gift shop were treated as toys, stripped of their historical meaning.

Fishkin traces Twain’s own transformation from a young man shaped by the racism of Hannibal to the writer who, in Elmira and Hartford, became a fierce critic of injustice. Many have tried to ban Huckleberry Finn for its use of the language of its time, but Twain was holding up a mirror to the society he knew. The novel’s climax — when Huck decides he will not betray Jim, even if it means “going to hell” — is a moral turning point. Jim is portrayed not as a caricature but as a grieving husband and father, a man of deep feeling and dignity. Fishkin argues that the novel’s final chapters are a satirical indictment of the virtual re-enslavement of Black Americans in the 1880s.

Curious about what had changed since Fishkin’s visit, I looked into Hannibal today. The transformation is significant. Jim is now recognized. A museum — Jim’s Journey — traces African American history in Hannibal and highlights Twain’s advocacy for Black rights. G. Faye Dant, a Hannibal native, has documented the history of the town’s Black community and has been the driving force behind the museum. Hannibal has celebrated Juneteenth for years, even before it became a national holiday. These changes, in Hannibal and elsewhere, are markers of a broader shift in American consciousness.

And yet the millennium has not arrived. The Messiah has not appeared on the horizon. Antisemitism has surged in recent years, both in the United States and abroad. Racism continues to shape efforts to deny Black voters their rightful representation. As Jews, we know the heart of the stranger. Too often we have been the stranger — denied rights, persecuted, attacked. The Torah teaches that all humanity descends from a single individual, created in the image of God. Whether or not this is literally true, it expresses a profound truth: all people share a common dignity. Any ideology of racial superiority is incompatible with our deepest beliefs.

It is therefore incumbent upon us — as Jews and as Americans — to affirm this truth and to work toward a society that embodies it. This is the task before us as we mark 250 years of American independence.

Fishkin recounts staying at Quarry Farm, the Langdon family home where Twain spent summers and wrote many of his works. Twain often read with a pencil in hand, annotating the margins. Most of these books have been preserved in the Twain library, but one volume remained on the shelf: Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. In it, Twain had underlined a single sentence: “It is the deep commandment, dimmer or clearer, of our whole being, to be free.”

In this country, freedom includes the right to govern ourselves through our elected representatives — the right to vote. It took generations for that right to be extended to all Americans, regardless of race, status, or gender. It is now our responsibility to protect it, to expand it, and to ensure that the promise of freedom is not dimmed for any of our fellow citizens.