M. Twain's radical essays get him booted from American pantheon
- Thread starter overoceans
- Start date
Historical objectivity and emotion are incompatible. Someone who rages time and time again at the immoralities of historical people is not going to be fair when he assesses them and their actions.
McPherson
Banned
Tell that to the victims of "the Terror".
If I use a metric, it is consistent.
Was the person/group; "competent".
Did the person/group do harm?
Was the result worth the cost?
If by those metrics the result is not worth the cost, then I look at what ideas caused the decisions/actions?
Ideology, belief, desire, theory, etc.
Guess what those elements intertangle within and inside human beings?
Emotions.
So if I make a judgement that Woodrow Wilson was a rat bastard, and he was a rat bastard because his decisions were colored by his southern racist white supremacist pseudo-intellectual elitist hypocrisy mindset and that if we compare him to Ulysses Simpson Grant, I tend to favor U.S. Grant as the better president, even though there is an "emotional judgement call" I make based on the "do no harm" component allotted to the assessment.
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Tell me, how did you find out about that book? Internet, I'm guessing. I'd like a citation from you that Clemens knew about and had read that specific Wilson book before you explicitly condemn him for not judging Wilson based on the contents of said book.
The Reign of Terror proves that high emotion and fair judgement are incompatible. As it applies to the courts, so too does it apply to retroactive judgement of historical figures.
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Look, man, you can't seriously think you're the only person who hates Woodrow Wilson on the site where hating Woodrow Wilson is basically a requirement in the registration process. If you're getting into heated arguments with people over it, it's not because others are unwilling to condemn Wilson the way you do, it's because you seem incapable of comprehending that not everyone in history saw him the way that you do, and so you conclude that the only reason anyone ever supported him was because they were all exactly as authoritarian and racist as he was.
Ninja editing something into your post 10 minutes after the fact and then berating people for not reading the ninja edit before they replied in posts before it was even edited in... Interesting debate tactic there.
And that ninja edited text says nothing of value to refute the FACT that emotion-tinted historical narratives are NOT objective and are to be taken with the big lumps of salt they deserve. I could call FDR a rat bastard EUGENICIST and RACIST (which wouldn't be entirely wrong, either), but that would mean abandoning an objective analysis of the man and instead succumbing to emotional biases. And I actually think FDR was a pretty good president, by the way.
The fact is, people are complicated and judgmental historiography is not scholarship. I would be kidding myself if I believed that it is possible to be emotionally biased and a reliable historian by modern standards, at the same time. I think Woodrow Wilson did a great deal of harm (for example, his racism and extremely immoral foreign policy regarding Latin America), but that does not blind me to the fact that he also achieved some good things in his tenure, and had some genuinely good ideas. For example, he was prescient to the fact that a strong, united organization of nations would be valuable to reducing world conflict. He ruined his health trying to realize that vision.
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Just to be clear, I've always assumed that the Connecticut Yankee quote was attacking feudalism from the perspective of a pro-capitalist 19th Century liberal, not attacking capitalism from the perspective of a socialist.
And I think most serious Marxists would know that as well. Not sure about the "social activist deconstructionists". If I understand the kind of people you mean, it's possible a lot of them wouldn't have even read Twain.
And while Twain's views on Wilson may be of interest, if that's the direction tge thread is gonna go, I might suggest it be moved to Chat.
McPherson
Banned
I've actually read that piece of trash.
Division and reunion, 1829-1889 : Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.
archive.org
But here is a counter-question, if you have read "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" why would Mister Clements even need to read Mister Wilson's pack of lies, to know what kind of human being he was? Would not a single visit to Princeton not have done the same thing?
Certainly Mister Clemens hated Mister Roosevelt.
If he was perspicacious enough and knowledgeable about TR and Churchill, then he could sniff out Wilson.
Seems the link for the second work doesn't work. May I suggest using this one as a replacement?
The United States of Lyncherdom - Wikisource, the free online library
I've actually read that piece of trash.
Division and reunion, 1829-1889 : Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.archive.org
But here is a counter-question, if you have read "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" why would Mister Clements even need to read Mister Wilson's pack of lies, to know what kind of human being he was? Would not a single visit to Princeton not have done the same thing?
Certainly Mister Clemens hated Mister Roosevelt.
If he was perspicacious enough and knowledgeable about TR and Churchill, then he could sniff out Wilson.
Not necessarily. It would depend in part on how much interaction he had with the university president during his visit and what they happened to talk about, among other things. Again, you assume that one can see into a person's soul following perfunctory degrees of interaction. Human relationships are much more complicated than that, and I can only hope you don't practice what you preach in real life, because you'd be required to recognize and condemn everyone you meet who seems corrupt or immoral, or else be a moral failure yourself for not seeing them for what they are.
@dcguy3
Yeah, I was using an unfamiliar computer when I made that link. I'll edit my original post with a note directing people to yours. Thanks for the heads-up.
Yeah, I was using an unfamiliar computer when I made that link. I'll edit my original post with a note directing people to yours. Thanks for the heads-up.
Back to the OP, America is fine with radicals being lionized after they are dead and can be co-opted.
McPherson
Banned
Expanding my thoughts has nothing to do with "ninja editing". I just refine an answer as needed.
Emotions and facts? FDR by a measurable metric was using lessons learned from serving under a rat bastard in an effort not to be a rat bastard. There is an irony in that the objective metrics I listed are precisely why FDR was a good president and Wilson was a rat bastard.
Judgmental history is actually necessary to ascertain if mass murder and genocide, racial oppression and lying are "bad outcomes". These are not 2+2=4 outcomes historians work upon. These are judgment calls. There is a moral component.
Like so...
Mark Twain’s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls
In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his “angel-fish,” he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown—his favorite, Susy, was dead by then—and he was lonely. But...
www.theparisreview.org
You cannot junk emotion when you study human beings. It is a part of what we are, and I will not apologize or even attempt to separate emotion as a component when I feel EMPATHY in making such a judgement. To quote the hypocrite who is the title of this thread...
And...
I think it is curious that Mister Clemens would fixate on the "romantic elements" myself, but it is obvious that there is an "emotional component" to his hypocrisy.
Honestly, I think that's just a Western cultural tradition in general. Just look at Charles Dickens and his popular and lauded works on the inhumanity of Victorian Britain's poorhouses, orphanages and industrial economy, and how little social change that led to. I think in order to be memory-holed Clemens would at least have had to be involved in radical and possibly violent political movements.
I also just took another look at his wiki page and noticed he died in 1910, so that Woodrow sidebar was even more pointless and dilatory than I realized.
The victims of the wider Reign of Terror, such as the “Republican baptisms” and other massacres, were mostly lower class and poor, but they were massacred just as enthusiastically for not buying into the tyrannical regime run by the rich of Paris and their lynch mob supporters which eclipsed anything of Louis XVI’s regime.