Mark Twain Quotes
I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade in that region. I shall recommend legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be: "Dessicate the poor working-man; stuff him into sausages.”
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910. This is a great example of extreme political sarcasm. One big political issue of the day was poverty and the poor. Most of the politicians condemned poverty but offered to do nothing about it or take actions that would even make life worse for the poor. So Twain, writing as a “presidential candidate” made this suggestion which would reduce the number of poor and improve our export trade. He then proposes his campaign slogan, today called a sound bite. Real politicians were faced with this absurd idea, were then challenged to come up with an idea that was not absurd.
Mark Twain, Writer, Founder, Anti-Imperialist League, "Mark Twain as a Presidential Candidate," New York Evening Post, June 9, 1879
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There were few if any consumer protection laws in those days and many wealthy aristocrats made their money by taking advantage of the poor. They were the landowners, bankers, financiers and often the industrialists. Shaw was a sarcastic social critic and this is a typical line he gave his upper class characters. Today, we have more controls on business and finance, and many wealthy business people have gotten that way by providing great value to the consumers and being honest. However, we still have large numbers of wealthy members of society who do make their money from the poor and middle class by unethical and often illegal means. In the aftermath of the Meltdown of 2008. hundreds of thousands of the homes of the working poor and middle class were foreclosed by the major banks forging the legal documentation for the foreclusures. Millions of consumer contracts are issued that even a PhD cannot understand the terms of without special legal and financial training. There is even a legal definition of a salesperson lying to make a sale which is so commonplace that our law excuses it and calls it "puffing". However, there has been over time, improvement over Shaw's era.
The hymn was officially removed from the Anglican Hymnal in 1963. The hymn is a good example if how Christianity was used to reinforce the status quo of a riged English class system. God ordained the position of all men and onky he could change that. Hard work, education, personal qualities were all for naught. And no one should question the fairness of the status quo, as it was God’s will.
In May of 1886 police had killed some strikers for an 8 hour work day at the McCormick Plant in Chicago. A left wing newspaper called a rally using the word “revenge.” (See {43614}.) The next day, at the rally, someone threw a dynamite bomb killing several police who in turn wounded and killed many of the protestors. 31 people were indicted for the “Haymarket Bombing,” 8 were tried, and 7 were convicted and sentenced to death including Spies. There was however, no evidence linking any of the defendants with the bombing, only evidence linking them with left wing, anarchist positions and writings.
At the time, it did seem impossible that labor and capital would ever have harmonious relations. But the notion that slavery would solve the problem is as preposterous as anything ever entered into the American political dialogue. But there were many in the South, and some in the North, who actually believed it. Even 150 years later, while labor and capital relations were much better than pre Civil War, they still could not be described as “harmonious” or “friendly”.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
