Jim Bradshaw: Mark Twain and the Fourth of July

For some reason, when I begin to think about the Fourth of July, Mark Twain pops up in my head. He and Independence Day are for some reason as inseparably linked in my mind as are July 4th and hot dogs, ice cream, and mom’s apple pie.

I think it’s because Twain was truly an American. He traveled the continent and caught the flavor of a nation busy at building itself. That’s part of it. But he’s also tied up with visions of steamboats hooting and chugging up and down the Mississippi, a river laden with the commerce of a nation growing stronger and richer and more independent every day. He’s tied up with the thought of proud, simple, hard-working people who knew that a little spit on the hands and a dream in the head could build a nation.

Twain gave us the freedom and mischief of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn — not so untypical American boys who grew into American men who were filled with salt and vinegar and walked with a swagger. Sometimes they were a little scared of what was going on around them, but they were always more curious than frightened.

Bound up in Twain is the idea that a people who have done what we have done can afford to sit back and have a good belly laugh at ourselves when we really botch things up — because we’ve accomplished so much that laughing at ourselves is just fine.

Twain wasn’t too serious about this business of being so serious about everything.

He laughed at the pomposity of pompous folks who got so tied up in doing what they were doing that they forgot why they were doing it. He spoofed those things that some people used to set themselves above other people. He was common, in the best sense of the word — realizing that the nation that had grown up around him did so because of the work of folks who got dirt under their fingernails and cussed at a hot sun and a balky mule, and that finery was nice, but just frill.

In his humor there was much criticism of the evils and abuses he saw. He lived in a gilded age and took exception to the gilt. He gave his judgment on slavery and the weakness of human nature, and on anything else that came to mind. But he gave those judgments as an American who believed it better to be an American than to be anything else.

His America, too, was the America of bandstands in a central park, complete with kids beneath, popping firecrackers and rasslin’ in the grass and soaking up lemonade and homemade ice cream. It as an America already filled with traditions spun from simplicity of lifestyle, from honest values, from pride and independence and work and achievement.

Twain mirrored a world in which Americans were dead certain that — even in troubled times — with faith, and luck, and belief in ourselves, we could move any mountain, and then put it back if we wanted to.

He captured the spirit of the Fourth of July, which is the essence of the American spirit, boiled down into one day for tooting our own horn and standing up tall and hollering, “Look here world at what we’ve built.”

And then laughing to ourselves at the day the roof nearly fell down while we were doing it.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.