The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 29 (2018)
Copyright © 2018 Tsuyoshi Ishihara. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Memory of American Classics:
The Legacy of Mark Twain
in US School Textbooks, 1930s–1940s

Tsuyoshi Ishihara*

Commemorating Mark Twain: The Centennial Celebration
The public memories of literary classics and their authors are preserved ina variety of ways. Although the works of canonical authors are often
respected and celebrated through the years, they are sometimes revised,distorted, and even neglected for various reasons. In the case of Mark Twain,
the period between the 1930s and the 1940s was one of the greatest eras in
the development of his legacy. Although more than twenty years had passed
since his death in 1910, Twain’s significance in public memory was visibly
increasing in many spheres of American society. In the field of literary
criticism, Bernard DeVoto, editor of the leading literary magazine The
Saturday Review of Literature, fired his famous attacks at Van Wyck Brooks
for his interpretation of Twain as a crippled genius. In DeVoto’s 1932 book
Mark Twain’s America, he argued that Twain’s originality was deeply rooted
in his experiences of the American frontier. DeVoto was not alone incontemporary literary circles in proclaiming Twain’s significance.
Specifically, in 1935, the year of the centennial celebration of Twain’s birth,influential authors and literary critics such as Ernest Hemingway, Owen
Wister, and Mark Van Doren all proclaimed Twain’s literary pre-eminence.
*Professor, Waseda University

23

24   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

In that year Hemingway made the world’s most commonly quoted statement
on Twain: “All modern American literature comes from one book by MarkTwain called Huckleberry Finn,” which is perhaps the highest compliment
ever paid to that work, even today.1
Twain was not, however, an author of interest solely to those in literarycircles. Already in the 1930s, the imaginative world found in his works had
become a widely shared public memory among Americans. For example, anarticle entitled “Who Reads Mark Twain?,” published in the American
Mercury in 1934, asserted that the number of copies of Twain’s works heldin major public libraries was usually far greater than works of othersignificant American writers, such as Sinclair Lewis, Henry James, andErnest Hemingway.2 The centennial year 1935 was a golden year for
Twain’s legacy. The celebration was a year-long event, during which Twain
was accorded immense respect and admiration by people in a variety offields.3 In the field of politics, for instance, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
accepted the honorary chairmanship of the Mark Twain Centennial
Committee.4 He was not a chair in name alone: he announced in a radio
speech the official beginning of the year of events, and he theatricallymanifested his support by turning on the telegraph switch in the Oval Officethat lit the beacon of the Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse in Twain’s
hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. The President also dedicated the MarkTwain Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi River in Hannibal and evenvisited the town to deliver his speech at its opening ceremony (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Ticket to the dedication ceremony of the Mark Twain Memorial Bridge over theMississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speechat the ceremony and cut a ribbon, formally opening the bridge to traffic. Courtesy of the DaveThomson Collection.

Memory of American Classics    25Even politicians who were not Americans were eager to contribute to thecelebration. For example, the New York Times reported that the International
Mark Twain Society received a letter from the Italian fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini enclosing a two-hundred-dollar personal check to be applied tothe proposed project to build a Mark Twain memorial in St. Louis,
Missouri.5 Mussolini wrote:
His genius is the synthesis of the sparkling and useful characteristics ofthe people of the United States. Mark Twain has been and remains oneof my preferred authors. To the intellectuals of America I send mycordial greeting as well as the greeting of all Italians who follow withsympathy the dynamic spiritual life of the Republic of the Stars andStripes.6
Mussolini had just initiated the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Perhaps he hadneither read nor heard about Twain’s anti-imperialist writings; or he may
also have simply ignored them, hoping to gain support from the American
public by expressing admiration for a beloved American author. Of course, itwould be naïve to assume that these political leaders supported thecelebration of Twain solely because they were genuinely fascinated by hisworks. We need to take into account the political benefits they expected toreap from their actions. As suggested by Mussolini’s supreme compliments
to both Twain and Americans, such politicians were trying to win favor bydeveloping an emotional connection with the American public throughactively joining in the celebration of a cherished author. Their responses tothe centennial celebration clearly demonstrate that already by the 1930s
Twain was remembered as America’s favorite author and was too significant
to be ignored by even the highest leaders, both at home and abroad.
Twain and the New Textbooks
School textbooks, generally, cannot survive without accommodating to
the policies of the school systems in which they are used. If American
education changes, American textbooks must also change. In the first half ofthe twentieth century, American education changed tremendously. As
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz demonstrate in their study of the socalled high school movement that took place from 1910 to 1940, enrollment
dramatically expanded in US secondary schools. They found that although
only around 15 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds were enrolled in26   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

secondary schools in 1910, the number had increased to around 50 percent
in 1930 and 75 percent in 1940.7 Although the enrollment rate decreased bynearly 10 percent in the first half of the 1940s because of World War II, therate bounced back to around 75 percent immediately after the war.8 Becausea large percentage of American teenagers were attending high school in the
1930s and 1940s, the term “high school student” no longer necessarily
meant an academically oriented student interested in literature. It wastherefore inevitable that school textbooks would have to be adapted toaccommodate this new and challenging situation generated by the
democratization of American high schools.
This democratizing trend as it affected textbooks of the time can bedetected in their titles. Before the 1930s, literature textbooks usually had
bland titles like American Literature, Literature for Junior High School,
Readings in American Literature. During and after the 1930s, however,many textbook publishers started titling their new literature textbooks using
a variety of exhilarating words such as Hidden Treasures, Adventures,
Enjoying, Best-Liked, and Pleasure.9 Twain was obviously one of the“best-liked” American authors, famous for his “adventure” stories, which
provided great “pleasure” to millions of Americans, and it was therefore
inconceivable that these new textbooks would not welcome works by Twain
and many of them included his works among their selections as they werecertain that students would love his writings. In the preface to the newly
revised 1947 edition of Adventures in American Literature, the editors
specifically referred to the inclusion of more writings by Twain:
Probably the most pleasing additions from the students’ point of vieware two new Mark Twain selections, one from Roughing It, and one
from Innocents Abroad. Following the chapters from his Autobiography
and from Life on the Mississippi, which have been retained fromprevious editions, they build up a fascinating picture of the early life of
this distinguished American.10
Clearly, this statement commenting on the popularity of Twain’s works withstudents was not groundless. One of the most dramatic changes found in the
textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s was the incorporation of extensive student
surveys about the literary selections. For instance, in 1934 the editors of
Harcourt Brace’s literary anthology textbook, which included Twain’s
works, highlighted the use of such a survey in its preface titled “How the
Selections Were Chosen”:

Memory of American Classics    27In the development of this series, about 1,500 selections were
submitted to about 100,000 students for the expression as towhether a selection was “very interesting,” “fairly interesting,” or“uninteresting.” This testing program went on over a period of three
years. Merely because a selection was rated as “very interesting” did
not assure its inclusion. . . . Even so, 80 per cent, by pages, of thematerial in this series was rated “very interesting” by eight out of ten
students.11
One junior high school textbook even claimed that its selection of Twain’s
work was based on objective data about the popularity of his work amongchildren. In the introduction to the selection from Tom Sawyer, the editors
reported the results of an extensive survey on the work: “You will beinterested to know that when 36,000 children were asked which book they
liked best, Tom Sawyer ranked first. According to the Winnetka Book List,
ninety-nine out of every hundred boys and ninety-eight out of every hundred
girls enjoyed it, and it was in grade seven that it was liked best of all.”12
Such surveys demonstrate that the shift to student-centered textbook
editorship encouraged the inclusion of Twain’s works in the 1930s and1940s. When Twain was alive, the general public was the most reliable andgreatest supporter of his works, and the new textbooks prove that thiscontinued to be true even decades after his death.
Selznick’s Tom Sawyer Film
Although Twain was already popular among students of the time, thisdoes not mean that textbook editors did not take any new action to further
develop students’ interest in Twain and his works. Their instrument was film,
the new medium that fascinated tens of millions of young Americans at thattime. Various references to film are found in the textbooks’ discussions of
Twain. For instance, Rand McNally’s 1942 textbook reprinted the opening
segment of the filmscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, directed by
Norman Taurog and produced by David O. Selznick in 1938,13 which differs
significantly in its representation of humor from Twain’s original. The
textbook chose one of the most famous scenes in Tom Sawyer, in which Tom
is told by Aunt Polly to whitewash the long stretch of wall to punish him forbeing absent from school. In the film adaptation, Tom, noticing that his
young brother Sid is peeping through a hole in the wall, whitewashes his
brother’s face to get revenge on him because Sid had revealed to Aunt Polly28   Tsuyoshi Ishiharathat Tom tricked her into believing that he attended school when in fact hewas playing truant. In Twain’s original, Tom takes his revenge on Sid bythrowing dirt clods at him when he is off guard. The scene in which Sid’sface is comically whitewashed is not present in the original. As Perry June
Frank comments, “Slapstick variations on Tom’s abuse of Sid . . . occur
throughout the film.”14 Filmmakers needed to attract audiences in an alreadycompetitive film market. To do so, they often squeezed exciting, dramatic
scenes with exaggerated characters into limited-length films. Although we
can understand their motivation to produce an exciting movie, we cannot
call their product a respectful adaptation of Twain’s story.
In the introduction to their inclusion of the filmscript of Tom Sawyer Rand
McNally explains to students what it considers the usefulness of film
adaptations of literature, writing that they “help you to understand and enjoy
literature of the past [and] become more familiar with good literature.”15
How is it possible, however, to “understand and enjoy” literature if the film
version is significantly different from the original? The film version could
even lead students to misunderstand the original, if they do not bringcomparative perspectives to bear on the adaptation and the original source.
In the late 1930s, however, when this Tom Sawyer film was made, it was notpolitically easy for filmmakers to shoot films that were faithful to theoriginal stories they were based on. In 1934, the Motion Picture Associationof America implemented a self-censorship code, generally known as the
Hays Code, which restricted the use of various depictions in film. Most films
were scrutinized by the Hays office before their release, and Selznick’s 1938
film adaptation of Tom Sawyer was no exception. As Frank reveals, although
the PCA (Production Code Administration) approved the basic story basedon the submitted filmscript, they objected to some of its depictions,
including the inebriation of the town drunkard, Muff Potter; Aunt Polly’s useof biblical quotations; the characterization of a minister as a hypocrite;
comic elements in the church scenes; the gruesomeness of the graveyard
murder scene; Tom’s whipping at school; and the boys swimming nude.16
After the filmmakers made adjustments to overcome the objections, the film
was given a PCA certificate of approval for release.17
Thanks to the heavy bowdlerization of the original Tom Sawyer, the film
was welcomed by the educational establishment. In Frank’s words,“nowhere is the profoundly conservative nature of the 1938 Tom Sawyer
better illustrated than in the reaction of the educational establishment to thefilm. In February of 1938, Photoplay Studies, a magazine used in schools as
an aid to the study of film, published an issue devoted entirely to theMemory of American Classics    29Selznick Tom Sawyer.”18 As indicated on the cover, the issue was prepared“in cooperation with a committee of Greenwich, Conn., high school
students” and “recommended by the Motion-Picture Committee of the
Department of Secondary Education of the National Education
Association.”19 It is unimaginable that either textbook publishers or editors
would have been unaware of this influential educational film magazine’s
special feature on the film that was so highly recommended by the NEA.
One of the follow-up questions after the selection in Rand McNally’s 1942
textbook asks students: “Why does the story make an especially goodmotion picture?,” wording that attests to the editors’ confidence in thequality of the film.20 It is highly possible that the endorsement of Selznick’s
Tom Sawyer by Photoplay Studies gave the editors confidence in its quality
and encouraged them to use its script in their textbook, although, as we saw
earlier, the film was both a sensationalized and a bowdlerized version of
Twain’s original.
Even if textbook editors believed that it was an “especially good motion
picture,” they still could not use the full text of the original version of thefilm. They revised a few exchanges between Tom and Amy to make them
acceptable. In the film, when Tom meets Amy after her recovery fromchickenpox, he asks her, “Where you been? I haven’t seen you since we’vebeen engaged.”21 Perhaps because the editors thought their being engaged
sounded inappropriately precocious. Tom’s words were thus changed to thefollowing: “Where you been? I haven’t seen you for ages.”22 In the same
scene, when Amy expresses her hatred of her rival Becky, this is what shesays in the film: “Maw sent me over to play with her, but I wouldn’t. She’s
too ugly. Nobody around here is going to like her.”23 Again, textbook editors
must have felt the need to tone down Amy’s cruel comment about Becky tomake it more appropriate. They thus eliminated the last sentence, “Nobody
around here is going to like her.”24
Although textbooks from the 1930s and 1940s seldom attributed the
difficulties of teaching literature to either the rapidly expanding number ofless academically oriented students, many of whom were uninterested inliterature, or the general shift in students’ interests from literature to the new
visual and audio media, increasing references to film (and radio) in
textbooks indicate the challenges literature classes were facing. As
evidenced by textbooks’ introductions that addressed the new media,
including discussions of filmed versions of Twain, his work was suitable forthe new educational environment, as both his fiction and the film adaptationsof it appeared in numerous textbooks of the time. No matter how difficult

30   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

the times were, particularly for older, classic writers, Twain’s works werecapable of meeting the new demands and expectations of US textbooks.
Wartime Nationalism and Twain
During the period between the late 1930s and the mid-1940s, the world
experienced the most disastrous war in human history. In order to achieve
victory in this difficult world war, people were mobilized to support theirgovernments’ war efforts and encouraged to express their patriotism andloyalty to their countries. As we will see, the field of education was no
exception. Because the United States did not enter the war until the early
1940s, the representation of Twain in textbooks in the 1930s was somewhat
mixed in terms of patriotism. In the 1930s, one textbook openly rejected
patriotic perspectives on American literature. As Mark Van Doren, arespected poet and English professor at Columbia University, explained in
the preface to his 1932 anthology textbook, the Oxford Book of American
Prose: “I never to my knowledge read any special meaning into the word
American. Any prose written in America I took to be American prose, and I
judged it merely as prose. I was not patriotic.”25 In the early 1930s, one
textbook even took a critical view of Twain’s anti-European, Americacentric tone. Houghton Mifflin’s high school American literature textbook
warned students:
The tendency that Mark Twain fostered [in The Innocents Abroad],
namely, to regard older civilizations as outworn jokes, had its effect innarrowing the outlook of Americans. All the best civilization is notsummed up in good plumbing, steam heat, and a conviction that thepresent is the perfect state. After a hundred and fifty years of isolationfrom Europe, America can still learn from the Old World as well asteach.26
This does not mean that nonpatriotic textbooks did not include MarkTwain. For example, Mark Van Doren selected for his textbook three pieces
from Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi, the highest number of
selections among authors apart from Abraham Lincoln. As for Houghton
Mifflin’s textbook, it reprinted an unusually long, fifteen-page, excerpt from
Life on the Mississippi with detailed follow-up questions.27 Thus, the early
1930s textbooks show that Twain’s works were popular even without theassistance of patriotic editorial policies. From this we can also infer theMemory of American Classics    31increasing recognition of Twain’s works as belonging to world literatureduring the 1930s.
Indeed, internationalist views tended to be included in the textbooks ofthe early 1930s. For instance, as educational historian Gerard Giordano has
documented, the nationalistic biases in social studies and history textbooks
were already recognized in the 1920s,28 and concern about them led the
League of Nations to approve in 1930 the International Institute ofIntellectual Cooperation’s proposal calling for schoolbooks to be revised“with a view to the correction of passages harmful to a mutual
understanding of the peoples and to a spirit of international amity.”29
Responding to this call for international friendship, some history textbooksin the 1930s condemned the US decision not to join the League of Nations
and included materials that promoted the significance of peace throughglobal unity.30 We do not know the exact reasons why some early 1930sliterature textbooks incorporated internationalist perspectives in their
discussions of literature and of Twain in particular, they obviously shared
the liberal internationalist tone of contemporary US textbooks.
As Giordano documents, the popularity of the internationalist tone of the
1930s “diminished as the public became preoccupied with national
security.”31 From the late 1930s to the early 1940s, when the world order
deteriorated as a result of the wars in Europe, Russia, and East Asia, which
led to the eventual full participation of the United States, the internationalist
tone in American literature textbooks was rapidly replaced by nationalistic
editorial policies. In the field of social studies textbooks, for example,
textbooks that were thought to criticize America were severely attacked byan organization called the National Association of Manufacturers and were
threatened with removal from schools as “un-American.”32 Because
American literature textbooks were not openly critical of America, there wasno need to attack them. However, some of them went out of their way todemonstrate their patriotic views at this time, when America faced bothpotential and real enemies around the world. For example, Scott Foresman’shigh school American literature textbook of the late 1930s contains thefollowing in its preface:
The understanding of what it means to be an American is of special
importance to our secondary students as coming citizens. . . . In aperiod of rapid change like our own, when confusion bordering on
bewilderment reigns in many quarters, it is highly salutary that theyouth of our land form enlightened convictions about what America

32   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

essentially stands for and that they cherish the ideals which have madeus a mighty nation.33
It should be noted that these students were soon to be drafted to go to war
against various nations.
Various textbooks published after the late 1930s shared this patriotic
fervor. For example, a 1920s textbook that claimed in its introduction that“no course in American literature can ever justify itself unless it stimulates
the pride of young America” and called American literature “a record thatshould be familiar to every loyal American,”34 did not change these patriotic
words in its 1939 edition. Furthermore, the textbooks’ patriotic editorial
policies were also reflected in their titles and selections. In 1941, justmonths before Pearl Harbor, MacMillan began an unprecedented
multivolume American literature textbook project called the Democracy
Series, which consisted of books with highly patriotic titles suggesting that
America was a great nation and a model of democracy, such as Working for
Democracy, The Growth of Democracy, The Way of Democracy, Pioneeringin Democracy, Toward Freedom, Your Land and Mine, and Enjoying Our
Land. This emphasis on democracy was in line with the direction taken by
one of the most influential educational organizations in America, theNational Education Association. The NEA published a highly influential
book of educational guidelines, The Purpose of Education in American
Democracy (1938), as well as “an extended series of materials [from 1937 to
1952] that affirmed the need to teach the principles of democracy.”35 In
addition, Adventures in American Literature, one of the largest singlevolume American literature textbooks of the time, added to its 1936 second
edition a new section of more than 120 pages entitled “The Growth of theAmerican Spirit,” which included a variety of patriotic writings by famous
political and military figures such as Washington, Patrick Henry, Jefferson,
Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Lincoln.36 In its 1941 third edition, whichcame out when the prospect of US participation in the war had become
likely, the section was not only retained but also expanded to more than 400
pages, in which numerous American writings thought to show “the growthof American ideas and ideals” were newly included.37 Selections deemed to
be unsuitable for this patriotic textbook were excluded from the revised
edition. An example of this was the elimination from the 1941 edition of theaccount of transatlantic flight by Charles Lindbergh, who was publicly (mis)remembered at the time as a Nazi sympathizer and who was one of President
Roosevelt’s most prominent enemies, despite his patriotic contribution to US

Memory of American Classics    33military aviation in the Pacific front during the World War II.
Once the US officially entered World War II, the impact of the war
became more easily discernible in American literature textbooks. Echoing
Roosevelt’s “national pleas that effectively transformed democratic
education into patriotic education,”38 a variety of literature textbooks
voluntarily expressed support for America’s war effort. For instance, awartime teacher’s manuals for Scott Foresman’s high school American
literature textbook emphasized that the textbook aimed to help students
understand difficult questions related to the war, such as “Why did people
like Uncle Dan and Joe’s brother Bill and Miss Collins break up their way ofliving, leave their jobs and their families, and go half way around the world
into most deadly danger?”39 To help students understand the meaning ofAmerica’s participation in the war, the textbook added to its revised wartime
edition selections that “portray the significance of democracy in crisis,”40
such as an excerpt from William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, the American
journalist’s famous firsthand critical report about Hitler.41
In this nationalistic atmosphere in literature textbooks in the late 1930s
and early 1940s, multidimensional, nonpatriotic readings of Twain’s work
were sometimes restricted. For instance, Scott Foresman’s high school
American literature textbook from the late 1930s to the 1940s presented a
one-dimensional patriotic interpretation of A Connecticut Yankee, arguingthat the ideas suggested by Twain in that book “show the superiority of
democracy over monarchy; they reveal the long strides which Americans
have taken in removing cruelty, superstition, and tyranny.”42 It is true that
Hank Morgan, the protagonist of the story, believed in “the superiority of
democracy over monarchy” and launched his revolution in order to build
both a democratic and an industrialized society. Whatever he believed, Hank
Morgan was not, however, a true democrat, but a dictator with supreme
military and political power who skips the time-consuming democratic
process of decision making. In addition, his revolution ended in complete
failure, with atrocious mass killings, after he mobilized his superior
weapons. The novel vividly shows that even a leader who fights against
tyranny with a strong belief in “the superiority of democracy” can becometyrannical and resort to cruelty when trying to implement democracy. Thisprescient view brings to mind today some of the controversial incidents thattook place during the later wars against tyranny that the United States
engaged in such as the nuclear bombing at the end of World War II, the My
Lai massacre, the use of Agent Orange and Agent Purple in the Vietnam

34   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

War, and the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay during the Iraq War.
The novel does reveal the “long strides which Americans have taken inremoving cruelty, superstition, and tyranny.”43 Ironically, it also
demonstrated its prophetic nature in regard to the unimaginable suffering theUnited States has since engaged in in the name of instituting democracy.
This patriotic textbook never mentioned the possibility of reading Twain’s
novel as a warning about the future of American democracy. Nationalistic
textbooks in the 1930s and early 1940s, instead, chose to represent Twain
not a skeptical observer of American democracy but as an ardent supporterof its superiority.
Twain as an American Icon
As we saw earlier, public responses to the 1935 centennial celebration of
Twain’s birth demonstrated his tremendous popularity among the generalpublic. At the same time, the celebration also revealed that people viewed
him not only as a beloved author but also as the embodiment of distinctively
American experiences. People’s desire to view him as an American icon isevidenced by such headlines as “Mark Twain The American,” the title of aleading magazine’s (The New Republic) essay that featured his centennialcelebration in 1935.44 Even if all essays did not have such straightforward
titles, the centennial essays on Twain often suggested that he was an
undeniable symbol of America. As Mark Van Doren wrote in 1935 in The
Nation magazine, “Mark Twain was almost indissolubly attached toAmerica, and America to him; and this is still the case.”45 Similar views on
Twain were expressed in another article, “Hunting Mark’s Remainders,”
which appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature in the same year:[Twain] fitted perfectly into a Great American Legend (we’ve seen it
lately in Will Rogers). That is, that a man risen from rough and tumble
pioneer circumstances can make merry at Kings and Emperors, outwit
philosophers and scholars. . . . To the American mass, the largest
articulate mythopoetic group, this doctrine is wafer, wine andhassocks.46
In this environment, in which Twain was seen as an American icon, it was
simply unimaginable for American literature textbooks to ignore him. Fromthe 1910s to the 1920s, twenty-two selections from Twain’s works andthirty-two introductions about him can be found in literature textbooks. The

Memory of American Classics    35total number of both selections and introductions is at least 55. However,that number more than doubled to at least 108 in the 1930s and 1940s.
Among Twain’s writings, the most frequently excerpted works were Life on
the Mississippi (twenty-four times), Roughing It (eleven times), and“Jumping Frog” stories (nine times), all three being popular works depicting
American settings. None of the 1920s textbooks selected stories fromTwain’s Autobiography, although it was published by Harper’s in 1924. In
the 1930s to the 1940s, however, Twain’s Autobiography was excerpted ninetimes in textbooks, becoming one of the most popular choices of the time.
Like the extracts from his other works that were most frequently included in
the period’s textbooks, all selections from his Autobiography were episodes
with American settings, particularly from his Missouri childhood.
Although Twain had already been dead for over a decade in the 1920s,
Vernon Louis Parrington, the Americanist who wrote one of the mostinfluential American literary histories in the 1930s and 1940s, must havebeen satisfied with the selections made by the textbook editors. His views on
Twain were obviously shared by many editors. The following words on
Twain from Parrington’s Main Currents of American Thought (editions
1927–30) were among the most popular in literature textbooks from the
1930s to the 1940s. Just as textbook editors did in making their selections,Parrington emphasized the American elements in Twain: “Here at last wasan authentic American—native writer thinking his own thoughts, using his
own eyes, speaking his own dialect—everything European fallen away.”47
The selections of Twain’s works in textbooks echoed Parrington’s view of
Twain as “an authentic American.” For instance, Harcourt Brace’s highly
nationalistic revised literature textbook of 1941, which quoted these wordsof Parrington, dropped a European episode from Tramp Abroad that had
been included its previous edition, instead choosing an excerpt from Life on
the Mississippi. This selection was placed in the text’s newly expanded
patriotic section, “The Growth of the American Spirit,” side by side with theworks of legendary American political and military leaders such as
Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.48
Some textbooks took Twain’s works as a means for understanding theessence of America and its history. For instance, one of the 1940s highschool literature textbooks that selected “Jumping Frog” introduced it as awork helpful to understanding the American character. The textbook’s
follow-up section, entitled “The Panorama of America,” asks students thefollowing question: “Two American types were met in ‘The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’: Simon Wheeler and Jim Smiley. Try to36   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

find in your family albums or in magazines or newspapers pictures of thistype.”49 A variety of textbooks also attempted to connect Twain’s life andwork with the public memory of American experiences. One of the 1940s
textbooks, for example, introduced a selection from Roughing It as beingmaterial suitable for understanding the development of transportation in
America: “His entertaining narrative of the hardship of travel is aninteresting reminder of the part which changes in transportation have playedin the growth of America.”50 There was even a textbook published in the
1940s in which Twain’s eventful life was used as a source for an American
history quiz. One of the questions about the selection from Life on theMississippi was “Can you understand why Mark Twain quit a professionthat so fascinated him? The answer lies in the year that he quit, 1860, andthe location of the Mississippi River.”51 As Sarah M. Corse writes in her
book on nationalism and literature, “national literature” is expected toprovide citizens with “national communion” and “common experiences”
and help them “construct common images of the nation.”52 The increasing
number of selections from Twain’s works with American settings, therepeated employment of the words of authoritative figures praising Twain as
an authentic American writer, the placement of his works in highly patriotic
sections alongside the writing of historic American figures, and the use of
his life and work as a means of understanding the American character andhistory all suggest that the textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s began viewing
Twain as the icon of an American national literature that would be helpful inconstructing common memories of the nation.
The image of Twain as a Westerner was particularly emphasized in the
1930s and 1940s textbooks, largely in line with influential books of literary
criticism of the early 1930s. As we have already seen, Parrington’s Main
Currents of American Thought was one of the most popular references usedin textbooks in the 1930s and 1940s, and its chapter title on Twain, “TheBackwash of the Frontier,” clearly demonstrates the basic framework of
Parrington’s understanding of Twain as “an embodiment of three centuriesof American experiences—frontier centuries . . . the child of frontier past.”53
Bernard DeVoto’s Mark Twain’s America (1932), one of the most influential
books on Twain of the time, is known for its emphasis on Twain’s frontier
experiences for the development of his originality. DeVoto obviously shared
Parrington’s view of Twain as an embodiment of the American West. In
many cases, Twain’s works no longer solely appeared in sections associatedwith the West, since Twain had already been widely recognized as arepresentative American writer. He was, nevertheless, often referred to as

Memory of American Classics    37the writer who best revived public memories of the American frontier. For
example, a textbook from the 1930s called DeVoto’s Mark Twain’s America“an excellent account of frontier life in Twain’s day” and depicting Twain as
an incarnation of the frontier spirit. It claimed: “[Twain] did more than any
other writer to bring into our literature the real spirit of the West.”54 Anothertextbook from the 1930s, describing Twain not as an outsider but an insider
in relation to the West, said, Twain “was pre-eminently the voice of the Westrather than a voice about the West.”55 Other textbooks of the time agreed andcalled Twain “the West’s first great writer” and “the first great American
writer who was indisputably of the West.”56 One of them even juxtaposed
Twain with such a famous figure from (what was then considered to be) theWest as Abraham Lincoln and wrote: “As Lincoln brought the spirit of theWest into our statesmanship, so Mark Twain put it into our books.”57 Just as
DeVoto saw the essence of “Mark Twain’s America” in Twain’s close
cultural ties to the American frontier, so the West was viewed as the sourceof America’s cultural originality. Because Western heroes were often viewed
as emblematic American heroes as well, the West was easily associated with
American national pride. As we have discussed, a nationalistic atmosphere
was evident in textbooks from the late 1930s to the 1940s, when America
faced both potential and real foreign enemies; thus, it is not surprising thattextbook editors regarded the elements of the American West in Twain’s lifeand literature as a convenient tool for demonstrating Twain’s authenticity as
the American artist who resonated with the patriotic feelings of theAmerican public at that time.
Censoring the Memory of Race
The secondary school textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s sometimes
censored Twain’s works, and race and slavery were two of the most targetedelements. Although Twain’s Autobiography provided the most numerous
textbook selections, the editors did not always view the portions referring toslavery in Hannibal and at his childhood summer retreat at the Quarles farmin Missouri as suitable for their textbooks. Although the nostalgic tone in his
recollections of the Quarles farm and Hannibal is obvious, Twain nevershirks from talking about the existence of slavery, which many of the local
people uncritically accepted as an institution approved of by God. Twain
wrote: “The local pulpit taught us . . . that the doubter [of slavery] need only
look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts wereread aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an

38   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”58 This section isimmediately followed by a vignette of Twain’s mother’s heartfelt answer toyoung Sam, who had complained about the irritating vocal noise made by
their household slave, Sandy. His mother, her eyes welling with tears, told
him that she felt thankful when Sandy was singing because it made her thinkthat at that moment he was not remembering his mother, whom he would
never see again. Twain said that after hearing her “simple speech,” “Sandy’s
noise was not a trouble to [him] any more.”59 These vignettes reveal local
people’s hypocrisy in trying to justify an unjustifiable and inhumane
institution as well as Twain’s mother’s genuine sympathy toward the victimsof it, which might have been highly educational for students wishing tolearn about how slavery was viewed almost a century earlier. Yet two of the
major junior high literature textbooks of the 1930s and 1940s entirely erased
this segment from their selections.60 In his Autobiography, Twain also
recollects his childhood memories about slaves at the Quarles farm, where
his family used to spend long summers. He writes the following: “All the
negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were ineffect comrades. I say in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We werecomrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle
line which both parties were conscious of and which rendered complete
fusion impossible.”61 Yet the passage that I have italicized clearly shows thereality of the racial division between whites and blacks in a slave-holding
society was completely eliminated.62 The reason for these eliminations isobvious if we look at both the introduction and the follow-up questions
prepared for this selection about the farm. The introduction says: “In thisselection from his autobiography, Mark Twain tells you what it was thatmade his uncle’s farm in Missouri seem such ‘a heavenly place for a boy.’”63
Then the follow-up question asks students: “What made his uncle’s farm a‘heavenly place for a boy’?”64 In short, what the textbook editors wanted
their students to learn from this excerpt was not the harsh reality of slavery
but the nostalgic world of “a heavenly place for a boy.”
Even Huck Finn was not spared similar editorial interventions concerningreferences to slavery. Although slavery infuses the whole story with aninevitable social context, a high school textbook from the 1940s wiped out
all reference to slavery in the episode excerpted from Huck Finn. Ginn andCompany’s 1949 high school literature textbook chose one of the novel’s
best-remembered humorous scenes in which Huck, disguised as a girl, fails
to conceal his gender from Mrs. Loftus, who is alert enough to try a few
tricks on Huck to make sure he is a boy. Even in this episode, which is

Memory of American Classics    39seemingly unrelated to the issue of slavery, there are clear references to that
institution. For instance, Mrs. Loftus innocently tells “Huck” that her
husband has left for Jackson Island to hunt a runaway slave named Jim, asuspect in the alleged murder of Huck, hoping to win the $300 reward for a
successful capture. The episode would be utterly misleading if all thereferences to slavery are taken out. Huck “got so uneasy” after he wasinformed that her husband had just started the search for the runaway slave
on Jackson Island where Jim was hiding, and this unease gives Mrs. Loftus achance to become suspicious about his real gender, eventually enabling her
to uncover Huck’s identity as a boy. Without reference to slavery, students
would misunderstand and think that Huck felt uncomfortable at Mrs.
Loftus’s place simply because of her long tiresome talk. Yet, surprisingly,
the textbook’s editor took out the whole section that refers to Jim as the
runaway slave, including Mrs. Loftus’s references to the ongoing search for
him as the suspected murder. With this complete elimination, the episode isturned into a humorous but innocuous episode entirely unrelated to theatrociousness of slavery.65 There was also a byproduct of this editorial
elimination. Because, in Twain’s original, Jim was repeatedly addressed as a“nigger,” in the deleted sections, the textbook could safely avoid facing
potential controversy over the use of this racist term.
Ginn and Company’s textbook was hardly the only textbook in the 1930s
and 1940s to censor what is now called the “n-word” and to fail to introduce
Jim as he was presented in Twain’s original. Even the Harper and Brothershigh school literature textbook of 1936, whose selections from Twain’s
works were usually faithful to the originals—at least in comparison withother textbooks—failed to reveal the full depth of Jim’s character as a loving
father. The textbook excerpted chapter 23 of Huck Finn almost in its entirety.
This chapter includes one of the novel’s most memorable scenes, in which
Huck notices Jim sitting alone at night with his head between his knees andoverhears him mourning his separation from his wife and children.
Unfortunately, the selection cuts off there, omitting the last part of thischapter, in which Jim remorsefully recollects his thoughtless action ofsmacking his innocent daughter for ignoring an order he has given her
before he realized that scarlet fever had left her deaf and dumb.66 In thistextbook, there is no indication that the original ending of the chapter is notincluded. Therefore, students who did not pick up the original had no way ofknowing Jim’s complete story about his family. Although this textbook is far
more faithful than those that erased all references to Jim being a slave, it
unfortunately missed a great chance to introduce students to the depth of

40   Tsuyoshi Ishihara

Jim’s humanity as it appears in the original novel.
The period between the 1930s and the 1940s was a transitional era interms of censorship of the word “nigger” in Twain’s works in US literature
textbooks. As almost all textbooks did in preceding decades, most of the
textbooks in the 1930s retained ”nigger” as it appears in Twain’s originals,
as the level of sensitivity to the word was clearly not very high at that time.
For example, in its introduction to Huck Finn, a 1930s textbook insensitively
used the words “Nigger Jim,”67 a phrase popularized by Albert Bigelow
Paine’s Twain biography but which Twain himself never used in his own
work. In the 1940s, however, the position changed dramatically. Both theword “nigger’” and sentences that included the word were meticulously
censored in various textbooks. For instance, the following words of Tom
Sawyer’s became an easy target for censors, and the parts I have italicizedwere eliminated from the textbook excerpt: “They’ll all lie. Leastways all
but the nigger. I don’t know him. But I never see a nigger that wouldn’t lie.
Shucks!”68 The offensive word was replaced by a variety of neutral terms,
such as “he,” “fellow,” “negro,” “runaway,” “man,” “person,” and “coloredperson.”69
We do not know precisely why American textbooks started avoiding
references to slavery and racist terms from the 1930s and into the 1940s. No
explanation regarding this censorship can be found in the textbooks of thetime. None of them even mentioned that their selections were in factcensored versions. There was, however, a cultural atmosphere thatwelcomed such editorial interventions at that time. As we saw earlier,patriotic editorship was widespread in school textbooks in the 1930s and1940s, when America faced global enemies and went to war. Being
surrounded by nationalistic sentiment, it is plausible that publishers andeditors would be reluctant to introduce any negative aspects of American
history such as slavery and racism to students who might soon enlist in the
US military. Moreover, particularly in the 1940s, as demonstrated by Asa
Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement in 1941 and theoutbreak of large-scale racial riots in multiple cities during World War II,
African Americans could no longer be ignored as citizens. With Imperial
Japan trying to cooperate with black organizations in order to disrupt
America from the inside, this was a time when the perceived mistreatmentof African Americans could be considered a threat to US national security. In
light of the increasing attention given to racial inequality, various studies
were conducted to detect racial biases in school textbooks, particularly in the
1940s, and these provided educators with valuable resources to help themMemory of American Classics    41nurture classrooms that respected racial equality.70 In this atmosphere ofheightening sensitivity to racial prejudice, objectionable ethnic terms could
not be expected to be easily handled in classrooms. No wonder many
textbooks decided to stay on the safe side by expurgating the word “nigger”
altogether, although we cannot be sure whether the decision was effective in
helping students understand the dark memory of racism in America.
Records of Memories
Thomas Edison once said: “An average American loves his family. If he
has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects MarkTwain.”71 Love is noble, but it is blind. People often idolize the objects of
their love and draw fascinated but untruthful images of those loved ones.
The more a person is infatuated, the more difficult it becomes to see a loved
one objectively. Sometimes, people try to see in their love objects only what
they want to see, and they refuse to recognize what they actually are. In away, in this article I have collected and organized many of the scattered“love letters” to Twain written by those who wrote the textbooks, andattempted to explain why they wrote those letters in this or that way. Often,
textbook editors idolized, distorted, and blindly accepted Twain, and even
tried not to see what they did not want to see in him. Although theirtreatment of Twain was sometimes untruthful to both what Twain wrote andwho he was, it was at least truthful to what many Americans expected him tobe. Therefore, every piece of material about Twain in US textbooks is aninvaluable record with the potential to help us understand how the publicmemory of this American icon was formed. Whether we agree with theviews taken by editors of these texts or not, they memorialize thedevelopment of the American people’s love of Twain. This love story neverends. It will certainly long continue to leave its mark in the textbooks of the
future.
Notes
Owen Wister, “In Homage to Mark Twain,” Harper’s Monthly, November 1935, 547–56;
Mark Van Doren, “A Century of Mark Twain,” Nation, October 23, 1935, 472–77;.
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner, 1935), 22.
2Charles H. Compton, “Who Reads Mark Twain?,” American Mercury, April 1934, 465–
71.
3Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain andAmerican Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 26–27.
4“Mark Twain Centennial,” Literary Digest, April 20, 1935, 31.
1

42   Tsuyoshi Ishihara
5“Duce Honors Mark Twain: Mussolini Also Pays Tribute to America; Aids Memorial
Fund.” New York Times, November 19, 1935, 21; According to The Literary Digest,
Mussolini was honorary president of the memorial fund for the St. Louis project. “Ever This
Twain Is Met.” Literary Digest, November 30, 1935, 19.
6“Duce Honors Mark Twain,” 21.
7
Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, Why the United States Led in Education: Lessons
from Secondary School Expansion, 1910 to 1940, NBER Working Paper No. 6144, August
1997, 41.
8Ibid.
9Their full titles are: Hidden Treasures in Literature, Adventures in American Literature,
Treasury of Life and Literature, Widening Horizons, Best-Liked Literature, and Pleasure in
Literature.
10
Rewey Belle Inglis, ed., preface to Adventures in American Literature (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1947), v.
11
Luella B. Cook, et al., eds., Hidden Treasures in Literature, vol.3 (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1934), vi.
12Luella B. Cook, et al., eds., Hidden Treasures in Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1934), 406.
13Mark A. Neville and Leonidas Warren Payne, eds., Broadening Horizons (New York:
Rand McNally, 1942), 570–87.
14
Perry June Frank, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer on Film: The Evolution of an
American Icon” (PhD. diss., George Washington University, 1991), 231.
15
Neville and Payne, Broadening Horizons, 570.
16Frank, 256–59
17
Ibid., 261.
18
Ibid., 262.
19
Max J. Herzberg, ed., Photoplay Studies, vol.4, no.2 (February 1938), cover. Also seeFrank, 262n38.
20
Neville and Payne, Broadening Horizons, 587.
21
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, directed by Norman Taurog (Selznick International,
Warner Brothers, and United Artists: 1938).
22
Neville and Payne, Broadening Horizons, 585.
23
Taurog, Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
24
Neville and Payne, Broadening Horizons, 585.
25Mark Van Doren, ed., Oxford Book of American Prose (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1932), vii–viii.
26
Thomas H. Briggs, et al., eds., American Literature (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933),
667.
27
Ibid., 56–71.
28
Gerard Giordano, Wartime Schools: How World War II Changed American Education.
(New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 31–35.
29
Ibid., 41–42.
30
Ibid., 40–44.
31
Ibid., 130.
32
Ibid., 126–30.
33
Dudley Miles, et al., eds., introduction to Literature and Life, Book 3: American
Literature (New York: Scott Foresman. 1936), vi.
34John Lewis Haney, ed., The Story of Our Literature: An Interpretation of the American
Spirit (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1923), x.
35
Giordano, Wartime Schools, 121.

Memory of American Classics    43
36Harry Christian Schweikert, et al., eds., Adventures in American Literature (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1936).
37
Rewey Belle Inglis, et al., eds., introduction to Adventures in American Literature (NewYork: Harcourt Brace, 1941), iii.
38
Giordano, Wartime Schools, 122.
39
Dudley Miles, et al., Teaching Literature: A Handbook for Use with the Literature andLife Series (New York: Scott Foresman, 1943), 3.
40
Dudley Miles, et al., eds., Literature and Life in America (New York: Scott Foresman,1943), v.
41
Ibid., 446–51.
42
Dudley Miles, et al., eds., Literature and Life in America (New York: Scott Foresman,
1936 and 1943), 293.
43
Ibid.
44
Robert Morss Lovett, “Mark Twain The American,” New Republic, November 20, 1935,
50–51.
45
Mark Van Doren, “A Century of Mark Twain,” Nation, October 23, 1935, 89.
46“Hunting Mark’s Remainders,” Saturday Review of Literature, November 2, 1935, 15.
47
Inglis, Adventures in American Literature (1941), 1142; Inglis, Adventures in American
Literature (1947), 678. Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3(New York: Harcourt, 1930), 86.
48
Inglis, Adventures in American Literature (1941), 1011–16.
49
Luella B. Cook, ed., America through Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 657.
50
Ibid., 595.
51
Inglis, Adventures in American Literature (1941), 1017.
52
Sarah M Corse, Nationalism and Literature: The Politics of Culture in Canada and theUnited States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 22–24.
53
Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, vol. 3, 87.
54
Orton Lowe, Our Land and Its Literature (New York: Harper and Bros., 1936), 43.
55
Percy H. Boynton, ed., Literature and American Life, for Students of American Literature.
(Boston: Ginn, 1936), 637.
56
Inglis, Adventures in American Literature (1947), 678; Schweikert, Adventures in
American Literature (1936), 1142.
57
Inglis, Adventures in American Literature (1947), 678.
58
Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vol.1 (New York: Harper andBros., 1924), 101.
59
Ibid., 102.
60
Cook, Hidden Treasures in Literature, vol.3, 349; Luella B. Cook, et al., eds., Adventuresin Literature: Challenge to Grow (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1941), 138–39.
61
Paine, Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 1:100.
62
Cook, Challenge to Grow, 137.
63
Ibid., 135.
64
Ibid., 144.
65
Elizabeth Collette, ed., Writers in America (Boston: Ginn, 1949), 223.
66
Lowe, Our Land and Its Literature (1936), 605.
67
Harry Christian Schweikert, et al., eds., Adventures in American Literature (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1930), 984.
68
Rudolph W. Chamberlain, et al., eds., Beacon Lights of Literature, Book 7 (Syracuse, NY:
Iroquois, 1940), 432.
69
Ibid., 432; Ethan Allen Cross, et al., eds., Literature, Heritage of American Literature(New York: Macmillan, 1944), 255, 258, 259; Leo Broening, ed., Best-Liked Literature: Book

44   Tsuyoshi Ishihara
1, (Boston: Ginn, 1944), 218, 219.
70
Gerard Giordano, Twentieth-Century Textbook Wars: A History of Advocacy andOpposition (New York: P. Lang, 2003), 70–72.
71
Barbara Schmidt, “Quotes, Comments, and Poems about Mark Twain by Himself andOthers,” www.twainquotes.com, accessed August 15, 2017,
http://www.twainquotes.com/Twain.html.