Mark Twain Takes on Cornelius Vanderbilt

“You seem to be the idol of only a crawling swarm of small souls, who love to glorify your most flagrant unworthiness in print or praise your vast possessions worshippingly; or sing of your unimportant private habits and sayings and doings, as if your millions gave them dignity.”

Mark Twain 1869

Wait there’s more:

”Poor Vanderbilt! How I pity you: and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you… It isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth. No–it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn’t rich. Seventy times seventy millions can’t make him rich, as long as his poor heart is breaking for more. I am just about rich enough to buy the least valuable horse in your stable, perhaps, but I cannot sincerely and honestly take an oath that I need any more now. And so I am rich. But you, you have got seventy millions and you need five hundred millions, and are really suffering for it. Your poverty is something appalling. I tell you truly that I do not believe I could live twenty-four hours with the awful weight of four hundred and thirty millions of abject want crushing down upon me. I should die under it. My soul is so wrought upon by your helpless pauperism that if you came to me now, I would freely put ten cents in your tin cup, if you carry one, and say, “God pity you, poor unfortunate.”

A little background. Some historians consider the 3 most famous people of the 19th century to be Twain, Vanderbilt, and Edison. In any case Vanderbilt, at the time, the richest man in the world, was constantly in the news. First because he loved to be in the paper, but more importantly, as a poor boy who made good he was the people’s choice. He was one of them. Here is what Vanderbilt says in the novel:

‘What a crock of shit. What’s with this guy? He is more involved with me than I am. What else has he written about me?”

“I think that’s it.”

“Mark my words. He cares about money a lot. I mean a lot. Or, he wouldn’t care so much about me.”

“Well you are in the paper all the time. It’s hard not to react.”

“Yeah but he’s not calling me a show off.”

Vanderbilt sends a wad of phlegm and spit accurately into the spittoon.

“One day, this Mark Twain guy is going to go broke. People who love money, but won’t admit it, that’s what happens. They don’t think clearly about what they’re doing. There are more people not worrying who make fucked up money decisions just because they make believe they don’t care.

I said I am crazy when it comes to money. But, I’m not the only one. I see people all the time like Twain, acting better than other people and all that. Snobs about it. You just know it’s a big lie. Sonia has a cousin like that. He made the craziest decisions. You couldn’t get him to talk about it, like it is not dinnertime talk. But some of the things he did. He’s a lot crazier than me. He couldn’t be sensible making decisions because it drove him too nuts. Tellin’ yah. Twain is going to make crazy money decisions.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Mark my words.”

Clearly Twain was protesting too much. Fact is, our Huck Finn, man of the people, lived a genteel, dandified existence in Hartford, with many servants. He made all kinds of desperate financial decisions, which brought about his ruin. So if Vanderbilt had still been around he would have had the last laugh.

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