Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Re-Imagining the American Dream,
By Harry Mensh, Elaine Mensh

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1 The Trespassers
I
On September 4, 1957, National Guard troops ringed Little Rock's Central High School, which had been ordered to desegregate. They had been called up by the governor, who predicted, or promised, that "blood would run in the streets" if black children tried to enter. When eight of the children arrived, accompanied by two black and two white clergymen, they were confronted by the troops and a howling mob of men and women. The children were pushed and shoved, then informed by a National Guard captain that on orders of the governor they would not be allowed to enter. Escorted by the president of the State Conference of NAACP branches, a black woman, the children proceeded to the offices of the United States Attorney and the FBI. 1

A ninth child had not been informed that the students were to come as a group. When she arrived alone, there were shouts from the mob, which now numbered about five hundred: "They're here! The niggers are coming!""Get her! Lynch her!" The student tried several times to pass through the troops; on her last try, she was stopped with bayonets. The mob yelled, "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school." With the troops standing by impassively, someone screamed, "Get a rope and drag her over to this tree." A white-haired woman fought her way through the mob, shouting: "Leave this child alone! Why are you tormenting her? Six months from now you will hang your heads in shame." The mob hollered, "Another nigger-lover. Get out of here!"

The woman, a professor at a Little Rock college, stayed with the child until she could get her away on a bus. Joining with her to protect the child during the wait was the New York Times education editor, who was threatened as a "dirty New York Jew." In the next weeks, there were attacks on black men and women and on their homes, as well as assaults on black and white journalists. Finally, confronted with the Little Rock black community, which refused to surrender to the authorities or the mob, and also challenged by national and world opinion, the president acted to enforce the desegregation order; he federalized the Arkansas National Guard and directed the secretary of defense to send in regular troops as needed. 2

The incident at Little Rock had myriad consequences, explicit and tacit. One of the latter appears to be an action taken by the New York Board of Education. Just eight days after the confrontation at Central High, the New York Times reported, in a front-page story, that the board had "quietly dropped" Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from approved textbook lists for elementary and junior high schools. The novel, the Times also related, could still be purchased for school libraries and used as a textbook in high schools. The story linked the board's action to objections from the NAACP. The NAACP denied having protested to the board, but acknowledged that it "strongly objected to the 'racial slurs' and 'belittling racial designations' in Mark Twain's works." 3

Although there is no evidence that the NAACP protested directly to the board, objections from one or another source certainly reached the board. But the official in charge of curriculum development stated that no objections had come to her attention. She said the novel had been taken off the approved textbook list because, as the Times put it, it was "not really a textbook." 4 In giving this explanation, which was notable only for its surrealism (a book approved as a textbook was removed for not being a textbook), New York City school officials apparently believed they had converted a controversial move into an administrative correction, and so could escape responsibility for their own action. 5

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II
"Once we understand how they arose, we no longer see literary canons as objets trouvés washed up on the beach of history," observes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 6 The point is aptly illustrated by Huckleberry Finn's journey into the schools' literary canon. The journey, which spanned more than two decades, began with a study whose stated aim was to determine "the most effective ways of utilizing" the novel in junior high schools. 7 The study was followed, in 1931, by an edition published especially for junior high schools. In the introduction, the editors--speaking with the quaintness then deemed appropriate for addressing children--wrote: "In those early days Huck had but one friend who dared openly to seek his company, . . . Tom Sawyer. But today how different! . . . Then the parents tabooed Huck as a companion for their sons, but today the most respected of mothers open their doors to welcome in this wanderer." 8

Since these lines descend from a supposedly more innocent time, it might seem they really were intended for children. But not only is it quite illogical to expect that children would be delighted by Huck's newfound respectability, it also seems odd to contrast the novel's respectability in the eyes of real parents with Huck's lack of it with fictional ones. Clearly, when the editors spoke of Huck's ostracism in his "early days," they had in mind not Huck's status in Tom Sawyer, but Huck Finn's expulsion from the Concord Public Library in 1885 as the "veriest trash," "rough, coarse, and inelegant," 9 unfit for "our pure-minded lads and lasses," 10 and the copycat expulsions that followed.

The editors were Emily Fanning Barry, an English teacher at Teachers College, and Herbert B. Bruner, who headed its Curriculum Construction Laboratory. Under the aegis of the publisher, Harper & Brothers, they conducted the study, which involved "thousands" of reports obtained from an unspecified number of teachers and pupils. The editors describe the student participants according to class, nationality, and location. Since they do not mention race, it is quite safe to assume "children" meant "white children." 11

That this study undoubtedly included white children only does not mean the editors consciously sought to exclude black children. Their apparent absence from the study simply mirrored the exclusion of blacks from vast areas of American life. And even if the editors had been amazingly ahead of their time and wondered how black children might feel about Huck Finn, there would have been no reason to pursue the daring thought. Certainly it would have had no value for the publisher, given that black schools were likely to receive books handed down from white ones.

While the study, the classroom edition, and growing support from educators laid the groundwork for Huck Finn to become required reading, something more was needed to bring the effort to fruition. This arrived in the form of essays by Lionel Trilling ( 1948) and T. S. Eliot ( 1950) that provided the novel with the "academic respectability and clout" that assured its entry into the nation's classrooms, points out Peaches Henry. 12 Trilling, who launched what Jonathan Arac calls the "hypercanonization" of Huck Finn, 13 spoke of it as "one of the world's great books and one of the central documents of American culture." 14 Eliot termed it a "masterpiece." 15 Both, however, were concerned with defending it against the by now largely anachronistic morality charge. Eliot made the point fairly subtly by stating he had not read the book as a boy because his parents considered it unsuitable, while he also spoke of things in it that would delight boys. The matter is, though, handled quite explicitly by Trilling, who remarks that Huck is "really a very respectable person." 16

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If Huck is objective (as other commentators have also held), 2 he speaks faithfully for an author who can be unequivocally relied upon. In fact, though, Huckleberry Finn presents an author-narrator relationship of quite a different kind. That Twain's perspective is antislavery and Huck's is not, and that the concept of racial prejudice, meaningful to Twain, would be meaningless to Huck--these preclude any possibility of a consistently objective narrator. And, too, while Twain often purposefully clouded Huck's "restive eyes" with ideas received from the society Huck lived in, there is, again, the question of the degree to which Twain's own eyes, clear and penetrating as they could be, were not also thus shadowed.

Fitzgerald's remarks also illustrate the role of commentators in creating a legendary Huck. Although some of the myths around Huck Finn have not traveled beyond critical circles (for instance, Trilling's myth of Huck as "the servant of the river-god," who "comes very close to being aware of the divine nature of the being he serves"), 3 others occupy a favored place in the national consciousness. One of these is the myth of Huck-the-rebel. It is not that this myth is entirely devoid of truth, but rather that it favors lesser truths over greater ones.

The distinction between Huck as legendary rebel and the Huck that Twain created can already be detected in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. There Twain describes Huck as a "romantic outcast," but even this phrase does not express Twain's own attitude. It is instead that of the properly-brought-up village boys: "everything that goes to make life precious, [Huck] had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg." 4 These boys see a Huck who can come and go as he pleases, is not expected to attend school or church, is free to swear and to fight if he feels like it. Twain, though, allows us to see that it is the boys' vision of Huck that is romantic, not Huck's life: if he can do as he pleases, it is only because his father is the town drunk and his mother dead. So it is not surprising to learn, in Huckleberry Finn, that Huck is prone to melancholy, is sometimes so sad he almost wants to die.

If most readers of Tom Sawyer, despite Twain's signals to the contrary, see Huck as a rebel, one explanation may be that they have allowed Huck's deeds to eclipse his motives. Take, for instance, Huck's first violation of a taboo in white-black relations. In a passage in Tom Sawyer that prefigures Huck's relationship with Jim, Tom asks the homeless boy where he will sleep. Huck replies: "In Ben Rogers's hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man, Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I don't ever act as if I was above him. Sometimes I've set right down and eat with him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing." 5 On the one hand, Huck--whom Twain described as a boy with a "sound heart and a deformed conscience"--is humanly appreciative of help from Uncle Jake and reciprocates by giving Uncle Jake what help he can. He is also perceptive enough to recognize that the black man wouldn't like him if he acted as if he were above him. Yet Huck does consider himself above Uncle Jake--not as an objective matter of social station, but because the man is black and Huck is white. (Although Huck never doubts that Uncle Jake, who remains offstage, is taken in by his pretense, a reader may wonder whether an Uncle Jake would not be wary of a white boy who, even in his innermost thoughts, cordons him off as "nigger.")

It was not unusual for the young sons of slaveholders to have a relationship with a slave (traditionally known as "Uncle") in which the man would tell the boy stories ( Twain himself had such a connection with an "Uncle Dan'l"). Where these boys would go to a black man in search of diversion, Huck goes to Uncle Jake out of need. As a result, the white boy's role is determined by the black man rather than the other way around. But the need that drives Huck to Uncle Jake is also a source of shame, making him do something he "wouldn't want to do as a steady thing." Still, it does not seem that Huck would have any objection to sitting down to eat with Uncle Jake were it not for a mind's eye that looks on censoriously. No incident could better suggest the vast social and emotional distance that separated even the poorest whites from the blacks than this one, which finds Huck--a boy who dresses in rags and sleeps in barrels, whose reputation is so disgraceful that the schoolmaster punishes Tom Sawyer for talking to him--desperate about what people will think if they find out he ate with a black man. 6

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Constitution Making: Conflict and Consensus in the Federal Convention of 1787,
By Calvin C. Jillson

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Preface
This study explores both the empirical and the substantive validity of the traditional historical and philosophical interpretations of the creation of the American Constitution. Advocates of differing interpretations of the Constitution's drafting have taken two distinct views, some arguing that the Convention created the Constitution out of a commitment to ideas and political principles, others arguing that the participants designed the Constitution to aid and protect their social, political, and economic interests. This study looks more closely at the roll-call voting record of the Constitutional Convention than any previous study and concludes that an accurate understanding of the constitution-making process must acknowledge that both philosophical and material concerns were at work in the Federal Convention.

I will demonstrate that constitution making is an elaborate and delicate, yet elegantly simple, process in which the participants refer to distinctly different sources of knowledge and information to reach judgments about two fundamental aspects of constitutional design. Thus, I will show that the Founding Fathers acted out of broad, though distinct and competing, philosophical perspectives concerning the working relationships between human nature, particular political institutions, and the resulting social order, when they struggled to design the general institutional structure for the new national government. On these issues of basic governmental organization and design, the nationalist delegates from the Middle Atlantic states, generally supporting Madison's vision of an "extended" republic, opposed the delegates from New England and the lower South, who held tenaciously to Montesquieu's warning that free institutions could survive only in "small" republics.

The delegates, on the other hand, pursued narrow material interests when they voted on specific mechanisms for implementing various aspects of the constitutional design. When debate touched upon the distribution of power and influence within the institutions of the new government, coalitions based upon interest posed the large states against the small, the northern states against the southern, and the states with large claims to the lands in the West against the states that had no such claims to future wealth and power. This movement from the consideration of broad principles to a concern with narrow interests conforms to the general expectation of modern social choice theory, particularly in the work of James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Vincent Ostrom. I will argue, however, that there was more frequent movement back and forth from philosophical principles to material interests than social choice theory would seem to anticipate. Such recurring movement indicates that constitution making is a more delicate and complex process than either the traditional historical analysts or the contemporary social choice theorists have realized. This complexity arises from the broad range of issues raised in constitution making, the lack of a single natural majority coalition across all issues, and the consequent tendency of delegates and state delegations to realign during constitution making as the Convention moved from one set of critical and controversial issues to another set.

Underlying the complexity of the constitution-making process in the Federal Convention of 1787, there nonetheless existed a very simple and widely shared goal. The delegates, though drawn from different cultural and material contexts, sought to create a common constitutional framework through which representative decision-making could resolve their legitimate political differences. They disagreed on the appropriate design of the Constitution, and on the distribution of political power and influence within and across particular institutions, but the general goal of a representative constitution united them and led to a sophisticated and sincere decision process that continues to stand as a model of democratic constitution making.

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In elaborating this thesis, I attempt to accomplish three goals. First, I supply an empirical description of the voting coalitions, the stable patterns of cooperation and conflict among the delegates and their state delegations as voting units, that characterized the Convention's work. Particular attention is dedicated to changes in voting coalitions and to the implications of these changes for the substantive issues before the Convention. The goal here is to establish the traditional historical and philosophical discussion of the debates and decisions of the Federal Convention on a firm empirical footing.

Second, I advance an explanation of the underlying rationale (philosophical, sociocultural, economic, or regional) for each division of the states. I will describe the Convention chronologically as a series of confrontations between stable coalitions of states and their delegates over the major issues that confronted the Convention from its opening on May 25 to its final adjournment on September 17, 1787. Questions such as the following will be addressed: What were the major issues that spawned each alignment? What were the theoretical justifications and the practical power implications of each of the principal positions adopted by the delegates? Who finally prevailed and why?

Third, I will demonstrate that the long-standing division in the secondary literature on the Convention between those analysts who stress the impact of philosophical principles and those who stress the influence of political and economic interests is misleading. In fact, a dynamic relationship of mutual interdependence existed—and, in fact, had to exist—between philosophical and material influences in the Convention. I will show that the principled or ideological conflicts that arose in the Convention were generated by the clash of regionally based variations in the republican political culture of the new nation, while the conflicts over power and policy were generated by differences in political and economic interests relating to state size and to region.

The key to my interpretation of the politics of the Federal Convention is the contention that debate moved between two distinct but interrelated levels of constitutional construction and that the relative influence of the delegates' political principles and their material interests on the Convention's debates and decisions was quite different at each level. My thesis is that principles guided action on distinguishable types of questions, while on other sets of questions, personal, state, and regional interests encroached upon, and in some cases overwhelmed and subordinated, the independent impact of ideas. I will argue that questions of each general type dominated the Convention's attention during particular phases of its work, so that at some stages, the dominant voting coalitions were organized around shared principles, while at other times, the dominant coalitions were organized around conflicting material interests.

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In developing this revisionist interpretation, I argue that intellectual divisions in the Convention had their basis in regional variations in the republican political culture of the American founding period. This argument is based on the work of Daniel Elazar, Robert Kelley, and many others. Elazar, for instance, has described three related but distinct political subcultures: moralistic in New England, individualistic in the Middle Atlantic states, and traditionalistic in the South. Kelley, while calling his regional subcultures by different names and finding two distinct subcultures active in the Middle Atlantic states, has provided very similar substantive descriptions of the ideas and values at the center of each regional subculture.

Further, I will support this argument by demonstrating—both empirically, through analysis of roll-call voting data, and substantively, through analysis of the Convention's voluminous debates—that when the Convention concentrated on "higher" level questions of constitutional design, voting coalitions among the state delegations formed along lines of intellectual cleavage. During these phases of the Convention's work, the delegates from the more nationally oriented Middle Atlantic states opposed the more locally oriented delegates representing the northern and southern periphery. When the focus shifted to "lower" level choices among specific decision rules, each of which represented an alternative distribution of authority within and over the institutions of government, the states split along lines defined by economic and geographic interest, state size (large versus small), and region (North versus South). But perhaps most importantly, I will show that coalitions, whether based on political principles or on material interests, consistently undercut, disrupted, and weakened one another as debate and decision ranged across the fundamental issues that were the Convention's daily business. What is more, the interplay between coalitions effectively checked and limited the long-term cohesion that any alignment of states could maintain and resulted in the politics of bargaining, compromise, and accommodation for which the Convention is so justly famous.

The ultimate impact of shifting cleavages generating new patterns of allegiance among the participants was that no major group was radically dissatisfied with the product of the Convention's long deliberations. In Charles Warren's words, "One of the most fortunate features of the Constitution was that it was the result of compromises and adjustments and accommodation.... It did not represent the complete supremacy of the views of any particular man or set of men, or of any State or group of States.The claims and interests of neither the North nor the South prevailed.... Moreover, it represented neither an extreme Nationalist point of view nor an extreme States' Rights doctrine. The adherents of each theory had been obliged to yield" ( Warren, 1928, p. 733). Thus, the delegates, almost to a man, departed the Convention convinced that their constitutional glass was at least half full as opposed to half empty.

The impact of factional politics, political compromises, and shifting coalitions has, however, been less happy for scholars seeking to understand and interpret the Convention. Because no consistent set of political principles, no region, no social or economic class interest dominated the Convention's business, and though each of these sources of influence was visibly present and was clearly felt, no simple description of divisions in the Convention or of their sources is available. This has greatly embarrassed most of the sweeping dichotomies—nationalists against federalists, large republic men against small republic men, large states against small states, northern states against southern states, commercial interests against agrarian interests, and many others—that have traditionally been used to explain the work of the Convention. Consequently, we have been inundated by a wealth of contradictory claims concerning divisions within the Convention and their effects, with no firm basis for choice among them. I will attempt throughout this book to explain in some detail, both empirically and substantively, who won (in factional terms), when (at what stage in the Convention's business), and why (in terms of intellectual or practical political advantage) on the major issues faced by the delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787. Ultimately, a conceptually sophisticated and empirically accurate understanding of the politics of constitution making in the Federal Convention will allow us to see the democratic politics of our own age in clearer perspective.

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