MARK TWAIN'S HADLEYBURG
by GUY A. CARDWELL
Professor of English, Washington
University, St. Louis
Citizens of Oberlin, Ohio, have claimed
for their town the dis-
tinction of being the original for
Hadleyburg in Mark Twain's
"The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg." The story reflects Twain's
resentment, they think, at the
unfavorable reception they accorded
his readings in the First
Congregational Church on February 11,
1885. Mr. Russel Nye examines and
approves this Oberlin tra-
dition in a persuasive essay1 to which
no written exception has been
taken; yet this identification of
Oberlin with Hadleyburg is almost
surely an error that invites rebuttal.
It calls, too, for the cautionary
suggestion that this particular type of
source hunting in Twain
should be conducted with great
discretion: the fact is that Twain's
personal magnetism caused swarms of his
contemporaries to wish
to connect themselves with him in some
way.
Because "The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg" is one of
Twain's few really good short stories,
it is particularly important
that we see it in proper perspective.
The story is a scathing com-
mentary on man's hypocrisy and cowardice, and its
theme should
not be blurred by the supposition that
the "final cause," to use
Aristotle's phrase, was the repayment
of the citizens of Oberlin for
a fourteen-year-old injury.
As I have indicated, identification of
Hadleyburg with Oberlin
rests on two main arguments: (1) when
"The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg" appeared in 1899, at
least some of the residents of
Oberlin believed that Twain intended to
pillory their town as a
seat of hypocrisy and corruption; (2)
the unflattering attention
allegedly paid to Oberlin could have
been occasioned by adverse
comments in Oberlin periodicals at the
time that Twain and George
W. Cable made their joint lecture tour.2
1 "Mark Twain in Oberlin,"
Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly,
XLVII (1938), 69-73.
2 See
Nye, loc. cit., 69-70. The Weekly News (Oberlin)
indicated that the re-
ception of Twain was less favorable than
that of Cable. The Review, an Oberlin
257
258 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
Mr. Nye adduces several parallels in
support of this identification
of Oberlin and Hadleyburg: (1) the
downfall of Hadleyburg is
accomplished by a "passing
stranger" whom the town unwittingly
offended--Twain, a passing stranger,
was offended by citizens of
Oberlin; (2) Hadleyburg is noted for
honesty extending over a
period of three generations--Oberlin,
founded as a religious and
educational settlement in 1833, has
enjoyed a wide reputation as an
educational and religious center; (3)
the humiliation of the people
of Hadleyburg took place in the village
church--a church was the
scene of Twain's ill-received lecture
in Oberlin.
Oberlin's widespread reputation is
supposed to have helped make
the connection apparent.
Before examining the evidence for the
supposition that Twain
set his story of disintegrating
character in Oberlin and directed it
at the people of Oberlin, it is
important to assemble the meager
information at hand on the possible
genesis of the story. We know
that the despicable nature of mankind
was one of Twain's concepts
from an early period. But despite his
generally low opinion of "the
damned human race," I do not find
any plausible, pointed hint for
"The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg" before 1891.3 In that
year while traveling in Europe Twain
made the following note:
"Hell or Heidelberg, whichever you
come to, first."4 Here is a
direct parallel with the crucial words
in the story: "Go, and reform
--or, mark my words--some day, for your
sins, you will die and
go to hell or Hadleyburg--try and make
it the former."
Twain's experiences in Europe
frequently led him to reflect on
man's hypocrisy. While in Heidelberg, a
place that he liked, he
wrote:
Europe has lived a life of hypocrisy
for ages; it is so ingrained in flesh
College publication, took the same
position but expressed itself more forcefully. A
prominent citizen, a member of the town
council, complained in a letter to the
Weekly News that the people of the town had been humbugged and
should own
up in order to save other communities
from being imposed on.
3 In 1885, the year in which Twain and
Cable lectured in Oberlin, Twain made a
note which may be pertinent here:
"Club Subject: The insincerity of man--all men
are liars, partial or hiders of facts,
half tellers of truth, shirks, moral sneaks. When
a merely honest man appears he is a
comet--his fame is eternal--needs no genius,
no talent--mere honesty--Luther, Christ,
etc." See Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark
Twain's Notebook (New York, 1935), 181.
4 Ibid., 216. Paine calls this "the first hint of the
story."
Mark Twain's Hadleyburg 259
and blood that sincere speech is
impossible to these people, when speaking
of hereditary power. "God save the
King" is uttered millions of times a
day in Europe, and issues nearly always
from just the mouth, neither higher
nor lower.5
The next discoverable item of any
relevance, written in Vienna
in December 1897, brings us closer to
the published story: "Buried
treasure in a Missouri village--supposed
by worn figures to be
$980. Corrupts the village,causes
quarrels and murder, and when
found at last is $9.80."6
These three seem to be the only
passages in Twain's published
writings that clearly bear on the
genesis of the story. With this
primary evidence before us, let us
examine the parallels which
support the hypothesis that Hadleyburg
is Oberlin.
Two of the three major parallels
linking Hadleyburg and Oberlin
do not stand up under close scrutiny.
The parallel of the "passing
stranger" has no especial
validity. Twain was a "passing stranger"
in dozens of towns and villages all
over the world and was offended
in one way or another in a good many of
them. The obvious reason
for including the "passing
stranger" in the story is that he is
necessary to the plotting. The parallel
of the unusual reputation for
probity enjoyed by Hadleyburg and the
reputation as a religious
and educational center enjoyed by
Oberlin is loose and inconclusive.
Hadleyburg is not described as a
religious or educational center;
it has a Presbyterian church and a
Baptist church but neither a
Congregational church nor a college.
The third parallel is likewise
inconclusive. The Congregational church
in which Twain spoke in
Oberlin was used as the town hall. The humiliation
of the good
5 Ibid., 217. On September 28,
1891, while floating down the Rhone, Mark wrote
a letter to his wife that shows what
themes were uppermost in his mind. He visited
the ruins of a castle and commented on
"the Christians [who] displaced the
Saracens": "It was these pious
animals who built these strange lairs and cut each
other's throats in the name and for the
glory of God, and robbed and burned and
slew in peace and war; and the pauper
and the slave built churches, and the credit
of it went to the Bishop who racked the
money out of them. These are pathetic
shores, and they make one despise the
human race." See Albert Bigelow Paine, ed.,
Mark Twain's Letters (2 vols., New York, 1917), II, 553.
6 Paine,
Mark Twain's Notebook, 342. Forgetting his earlier remark (see note 4
above), Paine writes that we "have
here probably the first hint of the great story he
was to write a little later." Twain's succeeding
entry continues in the same mood:
"Ecclesiastical and military
courts-made up of cowards, hypocrites and time-
servers--can be bred at the rate of a
million a year and have material left over; but
it takes five centuries to breed a Joan of Arc and a
Zola."
260 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
people of Hadleyburg took place in the
town hall. The town hall
of Hadleyburg is not, however, a
church.
Have we overlooked any important
evidence joining Oberlin
and Hadleyburg?7 Apparently not,
although we may make two
relevant comments on Twain's writing
habits: Twain usually
started his best stories from one or
more kernels of fact;8 and he
was capable of loosing in his fiction
the lightning of his wrath.9
Having thus dismissed the positive
evidence in the case, we are
still faced with the major arguments
that gave the parallels their
excuse for being: the people of Oberlin
wanted the identification
to be established and believed in it;
they presented evidence that
Twain could have been irritated by
their adverse comments. It is
precisely such arguments as these that
give rise to a wealth of con-
fusion-some of it important-in Twain
scholarship. Here we may
begin by saying that although we have
no positive grounds for dis-
missing Oberlin as the original for
Hadleyburg, neither do we have
evidence favoring the identification
that could not be matched by
other possible claimants.
Twain was preeminently a person with
whom, or with whose
writings, men liked to associate
themselves. He was a great public
figure, comparable, perhaps, to Winston
Churchill or Babe Ruth
in our day. Men and women all over the
world identified themselves
as the originals for his characters or
as his drinking companions, or
relatives, or persons he had sworn at.
An appalling number of these
persons have cluttered the literature
on Twain with their imaginary
reminiscences. Twain was well aware of
this tendency that strangers
had to imagine connections with him.
After a meeting at Carnegie
Hall in 1906 he noted that the usual
thing happened, the thing
7 The late Dixon Wecter, literary editor
of the Mark Twain Papers, informed me
that no search may be made of the Twain
papers. There is, of course, the possibility
that corroborative evidence may exist in them.
8 Twain himself supplies an illuminating
statement: "If you attempt to create a
wholly imaginary incident, adventure or
situation, you will go astray and the
artificiality of the thing will be
detectable, but if you found on a fact in your
personal experience it is an acorn, a
root, and every created adornment that grows
up out of it, and spreads its foliage
and blossoms to the sun will seem reality, not
inventions. You will not be likely to go
astray; your compass of fact is there to
keep you on the right course." Paine, Mark
Twain's Notebook, 192-193.
9 For example, the story of the
swindling lecture agent whom Twain immolated
as Mr. Griller in The Gilded Age. See
J. B. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius (London,
1901), 197.
Mark Twain's Hadleyburg 261
that always happened. He shook hands
with people who had known
his mother intimately in Arkansas, New
Jersey, California, and
Jericho, and he had to seem happy to
meet them, although his
mother had never been in any of those
places. A pretty creature
remembered being at his house in
Hartford, and he was delighted
to chat with her, although she had
never been there. A brisk,
overpoweringly cordial young fellow
told how his mother, a teacher
in Elmira, New York, had always talked
of Twain, whom she held
in high esteem, although she confessed
that of all the boys she had
taught he had been the most
troublesome. Twain remarked-but
the young man did not attend-that
through long practice in being
troublesome in school he had reached
the summit when he got to
Elmira, for that was when he was more
than thirty-three years old.10
Oberlin was not the only town in which
Twain was unfavorably
received and which he may in
consequence have viewed with
antipathy and have wished to satirize.
By this reasoning there are
many prominent candidates for
identification with Hadleyburg.
Twain complains that he received
"an unjust and angry" criticism
in Pittsburgh in 1868.11 At Iowa City
in 1869 the editor of the
Republican declared Twain's lecture a humbug and said that he
"would not give two cents to hear
him again." Moreover, he re-
tailed at length the story of Mark's
barbarous bad manners at the
local hotel.l2 We cannot
imagine that Twain took kindly to these
comments any more than he did to
adverse criticism of his lecture
at Jamestown, New York. We have the
letter that he wrote but did
not mail when, sixteen years after the
event, his Jamestown critic
asked for help in securing a
consulship:
Oh-so you have arrived at last, but
only by letter, I am sorry to say.
I have long wanted to meet you, get
acquainted with you and kill you. You
wrote that thing about my lecture
sixteen years ago, in the Jamestown,
10 Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain's
Autobiography (2 vols., New York,
1924), II, 3-4.
11 See Dixon Wecter, ed., "The Love
Letters of Mark Twain," Atlantic Monthly,
CLXXX, No. 5 (November 1947), 37.
12
Fred W. Lorch, "Lecture Trips and Visits of Mark Twain in Iowa," Iowa
Journal of History and Politics, XXVII (1929), 507-547. According to a letter to
his wife, Twain repented his bad manners
and wrote an apology to his landlord.
See Wecter, loc. cit., 38. Twain
thought that he was a failure at Burlington, also,
although Lorch does not say so. See
Samuel C. Webster, ed., Mark Twain, Business Man
(Boston, 1946), 292-293.
262 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
N.Y. Journal--property of that
ostentatiously pious, half-human Bishop. . . .
You were ashamed to put your name to it,
a diffidence which was creditable
to you, for the article had not a merit
in the world, except that it was well
written and true. You will want to jump
up and ask, "Where then, was
the fault?" The fault was just
there where I had put it. Do you suppose
I care anything for critical severities
which are not true? . . . That was a
poor lecture and poorly delivered; for I
was fagged with railway travel.13
Twain's readings with Cable at
Worcester, Massachusetts, did not
go well. He criticized the cold
audience in a letter to his wife:
"Livy darling, I am just in from
the lecture--just in from talking
to 1700 of the staidest, puritanical
people you ever saw--one of
the hardest groups to move that ever
was."14 When he reminisced
later about his tour with Cable, he
said that lecture audiences in this
period were inferior to those of
earlier years: "They were difficult
audiences, those untrained squads, and
Cable and I had a hard time
with them sometimes."15 Even
on the last great tour, after his
bankruptcy, Twain's readings were not
always well received. A
critic in Duluth wrote that some of his
stories were rather flat and
that he "did not seem to be able
to get the audience under his
control although he had the opportunity
to do it very easily at
the beginning.16 But all these
disappointments and failures were
trivial. If one were searching out the
one unforgettably unhappy
public address by Twain, one would not
hesitate to select the
celebrated, crushing failure of his
Whittier birthday speech on
December 17, 1877. This almost
traumatic experience lived in his
mind until he died. Boston is not to be
identified with Hadleyburg,
however, nor are Longfellow, Emerson,
Holmes, Howells, and the
others of that distinguished circle to
be identified with the In-
corruptible Nineteen.
We have seen that members of many
audiences received Twain
with distaste. Did Twain exhibit animus
towards any audience or
town? He wrote disparagingly of the
inhabitants of various places,
but never, so far as I can discover, of
the citizens of Oberlin. His
mother lived for a time in Fredonia,
New York, reached by horse-
13 Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain (New York, 1931), 69-70.
14 Ibid., 45.
15 Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in
Eruption (New York, 1940), 215.
16 Evening Herald (Duluth),
July 23, 1895, quoted in John T. Flanagan, "Mark
Twain on the Upper Mississippi," Minnesota
History, XVII (1936), 380.
Mark Twain's Hadleyburg 263
car from Dunkirk. On one occasion he
waited for his train at
Dunkirk for three and one-half hours.
The wait embittered him,
for "in later years anybody he
didn't like came from Dunkirk."17
Concord, Massachusetts, is another
small town which roused his ire.
After the Concord public library
declared Huckleberry Finn unfit for
young readers, Twain wrote to his
sister Pamela that "those idiots
in Concord are not a court of last
resort, & I am not disturbed by
their moral gymnastics."18 A
little later, when the Concord Free
Trade Club elected him an honorary
member, he wrote the club,
pointing out that the committee of the
public library by condemning
and excommunicating his book had
doubled its sale and caused
purchasers to read it instead of merely
intending to do so. Pre-
sumably, he wrote, this election to
honorary membership would
make "even the moral icebergs of
the Concord Library Committee"
bound to respect him.19
The most convincing evidence that
Hadleyburg is not Oberlin,
Heidelberg, Vienna, Jamestown,
Burlington, Iowa City, Dunkirk,
Duluth, or Concord comes from a close
reading of the story with
Twain's usual views and methods kept in
mind. I find no internal
evidence that Twain intended to portray
any specific town or
village. The scene is American but very
general. As against iden-
tification with Oberlin, the point must
be stressed that Hadleyburg
has no college, no Congregational
church, no history of antislavery
agitation.20 The theme of
the tale was a commonplace, but a burning
commonplace, with Twain.21 He
distressed his friends and family
by dwelling on the depravity, the
cowardice, and the hypocrisy of
mankind; not the citizens of Oberlin
but all men are hypocrites.
And not Oberlin but a Missouri village
was Twain's favorite
microcosm. In this village, that came
nearest to being Hannibal,22
17 Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man,
170. Webster is at least partly serious
in his comment.
18 Ibid., 317.
19 Ibid., 317-318.
20 Indeed, a point against one of
Hadleyburg's hypocrites--too subtly put for
Twain to have intended to stigmatize
Oberlin with it--is that the hypocrite applauds
himself for imagining that he saved a man from marrying
a girl who had, or was
thought to have, "a spoonful of
negro blood in her veins."
21 A
very close parallel to the Hadleyburg story is Twain's chapter called "The
Disposal of a Bonanza" in Life on the
Mississippi.
22 Mr.
Bernard DeVoto, who has read Twain with unusual care and insight,
makes this comment: "When he wrote fiction, he was
impelled to write about the
264 Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
many of his most creatively imagined
scenes took place. But whether
he localized his story in a Missouri
village, Heidelberg, or Oberlin,
Twain's fundamental purpose was to
create Everytown. In that sense
Oberlin may safely be identified with
Hadleyburg, and the citizens
of Oberlin may be identified with the
Incorruptibles.
society in which his boyhood had been
spent, and to write it out of the phantasies,
the ecstasy, and the apprehension which
he remembered from his boyhood. Tom
Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd abead
Wilson, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,
The Mysterious Stranger, and
the bulk of his shorter pieces give us Hannibal with
little alteration." DeVoto, Mark
Twain in Eruption, xvii.