Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. later in the show: ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is America’s great anti-slavery novel, but there’s a secret behind it: Mark Twain wasn’t always anti-slavery and anti-racist; in fact he fought, briefly, for the Confederacy. Adam Hochschild will explain how Twain changed his mind. But first: Trump’s strategy in sending the National Guard to Chicago – and ours.John Nichols will comment – in a minute.
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Trump is threatening to send the National Guard into Chicago soon. Of course, that’s illegal and unconstitutional, but what’s his long-term strategy here – and what are our priorities, our most important political tasks in the face of this new threat? For comment, we turn to John Nichols. He’s executive editor of The Nation, and we reached him today at the magazine’s offices in Manhattan. John, welcome back.
John Nichols: It’s great to be with you, Jon. I noticed that you pronounced Chicago, I think, correctly.
JW: Thank you. Our friend Marc Cooper wrote on Tuesday, “let’s not get out over our skis by claiming that Trump, as much as he would like to, is about to militarize every major city in America. What he’s really doing is testing and probing to find his limits, which makes it imperative that we push back.” I wonder if you agree?
JN: I think that that is precisely what’s going on. The Trump administration is a very, very chaotic administration. It’s shooting off in a bunch of different directions on any given day, he’s looking for places where he might be able to have an easy, in his view, win — put troops out there and somehow have it play okay. And so it becomes absolutely central to resist, to push back. There are many ways in which to do this – legislatively, legally, in the streets, politically and by voting. But I think a lot of the resistance, the very popular, even high-spirited and optimistic resistance in Washington is notable.
JW: So yeah, let’s talk about Washington. The District of Columbia is a special case because it is under the control of the federal government. It’s not part of any state, so it doesn’t have the constitutional protections against Trump that all the other states and cities have. Trump’s claimed justification was stopping violent crime, which has of course been a Republican campaign theme for decades. In this case, it’s also totally based on lies. Just to pick one, Trump boasted that Washington went a week without a homicide since his National Guard deployment, and he says, ‘when was the last time anyone can remember this happening?’ Well, it turns out since January 1st, there have been five weeks without a homicide. You could spend all day correcting Trump’s lies, but he can’t legally do in Chicago what he’s doing in DC. Governor Pritzker had a big press conference about this earlier this week. He said, ‘Trump’s goal in Chicago is to try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for doing something darker and more dangerous.’ I wonder if you agree with that.
JN: We should pause for just a moment and make it absolutely clear that Democrats let DC down. When they were in power again and again, they had opportunities to move aggressively and using both the bully pulpit and their legislative authority, taking council from Jamie Raskin and others, to find a strategy for getting DC to statehood, or at least to some form of real representation in Congress. That hasn’t happened, but this was something Democrats should have focused on a long time ago, and they should not let go of it now. I think that Pritzker is – he is going to do everything in his power to protect Chicago, right? Donald Trump thrives on chaos. He thrives on uncertainty. He thrives on confusion and kind of mixed messages about who’s in charge or who isn’t and things like that. Pritzker is working very, very hard to make it clear that he’s in charge. The state of Illinois has a lot of authority to push back on it.
JW: So, let’s review just briefly what the law and the Constitution require at this point. Governors control their state’s National Guard. There’s no question about that. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement, except if it’s explicitly authorized by Congress or there’s one of a couple of very narrow exceptions. One of them is the president can invoke the Insurrection Act. He can mobilize the National Guard to suppress an insurrection or rebellion. As far as I’ve heard, there is no insurrection or rebellion underway in Chicago or any other city right now. In LA, the other precedent for this, he claimed a different authority for taking control of the State’s National Guard against the wishes of the governor, something called Title 10 of the US Code. I have studied this permits the president to overrule the governor if there is obstruction of federal law enforcement, and he claimed that the protests against ICE conducting random raids, detaining people who looked Latino justified provided a legal basis for doing this.
And of course, Gavin Newsom sued, went to court, challenged that. The trial for that ended August 14th. The judge seemed very favorable to California’s case, but in the meantime, this is just kind of an update on where we stand with the California Challenge, an appeals court ruled that the Guard could remain in LA temporarily until a verdict is delivered in the case, and Pritzker is going to make the same challenge, we assume. And it actually worked pretty well in Los Angeles. There are these statistics that show that after the ACLU, along with some immigrant rights groups like CHIRLA, Public Council got an injunction blocking ICE from these random stops of people who looked Latino. The courts ruled this is racial discrimination. Pretty clearly it is, and ICE is now required in Southern California to have a warrant for each of the people they take into detention. And the result is, the number of people detained has gone way down in California. It worked. There’s three times as many ICE arrests in Florida as in California, almost twice as many in Texas as in California. So pushback in the courts, and in the streets, has had some success, and this is what Pritzker seems to be have in mind for Illinois and Chicago.
JN: Absolutely, you want to challenge him. Having clarity and focus becomes very useful if the people on the ground know the status of warrants or the lack of a warrant in that case, there’s a lot of space in which to push back against what ICE is doing, what the Trump administration is doing, et cetera. And also, this begins to clarify the relationship between the federal folks and local law enforcement.
And what I’ve seen in places all over the country is there’s confusion about these warrants. There’s a case where a judge in Milwaukee was arrested because she pushed back on a warrant issue. We just had a court commissioner in a rural county forced to resign because he’s demanded to see a warrant from the sheriff before turning somebody over to ICE. And so when we extrapolate this out, I think the legalities on warrants and the ability to clarify this become vital.
Now, that’s all sort of a prelude to saying Illinois has a really big and really experienced Attorney’s General office, and I talk a lot to AGs around the country and especially to Keith Ellison in Minnesota who has done a lot of work to make sure that the AGs are talking to each other, comparing notes all the time, et cetera. So bottom line is there are a few states where if Trump comes into a big city, he is going to face a real legal onslaught. He got that in California. I think you’d see the same or more in Illinois.
The last thing I’ll say on this is that the Democratic AGs around the country really do consult with each other. They talk on a weekly, sometimes more frequent basis. They share information about how they’re pushing back against this, how they’re responding to it. And if you understand it in that context, each state that Trump targets should be more sophisticated in its response.
JW: And let’s just name a couple of our leaders on this score: Letitia James, Attorney General of New York; Rob Bonta, Attorney General of California. These people are the best and we’re very lucky to have them.
A lot of our friends say Trump’s long-term strategy here that he’s just beginning, is to send troops to all the blue cities for the midterms next year to try to intimidate voters. Here’s my problem with that. Trump’s big problem is he’s very likely to lose the House in the midterms. He knows that. I don’t see what it would get him to intimidate voters in blue cities because they’re going to elect Democrats to the house anyway, even if the total vote is a little lower, because Trump has intimidated some people who go to polling places to vote in-person on election day, and he knows what all the rest of us know. In the midterms, the opposition party virtually always gains more seats. And in this one, the Democrats are way ahead right now. I checked what are the gambling odds right now that the Democrats will retake the House: 67 to 33, two to one.
JN:There’s a gGeneric poll that shows 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 point spread. When you get to those kinds of spreads, even with gerrymandering some of these districts they’re drawing in Texas, which are –they’re very Republican, but if there really was a surge of anti-Trump voting, you could even see some of the best laid plans of Donald Trump upended around the country, where traditionally Republican districts flip. That’s what happens in a wave election.
And so yeah, Trump is afraid of that. Here’s where the one thing I’ll push back on you just a tiny bit, Jon. The one place that I worry, and I think is complex is in red states that do elect Democrats to Congress. And there’s where federal troops in cities could have an impact, right? If there is an intimidation factor. I’m not saying there will be an intimidation factor. I think it’s within reason that federal troops might actually make, they might not be a problem at all. But if there was an intimidation factor, remember, some of our biggest Senate races in recent years have been in places like Georgia. There are competitive seats in Ohio. There’s a competitive seat going into 2026, and if you had federal troops on the ground in cities in those states, that’s something that at the very least, we ought to be keeping a close eye on.
JW: Nevertheless, it seems to me the reapportionment is a much better idea of Trump’s than trying to win back the House through elections. And that makes the California upcoming referendum on Gavin Newsom’s initiative to respond to the Texas reapportionment with an equal number of reapportioned seats in California, that makes that really the most important thing that’s going to happen in the next year. That referendum needs just 50% plus one to pass and seems like there’s a lot more Democrats than Republicans in California. The polling that’s been done so far shows 55% in favor, 34% opposed. So Newsom’s plan seems likely to succeed, at least right now. Of course, this is going to be a huge nationally funded campaign with hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s going to be spent on TV ads in California between now and November, but I conclude that the number one battleground for winning the House is to pass the California initiative in November.
JN: I think you’re right. I think it’s one of many steps on a ladder, right? You work your way up and the California one becomes this – it’s really essential. Of course, if the election is so close that it comes down to five seats of Texas versus five seats of California, then that’s not very good for the Democrats. Obviously, what the Democrats hope for is to have as even a playing field to begin with, and then to build a lot on that by winning in western Wisconsin and eastern Nebraska and places like that.
But at the end of the day, I will tell you that California remains one of the most unionized states in the country, and I just think the unions are at the heart of this thing. They’re sort of the key to it. If the unions do a very serious mobilization, I think they will, and if they put the resources into it, no matter what you put on TV, you’re just going to have a vehicle there by which a tremendous number of people are gotten to the polls in an off-year, odd-year election. And I think that gives the unions a lot of pull and a lot of power, and probably is one of the many reasons, but maybe a very high on the list one for why Gavin Newsom decided to take this chance.
JW: One last thing: What’s Trump’s response to all this going to b3 as he sees his poll numbers continue to drop, as he sees the opposition getting stronger and bolder? I think he is likely to become more desperate and more destructive, partly that’s just his own personal psychology, to make himself feel powerful and effective. And that’s part of what’s sending troops into the cities is about. But really it suggests that he’s getting weaker and that he’s in decline. And desperation will make him more dangerous over the next year. I don’t think there’s any question about that. But we should see that for what it is: it’s a sign of his growing sense of his own weakness, not that we have become more weak.
JN: I think that’s exactly right. There are two factors here, weakness and organization. I don’t think there’s any question that the opposition to Trump at this point is at a pretty epic level across the country.
Bernie Sanders was just out the other day in Davenport, Iowa and Viroqua, Wisconsin, population 4,000, Western Michigan, as well as Chicago. Every place he went, the crowds were through the roof. In Viroqua, Wisconsin, population 4,000, there was well over a thousand people at his event. And it’s a rural county, so what you’re talking about here is a huge portion of the population. And I’ll tell you something that’s interesting about it too. This is maybe a slight deviation, but it fits to the overall message, and that is when Bernie Sanders in Viroqua ran through his list of domestic policy issues, the cheers were very, very loud. When he said he wanted to cut U.S. military aid to Israel, the crowd rose to his feet in a standing ovation. This is rural Republican leaning county.
So I think that the lesson for Democrats is if they organize and if they bring in the people who they’ve sometimes pushed away, and especially young people and people who take what I believe is the right and bold stand on a host of issues, I think they have the potential to build a political juggernaut that will not just win them back the Congress, but that has the potential to bring them in as folks who are really ready to fight for economic and social and racial justice in these last two years of Trump’s presidency.
So bottom line is there still needs to be a lot of organization to bring all this – elements of this great coalition together, and B, there has to be a flexibility to say, we see the challenges, we see what we’re running against. That means everybody in, nobody out. I think a bold, outspoken, passionate campaign to take back America has tremendous political potential no matter what they do on gerrymandering. And no matter what other stunts Trump may play.
JW: The resistance to Trump has become epic – now it’s time to get organized. John Nichols, read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.
JN: Great honor to be with you, Jon. And thank you again for pronouncing Chicago correctly.
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JW: ‘Huck Finn’ is America’s great anti-slavery novel, but there’s a secret behind it: Mark Twain, the author, wasn’t always anti-slavery and anti-racist. He grew up in a slave state. His father owned slaves. And at the beginning of the Civil War, Twain himself served briefly in a Confederate militia. But eventually he changed his mind about Black people. Changing your mind about something fundamental is not easy to do, and it does not happen often. For the story of how Mark Twain did it, we turn to Adam Hochschild. Of course, he’s an award-winning historian, author of many books, most recently, American Midnight: The Great War of Violent Peace in Democracies Forgotten Crisis. We talked about it here. He’s a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine. He writes for The New York Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation, where he wrote about Mark Twain for the current issue of the magazine, in an essay about the new Twain biography by Ron Chernow. Adam, welcome back.
Adam Hochschild: Well, thank you Jon. It’s great to be with you. It’s always a pleasure to both to talk to you and now to have a chance to talk about one of my favorite writers, Mark Twain.
JW: The book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wasn’t published in the United States until 1885. That’s 20 years after the end of the Civil War. Mark Twain was almost 50 when it was published. Among other things, it’s a portrait of boyhood in a slave state. What was Mark Twain’s experience of slavery when he was a boy growing up in the slave state of Missouri?
AH: Well, as you say, this was a slave state. People in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, which is St. Petersburg, in the novel, many people owned slaves, Twain’s own ne’er-do-well father who experienced a long string of business failures at one point himself had owned slaves and Twain certainly knew many people in town who did. So I think like most people in most places, he took what he saw around him as the natural order of things and didn’t really question it. Evidence of that is that when the Civil War broke out and he was then, I have to do some calculating, he was then around 22 or 23 years old, he briefly fought one skirmish as a member of the Confederate militia and wrote a piece about it, then thought better remaining involved in the war, and he and his brother made this epic stage coach journey across the United States to the west coast.
JW: And how did he change his mind about slavery?
AH: I think there were a couple of things that affected him. One was that his wife, Olivia or Livy, came from a family of wealthy abolitionists who had financially supported a stop on the Underground railroad in New York state. She obviously had very strong feelings on the subject. He was deeply in love with her, and I think he was affected by that, as all of us are when we get close to somebody who’s got strong feelings. He also recounts a conversation with his sister-in-law’s Black hook. This was a few years after he got married where, long conversation, which she described being separated in a slave sale, this happened in those days, this was before the Civil War from her husband and their six children, and only one of those children did she ever see again. And that conversation seemed to have had an enormous impact on Twain and made him recall the fact that in Hannibal, Missouri, when he’d been a boy, he had seen slaves on the docks there in chains waiting to be shipped down the Mississippi River on steamboats. And now I think he had a sense for the first time perhaps, of what that meant to a family.
JW: As much as any American writer in his time, he came to see slavery as America’s original sin. But you point out in your review that he didn’t just write about it. According to Ron Chernow, he put his money where his principles were. Tell us about that part of his life.
AH: He did indeed do that. And Chernow, like other Twain biographers, like Ron Powers for instance, talks about this. He financially supported a number of Black students. One of them, for instance, a fellow by the name of McGuinn was one of the first Black students at Yale Law School. Twain had met him when he made a visit there, taken a liking to him and financially supported him through school. And McGuinn then became a prominent lawyer in Baltimore, member of the city council. And he became a mentor and someone who referred cases to a much younger Black lawyer in the city who was Thurgood Marshall, who later of course argued the successful Brown v. Board of Education, a case before the Supreme Court that desegregated or supposedly desegregated this country’s schools. And then Marshall, of course, became himself a very distinguished Supreme Court justice. So I think this happened long after Twain’s death, but I think he would’ve been pleased that his active philanthropy had had results like that several generations later.
JW: And he wasn’t just an activist around racial issues. Twain was also a prominent anti-imperialist. In the 1890s, he joined the anti-Imperialist league and was an opponent of American fighting in the Philippines, which he saw as a violation of American ideals of freedom and equality. He also spoke out in favor of women’s suffrage, and, I learned from your review, he even spoke out against antisemitism.
AH: That’s right. He was all of a piece. I think he recognized injustice wherever he saw it, and you detailed the many times in which he spoke out. Another issue, actually, one that I care a lot about because I wrote a book about it, was the horribly brutal rule, a form of slavery that King Leopold of Belgian imposed on his personally owned colony, the Congo. Twain went on a speaking tour to talk about that, he wrote a couple of pamphlets about it. He was outraged by it. And I think he saw the commonality between people being horribly mistreated because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity, whether it was a matter of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire, slaves in the American South before the Civil War, Black people in the United States after the Civil War and the natives of the Congo.
JW: And Mark Twain accomplished something else unique in 19th century America. All of us book authors want our publishers to send us out on the book tour, and the book tour has been going downhill for the last couple of decades. But Mark Twain did the book tours to end all book tours.
AH: He certainly did. And you’re right that the book tour has gone downhill. My last book, I had trouble getting my publisher to send me anywhere. Now partly that’s due to the rise of electronic communications like we’re having right now, but it’s still a lot of fun for authors to go out to different parts of the country, different parts of the world, and actually meet their readers. Mark Twain was not just a writer, he was a performer. And one of the great tragedies is that we don’t have a record of his performances because even though he gave more than 800 documented lectures, speeches, commencement addresses, after dinner speeches and the number is probably much greater, the 800 and something is just the amount that people have been able to tabulate. This was unfortunately before the days of audio and video recordings, and we don’t really know what they were like except from the ecstatic descriptions of the people who were there.
Twain loved his role as a performer, and it’s been copied by many people ever since then. If you go to places like Twain’s former summer house in Elmira, New York, where I’ve been, and other places where he lived, you’ll see people dressed up in the kind of white suit that he wore and the flowing mane of white hair performing as he did, reading his works aloud. The actor, Hal Holbrook had his show ‘Mark Twain Tonight,’ which ran for more than 60 years. He did it in between stretches as a very accomplished film actor. He would go back to Broadway or somewhere else and do another run of ‘Mark Twain Tonight.’
So I’m terribly sorry that we don’t have a record of those performances, but they must have been terrific. And I say in the review I did of Chernow’s books that I think for Twain, it was helpful in his writing just in the way that Shakespeare’s time on stages as an actor must have helped him.
Speaking of book tours, I often think it’s a pity that the book tour doesn’t precede the book because I find that when I go around and talk about a book that I’ve written, I sometimes discover ways of talking about it that I wish I had been able to use in the book itself. I think Twain was able to do this by being on the lecture circuit so much and trying out a lot of his ideas with live audiences. And when you’re a skilled performer working with a live audience, you see what people respond to, you see what they don’t respond to. You get a sense of the rhythm of how to tell a story. And I think he learned a great deal in these hundreds of performances, which took him all over the world.
JW: I want to talk a little more about the book. ‘Huck Finn’ was originally written as a kind of young person’s literature, and it was controversial, I understand, from the beginning, in part because it uses vernacular speech, not proper English. That’s what it’s very famous for in English courses now. And it also got in trouble at the time it was published because it didn’t have the moral lessons that children’s books were supposed to incorporate, and often still do today.
But of course, there’s been, especially since the 1950s and the early Civil Rights Movement, a controversy about Mark Twain’s use of the N-word in Huck Finn – over a hundred times. I remember when I was in elementary school in St. Paul, Minnesota, our teacher wouldn’t read to us ‘Huck Finn’ because it contained the N-word. I think this was a very big issue in America, and I think this still is a big issue in America today. It’s significance rises and falls depending on the current political situation. In some places the book has been banned. Where do you stand on the question of the N-word in ‘Huck Finn’?
AH: I’m glad it’s there because that’s how people talked, and it is unfortunately how some people still talk today, and I don’t think there’s anything terrible about leaving it out or not pronouncing it in the classroom. I don’t think there’s anything terrible about pronouncing it in the classroom. If you’re reading aloud the speech that somebody actually gave in the novel, and I think it’s a novel that does so much, it treats a black character as a full human being, which was a very rare thing in a novel written by a white person at that time.
My only beef with ‘Huck Finn’ as a novel, which is shared by millions of other people, is that it ends rather weakly, where we find out at the end that Jim has already been freed when his owner died, and Tom Sawyer comes along and tells them that, and it’s kind of deflating.
I think I would’ve ended the novel very differently where Huck and Jim continue to flee and maybe finally fulfill their original intention of stowing away on a ship sailing away from New Orleans, it’s going to take them someplace that we don’t know. So that would be my revised ‘Huckleberry Finn’ end. There’ve been a lot of people who have written, if not alternative endings to ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ but at least novels that take the story further because we don’t want to let these characters go and have Huck and Jim head on to the American West, for example. I wish I could remember the author’s name, but there was such a novel that I read aloud to my children when I’d read them ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ and we didn’t want the story to end, and then we found that there was a guy who had written a sequel. So that’s a tribute to an author when he or makes someone want to write a sequel.
JW: And of course, the big book of the last couple of years taking off from ‘Huck Finn’ is Percival Everett’s book ‘James,’ which is centered on the slave Jim, and reimagines him speaking beautiful English and he does a performance for white people of what they expect Black vernacular dialogue to be. Percival Everett has won every prize for his recent book, ‘James.’
In his later years, Twain’s life was not just a story of many sorrows involving deaths in his family, most of which were private, but we also see the emergence of what you call ‘a strange and revealing fixation.’
AH: One of the unusual things about Chernow’s biography is that nearly half of it is devoted to the last 15 years of Twain’s life. And I found it quite fascinating. Not all reviewers did, but I found it interesting because this was a tragic period. I think it’s always interesting when what’s really going on in somebody’s life is different from what the public perceives. To the public, he was the grand old man of American letters. in his white suit walking down fifth Avenue in New York, recognized by everybody, meeting every famous person who came to town, from Booker T. Washington to Winston Churchill.
In private, he was having a very rough time. His much beloved wife died during those years. Just before her death, their eldest daughter, who Twain was particularly close to, died fairly suddenly of spinal meningitis. And then Twain lived on in a household with two of his other daughters, one of whom was often not there much of the time because she suffered from epilepsy. And if you’ve ever shared a household with somebody who’s an epileptic in the days before they had modern medicine for this kind of thing, and I’ve had that experience myself in my childhood, sharing a house, with a cousin who was an epileptic, in the summertime, it’s a horrible thing because you never know when somebody’s going to get a seizure, you’re going to swallow their tongue or something else happen. You’re always anticipating it. It’s a horrible thing to watch. And so the epileptic daughter was shuffled in and out of the household, felt that she was being excluded because of this disease, which in a way she was.
And then finally, the other daughter who was still living, got married and left. And the epileptic daughter returned and was happy to be mistress of the household as well, at last, which was what she’d been hoping for. And then she died, very suddenly, a seizure apparently triggered a heart attack when she was taking a bath, and Twain was just devastated.
All during these last years, he did have this very strange obsession where he always wanted to have on hand one or more young girls between the ages of 10 and 16. He would read aloud to them, he would take them for excursions in a carriage, they would join him at meals. It was all very chaste. There was nothing overtly sexual about it. They were often chaperoned by their mothers. They were people he’d met on his travels or the daughters of friends. But for me, it seemed to mean that he had a picture in his mind of a sort of imagined female innocence of a time of life in a woman’s life before they reached the age of these very complex, deeply troubled adult women in his household.
Basically, Twain’s two great books were ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ his memoir of working as a river pilot, these are about worlds that were very ‘men only,’ they were the mano-spheres of their day. For the great bulk of ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ it’s Huck and Jim floating down the river, leaving Ms. Watson and leaving Aunt Polly behind. And ‘Life on the Mississippi,’ his wonderful memoir of working as a river pilot – this was an all-male world.
So I think he was in some ways not completely comfortable to be living in a household with a strong-minded wife and three daughters.
JW: Adam Hochschild – he wrote about Mark Twain for the current issue of The Nation magazine in a review of Ron Chernow’s biography. You can read the review at thenation.com. Adam, thanks for talking with us today.
AH: Thank you, Jon.
