Born in the U.S.A.: Birth, Commemoration, and American Public Memory

4. Authenticity and Interpretation at Mark Twain’s Birthplace Cabins

P 95 p 4P In the previous two chapters, we’ve seen how claims of authenticity—carefully crafted in one case by a president’s mother and, in the other, vouchsafed by the president himself—are essential to the commemorative enterprise at birthplace monuments. What happens, then, when doubt is cast on the ties that bind a hallowed birthplace to its honoree? If that person happens to be Mark Twain, then, in Hilary Iris Lowe’s assessment, the possibilities for clever interpretation only multiply. Lowe, a literary historian, appreciates how fitting it is that America’s most famous raconteur left the secret of his birthplace swaddled in a confusing web of myths and mistruths. But has our fondness for Twain’s fiction excused the keepers of his birth memory from coming to terms with the difficult history of more recent pasts? Lowe takes us on a fascinating journey into the heyday of early twentieth-century birthplace commemoration when a preoccupation with authenticity somehow inscribed inauthenticity as the defining feature of Twain’s birthplace(s). Along the way, we discover that our search for the “real” has largely distracted us from recognizing what lessons may exist for today’s heritage tourists in the failed hopes of those who would profit from Twain’s birth memory. Authenticity and Interpretation at Mark Twain’s Birthplace Cabins HILARY IRIS LOWE Samuel Clemens’s birthplace in Florida, Missouri, has changed a great deal since he was born there in 1835. In the intervening years, Clemens—or, more accurately, “Mark Twain,” his nom de plume—has become a household name. He is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable Americans, and his image is an icon even to those who have 96 p HILARY IRIS LOWE never read a page of his work. Even a hundred years after his death, Twain’s autobiography, published unabridged for the first time in 2010, soared to the top of the best-seller lists. The village where Clemens was born, however, is largely lost to time. Florida supported about sixty families in Clemens’s day, but today none remain. Those Twain pilgrims who make the journey to Florida find his birthplace in two places. At one, they encounter an empty field with a commemorative plaque showing old photographs of Florida. A few miles down the road, at the Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site, they can visit a Clemens “birthplace cabin.” The exact spot where Clemens was born remains a bit of a mystery. Locals have claimed over the years that any of several cabins mark Clemens’s birthplace. Some newspaper reports indicate that relic seekers carried away Clemens’s actual birth cabin piece by piece sometime before 1905. Others say that the house was whittled down into mementos and sold at any number of World’s Fairs. More recently, site administrators have argued about the birthplace cabin’s authenticity and whether “visitors are entitled to know” a fuller story.1 Clemens’s birthplace is not unique in this regard. The National Park Service, for instance, has grappled with similar problems of authenticity at Abraham Lincoln’sbirthplaceinHodgenville,Kentucky,andGeorgeWashington’s birthplace near Colonial Beach, Virginia. Since 1931, however, the state of Missouri has largely ignored all of these concerns in celebration of its Mark Twain birthplace cabin. Whether or not the site’s visitors and the state taxpayers are entitled to know whether the cabin is the birthplace of Sam Clemens, it is likely that they never will. Ultimately, however, the birthplace’s tenuous claims to authenticity may not matter as much as other stories that this place can tell us about its curious history. Perhaps a pioneer site in Missouri that promotes a famous Missourian is enough to keep interested tourists coming through the doors. If the site’s authenticity matters at all today, it does so in its relationship to the history of Florida in recent memory and in exploring why it has become so important to remember Clemens’s birth there. What follows then is a history of the current birthplace cabin and its claims to authenticity. It may be fitting that a historical site associated with our nation’s greatest teller of tall tales has been plagued by inauthenticity. Its history raises important questions about how, Mark Twain’s Birthplace Cabins P 97 why, and where we remember literary birthplaces and presents interesting interpretive opportunities that speak...