Mark Twain Would Never Have Made It Today

The internet makes it too easy to check basic facts. He’d have been an easy target.

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When Samuel Clemens began writing for the Nevada-based Territorial Enterprise newspaper in 1862, his news stories featured what recent biographer Ron Chernow called a “casual relationship with facts.”

Clemens filed a story about a “petrified man” who had been freed from rocks after being dead for three centuries and tales titled “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” and “The Great Landslide Case.” All hoaxes. The man who would become Mark Twain explained this away by saying, “the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast.”

Twain was a breed of writer that can no longer exist in modern America: the self-mythologizing con artist who lives in the liminal space between fact and fiction. The literary master who can feed a gullible public an alternative reality, but with a wink.

This genre of writers can no longer survive because every American now carries a fact-checker in his pocket. Media consumption is no longer a passive act. It is an active one—and taking the scalp of a public figure who fudges his experiences is one of our most popular sports.

Obviously, there are areas in which truth and accuracy are crucial. We don’t expect modern newspapers to fabricate facts or weave falsehoods into their reporting. However, it is always entertaining when a public figure occupies a space somewhere between truth and fiction.

If today’s technology standards had governed the past, the U.S. would have missed out on some of its most risible pranks. A few clicks on social media would have told listeners that Orson Welles’s 1938 “War of the Worlds” broadcast was a hoax. The 20th century was replete with people infiltrating American high society by falsely claiming to be members of European royalty. Facebook has virtually eliminated that fun scam—aside from modern fake heiress Anna Sorokin, whose friends were too gullible to check.

In the early 1800s, author Washington Irving ran a public relations hoax that would put modern TikTokers to shame. To promote his satirical history of New York City, Irving placed missing person ads in local newspapers seeking the whereabouts of a fictitious author named Diedrich Knickerbocker. Irving claimed to represent a hotel whose guest, Knickerbocker, hadn’t paid his bill. If the scofflaw wasn’t found, hotel management promised to print the full manuscript of a book he’d supposedly left behind. The campaign fooled everyone. The Knickerbocker moniker became so popular, the city’s professional basketball team later adopted it.

None of this, of course, would have happened in the mobile phone era, when Irving’s ruse would have been sniffed out immediately.

Information can be the enemy of fun. Some say you should never argue a point that can be looked up. I prefer a different rule: If you need your phone to buttress your opinion, you shouldn’t be allowed to argue it.

Humans frequently get along without the whole truth, though it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference between harmless fun and outright fraud. Elizabeth Holmes is in prison because her fake blood-testing machine could have caused real damage.

Nonetheless, a sizable slice of being human is both fooling and being fooled. P.T. Barnum didn’t need fact-checkers to verify his exhibits; he allowed the public to escape into a previously unknown fantasy world. His career of serving up metaphorical bovine excrement served a valuable purpose, whereas, telling pregnant women that Tylenol is dangerous is simply malicious.

One of America’s greatest exports is big personalities with even bigger stories. As an old man, Twain said that when he was younger, he “could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.” But, with his faculties “decaying,” Twain added that he “cannot remember any but the latter.”

And it is the things that never happened to him that made him the quintessential American.

This column first ran in the Wall Street Journal’s Free Expression section.