A neighbor of mine, Michael Frank, is a Mark Twain scholar at the University of California at Berkeley. He is a part of a project producing volumes of his writings we’ve never read before. What follows are some of those excerpts told in Mark Twains signature ascerbic style:
ON THE AMERICAN BUSINESS CLASS
“The multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould — that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died — have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration; that our Christianity which we have always been so proud of — not to say vain of — is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty; that when we are not coldly indifferent to such things we sneer at them, and that the sneer is about the only expression the newspapers and the nation deal in with regard to such things.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/books/10btwain.html?ref=books