Do we like Mark Twain?
Our score: 8 out of 10. He backed women's votes, paid a Black law student's way and repaid his debts in full, with a contested spot or two from the attitudes of his time.
Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the river town that became the St Petersburg of Tom Sawyer. His father died when he was 12, and he left school to become a printer's apprentice. That's the road that ended with the pen name Mark Twain and a career built on wit and a nose for humbug.
The money story is the one that tells you who he was. He filed for bankruptcy in 1894 after his investments and publishing business went under. He then went on a world speaking tour and wrote bestsellers, and paid back about $80,000 to authors, friends and relatives, even though the law didn't require it. Plenty of rich blokes have walked away from less.
On women he started in the wrong place and moved. In 1867 he wrote letters to Missouri dismissing women's votes, and the reformers around his wife Olivia Langdon and her circle pushed him the other way. By a 1901 address to a girls' school he was telling the audience that women with the ballot would “rise in their might and change the awful state of things.”
The harm check, then. We found no campaign against LGBTQ+ people, women or the planet in his own words or acts. On empire, the record we could see has him on the right side: scholars and Filipino press remember him as an outspoken opponent of the US taking the Philippines. The caveat is that scholars debate how he wrote about some groups in his early career, and we haven't sourced that here.
The Yale story is the best of him. After meeting Warner McGuinn, one of the first Black students at Yale Law School, he asked the dean whether supporting him was a good idea. He then paid McGuinn's expenses for the rest of his time at Yale. McGuinn went on to win the top commencement prize and became a prominent Baltimore lawyer who mentored Thurgood Marshall.
Huckleberry Finn is where it gets argued over. In 2015 a Pennsylvania school pulled it from an 11th-grade class after some students said it made them uncomfortable, and the principal rejected the idea that this was censorship. The American Library Association and PEN called the removal a form of censorship. Other nearby schools kept teaching it with units on the language and history. Where you land depends on whether you read the slur as the target of the satire or as the cost of using it.