Sam and his collaborator Charles Dudley Warner famously named the decades after the Civil War in America “the gilded age.” The period was hardly a golden age. Fueled by the Industrial Revolution, the economy grew exponentially during the last third of the nineteenth century and rates of social mobility were among the highest in U.S. history. Yet the same economic growth fostered unprecedented income inequality, with the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, the so-called millionaire class, owning by some estimates as much as 90 percent of the property in the country. In his “Open Letter to Commodore Vanderbilt” in the Galaxy for March 1869 Sam leveled a high-profile broadside at these trends and the individual who epitomized them, the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. In the wake of his recent engagement to Livy, he implicitly contrasted Vanderbilt with Jervis Langdon, who, while scarcely as rich as the robber baron, was more socially responsible. Sam indicted Vanderbilt’s “superhuman stinginess” and “most lawless violations of commercial honor.” He urged Vanderbilt to “crush out your native instincts and go and do something worthy of praise” that
you need not blush to see in print. . . . How I do pity you; and this is honest. You are an old man, and ought to have some rest, and yet you have to struggle and struggle, and deny yourself, and rob yourself of restful sleep and peace of mind, because you need money so badly. I always feel for a man who is so poverty ridden as you. Don’t misunderstand me, Vanderbilt. I know you own seventy millions; but then you know and I know that it isn’t what a man has that constitutes wealth. No—it is to be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn’t rich. Seventy times seventy millions can’t make him rich as long as his poor heart is breaking for more. . . . You observe that I don’t say anything about your soul, Vanderbilt. It is because I have evidence that you haven’t any.
This essay, another barometer of Sam’s populist sympathies in the first flush of his fame, points toward his condemnation of political corruption in The Gilded Age and of economic aristocracy in A Connecticut Yankee. The piece was applauded in such newspapers as the Dakota Republican (“full of ennobling thoughts expressed in a pointed and masterly manner”) and widely reprinted in its entirety in such papers as the Cleveland Plain Dealer and Marysville, California, Appeal. It also became a magnet for public criticism. Sam was severely chastised in some quarters for his social satire, which struck a different tone—or nerve—than did his typical light humor. Sam’s writings “have heretofore been marked by good nature,” a New Haven, Connecticut, paper asserted, but his open letter to Vanderbilt
is a piece of impertinence and malignity for which he deserves severe chastisement, and we are not a little surprised at the encomiums with which it has been received. Mr. Vanderbilt is so much of a public man that there is nothing objectionable or improper in a fair criticism upon his conduct or character. But Mark Twain, accepting the vulgar slander of the streets as gospel, assails his reputation in a strain of vituperation and disparagement both unjust and unfair, as we are well assured, and certainly in execrable taste.55
With the formal announcement of his engagement to Livy, Sam suddenly enjoyed an entrée to the polite social circles in which the Langdons lived and moved. Jervis Langdon joked to Susan Crane in early March 1869 that Sam “has been giving us a great deal of trouble lately. We cannot have a joy in our family without a feeling, on the part of the little incorrigible in our family, that this wanderer must share it.” Sam joined the family in hosting the social activist Wendell Phillips at their Elmira home in mid-March 1869. The young couple and Jervis Langdon attended Alice Hooker’s wedding to John Day in Hartford in June 1869, when Sam introduced Livy to Joe Twichell and his wife Harmony. As Livy later wrote them, “I can still vividly recall the spirit of restful pleasure that was upon me as we four sat in your parlor, with a fire in the grate adding cheer to the room” and then “eating strawberries in the dining room.” Sam vacationed with the family at Niagara Falls for a few days in late July and early August, registering with them at the posh Cataract House. The dutiful son and suitor accompanied the Langdons back to Elmira on August 7. In short, long before Sam and Livy’s marriage Olivia Lewis Langdon allowed that “he seems so incorporated into our whole being that I seem hardly to remember when it was not so.” The entire family was so “attached to Mr. Clemens” that “every time he leaves us” they loved “him better than when he came.”56
Sam was so closely knit into the fabric of his prospective in-laws’ family that in July 1869 his surrogate father Jervis Langdon offered to buy the Clemens land in Tennessee with its timber and coal for twenty thousand dollars cash and ten thousand dollars in canal stock. Sam jumped at the offer. “I would do pretty much anything to ‘get shut’ of that land,” he wrote Pamela in June 1869. Orion had granted a St. Louis real estate agency an exclusive option to sell the land for a dollar per acre through April 1870, however, and in the months before the expiration of that contract he effectively vetoed the deal with Langdon lest Sam exploit the good offices of his future father-in-law. He thought the land worth a total of only about five thousand dollars, and in this case Sam’s older brother, so often disparaged as an impractical dreamer and inept businessman, was the better judge of Langdon’s proposal. “I am much pleased” with the offer, Orion conceded, but Langdon
must not buy blindfold, or until he sends his Memphis agent there to examine. . . . The difficulties are that Tennessee grants the same land over and over again to different parties if they apply for it. . . . The truth is that where great tracts like ours commence at a tree in the wilderness and run miles through the wood a man might enter a tract on some part of ours, and live to old age without ever knowing he was conflicting with us. By cutting them up into 160 acre tracts and settling immigrants on them with seven or eight years’ leases, we could perfect the titles, even if we derived no income from the leases. It could thus be demonstrated what the land is good for. The character of the population would be improved. And by the time the leases would expire, perhaps a railroad or two might give the people better means of reaching market.
Rather than an outright purchase by Jervis Langdon, Orion proposed an alternative. “How would it do to propose to Mr. Langdon an equal copartnership—we to furnish the land and he the means to colonize?” As usual, Orion erred on the side of caution and nothing came of his plan. He admitted four months later that he regretted his failure to “send you a deed for all the Tennessee land when you had a chance to trade with Mr. Langdon. But I feared you would unconsciously cheat your prospective father-in-law.”57
In frustration Sam washed his hands of the land. He offered Orion the opportunity to “draw on me for two or three hundred dollars” on the condition
that you consider yourself under oath to either sell at some price or other, or give away, one full half of the Tennessee land within 4 months from date—but it must be honestly parted with, & forever. The family have been bled for 40 years to keep that cursed land on their hands & perpetuate our father’s well intended folly in buying it. . . . I never will have anything more to do with its care or its sale. I have always contended that the family were too poor to keep a luxury like that worthless land.
Orion sold off some of the Tennessee land in 1880 and traded some ten thousand acres for a building lot he sold in 1894 for $250. Pamela’s children sold the last scraps of the land to a developer in 1907.58
With the critical and commercial success of The Innocents Abroad, Sam’s talent and reputation were suddenly in demand. In Hartford in November, Charley Warner tried to persuade him to invest in the Hartford Courant “now that I have achieved such a sudden & sweeping popularity,” Sam wrote Livy, but “he forgot we had not yet come to any terms, & fell to appointing the work I should do on the paper”—this coming three months after he had bought a stake in the Buffalo Express. “Revenge is wicked, and unchristian and in every way unbecoming,” he wrote Livy, with no little satisfaction, but it “is powerful sw
eet anyway.” The Express was “an exceedingly thriving newspaper,” Sam wrote Elisha Bliss on August 12, and he hoped “to make it more so. I expect I shall have to buckle right down to it & give up lecturing until next year.”59
Three days later he joined the staff of the paper as its managing editor and occasional contributor, but with no fixed office hours. John Harrison Mills, the staff artist, remembered that Sam immediately went to work at his third-floor desk: “I think within five minutes the new editor had assumed the easy look of one entirely at home, pencil in hand and a clutch of paper before him, with an air of preoccupation, as of one intent on a task delayed.” Sam wrote Mother Fairbanks his first day on the job that he was “capable of slaving over an editorial desk without rest from noon till Midnight & keep it up without losing a day for 3 years on a stretch.” Earl Berry, another of the employees, recalled that Sam was a stalwart believer in personal comfort while at work:
On hot days in particular he cast aside formalities—and a considerable portion of his clothing as well. At the outset he bought a comfortable lounging chair with a writing board hinged on to the arm, and it was no infrequent sight during the summer to find him nestled cosily in that chair, a pipe in his mouth and only a negligee shirt, trousers and socks in evidence as costume. His collar and shoes would most likely be in a waste basket and his hat, coat and waistcoat wherever they chanced to land when he cast them off.
Sam had landed in “an easy, pleasant, delightful situation,” he bragged to Livy on August 19, “& I never liked anything better.” The next day he noted in a letter to Pamela that he had “a strong liking & the highest respect” for his partners, Josephus N. Larned and George H. Selkirk, and he was “a hundred thousand times better off” than if he had invested in the Cleveland Herald, adding, “I am well satisfied.” He reported to Livy two days later that he and Larned
sit upon opposite sides of the same table & it is exceedingly convenient—for if you will remember, you sometimes write till you reach the middle of a subject & then run hard aground—you know what you want to say, but for the life of you you can’t say—your ideas & your words get thick & sluggish & you are vanquished. So occasionally, after biting our nails & scratching our heads awhile, we just reach over & swap manuscript—& then we scribble away without the least trouble, he finishing my article & I his.
On his part, Larned recalled that Sam was “a man of wonderful charm. . . . His disposition was to be genial and companionable; but the geniality was easily frosted, and he could bristle with repulsions as readily as anybody I have ever known.” Berry echoed the point: Sam was “a bitterly sarcastic man” and “chary of conversation even with personal acquaintances and positively repellent to strangers.” But he understood priorities. In his first signed article, “Salutatory,” Sam pledged,
I am not going to hurt the paper deliberately and intentionally at any time. I am not going to introduce any startling reforms, or in any way attempt to make trouble. I am simply going to do my plain, unpretending duty, when I cannot get out of it; I shall work diligently and honestly and faithfully at all times and upon all occasions, when privation and want shall compel me to do it; in writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience; I shall witheringly rebuke all forms of crime and misconduct, except when committed by the party inhabiting my own vest; I shall not make use of slang or vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use profanity except in discussing house-rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not even use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant and degrading—though to speak truly I do not see how house-rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political editor [Larned] who is already excellent, and only needs to serve a term in the penitentiary in order to be perfect. I shall not write any poetry, unless I conceive a spite against the subscribers.60
Sam’s declaration of editorial principles was a far cry from Orion’s long-ago prospectus for the Hannibal Western Union. He sent a clipping of this column to Livy for her files because, as he put it, he wanted her to edit his complete works after his death.
For six weeks or so Sam not only seemed well suited to the job but eager to perform it. Berry remembered that “in his working mood” Sam’s “rapid pen knew little idleness and less constraint.” Sam lived in a boardinghouse near the offices of the paper on Swan Street and walked to work. He also escaped to Elmira every other weekend or so. His prospects in Buffalo, a thriving industrial city and transportation center located at the confluence of the Erie Canal and Lake Erie, were auspicious. It was the eleventh-largest city in the country, with a population of about 115,000 residents and twenty-five breweries, most of them founded by German immigrants or their descendants. As late as 1906 Sam reminisced about the “pleasant times in the beer mills of Buffalo” he shared with his friendly rival David Gray of the Courier. Buffalo also boasted a new park system designed by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, and it was the hometown of both former president Millard Fillmore and future president Grover Cleveland. The day after taking charge in Buffalo, Sam notified Bliss that he had “shut off all my engagements outside of N[ew] England & withdrawn from the talking ring wholly for this season” in order to focus on his editorial duties. A week later he begged Redpath “to let me off entirely from lecturing in New England this season, for I would rather scribble, now, while I take a genuine interest in it, & I am so tired of wandering, & want to be still & rest.”61
He certainly took his duties seriously, at least at first. Unlike the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the Buffalo Express could not survive on advertising revenue alone. It was the smallest of three local English-language dailies, with a circulation a decade later estimated at about four thousand compared to the forty-three hundred of the Courier and the sixty-five hundred of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser. Then again, the Express had the most room to grow. No longer a beat reporter but a co-owner, Sam shared responsibility for making payroll in a competitive market. That is, he could not afford to be a genial, permissive employer like Goodman of the Enterprise, a newspaper that faced far fewer financial challenges than the Express. Berry remembered that Sam was “a quiet, reserved and irritable man” who “gave his fellow citizens little opportunity to annoy him with their attentions or questions.” Similarly, Selkirk reminisced in 1925 that Sam “confined his humor to his writings. He was a very ordinary chap otherwise and was not given to wise cracking or the amusement of his associates.”62
Sam was also quick to introduce some changes to the paper. He worked with the print shop foreman to eliminate scare headlines by reducing their font size and in consequence, he bragged, “the paper is vastly improved in appearance. I have annihilated all the glaring thunder-&-lightning headings over the telegraphic news & made that department look quiet & respectable.” He schooled the news staff in a more objective writing style: to “modify the adjectives, curtail their philosophical reflections & leave out the slang.” As a first-time employer, Sam cracked the proverbial whip over his underlings. He never suffered fools gladly, but he managed his Buffalo staff by a set of rules more like those he had known in San Francisco than in Virginia City. That is, the Express was necessarily run on more strictly business principles than the Enterprise. “The manner in which he wielded the journalistic scepter was more that of an impatient autocrat than an humble American citizen,” according to Berry. “No man detested loafers more than Mr. Clemens, and assuredly no man could be more pitiless in his treatment of bores. He was vigorous in his denunciation of that class of people who aimlessly and impudently intrude their constant presence in an editorial room.”63
Sam also shifted the editorial position of the Express, a nominally Republican paper, vis-à-vis a local coal monopoly of which Jervis Langdon’s company was a part. Whereas the Express had previously defended a citizen cooperative organized to sell cheap coal, as soon as Sam bec
ame its managing editor the newspaper muted its criticism of the Anthracite Coal Association and indicted the “unreasonable demands” of the coal miners’ union. “Up to the present time,” he announced in an unsigned editorial in the August 20 issue, “we have heard only the people’s side of the coal question, though there could be no doubt that the coal men had a side also.” In the same issue, the Express printed a letter from John De La Fletcher Slee, Jervis Langdon’s manager in Buffalo, defending the practices of the association. On September 1 the Buffalo Courier noted that a “change seems to have come over” the Express “in reference to the coal monopoly” and asked “the reason for it.” Sam complained to Livy about this “sneaking little communication,” grumbled that the “effrontery of these people transcends everything I ever heard of,” and warned that if George Deuther, one of the organizers of the Citizen’s Mutual Coal Mining, Purchasing, and Sale Company, “don’t go mighty slow I will let off a blast at him some day that will lift the hair off his head & loosen some of his teeth.” He planned to protect at all costs the interests of his financial angel and future father-in-law. That is, in the first weeks of his part ownership of the Express Sam seemed ready to sacrifice democratic principle to his newfound sobriety and respectability. The following March he published a second unsigned, pro-monopoly, antilabor editorial in the paper in which he decried “the spectacle of a legislature delivering into the hands of an irresponsible mob the actual control of property belonging wholly to their employers.” In this article Sam betrayed the same anti-Hibernian prejudice first evident in his reporting for the San Francisco Morning Call in late 1864. Much as the Irish had threatened the Chinese in California, the Molly Maguires, an organization dominated by Irish activists, were “an irresponsible society of men who hold meetings, pass laws, and enforce them by the agencies of terrorism and blood” in the coal mining districts of Pennsylvania.64 During his courtship, that is, Sam began to express a brand of antiunion rhetoric at odds with his normal affinity for the working class.
The Life of Mark Twain Page 74
