by Ron Powers
To wit: “We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own,” Mark Twain had pointed out to his interviewer in London, “and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States.
“But now—why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I’m sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”14
That was the only unfamiliar and unsettling word he used in the entire interview—“quagmire.”
AFTER A brief stay at a hotel, the Clemenses rented a house at 14 West 10th Street, at Fifth Avenue, while Livy searched for a more permanent residence. Clemens had routinely been telling reporters that he and his family would eventually return to their house in Hartford. If he ever really believed that, he was soon to change his mind. Five days after his arrival in New York, Charles Dudley Warner, his old Nook Farm neighbor and co-author of The Gilded Age, died at seventy-one. Sam went up to Hartford for his funeral, and the shock of reentering the city where Susy had died sealed his understanding that the family could never bear to live there again. Livy would not have been able to endure the trauma. Livy could hardly endure daily life. She was just shy of fifty-five in the autumn of 1900, and looked seventy. A glass-plate photograph made in London the previous summer shows her seated under a tree between Clara, on her right, who gazes down protectively at her, and Sam, on her left, clutching his pipe, completely engaged in the camera under his sharp white Stetson, his slippers fiercely shined. Livy looks dazed. She is staring somewhere else through sunken, heavy-lidded eyes, the lines around her mouth deeply etched.
The family stayed on at West 10th through the winter, though Livy found the rooms drafty and cold. In January she mustered the energy to travel to Washington, where Clara, on the 22nd, made her debut as a concert singer. Sam, as disapproving of her independent ambitions as he had been of Susy’s, stayed home. Jean, who counted horsemanship among her few accomplishments, pursued the cause of animals’ rights when not recovering from one of her attacks.
THE HOWELLSES lived just on the far side of Union Square, at 115 East 16th Street. This was the first time that Clemens and Howells had ever lived within walking distance of each other, something Sam had wished for since the 1870s. They made the most of this proximity. They rejuvenated their long friendship, shifting their passions from the literary world to the political. Howells swept Clemens up into the Anti-Imperialist crusade, introducing him at a Lotos Club dinner on November 10 as the ascendant satirist laureate of the country. Mark Twain was mostly charming and gently ironic on that occasion (“We elected a President four years ago. We’ve found fault with him and criticized him, and here a day or two ago we go and elect him for another four years with votes enough to spare to do it over again.”15); but within two weeks he was mincing no words. “The Boxer is a patriot,” he declared to the Berkeley Lyceum on November 23, speaking of the Chinese guerrillas waging bloody resistance against the occupying Russians, Germans and other great powers who were “carving up the Chinese melon” (as the European policymakers liked to phrase it). He added, “I am a Boxer”16—an extraordinarily daring reversal in point of view (a famous Caucasian, asserting the identity of a Chinese peasant?!) that anticipated by nearly sixty-three years President Kennedy’s anticommunist declaration in West Berlin, “Ich bin ein Berliner!” Sam remained aggressively candid as he introduced the British war correspondent Winston Churchill to his first American audience at the Waldorf-Astoria on December 12, offering a muted preview of the slashing voice soon to be unleashed in full.
…I think that England sinned when she got herself into a war in South Africa which she could have avoided, just as we have sinned in getting into a similar war in the Philippines. Mr. Churchill by his father is an Englishman; by his mother he is an American; no doubt a blend that makes the perfect man. England and America: yes, we are kin. And now that we are also kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired. The harmony is complete, the blend is perfect—like Mr. Churchill himself, whom I now have the honor to present to you.17
Seldom would the 20th century’s signature orator be so upstaged. The New York Evening Post loved it: “He drew the razor of his satire across several of the most flaunting and destructive humbugs of the age.”18 The razor slash served notice that the Vandal was back in town, and he had some things on his mind.
Mark Twain became as ubiquitous in New York, and sometimes as formidable, as the new automobiles that were haring around scaring the hell out of pedestrians. (A driver “considers his responsibility fully discharged by the ringing of the gong,” sputtered an editorial in the Tribune.) He was the star attraction at luncheons and banquets given by the Aldine Club, the Nineteenth Century Club, the City Club, the Society of American Authors, the New England Society. Guests at these functions were as likely to be gonged by his emerging political views as amused by his wit. His cachet only increased; people wanted to hear him, look at him, be in the same room with him. The ringing telephone at the 10th Street house had servants constantly running up and down the stairs with messages. Every day there, Clara recalled, was a festive occasion. “One felt that a large party was going on and that by and by the guests would be leaving. But there was no leaving.”19 In his spare time he took ostentatious walks along Fifth Avenue, as if daring the public not to recognize him. He was in fighting trim, thanks perhaps to his intake of Plasmon, the new health food he’d discovered in Germany, and which had now become his latest investment craze. The chalky stuff, extracted from skim milk, was intended to improve digestion and nutrition. It proved to be the Paige typesetter of gastronomy; Clemens lost about fifty thousand dollars in investments before giving it up.
Howells would eventually worry about “so many dinners…so few books”20 in regard to his friend; but literature was not the point for Mark Twain now, and neither were escalloped oysters; the point was polemics, written fast and broadcast faster; and in this pursuit he excelled brilliantly. In a thundering long riff of speeches and essays that reverberated through 1905, the old Vandal showed his new reformer’s chops. He kicked off with his splenetic “A salutation-speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth Century,” which ran in the Herald on December 30:
I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate-raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa & the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap & a towel, but hide the looking-glass.21
He followed this with his masterpiece. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” in the February 1901 issue of the North American Review, stands as a landmark of social-political satire. The piece hit the benevolent assimilators in the soft solar plexus of their hypocrisies. “The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust,” he bitterly allows, had done its work
very neatly, and…they could not understand it; for we had been so friendly—so affectionate, even—with those simple-minded patriots!…We had…fought shoulder to shoulder with them against “the common enemy”…petted them, lied to them…used them until we needed them no longer; then derided the sucked orange and threw it away…What we wanted, in the interest of Progress and Civilization, was the Archipelago, unencumbered by patriots struggling for independence…22
Excoriating each element of the “Trust”—the empire-minded government, market-maddened business, and the Christian missionaries who served to apologize for both—Mark Twain drew uncomfortably explicit comparisons: the American adventure echoed similar aggressions by Germany against China, Russia against Japan and Manchuria, and the British against the Boers in South Africa. As his analogies expanded, his diction soared. Kipling had couched �
��White Man’s Burden” in the lockstep rhythms of a big bass drum. “Sitting in Darkness,” by contrast, picked up the throbbing reiterative cadences of the gospel preacher, the calling Clemens had once considered. (He took the essay’s title from Matthew 4:16, which chronicles the beginning of Jesus’s ministry.) He infused these familiar old cadences with a righteous snarl.
…There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us…we have debauched America’s honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best. We know this. The Head of every State and Sovereignty in Christendom…including our Congress and our fifty State Legislatures, are members not only of the church, but also of the Blessings-of-Civilization Trust. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.23
“Sitting in Darkness” dramatically reignited the Philippine debate in the nation’s newspapers, by giving the anti-imperialists, at last, the eloquent voice they had lacked. Papers that opposed the war and annexation reprinted it for weeks, while those in support of the government ignored it as long as they could, after which they blistered Mark Twain with invective. Most of these, finding his positions hard to quickly rebut, sneered that as a mere “humorist,” he was out of his depth in weighty public issues.
The New York Times on February 7 lacerated Mark Twain for “tumbling in among us from the clouds of exile and discarding the grin of the funny man for the sour visage of the austere moralist.”24 The Minneapolis Journal denounced his stance as “a very excellent specimen of flippancy, as well as utter disregard for truth and fact.”25 The imperialist-leaning Hartford Courant, so reliably an ally for so many years, mostly kept a pained silence; but its rival, the Hartford Times, was jubilant. Noting that Mark Twain was “a man whom the whole American people read,” the paper saluted him for bringing “the sad and shocking facts of the crime against the Filipinos home to hundreds of thousands of Americans from whom they have been hitherto hidden.”26 An excerpt of it was read into the Congressional Record by the Ohio Democrat John J. Lentz.
By now, some of his friends saw career catastrophe in the works: Mark Twain was jeopardizing the genial goodwill he’d built up with America for more than thirty years. The most wounding call for restraint came from Joe Twichell, the clergyman and friend whose manliness Sam Clemens had so admired. “I’m not expecting anything but kicks for scoffing at McKinley, that consciousless thief & traitor,” Sam’s second paragraph of reply carefully began, “& am expecting a diminution of my bread and butter by it, but if Livy will let me I will have my say.” Then, in an “et tu…?” burst of dismayed admonishment:
I can’t understand it! You are a public guide & teacher, Joe, & are under a heavy responsibility to men, young & old; if you teach your people—as you teach me—to hide their opinions when they believe their flag is being abused & dishonored, lest the utterance do them & a publisher a damage, how do you answer for it to your conscience? You are sorry for me; in the fair way of give & take, I am willing to be a little sorry for you.27
Mark Twain continued tramping out this vintage with “To My Missionary Critics” in April 1901; “A Defense of General Funston” in May 1902; “The Czar’s Soliloquy” in March 1905 (all of these in the North American Review); “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” in September of that year; and finally, his great valedictory in the genre, unpublished in his lifetime, “The War Prayer.” In this best-known of all his polemical writings (thanks in part to two television adaptations, an oratorio, and a renaissance on the Internet), Mark Twain employs his favorite fictive spokesman, the Stranger, to interrupt a minister’s invocations of God’s blessings on young soldiers headed for battle, and deliver an anti-prayer that inventories the hideous truths about warfare—truths that remained susceptible to the fog of piety well into the age of electronic transmission of images.
In 1905, at the height of its influence, Mark Twain’s hot dissenting voice largely disappeared from the magazines. It was swallowed up by a combination of financial forces generally assumed to have gathered only in the late 20th century: concentrated media ownership; the influence of wealthy businessmen over editors in the flow of ideas; lavish “celebrity” book and magazine deals. Publishing imperialism, in short. The chain of events, largely unexamined in Mark Twain scholarship, are worth tracing as unheeded prophecy.
IN 1899, the august North American Review, a publisher of Mark Twain essays for fifteen years, was purchased by the capitalist George B. Harvey, the head of a $15 million syndicate (a little more than $300 million in today’s dollars). Harvey had written for town newspapers in Vermont as a boy and had edited the Newark Journal and the New York World before joining the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company to earn his fortune. He was known by the honorific “Colonel.”
At exactly this same time, Harper & Brothers was trying to pull itself out of debt following some misjudgments worthy of Charles Webster himself. These included a weakness for celebrity-author contracts. Philip Harper (who apotheosized the “family house” publisher when he became his own father’s brother-in-law) offered Lew Wallace, author of the wildly popular Ben Hur, $10,000 a year for ten years to write more hits. Wallace, whose entire literary career could be summed up as “Ben Hur done that,” disgorged something called The Prince of India, which flopped—owing perhaps to its scarcity of chariot races.
Philip Harper turned, for a bailout, to the corporate world: specifically, the financial firm of J. P. Morgan & Company. Morgan essentially bought the company, ending its long run as a family house. This sort of thing would recur often in the second half of the 20th century. Morgan hired such publishing stars as S. S. McClure, founder of the magazine that bore his name, and Nelson Doubleday, the nephew of the man who did not invent baseball. Nothing worked; McClure and Doubleday were soon out, and the Morgan people brought in Colonel Harvey, who brought the Review with him. Among Harvey’s first acts was to declare the house bankrupt. This caused the immediate exodus of such stars as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Owen Wister. Harvey recruited replacement stars, among them the “cowboy” novelist Zane Grey. His biggest coup was a deal, negotiated through Henry Rogers in 1903, for exclusive rights to another celebrity author, Mark Twain.
This turned out to be good for Harper’s and good for Mark Twain, financially, at least. Colonel Harvey liked to boast that he paid the author 30 cents a word for everything he wrote, which (he said) made Mark Twain the highest-paid man in the history of American and European letters. “Mark Twain earns $59,000 a year,” he told a Washington Post reporter in 1907. “Indeed, I think his income in 1907 will reach $70,000 [nearly $1.5 million in adjusted dollars].”28 The publisher maintained that the contract was “absolutely without conditions as to subjects, treatment, or anything else. It is unthinkable that Mark Twain should write a story or article and have it rejected.”29
But it had already happened. Harvey tolerated “The Czar’s Soliloquy,” but after that, the company found the author’s polemics a little too risky for its circulation interests. “The War Prayer” was rejected by Harper’s Bazar (as it was then titled) in late 1905 by its progressive editor Elizabeth Jordan, who suppressed her suffragist ideals in being persuaded that it would alarm her feminine readership’s sensibilities. The company likewise turned down King Leopold’s Soliloquy a month later. He was eventually able to issue the Soliloquy in pamphlet form with his publisher’s permission. Paine included excerpts from it in his biography of Mark Twain, and published it in full (as far as is known) in 1923, in the collection Europe and Elsewhere. By then—amid the roaring hedonism following a world war that had generally anesthetized romantic ideals—it was disconnected from the passi
ons of the times, and lay ignored for most of the ensuing century.
Europe and Elsewhere is an interesting graveyard for Mark Twain’s reformist work. It also includes the altered remains of “The United States of Lyncherdom,” a white-hot condemnation of sanctioned murder by whites against blacks. Mark Twain wrote the essay in fury upon learning in 1901 of one more lynching among many in his home state of Missouri. Vigilante hangings of blacks suspected of crimes—or not suspected of crimes—had increased rampantly since the end of Reconstruction. The spirit, if not the scale of ethnic cleansing, was newly abroad in the land, having rested up after the decimation of the native Indian tribes. Like “The War Prayer,” “Lyncherdom” went unpublished in the author’s lifetime, and was seriously distorted by Paine’s edits in 1923, and thus underappreciated until 2000. Mark Twain had opted against offering it for magazine publication when he completed it. That decision opened him to the century-long received wisdom that he cared more about his popularity in the South than about his social ideals. But he hadn’t worried about the South when he published Life on the Mississippi, with its dismissal of the region’s chivalric pretense, and he certainly hadn’t worried about it with Huckleberry Finn. More likely, the withholding was a factor of his developing belief that the publishing world could not bear his strongest ideas. He made this belief explicit in an unpublished essay written a few years later.
