Mark Twain and the Colonel and the Arrival of a New Century

Philip McFarland, “Mark Twain and the Colonel and the Arrival of a New Century,” Rowman & Littlefield, 2012, 427 pp.

Philip McFarland’s book “Mark Twain and the Colonel” is a dual biography, providing a look at America at the beginning of the 20th century.  They knew each other and while Twain, twenty years older than Roosevelt, did not particularly like Roosevelt, Roosevelt did admire Twain.  Probably because Twain kept his true opinion of Roosevelt a secret, not revealed in publication until after they both were dead.

Both Twain (Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) and Teddy (Theodore Roosevelt, 1859-1919) shared common characteristics. They wrote books, loved the limelight and were masters of self-promotion — well adept at providing quotable phrases. Yet their temperaments and outlook on life were quite different. Roosevelt represented the new, century, advocating in his essays a “strenuous life” for an America emerging as a global power, while Twain in his notebooks reflected, “The twentieth century is a stranger to me.”  Twain never did adapt to the new century, but he only lived in it for ten years.

The new century was a time of rapid change and the US went from a rural country into an urban nation. Enormous fortunes were made by names still synonymous with money — Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan. Twain gave the era the definitive title, the “Gilded Age.”  Increasing immigration between 1860 and 1900 caused the population to soar from 36 million to 76 million. Many immigrants sought work in industry and trade unions rose to battle corporations.

A printer-newspaperman turned successful author, Twain purchased Webster and Co., a publishing firm that in 1885 published two enormous best-sellers — his “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and the classic “Grant’s Memoirs” — earning Gen. Ulysses Grant, dying of throat cancer, more than $400,000 for his family. However, the firm went bankrupt in 1894. Twain landed further into insolvency, investing in a newfangled typesetter machine. To extinguish his debt, Twain left America in 1885 with his family on a five-year worldwide lecture tour to raise money and pay off his debts, which he paid off every dollar.

Twain’s years abroad were those of phenomenal ascendency for Theodore Roosevelt on the American political stage. A national hero in the 1898 war with Spain, Roosevelt was elected governor of New York. Picked by President William McKinley to be his running mate in 1900, Roosevelt became the youngest president of the United States when McKinley died of an assassin’s bullet in 1901.

Historians rate Theodore Roosevelt as one of America’s greatest leaders. Twain thought otherwise and wrote in journals published after his death that TR was far and away the worst president we ever had. Referring to him as our windy and flamboyant president, he had low regard for Roosevelt’s intellect and loathed his expansionist foreign policy. Twain even found fault with Roosevelt’s successful resolution of the Russo-Japanese War, for which he won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. Twain thought Roosevelt’s intervention pulled the czar’s chestnuts out of the fire and prevented an early version of the Russian Revolution.

Roosevelt had contempt for the “hard” and “narrow, shut-in materialism,” Twain expressed. He thought man possesses free will and can act no matter how dark life sometimes seems. As president, he put Edwin Arlington Robinson on the federal payroll, stipulating that the poet do little government work. He urged Scribner’s to publish Robinson’s poetry. Roosevelt thought, along with G.K. Chesterton, that poets were often a nuisance to their families but were a general blessing for mankind. Roosevelt was no pessimist. In a letter to Robinson (who suffered from depression and drinking), Roosevelt encouraged, “That there is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell: at some time, the devil masters each of us. It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it that counts.”

My Notes:

Pg. 14:  In the midst of the financial panic of 1893, Mark Twain’s publishing firm declared bankruptcy.  Mark Twain pledged to pay back every penny owed to the many creditors, 100 cents on the dollar, declining a legal remedy that would have let him off.  He would pay it all back by setting off on a lecture tour around the world, undertaking the ordeal while in less than hearty good health and at the advanced age (for the time) of fifty-nine. 

Pg. 35:  On July 1, 1898, Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and 500 Rough Riders were at the base of what came to be called Kettle Hill.  Alone of his men, the Colonel rode on horseback, an obvious target galloping in full view of the enemy up the slope of the next hill (San Juan) over, to a barbed-wire fence that halted his advance, forty feet from the summit.  He leaped down, turned the horse loose, and looked back across the slope, shouting for his men to come on.  In the minutes ahead many on both sides died.  American losses proved to be three times those in the trenches.  But the enemy was bested, leaving the attackers in possession of the hilltop. 

Pg. 45:  On May 1, 1898, in a stunning victory that cost not a single American life, the American navy caught and sank or disabled Spain’s entire Pacific fleet. 

Pg. 63:  Roosevelt was a writer, author of numerous articles as well as many books about nature: about ranching and hunting, about life outdoors (he owned and worked a ranch in the Dakotas).  He had completed a two-year term as governor of New York State, was formerly a member of the New York Assembly in Albany and a police commissioner of New York City—and as civil service commissioner and assistant secretary of the navy.

Pg. 130:  In the mid-1880s it seemed that everything Mark Twain was involved in turned to gold.  His own publishing firm put out Huckleberry Finn as well as the Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, a publishing coup so phenomenal that the impoverished family of the general, who had died in July 1885—just days after completing his book, could be presented with a single royalty check for $200,000 (about $4.5 million now) in partial payment of earnings.  But it all turned sour for Twain.  In June 1891 the Clemens’s closed up their magnificent Hartford home and sailed for Europe.  The family remained abroad for most of nine years although Clemens often returned on business trips.  His Webster & Co. Publishers publishing business was bankrupt, and he lost his $300,000 investment in the failed, over delicate, typesetter mechanism.

Pg. 136:  Much of Mark Twin’s writing after his return to America in 1900 went unpublished during his lifetime.  His wife, Livy, was wary of alienating readers with his harsh and atheistic statements.  He was particularly incensed by America’s imperial ambitions, especially in the Philippines.  (He also wrote “The United States of Lyncherdom” during this time, but did not publish it).

Pg. 143:  When McKinley was shot in 1901, the physician who performed the operation was a gynecologist--not a surgeon.  The light in the clinic had been poor; an attending physician had held a mirror at the window to direct late afternoon sunbeams onto the operation table.  There was an X-ray machine nearby, but no one knew how to use it.  One of the two bullets could not be got at and remained in the body; the instruments probing for it had been inadequately sterilized, the wound left undrained.  (So, twenty years after Garfield was essentially killed by Dr. Bliss using unsterilized procedures, McKinley now suffered the same fate.)

Pg. 164:  In the years just after the Civil War, southern states had responded to former slaves set free by passing so-called Black Codes, regulations to control the movement and employment of freed black people.  Varying from state to state the codes generally restricted such people from roaming about at will.  Freedmen had to sign annual contracts for labor and work from sunup to sundown.  Vagrancy—that is, not being employed—was severely punished.  There were other such ordinances, the effect of which was to move African-Americans back toward the doleful condition of enslavement.

The federal government intervened.  Troops were sent south to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and the Reconstruction period began.  President Grant quickly crushed the Ku Klux Klan. A decade passed until the contested presidential election of 1876, between the Republican Hayes of Ohio and the Democrat Tilden of New York.  Tilden won the popular vote, but the electoral vote went to Hayes, although the count in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina remained in doubt.  A deal was struck.  Democrats would break the deadlock by conceding the presidency if the new Republican administration agreed to remove federal troops from southern soil.

Pg. 232:  As the century turned, the US was transitioning from an agricultural to an industrial society, from a producer to a consumer population, from a merchant to a corporate economy, from rural to urban ways of life.  There had been no major wars since 1815 with Napoleon.

Pg. 245:  The Gilded Age denotes the years between 1870 and 1900 when Vanderbilt’s chateau and Mrs. Astor’s huge home were erected along Millionaires Row on New York’s Fifth Avenue. 

Pg. 265:  The 1823 Monroe Doctrine states that “the American continents are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European power”.  In part to defend the doctrine, the US navy would grow during Roosevelt’s presidency from fifth largest in the world to a size—with twenty battleships at sea—second only to the Royal Navy.  If European powers sought to interfere in the unstable affairs of Latin America, our naval vessels were there to convince them to think better of it.  Roosevelt’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine was announced in his 1904 annual message to Congress.  He stated that henceforth the US alone would intervene, preemptively when necessary, in order to stabilize any country in our hemisphere in such disorder that it was incapable of meeting its international obligations.  Europe must leave America alone to police our half of the globe. 

Pg. 268:  During Roosevelt’s presidency he succeeded in setting aside 230 million acres of land for the public—roughly the size of California, Montana, and Michigan combined—in the form of 150 national forests, fifty-one federal game preserves and bird sanctuaries, five national parks, eighteen national monuments, and twenty-four reclamation projects that affect4ed fourteen states, those last designed to control scarce water out West and redistribute a vital resource fairly, as well as to provide irrigation of and lands and to erect dams to manage flooding. 

Pg. 271:  Roosevelt departed from his predecessors in his dedication to conserving our resources, enlarging our navy, and regulating corporations.  The 1890 Sherman Anti-trust law had so far been used mostly to suppress unions.  Roosevelt now broke up Standard Oil.

Pg. 411:  Roosevelt went to Africa on a Big Game hunt after his term as President.  In Africa he bagged among much else nine lions, thirteen rhinos, seven giraffes, eight elephants, twenty zebras, and six water buffaloes, and had sent back to the Smithsonian 3,000 skins and 13,000 specimens. 

Pg. 414:  Roosevelt was not pleased with Taft’s presidency and chose to run against him in 1912.  Shortly before the campaign, twelve states had introduced the novelty of primaries as a way to let voters have a say in choosing nominees.  Roosevelt entered all the primaries and won nine of the twelve, including the one in Taft’s own state of Ohio.  However, when delegates met in Chicago that summer to pick the Republican candidate, the Roosevelt faction had amassed impressive support among the populace at large.  But the convention machinery remained in the hands of the Old Guard, who managed to disqualify most of Roosevelt’s delegates in favor of the regulars, pledged to Taft.  TR’s supporters stormed out of the convention and create the Bull Moose Party. (Wilson then won the presidency as the Republican Party was split).

Addenda:

Pg. 393:  By 2012 militarism had trumped US diplomacy.  The present total of all US Foreign Service officers is less than the sum of people serving on a single carrier battle group.  The US has eleven such carrier battle groups; no other nation has more than one.  George W. Bush had declared war, not on a country, but on terrorism--$3 trillion has so far been spent on this war.