The Twain Once Met In Florida, (Missouri)
He arrived 175 years ago with Halley’s Comet., on November 30, 1835, Known as Samuel Longhorne Clemens. As his superb writing hand grew, in his early twenties he chose a number of pen names, among others, “Josh,” “Sergeant Fathom,” “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,” and “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab.” As he told it in Life on the Mississippi, he settled on “Mark Twain” in 1859 after two-years training as a Mississipi River riverboat pilot, although he didn’t use his new pen name until 1863. Ironically, “mark twain,” a river pilot’s term that refers to the two fathoms of river depth where a boat is safe to navigate, never really suited him as what he called his nom de guerre; he too often consciously challenged the low tide of his day: imperialism, slavery, opposition to women’s suffrage and unionization.
Dr. Clemens, as he was often called in his later years (he’d received an honorary Doctorate from Oxford University in 1907), became considerably more outspoken. He made his opposition to imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines well known. (See the War Prayer)
He’d lost what optimism he had by the end, and in 1906 at 70 years, he wrote:
Three days ago a neighbor brought the celebrated Russian revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky, to call upon me. He is grizzled, and shows age – as to exteriors – but he has a Vesuvius, inside, which is a strong and active volcano yet. He is so full of belief in the ultimate and almost immediate triumph of the revolution and the destruction of the fiendish autocracy, that he almost made me believe and hope with him. He has come over here expecting to arouse a conflagration of noble sympathy in our vast nation of eighty millions of happy and enthusiastic freemen. But honesty obliged me to pour some cold water down his crater. I told him what I believed to be true – that the McKinleys and the Roosevelts and 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 so vain of – is now nothing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy. . . [From his autobiography, Volume 1, published in November 2010, by his request, 100 years after his death.]
“Politicians are like diapers; they need to be changed often and for the same reason.”
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
– Autobiography of Mark Twain
When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible…
– Letter to Jules Hart, 17 December 1901
[In the Galaxy Magazine]: I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.
– Mark Twain, a Biography
Look at the tyranny of party — at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty — a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes — and which turns voters into chattles, slaves, rabbits, and all the while their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.
– “The Character of Man,” Mark Twain’s Autobiography
All kings is mostly rapscallions.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Government is merely a servant – merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
The Bible According to Mark Twain
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book–a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal.
