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the coming of the camera, the King could avail himself of what became known in our Watergate era as “plausible deniability.”) “Then all of a sudden came the crash!” Twain’s Leopold laments. “That is to say, the incorruptible Kodak — and all the harmony went to hell! The only witness I have encountered in my long experi- ence that I couldn’t bribe.” At least King Leopold didn’t have to worry about a WikiLeaks exposing his skullduggery on the Internet. “Whether Twain was talking about rac- ism at home, the foreign misadventures of the Western powers or the excesses of the era of greed he initially flourished in after the Civil War,” Blount wrote, “his target was always human folly and hypocrisy, which turn out to be perennial topics for further study.” On the centenary of the author’s 1910 death, the University of California Press late last year released the first of three volumes of Twain’s expanded biography, including material the author himself de- creed should not be published until he had been dead for 100 years. “From the first, second, third and fourth

Mark Twain’s Tabooed Talk Talk Tabooed Twain’s Mark editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed his heirs and editors in 1906. “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.” Some of those opinions might still be

AP Images regarded in some quarters as something other than “sound and sane.” Twain re- Mark Twain directed his heirs not to release for 100 years ferred to American soldiers in the Philip- some of his manuscripts that contained his unvarnished pines as “our uniformed assassins,” though his invective was more often and more opinion about touchy topics — the time’s up. appropriately aimed at the government that sent them there. Still, it is not hard by Jack Kenny papers, magazines, and books. In a 2008 to imagine the outrage that description article for Time magazine, humorist Roy would provoke were it uttered today about t is sometimes said regretfully that Blount, Jr. showed just how topical, yet our troops in Afghanistan or Iraq. Bill many Americans today get their timeless, Twain’s humor was and is. O’Reilly would likely have Mark Twain I “slant” on the news from TV’s late- In King Leopold’s Soliloquy , Twain’s hauled off his set at Fox News, perhaps in night comedians. But today’s “baby scathing 1905 satire on the Belgian oc- one piece, if Twain dared to enter the “No boomers” and Generation X-ers and Y-ers cupation of the Congo, Blount found the Spin Zone.” And there would be a predict- are not among the first Americans to find kind of criticism that might have been able and understandable uproar if Twain’s their politics strained through the filter of aimed a few short years ago at a U.S. gov- version of the Thanksgiving holiday were humor. More than a century before Jay ernment embarrassed by the photographs taught in our public schools: Leno, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert of abuse at the American-run Abu Ghraib began coming into people’s living rooms prison in Iraq. Twain imagined the frustra- Thanksgiving Day, a function which via broadcast and cable television, Sam- tion the Belgian King must have felt when originated in New England two or uel Langhorne Clemens, known to read- photographers discovered natives of the three centuries ago when those pe ople ers around the world as Mark Twain, was Congo whose hands had been cut off by recognized that they really had some- infiltrating the same sanctuary via news- their Belgian captors. (In the days before thing to be thankful for — annually,

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not oftener — if they had suc- If it is surprising to find ceeded in exterminating their echoes of today’s controversies neighbors, the Indians, during in the polemics of 100 years the previous twelve months ago, we can be reasonably cer- instead of getting extermi- tain that Twain’s views were nated by their neighbors the no less controversial in his own Indians. Thanksgiving Day time. The fact that he was the became a habit, for the reason world’s best-known and much- that in the course of time, as loved humorist did not make his the years drifted on, it was anti-establishment essays and perceived that the extermi- speeches any less loathsome to nating had ceased to be mu- men who wielded great power to tual and was all on the white their own advantage and, so they man’s side, consequently on imagined, their nation’s advan- the Lord’s side, consequently tage. When the United States, in it was proper to thank the Lord a coalition of Western nations, for it. invaded China to put down the Boxer rebellion in 1900, Mark Skewering Imperialism Twain conspicuously did not Killing, Twain wrote in his short “support the troops.” story The Chronicle of Young “It is all China now and my Satan , is “the chiefest ambition sympathies are with the Chi- of the human race and the ear- nese,” he wrote. “I hope they liest incident in its history.” Yet will drive all the foreigners out he was not a pacifist. He wrote and keep them out for good.” favorably of the French Revolu- Twain’s views on that subject tion, which in the name of lib- inspired President Theodore erty devoured it, and in his own Library of Congress Roosevelt in 1901 to label the time favored the Japanese in the A cartoon that appeared in the magazine Puck in 1885 of Mark esteemed author a “prize idiot.” Russo-Japanese War. Though he Twain standing on stage speaking to an audience. No doubt many Americans was later a founding member agreed with the popular young and vice president of the Anti-Imperialist “I am an anti-imperialist,” the author told President. Many of Twain’s opinions were League, he was initially a supporter of the reporters on his return to the States. “I am too much for his contemporaries. “None U.S. role in the Spanish-American War, opposed to having the eagle put its talons but the dead are permitted to tell the truth,” applauding it as a means of freeing Cuba. on any other land.” His description of the he lamented. Even at the height of his un- “Old as I am, I want to go to the war my- nation’s first overseas imperialist adventure disputed talent, he encountered rejection self,” he wrote in a letter from Vienna. reads like a retrospective of the Vietnam from fearful editors, and at the peak of “And I should do it, too, if it were not for War or the promised “cakewalk” in Iraq. his popularity, he dared the scorn of both the danger.” We had, he said, “got into a mess, a quag- press and public. He was, not surprisingly, But he believed his country — or, more mire from which each fresh step renders the as contemptuous of the gatekeepers of ac- precisely, his government — had gone difficulty of extraction immensely greater.” ceptable opinion and lions of the “fourth astray, both morally and geographically, While he deplored the slaughter going estate” as many Americans are today. “The when it used the war over Cuba as the oc- on in the name of civilization, “uplift,” awful power, the public opinion of a na- casion for also taking the Philippines from and, especially, Christianity, Twain had tion,” he wrote, “is created in America by a the Spanish colonists and then denying the particular contempt for “the water cure,” hoard of ignorant, self-complacent simple- Filipinos their promised independence. a method of “enhanced interrogation” we tons who failed at ditching and shoemak- Benevolent American rule would “uplift now know as waterboarding. The purpose, ing and fetched up journalism on their way and civilize and Christianize” the poor na- then as now, was to get the subject to re- to the poorhouse.” tives, a pious President McKinley declared. veal information his captors believed he Twain submitted his now-famous “War In fact, most of the “little brown brothers” was withholding. Prayer” for publication in 1905, but its McKinley wished to “Christianize” were “To make them confess — what?” Twain graphic description of the realities of war Catholics. And the Filipinos, with ideas of thundered in an argument strikingly similar made it, in the judgment of Harper’s Ba- their own about liberty and independence, to one often heard today. “Truth? Or lies? zaar editor Elizabeth Jordan, unsuitable revolted against their new overlords. Dur- How can one know which it is they are tell- for publication in that genteel journal. It ing the war that followed, Twain bitterly ing? For under unendurable pain a man was eventually published posthumously in denounced America’s “land-stealing and confesses anything that is required of him, 1923 in what Ron Powers, author of Mark liberty-crucifying crusade.” true or false, and his evidence is worthless.” Twain: A Life , describes as a “bowdlerized

34 THE NEW AMERICAN • JANUAR y 10, 2011 form.” Little was heard of it from then until our public schools. “In the the Vietnam War era, when, Powers noted, first place God made idi- At its most humorous, his wit always had “war protestors read it aloud in coffee- ots,” he surmised. “That was house protests and mailed it around to one for practice. Then he made some bite to it, as when he proclaimed another.” It has since taken on new life in school boards.” George Washington “ignorant of the cyberspace as antiwar bloggers have cir- “He is very much in the culated it through the Internet. (“The War same position as myself,” commonest accomplishments of youth. Prayer” is reprinted on page 38.) wrote British playwright He could not even lie.” George Bernard Shaw. “He Creating Wonder With Wit has to put matters in such a Wit, observed G.K. Chesterton, “is a sword; way as to make people who would other- a premature obituary, noting, “Reports it is meant to make people feel the point as wise hang him believe he is joking.” Few of my death are greatly exaggerated.” well as see it. All honest people saw the would have thought Twain joking, and Perhaps by happenstance, perhaps by de- point of Mark Twain’s wit. Not a few dis- some might have wished to hang him, if sign, we have allowed the humor to over- honest people felt it.” But it was not just they had read his plain-spoken complaint, shadow and soften the sharp edge of his the dishonest or the dull-witted that Twain included in the new Autobiography , that social criticism. Twain became “Colonel skewered with his satirical swift sword. He “our people have no ideals now that are Sanders without the chicken, the avuncu- claimed that most men, himself included, worthy of consideration; that our Christi- lar man who told stories,” Powers told the are moral cowards, and he found it ironic anity which we have always been so proud New York Times in an interview in 2010. that the virtues of freedom were most often of — not to say vain of — is now noth- “He’s been scrubbed and sanitized, and his and most loudly praised by those who least ing but a shell, a sham, a hypocrisy; that passion has been kind of forgotten in all favor their exercise. An unconventional we have lost our ancient sympathy with these long decades. But here (in the previ- Presbyterian, Twain was not above paying oppressed peoples struggling for life and ously unpublished works) he is talking to a left-handed compliment to God in order liberty; that when we are not coldly indif- us, without any filtering at all, and what to castigate both the timidity and the intol- ferent to such things we sneer at them, and comes through that we have lost is pre- erance of his countrymen. that the sneer is about the only expression cisely this fierce, unceasing passion.” “It is by the goodness of God,” he the newspapers and the nation deal in with Hal Holbrook, who began his one-man wrote, “that in our country we have those regard to such things.” show Mark Twain Tonight! in 1956, has three unspeakably precious things: free- The author of such passages might seem been unearthing various levels of Twain’s dom of speech, freedom of conscience a different fellow altogether from the hu- wit and unique storytelling talents for and the prudence never to practice either morist who responded good-naturedly to more than half a century. In an article in- of them.” Scorn and ridicule are cluded in The Mark Twain An- not always adequate to silence thology , Holbrook wrote that it unwelcome opinion, he ac- was during an historic battle over knowledged, but they are often school integration in 1957 that the only weapons available. he began to incorporate Twain’s “If the man doe sn’t believe political and social commentary as we do, we say he is a crank into his shows. and that settles it,” he wrote in “Until then I had been trying Following the Equator. “I mean to put together a funny show, it does nowadays, because now born in a nightclub,” the actor we can’t burn him.” recalled. “But when President At its most humorous, his Eisenhower called out the troops wit always had some bite to it, to put down the racial explosion as when he proclaimed George at Central High School in Little Washington “ignorant of the Rock, Mark Twain’s social con- commonest accomplishments science began to cast its shadow of youth. He could not even lie.” over me.” As it happened, he was The low esteem in which the scheduled to do his show near American public now holds the Little Rock shortly after the riots Congress of the United States occurred. “I did not yet have ma- would surely not have surprised terial in my repertoire that spe- Twain, who surmised there was cifically commented on racial in- “no distinctively American crim- justice,” Holbrook wrote. “All I inal class except for Congress.” had was the Sherburn-Boggs se- Nor would the present-day con- lection from Huckleberry Finn , cern over the shortcomings of which ends with Colonel Sher- www.TheNewAmerican.com Harper’s magazine published many writings of Mark Twain. 35 HHISTORYISTORY — PAST AND PE RSP ECTIV E

Not all the Americans fighting the Fili- pinos were as eager to carry on the war as some of the politicians, preachers, and journalists back home. “I am not afraid and am always ready to do my duty,” said a sergeant in the First Nebraska regiment, “but I would like someone to tell me what we are fighting for.” But some seemed to glory in the blood and guts and gore of the battlefield. In his 1962 biography, Mark Dwight Eisenhower Twain, The Man and His Work , Edward shakes hands with “Mark Twain,” New York actor Wagenknecht quoted a letter from a sol- Hal Holbrook, at the White dier to his mother, published in an Iowa House Correspondents newspaper: “We never left one alive,” he Association dinner on Oct. wrote. “If any one was wounded we would 12, 1959. run our bayonets right through him.” The AP Images Anti-Imperialist League published a num- ber of letters from soldiers in the Philip- burn’s blistering speech to the mob that the hideous carnage and the fearful blow pines, including one from a volunteer from has come to lynch him. Although a white to civic progress must be hazarded in order the state of Washington, who wrote: “This man is speaking to a white mob, Mark to vindicate humanity and righteousness?” shooting of human beings is a ‘hot game’ Twain is making a thinly veiled statement Even as outspoken and frequently harsh and beats rabbit hunting all to pieces.” about the Ku Klux Klan. The portrait of a critic of the Philippines war as Senator Against such unbridled zeal for the sudden violence in the shooting of Boggs, George Hoar, a Massachusetts Republican, bloodied glory of war, the Nation’s warn- of ignorance and the mob mentality that referred to it at one point as “a policy of ing of “a fearful blow to civic progress” sweeps people along was eerily appro- ruffianism,” a phrase more apt to describe a was of little avail. Even the magazine’s ref- priate to this modern-day crisis in Little fistfight in a schoolyard. erence to “all the hideous carnage” merely Rock, and Twain’s setting did happen to be Defenders of the “ruffianism” countered hints at the hideous nature of the carnage. a town in Arkansas. So that was the selec- with charges of disloyalty or even trea- Twain’s “War Prayer” goes a good deal tion I chose to deliver.” son, accusing opponents of undermining further with words that all but bleed from Holbrook later worked into his routine the mission and endangering the lives of the page, describing bodies torn to “bloody what Twain called the “Silent Lie” of re- “our boys” overseas. “Their work cost the shreds,” guns drowning out the “shrieks of maining quiet in the face of grave injustice. lives of hundreds of American soldiers — the wounded,” and widows and orphans When he did his show in Prague, Holbrook stabbed in the back as they stood out there wandering from their war-wrecked homes, recalled, two brave souls applauded the on the firing line, by their own countrymen,” the white snow “stained with the blood of line about how “whole nations of people charged Fred C. Chamberlin, author of The their wounded feet.” conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies” Blow From Behind (1903). “All up and It’s not a description of war we are that serve only “tyrannies and shams.” The down this great country the Anti-Imperial- likely to hear on either broadcast or cable same line drew applause in Hamburg, Ger- ists made speeches of sympathy for the men TV news or read about in our daily papers. many, in 1961 and in Oxford, Mississippi, who were shooting at our own soldiers.” Nor are we likely to see a scene Twain on October 9, 1962, during the riots over The fact that our own soldiers had been wrote for a pageant called “The Stupen- the admission of African-American James sent on a mission to conquer and subju- dous Procession,” with the 20th century Meredith to the University of Mississippi. gate a people in their own land seemed portrayed as “a fair young creature, drunk to neither enter the thoughts nor cool the and disorderly, borne in the arms of Satan,” Words That Bleed ardor of those who, like Senator Albert Be- and Christendom “a majestic matron in Twain’s “War Prayer” and other polemic veridge of Indiana, saw the hand of God flowing robes drenched with blood.” On essays of the 1900s are “the Rosetta Stone leading the Stars and Stripes westward her head was “a golden crown of thorns, of dissent from American imperialist folly,” o’er the great Pacific. It was the same impaled on its spine the bleeding hearts wrote Powers. There were, to be sure, other hand seen by Congregationalist minister of patriots who died for their country — voices raised against that imperialist march, Josiah Strong, who proclaimed the mis- Boers, Boxers, Filipinos; in one hand a both within and outside the Anti-Imperialist sion of Anglo-Saxons to carry the bless- slingshot in the other a Bible, open at the League. But many of them spoke in such ings of civilization to inferior races. James text — ‘Do unto others,’ etc.” starched-collar, schoolmistress tones that M. King, a Methodist minister in New There are, after all, milder, antiseptic they proved poor kindling to fire the co n- York, said unequivocally: “God is using ways to talk about war, and we have sure- science of a nation. “Have we a course of the Anglo-Saxon to conquer the world for ly heard them all. As the humorist Blount war so clear, so loftily imperative,” asked Christ by dispossessing feeble races, and concluded, “Old Mark, unvarnished, might the weekly journal Nation in 1899, “that all assimilating and molding others.” be too hot for cable, even today.” n

36 THE NEW AMERICAN • JANUAR y 10, 2011 HHISTORYISTORY — PAST AND PE RSP ECTIV E The War Prayer

Mark Twain was famous for his satirical treatment of serious topics, and his treatment of war was no exception.

This short story by Mark Twain was published posthumously in 1923.

by Mark Twain

t was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of pa- I triotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balco- nies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot ora- tory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears run- ning down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way. Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the sur- render! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

38 AP Images THE NEW AMERICAN • JANUAR y 10, 2011 Then came the “long” prayer. None could cations, the spoken and remember the like of it for passionate the unspoken. Ponder pleading and moving and beautiful lan- this — keep it in mind. “O Lord our God, help us to tear their guage. The burden of its supplication If you would beseech a soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; was, that an ever-merciful and benignant blessing upon yourself, Father of us all would watch over our beware! lest without in- help us to cover their smiling fields with noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, tent you invoke a curse the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us and encourage them in their patriotic upon a neighbor at the work; bless them, shield them in the day same time. If you pray to drown the thunder of the guns with the of battle and the hour of peril, bear them for the blessing of rain shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.” in His mighty hand, make them strong upon your crop which and confident, invincible in the bloody needs it, by that act you onset; help them to crush the foe, grant are possibly praying for a curse upon of winter, broken in spirit, worn with tra- to them and to their flag and country im- some neighbor’s crop which may not vail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the perishable honor and glory — need rain and can be injured by it. grave and denied it — for our sakes who An aged stranger entered and moved “You have heard your servant’s prayer adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight with slow and noiseless step up the main — the uttered part of it. I am commis- their lives, protract their bitter pilgrim- aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his sioned of God to put into words the other age, make heavy their steps, water their long body clothed in a robe that reached part of it — that part which the pastor — way with their tears, stain the white snow to his feet, his head bare, his white hair and also you in your hearts — fervently with the blood of their wounded feet! We descending in a frothy cataract to his prayed silently. And ignorantly and un- ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally thinkingly? God grant that it was so! You the Source of Love, and Who is the ever- pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all heard these words: ‘Grant us the victory, faithful refuge and friend of all that are eyes following him and wondering, he O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The sore beset and seek His aid with humble made his silent way; without pausing, whole of the uttered prayer is compact and contrite hearts. Amen. he ascended to the preacher’s side and into those pregnant words. Elaborations (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if stood there waiting. With shut lids the were not necessary. When you have ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of preacher, unconscious of his presence, prayed for victory you have prayed for the Most High waits!” continued with his moving prayer, and at many unmentioned results which follow It was believed afterward that the man last finished it with the words, uttered in victory — must follow it, cannot help was a lunatic, because there was no sense fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of in what he said. n the victory, O Lord our God, Father and God fell also the unspoken part of Protector of our land and flag!” the prayer. He commandeth me to The stranger touched his arm, mo- put it into words. Listen! tioned him to step aside — which the “O Lord our Father, our young startled minister did — and took his patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth place. During some moments he surveyed to battle — be Thou near them! the spellbound audience with solemn With them — in spirit — we also eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; go forth from the sweet peace of our then in a deep voice he said: beloved firesides to smite the foe. O “I come from the Throne — bearing a Lord our God, help us to tear their message from Almighty God!” The words soldiers to bloody shreds with our smote the house with a shock; if the strang- shells; help us to cover their smil- er perceived it he gave no attention. “He ing fields with the pale forms of has heard the prayer of His servant your their patriot dead; help us to drown shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be the thunder of the guns with the your desire after I, His messenger, shall shrieks of their wounded, writhing have explained to you its import — that in pain; help us to lay waste their is to say, its full import. For it is like unto humble homes with a hurricane of many of the prayers of men, in that it asks fire; help us to wring the hearts of for more than he who utters it is aware of their unoffending widows with un- — except he pause and think. availing grief; help us to turn them “God’s servant and yours has prayed his out roofless with little children to prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? wander unfriended the wastes of Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one ut- their desolated land in rags and tered, the other not. Both have reached hunger and thirst, sports of the sun the ear of Him Who heareth all suppli- flames of summer and the icy winds www.TheNewAmerican.com 39