The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism
608
The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism
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Overview
And just as the narrative details the wisdom, and the occasional missteps, of two great men during a tumultuous time, it also penetrates the seat of power in Washington as the nation strove to make itself known internationally--and in the process committed acts antithetical to America’s professed ideals and promises.
The country’s most significant move in this time was to go to war with Spain and to eventually wrest control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In what has to be viewed as one of the most shameful periods in American political history, Filipinos who believed they had been promised independence were instead told they were incapable of self-government and then violently subdued in a war that featured torture and execution of native soldiers and civilians. The United States also used its growing military and political might to grab the entirety of the Hawaiian Islands and a large section of Panama.
As secretary of state during this time, Hay, though a charitable man, was nonetheless complicit in these misdeeds. Clemens, a staunch critic of his country’s imperialistic actions, was forced by his own financial and family needs to temper his remarks. Nearing the end of their long and remarkable lives, both men found themselves struggling to maintain their personal integrity while remaining celebrated and esteemed public figures.
Written with a keen eye--Mark Zwonitzer is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker--and informed by the author’s deep understanding of the patterns of history, The Statesman and the Storyteller has the compelling pace of a novel, the epic sweep of historical writing at its best, and, in capturing the essence of the lives of Hay and Twain, the humanity and nuance of masterful biography.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781616205980 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2016 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 608 |
| Sales rank: | 912,937 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Making a Way in the World
As the Warrimoo steamed into open sea on August 23, 1895, churning out toward the setting sun, a lone man in a dark suit leaned over the deck rail, pulling hard on his cheap cigar, feeling every lurch and spasm of the wounded ship in his own body. The old man's lively gray eyes, hooded by a wild and windblown thatch of gray hair, scanned the flock of birds off the port side of the ship. He noted the natural ease of those brown seabirds — a kind of albatross, he figured them — riding the soft, forgiving currents of Pacific air. He had been watching them for hours, mesmerized by the improbability of their flight, tracking the lazy beat of their wing tips as they hovered just beyond reach of the waves, negotiating every rise and depression, every swell and crash, without thought or worry, untouched by what roiled beneath them. Meanwhile the tiniest pitch or yaw of the boat reverberated up through the marine-varnished planking and into his person. He had never found it easy to get the hang of a new ship, and in the few hours since the Warrimoo had sailed from the port at Vancouver Island, bound for Sydney by way of Honolulu, he had felt most every roll, felt it as sure as he felt the hot pinch at his swollen ankle, and the scratch of cheap serge against the gaping wound in his thigh, and the searing in his lungs that shortened every breath he took. Focusing his attention on the flight of those birds was his best hope for distraction, but his own discomfort bade his attention, and so, too, did the memory of the previous night's picture show.
His mind struck him as a machine that worked independently of his will; it had long ago adopted the habit of performing its most vigorous manufacturing while he slept. For as long as Samuel Langhorne Clemens could remember, his dream head had produced hyperreal running frames of scenery and narrative, rich in color, fine grained, and capable of physical effect both sharp and lingering. No waking effort had ever matched his sleep eye's conjuring. He had, for instance, resigned himself to the enervating fact that during his many long separations from his wife he had never been able to consciously bring to mind the particulars of her face. His dream machine, however, had perfected the art of reproducing Livy in fluid, lifelike motion, and the next morning he had always felt as if she had truly been there, with him.
But the thought of last night's moving images offered no comfort, his subconscious projector having spooled out one of its recurrent nightmarish set pieces in which he found himself alone on a stage, in front of an eager and expectant audience who meant to be entertained by "Mark Twain." He had stood there, as he always did in this dream, paralyzed, unprepared, without a notion of where to begin, clothed in nothing but his night garments — and not one of the long, flowing nightshirts that his servant girl Katy Leary had been making for him for the past fifteen years (the ones with the splendid red piping down the front), but a ragged, short shirt of older vintage, from his days of penury, the kind that exposed altogether too much. Thinking of that nightmare made him shiver.
A goddamned torment was what it was, this overactive subbrain of his, because it had a penchant for — no, a delight in — poking at him until it had riled his deepest insecurities. Sam Clemens was just three months shy of his sixtieth birthday, at an age where a respectable man would have put behind him the hard labor of life and packed the larder for generations to come, would have lifted his wife, his children, his unknown grandchildren, beyond the reach of financial worry. And here he was, a sick old man with a trunk full of fraying suits and scuffed brogans, more than a hundred thousand dollars in debt (to people who had trusted him), and he could think of no way to raise the funds to pay them back but to circle the entire godless globe — along the path of greatest circumference, no less — in search of folks who would part with a little money if he promised to amuse them.
He had worked up a talk that answered his side of the bargain. He was advertising it as the "Morals Lecture," and a little more than a month out and twenty-four performances into "Mark Twain's world tour," he was still sanding the roughest patches and inviting his listeners in on the process. "I would start with two or three rules of moral principles which I want to impress upon those people," he had told his earliest groups of auditors. "I will just make the lecture gradual, by and by. The illustrations are the most important, so that when the lecture is by and by written and completed, it will just be a waveless ocean with this archipelago of smiling green islands of illustrations in the midst of it." But he knew those "smiling green islands" for what they really were: a collection of hoary tales — "My First Theft," "Tom Sawyer's Crusade," "The Jumping Frog" — that played to every paying customer's expectation of what "Mark Twain" ought to sound like. All across the western United States and into Canada, Clemens's traveling entourage — Livy, his tour manager, and his daughter Clara — had pronounced the audiences well satisfied. "As to satisfying myself," Clemens had written his closest confidant, Henry Rogers, "that is quite another matter."
After almost thirty years plying his singular stagecraft, Clemens could handle most any crowd, could discern in a flash the subtle shadings of climate and mood. A full house was the easiest, once he got it started, laughter being contagious. But Clemens had also, and of necessity, mastered the art of playing to a small and spotty audience; he knew how to keep clear of the jagged shoals that lurked on the dark periphery of that sort of crowd, for if a talker got flummoxed or fumbled away his best material, he was sure to run himself out of the swift channel of sympathy and into snags of contempt. "And contempt," he had told a group of newspapermen not long before he boarded the Warrimoo, "is fatal."
As he stood silent and alone on deck that evening, Clemens knew well enough that the simple certainty that people would gather to his call forcing upon him the duty to perform for the scores (or maybe even hundreds!) of separate crowds that awaited him in the coming year could not fully account for his dark dread or the slow-sinking feeling in his empty stomach. (He rarely had an appetite for anything but cigars these days.) What gnawed at him was his awareness that he needed those audiences much more desperately than they needed him.
Livy Clemens didn't fully appreciate her husband's conundrum, but their daughter Clara, an aspiring performer herself — she got it. Clara had made a long study of her father on the stage and off. She was the only person in the family who could do a dead-on impersonation of his dinner talk: the slow drawl, the cavernous pauses, the incorporation of any prop available. "Papa always seems to be having a quarrel with his piece of bread," she explained. Clara was not possessed of expert timing, but she had inherited some of her father's wit, and all of his intense powers of observation. At twenty-one, she was the only one of the Clemens daughters with their father's hard-eyed view of the world.
Clara did not allow romance to cloud her vision, and consequently she didn't miss much. She had endured a thousand innings of her father's private rages against the lecture business, could recite every blasphemous word of them by heart. But after keeping a particularly close vigil on him in the previous month, Clara had come to understand the allure of the stage and why he could not give it up, why he insisted, against all advice, on rising from his sickbed to make the next date. She had come to understand her father's need to connect with his audience, to tap its energy. When it happened, she would always remember, "his cheeks and eyes glowed with color that resembled tinted sparks."
* * *
Sam Clemens understood everything about himself that Clara did — and then some. He was nothing if not self-aware, mainly because he had built his life and his fame by depending entirely and exclusively on that self. He was self-made, self-propelled, self-promoted. He had never sought and never known the luxury of patronage; the entirety of his inheritance was between his own ears. The Civil War, back in '61, had cost him the only steady employment he had ever had up to that point, and the certainty of a life career with it. After fleeing west to avoid the fight, he had failed as an aide in Nevada's territorial legislature, as a miner, as a newspaper reporter who kept strictly to facts, and as a stockjobber. His ambition to preach the Gospel had been tempered by his tendency toward profanity and drunkenness — "could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade — i.e. religion." The best he had going for him was his natural ability "to excite the laughter of God's poor creatures," he explained to his brother Orion. "It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit." And once Sam Clemens had decided his course — he would talk and write his way out of poverty! — he had fought and scratched for everything he could get.
When Bret Harte got the jump on Clemens as the coming humorist from the West, Clemens stalked him with his nom de plume "Mark Twain" in tow, a meager dusting of celebrity that attended the nationwide publication of his "Jumping Frog" story, and blood in his eye. "I mean to go up ahead again & stay there," he told Orion five years into the back-and-forth scrap with Harte. That this particular contest was pretty far down on the undercard of American literary bouts did not diminish Clemens's ardor. "I will 'top' Bret Harte again or bust."
And hadn't he put Harte in the dust? Part of the reason, he knew, was native ability; but part was simple endurance and drive — the privilege of being able to sit all day at his writing desk and outwit the oily, insincere, heartless reprobate. But that wasn't the whole story of his thrashing of Bret Harte. Clemens had intuited early in his career that superior product and superior character would not be enough to secure the purse in postwar America. He had sold himself, and hard.
From the moment he landed on the East Coast in the late 1860s, Clemens had assiduously cultivated good feelings (and good press!) for "Mark Twain." It had been his joy as well as his mission to make fast friends and spread his own special brand of cheer among New York's young newspapermen, who gathered almost every evening in a loosely formed society of, as one of the young literati called it, "high aspirations and peregrinations." These were men on the move, and at a pace. The group picked up a new train of aspiring or visiting artistes as it made its way through New York nightlife. Harte fell in with them the minute he arrived in town, of course, as did the poet Edmund Clarence Stedman, and William Dean Howells, who was annoyingly quick to exhibit the Bostonian priggishness he had picked up in his adopted hometown, and Clarence King, who was fashioning his western experiences on the federally sponsored geological surveys into grand scientific theory and literary gems. America's best Shakespearean actor, Edwin Booth, stumped along at the rear of the procession some nights, though he generally took a pass on following the younger men in leapfrogging the ash cans that lined the sidewalks.
The club was, withal, unflinchingly democratic. The only necessity for membership was some sort of genius or the possibility of its later flowering. A man could rise as high as his talents took him. John Hay, a westerner who had entered adulthood, like Sam Clemens, with Mississippi mud caked on his trousers and had already made his first fame as one of two private secretaries to President Abraham Lincoln, was remembered as the "high priest of the revels." But among the nominal leaders of the gang was Whitelaw Reid, a tall, stiff-backed Ohioan with a forehead like a billboard and ambition to match. Reid was a newspaperman of a new stripe, which is to say high toned and apparently, if not actually, scholarly. But what put him at the front was the open secret — Whitelaw was not shy to tell it — that the imperious old Horace Greeley was grooming him for ascension to the editorship of the silken mouthpiece of the National Republican Party, the unquestioned choice of dailies among the nation's men of means, the New York Tribune. Hay, who worked under Reid as an editorial writer and assistant editor in those days, had a habit of poking fun at Greeley (behind his back) and his "Great Moral Organ." The GMO, Hay called the Tribune.
Reid, on his way up, was willing to favor his friends, so when the first full-length "Mark Twain" book was ready for sale, its author was not shy to push for a little publicity in the venerated newspaper. "To-day my new book [Innocents Abroad] will be sent to the Tribune," he alerted Whitelaw, " — & this is to ask you if you won't get your reviewer to praise the bad passages & feeble places in it for me. They are the only ones I am worrying about, you know — the meritorious parts can get along themselves, of course." And Reid did help. "The greater part of his book is pure fun," the Tribune offered in its notice, "and ... the freshness is wonderfully well sustained."
Whatever Innocents' merits, and they were not small as far as Clemens was concerned, it was the book's stunning sales — wasn't it running second to the Bible for a time? — that provided "Mark Twain" entrée to the places where an ambitious young man had to be. Even that crusty old bastard Greeley had to invite Sam Clemens to his sixty-first birthday celebration in 1872, which dropped the new author into a scrum of the nation's most accomplished attention seekers — a decidedly upscale scrum. Senators, diplomats, judges, publishers, and other distinguished guests had arrived at the host's New York City brownstone at such a steady clip that chill winter evening that the doorman froze in an attitude of utter despair and simply gave up his attempt to make formal announcement of the various personages.
Almost a quarter century later, Clemens could still recall his own entrance, an hour late, when he swept into the crowded house with a contingent from New England and spotted across the room that blatherskite Bret Harte holding forth.
By the time Clemens got shed of his hat and coat, he was way behind. John Hay was already working the room, luring new admirers among the swells. Here was a man to be reckoned with in Clemens's judgment — the pride of Warsaw (né Spunky Point), Illinois, a poet who had sounded the vernacular of the boatmen and pioneers of the Mississippi Valley, and a multilingual raconteur whose tales of recent diplomatic service at the exalted courts of Europe were deliciously racy: about the empress of a certain Continental power, he would confide, "She has a wonderful power over senile envoys. She kept [American minister] Dix and keeps [his successor] Washburne in chronic priapism."
As early as 1870, Hay could provide a bracing commentary on the tilt of the table of European politics. The Spanish were shredding what honor remained to them, offering to sell island possessions like Cuba at a discount and choking down insults with nary a whimper. "They retain the speech of Don Quixote, but the heart and stomach are Sancho's." The Prussians stood ready to whet their martial blade fighting Spain's battles. The German kaiser was bewildered by the insolent march toward democracy of his peasantry. "France still lies in her comatose slumber," Hay would say, " — but she talks in her sleep and murmurs the 'Marseillaise.'"
Hay's finest parlor talk had that rarest of virtues: it was first hand. He had seen behind the gilt-threaded tapestries into the wormy rot of Europe's despotic monarchs. Napoleon III, emperor of the French, "moves with a queer, side-long gait, like a crab," Hay would recall when telling of his own presentation at the court of Versailles. The story would become a long, detailed remembrance of Versailles's outer salons, lined by footmen of "portentous calf development," and of the monarch- bedazzled sycophants arrayed about the throne in all their uniform and colorful inner-sanctum resplendence. Hay would lead his listeners toward a slowly building climax, when the emperor finally turned his dull gaze toward him, a poorly dressed factotum in the lowly American legation, the royal mouth a-twitch beneath his mustache: "You can imagine it a sort of wooden clock preparing to strike."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Statesman and the Storyteller"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Mark Zwonitzer.
Excerpted by permission of ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue,
ONE Making a Way in the World,
TWO A Bad-Luck Habit,
THREE With Friends Like These,
FOUR Right and Kind towards the Others,
FIVE Something More Than Nothingness,
SIX Still at Sea,
SEVEN Accepting the Inevitable, or Not,
EIGHT Easing Burdens,
NINE Bluff, Brutal, Blunt,
TEN The Town Begins to Grow Abominable,
ELEVEN Theodore Beats the Drums,
TWELVE I Will Do without the Monument,
THIRTEEN A Panorama of Power Unequaled in History,
FOURTEEN The Warm Afterglow of a Diamond Jubilee,
FIFTEEN Repose and Restfulness and Superb Scenery,
SIXTEEN Smoke and Fog,
SEVENTEEN Proportionately Delightful,
EIGHTEEN The Demands of His Conscience,
NINETEEN No Back Down,
TWENTY You May Fire When You Are Ready,
TWENTY-ONE What Is Our Next Duty?,
TWENTY-TWO You Hold the Game in Your Own Hands,
TWENTY-THREE A Larger Orbe Than My Ambition Doth Stretch Unto,
TWENTY-FOUR As Becomes a Great Nation,
TWENTY-FIVE The United States Is God's Country,
TWENTY-SIX Planned and Designed by the Master of Men,
TWENTY-SEVEN Back into the Great Happy River of Life,
TWENTY-EIGHT I Have Never Felt So Absolutely Alone,
TWENTY-NINE Winter and Discontent,
THIRTY Daaaaaam-nation!,
THIRTY-ONE Et Tu, Theodore?,
THIRTY-TWO And Just beyond the Philippines ...,
THIRTY-THREE How Much Truth to Tell?,
THIRTY-FOUR I'm Expecting a Diminution of My Bread and Butter,
THIRTY-FIVE The Sorrow of One Who Knows,
THIRTY-SIX No Answers but in Time,
THIRTY-SEVEN The Prophet Samuel ... Banished,
THIRTY-EIGHT And Look Where We Are Now,
THIRTY-NINE I Could Not Resign Now if I Wanted To,
FORTY I Pledge You My Honor,
FORTY-ONE She Said She Wanted a Home,
FORTY-TWO Without Danger to the Public Health,
FORTY-THREE From the Political Point of View,
FORTY-FOUR It Takes So Little to Upset the Regular Action of the Heart,
FORTY-FIVE I Didn't Wish to Be Useful to the World on Such Expensive Conditions,
Acknowledgments,
A Note on Methods and Sources,
Bibliography,
Index,
About the Author,
About Algonquin,
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