Born on November 30, 1835, Samuel Clemens grew up in a very different America that we all know and love. In Clemens' America, slavery was the norm in the south. Preachers even explained that not only was it OK, but they preached that God supported the slaveholders and wanted them to own slaves. Growing up in Missouri, it was even illegal to read the Bible or the Declaration of Independence to any slave.
Throughout Clemens childhood, he grew up listening to the storytelling of slaves at his uncle's farm. All his life, Clemens would emulate this storytelling and satire he had learned and incorporated it into some of the greatest works of American Literature as Mark Twain.
Even though Twain grew up accepting slavery, and was indifferent during the Civil War, later in life he began to change his views on the subject becoming supporter of abolition, the Emancipation, and anti-racism. In the mid 1860's, while Twain was working as a reporter in San Francisco, he witnessed a mob attack a Chinese man as several amused policemen watched on. Twain wrote his account of the incident, but his publisher would not publish it, afraid that readers shared the prejudices of those policemen. At that point, Twain tried a new strategy. He decided to use satire to express his views against racism and prejudice. He sent those satirical essays to newspapers in other states and to a national magazine.
In his 1869 essay, Only a Nigger, Twain uses satire to recount a mob-led lynching of a black man, later found to be innocent. He wrote, “What are the lives of a few "niggers" in comparison with the preservation of the impetuous instincts of a proud and fiery race! Keep ready in the halter, therefore, oh chivalry of Memphis! Keep the lash knotted; keep the brand and the faggots in waiting, for prompt work with the next "nigger" who may be suspected of any damnable crime! Wreak a swift vengeance upon him, for the satisfaction of noble impulses that imitate knightly hearts, and then have time and accidentally to discover, if they will, whether he was guilty or no.”
In an essay called The United States of Lyncherdom, he expressed his disgust in lynchings that had taken place in his home state of Missouri. In trying to understand why lynchings were becoming more popular in the south, Twain wrote, “It must be that the increase comes of the inborn human instinct to imitate--that and man's commonest weakness, his aversion to being unpleasantly conspicuous, pointed at, shunned, as being on the unpopular side. Its other name is Moral Cowardice, and is the commanding feature of the make-up of 9,999 men in the 10,000...Why does a crowd of the same kind of people in Texas, Colorado, Indiana, stand by, smitten to the heart and miserable, and by ostentatious outward signs pretend to enjoy a lynching? Why does it lift no hand or voice in protest? Only because it would be unpopular to do it, I think; each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval--a thing which, to the general run of the race, is more dreaded than wounds and death.” Twain wrote that we needed more people in this country who are brave enough to stand up and do what is right, even if it is the unpopular thing to do, “Where shall these brave men be found? That is indeed a difficulty; there are not three hundred of them in the earth.”
Aside from his writing, Mark Twain was also the Vice President and one of the founders of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines. Defending his stance on the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote, “I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”
In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying, “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
His prediction proved to be accurate – Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
In 1910, Twain referred to Freemasonry as "the grip and the word that lift a man up and make him glad to be alive." He was a member of Polar Star Lodge #79 in Missouri. He was entered on May 22, passed on June 12, and raised on July 10, 1861.
“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
- Mark Twain
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