Teddy Roosevelt on Twain – “I wish I could skin Mark Twain alive.”
Twain on Roosevelt – “We
have had no President before who was destitute of self-respect for his high
office. We have had no President before who was not a gentleman; we have had no
President before who was intended for a butcher, a dive-keeper or a bully... Our people have adored this showy charlatan as perhaps no impostor of his brood has been adored since the Golden Calf, so it is to be expected that the Nation will want him back again after he is done hunting other wild animals heroically in Africa, with the safeguard and advertising equipment of a park of artillery and a brass band.”
Occasionally, columnists back up against a thorny subject
much in the way an innocent traveler in the woods backs up against a porcupine.
The collision is often painful for both the porcupine and the columnist.
Although the deathless struggle between Twain and TR has
been known for more than a century, it is rarely mentioned in print. Twain scholars
know that Twain and TR were natural enemies on the matter of American imperialism, TR favoring the civilizing benefits of imperialism, always good
for the native population and American businesses on the hunt for overseas
markets, and Twain opposing it – strenuously.
TR’s animal spirits were aroused by “killing things,” as his
political opponents said, and the notion that the American idea should extend
beyond its Monroe Doctrine borders to Hawaii, during Twain’s time, still an
island paradise controlled by the native population, Cuba and the Philippines,
both part of the far-flung Spanish empire, and wherever else three prominent
American expansionists --Teddy Roosevelt, whose ambitions for personal glory
knew no bounds, Willian Randolph Hearst, a pro-imperialist newspaper owner, and
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, TR’s comrade in
arms and a shaker and mover in the US Congress -- thought the United States should extend its
reach in the world.
Twain was still in Europe when a diffident President William
McKinley, largely at the urging of pro-imperialist, civilizing forces in the
United States, ordered the U.S. Navy into Cuba, there to support rebel groups
agitating for democracy and freedom from Spanish rule. We all recall Hearst’s
war-woop: “Remember the Maine; To Hell With Spain.”
The Maine went down in Havana Harbor, a sinking likely caused,
it was revealed seventy years after the event, by an internal fire that had
ignited explosives aboard the war ship. At the time, Hearst, dollar signs
always in his eyes, happily circulated the notion that the Maine had been sunk
by the Spanish and said so in many lurid and sensational stories printed in his
paper. Roosevelt went off as a colonel to command a regiment in Cuba and later
stormed San Juan Hill with his “Rough Riders.” The Philippians, Guam especially,
was set free of the Spanish navy. America’s imperial outreach was intended to Christianize
and civilize savage nations, open markets to U.S. goods and announce brashly to the world that,
in an era of colonializing powers, the United States had come of age. The
imperialists had the stage pretty much to themselves, and then Twain, who at
first supported the Cuban adventure because he thought it might help a nation
struggling against a colonial power to attain independence, returned home –
with a pen dipped in the fires of Hell.
TR found that San Juan Hill was easier to storm than Twain
who, to his last breath, insisted as a matter of principle, along with John
Adams, that while the United States is a friend to democracy everywhere, it is the
custodian only of its own.
The Twain-TR struggle continues today under different battle
flags. The presence of a resurgent Islam in modern times has changed the
calculus somewhat. Among other things, a resurgent Islam is intent upon 1) sweeping
western influence – religious, cultural and legal -- including democracy, from
its own sphere of influence, 2) restoring a sphere of influence it held for roughly for 15,000 years as an imperial power, and 3) bringing all other
faiths and social orders under Islam at the point of a sword. The contest
between a resurgent Islam and a West that has internally surrendered to a
superior spiritual force – demographics show that Islam will out-produce the
West in the only product that really matters, children, in the not too distant
future – places before those of us in the United States who believe Twain got
the better of the argument over TR the age old questions: Without a more than
equal countervailing force, how does the West preserve itself from destruction? Can there be a difference between imperialism and intervention? And has there ever been in the history of the world a non-imperialist nation whose mission is the preservation and extension of western civilization?
Comments