All the News Unfit to Print

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS DID NOT CHANGE THE NAME HE affixed to his newspaper articles, and to the rest of his life, to Mark Twain because of General Joseph “Fightin’ Joe” Hooker. No one really knows why he did it. But in creating a new identity for himself, Twain was in a sense formalizing a lie, and would eventually be one of the great American advocates of deception, producing it for newspapers long before he turned out his wondrously inventive fiction in books.

But there was a kind of deception Twain did not advocate. It was the kind perpetrated by governments, such as the government of the United States in carrying out what he thought to be the heartless dictates of Manifest Destiny, adding territory to the country regardless of the wishes of the people who lived in that territory. Nor did he care for the deception of the Confederate government in trying to defend the indefensible institution of slavery. He was troubled by the deception of dictatorships overseas and unfeeling corporate interests at home. “When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams,” he said late in his life, “why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals? Why should we try to make it appear that abstention from lying is a virtue? . . . Why should we without shame help the nation lie, and then be ashamed to do a little lying on our own account? Why shouldn’t we be honest and honourable, and lie every time we get a chance?” The questions undoubtedly represent some of Twain’s most deeply held feelings. They also provide the footholds for a lifetime of falsehoods.

Twain claimed that he could not recall his first lie; he had been too young at the time. His second lie, however, he remembered “very well. I was nine days old at the time, and had noticed that if a pin was sticking in me and I advertised it in the usual fashion, I was lovingly petted and coddled and pitied in a most agreeable way and got a ration between meals besides.” He continued, harkening back to his ninth day: “It was human nature to want to get these riches, and I fell. I lied about the pin—advertising one when there wasn’t any.” And he went on lying—one supposes he is telling the truth here—about one thing or another all the way through childhood.

But he didn’t stop there. He was still lying in his early days as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in Nevada, where his first duty was to report on local news, the kind of local news that doesn’t even interest people in the locality: comings, goings, shipments of new merchandise arriving in stores, engagements, weddings, births that people already know about, deaths they have already mourned.

Twain grew bored quickly. Not yet mature enough to write about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, he decided instead to give free reign to his immaturity. In October 1862, less than thirty years old and still known as Sam Clemens, mustachioed and with bushy hair, although not yet white, his eyes sometimes twinkling, sometimes narrowed in something close to malice, he wrote a story for the Territorial Enterprise about the discovery of a “Petrified Man”:

Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect, not even excepting the left leg, which had evidently been a wooden one during the lifetime of the owner—which lifetime, by the way, came to a close about a century ago, in the opinion of a savan [sic] who has examined the defunct. The body was in a sitting position . . . ; the attitude was pensive, the right thumb resting against the side of the nose; the left thumb partially supported the chin, the forefinger pressing the inner corner of the left eye and drawing it partly open.

Clemens went on to say that this “strange freak of nature created a sensation in the vicinity,” and several people volunteered to remove him and bury him. A Judge Sowell, however, refused to allow the bones to be taken away, fearing that to disturb them would be to damage them. “The opinion expressed by his Honor . . . was eminently just and proper,” Clemens stated. “Everybody goes to see the stone man, as many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.”

To Twain biographer Justin Kaplan, the tone was obviously that of a hoax, the excess of detail giving away the ruse. Historian Peter Charles Hoffer has written that “for a lie to work—for it to fool us—it must wear the mask of truth.” In this case, Kaplan believed, it did.

Most people who read the article, however, thought just the opposite, finding that the detail provided the ring of authenticity. Nobody could make up the right thumb against the side of the nose. Nobody could make up the left thumb supporting the chin. The story was reprinted by other papers in Nevada, as well as some in California, and people wrote to the Territorial Enterprise demanding to know the exact location of the petrified man so they could pay a visit. How long would it take to get there? Did one have to pay a fee to see him?

The responses forced Clemens to explain that he had only been kidding, and the nature of the piece was such that most readers enjoyed it once they knew it had been meant for their entertainment, not their enlightenment. But there is an important distinction here; Clemens was explaining, not apologizing. More than likely he was bemused by the readers who were foolish enough to believe so exaggerated and unlikely an account.

This was, after all, the Old West. Tall tales, both written and spoken, were one of the primary forms of amusement: one fellow telling another that he knew of a man who could put a choke-hold on two bears at the same time and when he was done with them they would scamper back into the woods whimpering; the listener responding that he knew of a man who could whip a whole regiment of soldiers single-handed, without even using a weapon. And then the first storyteller seeing the second one and raising him, exaggeration topping exaggeration until the pot was so full of blarney it could hold no more. Sometimes listeners copied down the tall tales for later retelling. Sometimes they just made a point of remembering. And so the stories spread and lived on, and Clemens must have hoped the same would happen to the petrified man, which had already been committed to the relatively long life of print.

Further evidence of Clemens’s lack of contrition is that he wrote another fake story for the Territorial Enterprise six months later, this one about “five Indians [being] smothered to death in a tunnel back of Gold Hill.” And then, six months after that, yet another hoax, this one causing much more of an uproar than either of its predecessors.

The mining business was the most important industry in the West in those days. It was what drew the majority of settlers to that part of the country, as well as most of the businesses, which were set up to provide the miners with goods and services. The boom had started in earnest with the California gold rush of 1849, which itself proved to be the source of a number of hoaxes. “The whole country,” read one of the first reports, in a newspaper called the Alta California, “from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the seashore to the base of the Sierra Nevada, resounds to the sordid cry of gold! Gold!! GOLD!!!” The paper went on to lament that “the field is left half planted, the home half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes.” It was, to say the least, a false lamentation. The last paragraph in the Alta California’s story notified its readers that it was going out of business for a while. Its entire staff was heading for the mines.

That particular article was not a hoax. But so many people gave up their previous lives to search for precious ore that after a few years there wasn’t nearly enough gold left to make the trip west worthwhile for them. Yet in the East, papers continued to publish accounts of riches in the mines. And sometimes the papers reported that it wasn’t even necessary to dig them out; you could just pick up pieces of gold from the ground or pluck them out of a stream.

In many cases, the papers knew nothing whatsoever about conditions in the so-called gold country. The stories they printed did not come from correspondents in gold country but from swindlers in cities like New York and Boston, who paid the papers to have their stories run—more bribery. The con men wanted to encourage a continued migration toward the Pacific so they could sell the gold-seekers transportation, lodging, supplies, and perhaps even land on which, the swindlers assured their marks, there was gold galore, just waiting to be removed and toted off to the assayer’s office. The newspapers, well compensated for their lack of integrity, collaborated in the fraud without reservation. What they did not do was publish stories about the families without number who had headed to California, lost their nest eggs within a few weeks, and were now begging either for a job or a means to return to the homes from which they had departed so recently and hopefully.

In one type of scam, speculators would buy a worthless mine and “salt” it, in other words, scatter gold dust on the floor and walls, in the hope of attracting investors who believed there was more wealth to be found once they started hacking away with picks. In other cases, speculators, through means too complicated to explain here, would appeal to their potential clients by creating false dividends to make the mines seem more profitable than they really were.

The speculators were Clemens’s target—although not, it seems, clearly so—in one of the first and vilest pieces he wrote under his new name, “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson”:

It seems that during the past six months a man named P. Hopkins, Philip Hopkins, has been residing with his family in the old log house at the edge of the great pine forest which lies between Empire City and Dutch Nick’s. The family consisted of nine children—five girls and four boys. . . . About ten o’clock on Monday evening Hopkins dashed into Carson on horseback, with his throat cut from ear to ear, and bearing in his hand a reeking scalp from which the warm, smoking blood was still dripping, and fell in a dying condition in front of the Magnolia saloon. Hopkins expired in the course of five minutes, without speaking. The long red hair of the scalp he bore marked it as that of Mrs. Hopkins. A number of citizens, headed by Sheriff Gasherie, mounted at once and rode to the Hopkins house.

Particularly important to the story, though not nearly as riveting as the preceding, was Twain’s description of Hopkins’s employment before he committed his dastardly crime: “He had been a heavy owner in the best mines of Virginia [Nevada] and Gold Hill, but when the San Francisco papers exposed the game of cooking dividends in order to bolster up our stocks he grew afraid and sold out, and invested an immense amount in the Spring Valley Water Company of San Francisco.”

Soon, however, the dividends were cooked on his new property as well, the water drying up and the investment worth nothing. “It is presumed,” Twain says, “that this misfortune drove him mad and resulted in his killing himself and the greater portion of his family.”

None of it ever happened—not the scalping, not the throat cutting, not the dividend cooking. Not in this particular case. It was simply Twain’s way of calling attention to the practices of real-life crooks like the imaginary Philip Hopkins. Once again, he admitted the truth promptly. This time, though, at least at first, it did little good, as “a storm of denunciation raged about him, from editors and readers who had been taken in by the hoax. Rival newspapers denounced that fountain of lies the Enterprise and that lunatic Mark Twain.” Friends told him he had gone too far; even strangers approached him on the street and asked him how he could make up a tale so grisly in its details. Why not simply describe the practices of real-life speculators? Why cut Hopkins’s throat? Twain’s bosses thought about firing him; he thought they had a point and considered resigning.

But the storm died down almost as quickly as it had arisen. After all, Ben Franklin and several others over the years had published hoaxes in newspapers for the purpose of giving their opinions on important issues, and Twain believed that the plague of speculation in gold mines was precisely that, a disease that ate away at the financial health of decent, hardworking Americans. And, he said, the more dramatically he made the point, the more likely people would be to remember it.

As had been the case previously, Twain was not apologetic. Like a lot of humorists since, he had an edginess to him, a deep-seated pessimism. He did not think much of his fellow human beings on the whole, or most of their institutions. “To find a petrified man,” he said several years later, “or break a stranger’s leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick’s, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil ENTERPRISE office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction in those days.” He was pleased to have had a role in making it so.

A few years later, having moved to New York, Twain turned the office of the Buffalo Express into a ghastly place of a different kind. This time it was not a hoax that he perpetrated, but a corrupt and complete dismissal of the truth. And he did it not to make a point for society’s benefit, but to try to solidify his personal gain.

It all had to do with the price of coal, which was so high around Buffalo at the time that consumers formed a citizens’ cooperative to try to fight the coal companies. It was the companies, not the marketplace, that had set the prices, having formed a cartel whose sole purpose was to squeeze every last penny of profit out of people in desperate need of their product. Today, such actions would be illegal. In fact, once Theodore Roosevelt got to the White House they would be illegal through most of the twentieth century. But this was the nineteenth, and capitalism was all too often unbridled.

For some time, the position of the Buffalo Express was, as it should have been, in favor of the citizens’ cooperative. Twain’s position was the same; he had in earlier days blasted monopolistic practices in private industry, and this was monopoly at its most corrupt. But after a while, he received a promotion and became the editor of the paper’s editorial page—and all of a sudden, with no explanation to anyone, he took the opposite view. In that moment, the man of the people became the man of the cartel. Those who knew him and knew what he had long stood for, including his superiors at the Express, were aghast.

Jervis Langdon was one of Buffalo’s richest citizens. Among his many sources of income was a coal company that he had purchased well after having amassed a fortune in lumber. Langdon has been described as a “stout, good-looking man of medium height [who] carried his achievements lightly. Unlike his daughter, he had a sense of humor. As a host, he was generous and hospitable.” As a coal baron, however, he was as grasping and uncaring as the rest of them. Pay up or freeze was his motto—if never overtly stated. For Twain to take his side was, on the surface of it, unthinkable, a form of mental illness.

Yet one day in 1870 Twain published and prominently displayed a letter from John Slee, Langdon’s sales manager, placing it next to an editorial Twain had lifted from the New York Evening Post. Both pieces defended the cartel. They insisted that it was not, as charged, manipulating prices; the high price of coal was the result of “unreasonable demands” by consumers. It was also the result of a miners’ strike some months earlier, which had adversely affected production and forced the companies to raise their rates.

Langdon, who because of his prominence had become the face of the opposition, was mentioned several times by both articles and vigorously exonerated. “Although he is wealthy and a member of a corporation,” Twain wrote in the Buffalo Express, “he has a soul of his own and his liberality is not confined to the city in which he resides.” It is true that during this period Langdon donated fifty tons of coal to the Buffalo General Hospital, but that is the only example of a soul of his own that he demonstrated during the entire strike.

The two articles provided a comprehensive, if totally unconvincing, defense of the cartel. What they did not do, however, what the Express never did—not until the day after the nuptials, that is—was mention the marriage plans of Olivia Langdon, Jervis’s daughter, the one with no sense of humor. As it happened, she was engaged to one of the town’s leading journalists, the editorial page editor of the Buffalo Express, Mark Twain, he of the most prominent sense of humor, who was afraid that to take issue with his future father-in-law would cost him his bride. And so to all being fair in love and war, he added for his own selfish interests, and the gross disservice of his readers, all being fair in journalism as well. This was not a humorist with the cheery nature of his successor, Will Rogers.

Twain might have been the leading practitioner of the hoax in nineteenth-century newspapers, but he was not responsible for the grandest of them, the one that foreshadowed the more extreme hoaxes of the future, the stories that would captivate millions of grocery shoppers midway through the twentieth century, in supermarket tabloids. That distinction goes to the New York Sun, which, in 1835, the year Twain was born, presented one of several whoppers it would print over the period of the next few years. What it published, in fact, was an epic: a six-part series on the discovery of men, or some kind of similar creatures, on the moon. The series claimed that a new telescope, the most powerful ever invented, had recently been erected in Africa at the Cape of Good Hope and had allowed scientists to see living beings that

averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy and copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly on their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh color, was of a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expansion of forehead.

Those who wanted to believe the series were free to do so, and they reacted with awe. Those who did not believe it derived their own enjoyment from the articles, laughing at both their excesses and the gullibility of those who thought they were reading the truth. Edgar Allan Poe, among others, was a fan of such writing in general and the series about the moon in particular. “From the epoch of the hoax,” he wrote, “the Sun shone with unmitigated splendor.”

Almost a decade later, Poe, now a newspaper reporter himself, wrote about some men who crossed the Atlantic in a balloon in just three days. It was “ASTOUNDING NEWS,” declared the New York Sun’s headline, and Poe picked it up from there:

The great problem is at length solved. The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by Science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has actually been crossed in a Balloon; and this too without difficulty—without any great apparent danger—with thorough control of the machine—and in the incredibly brief period of Seventy-five hours from shore to shore!

The eastern half of the United States was not terribly civilized when the New York Sun was making up the news. The English writer Frances Trollope, mother of the even more distinguished writer Anthony, was visiting America in 1828 and decided to take a steamboat trip in Ohio. She found her seat, made herself comfortable, and then looked down at the carpet. It was covered with the dried spit of tobacco juice. She tried to muffle a shriek and then said, “Let no one who wishes to receive agreeable impressions of American manners, commence their travels in a Mississippi steamboat; for myself it is with all sincerity that I declare, that I would infinitely prefer sharing the apartment of a party of well-conditioned pigs to the being confined in its cabin.”

The most famous English writer of the century, Charles Dickens, came to America in the early 1840s. Ironically, he and some friends were riding in a carriage along Broadway in New York City and were astonished to see pigs sharing the street with them, occasionally so many of the animals that the carriage had to stop to allow them to pass.

Like Trollope, Dickens too was appalled by tobacco chewers. They spit indiscriminately, sometimes onto their own shoes, sometimes into their own beards. In rare instances, women would also chew and spit, the muddy brown substance landing on their boots or the hems of their dresses. Neither gender seemed to mind.

The other side of the Mississippi was no more civilized a few decades later when Twain was making up the news. Pigs were not the only animals that roamed and relieved themselves freely in the streets of the West, nor were they the only threat to safe and sanitary living. Lawlessness was rampant, drunkenness even more common, violence a daily occurrence, and salubrious living conditions of interest to virtually no one, especially those men who stumbled out of saloons and urinated and defecated in the streets.

The press could not help but be as untamed as the society on which it reported. There was little respect for niceties, and truth is a nicety. There was little reverence toward institutions, either civil or sacred, and accuracy is a form of reverence. There was little regard for restraint, and a man who is afraid to wiggle a fact or two is not really a man at all. It is also fair to say that newspapers, although not new in America, were new enough so that they had not yet established the tradition of integrity upon which they pride themselves, if often abuse, today.

“Therefore,” said Mark Twain, who deserves the final word on this subject, “the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously . . . to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.”