“I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President,” Mark Twain wrote in an 1879 article that was syndicated in newspapers nationwide.1 A satiric piece by the nation’s preeminent humorist, it constituted the entirety of his “contemplated” presidential bid. In contrast to the reaction that followed the similarly satiric candidacy of John Donkey in 1848, neither the press nor politicians responded to Twain’s comic bid for the White House with comments or jokes of their own—raising the question Why? Other aspects, too, of Twain’s brief feint at becoming a candidate raise questions that yield insights.
Significant in its own right, Twain’s “candidacy” broke new ground that cleared the way for humorists such as Will Rogers in 1928 and comedians ranging from Gracie Allen in 1940, Pat Paulsen in 1968, Stephen Colbert in 2008, and others taking their acts to the presidential stage. Just as we’ll see how each of these comic candidates provides separate insights into the shape of the nation in those eras, Twain provides us with a window through which we are able to detect subtleties in the political landscape in his day.
Given the rise in recent times of negative ads attacking rival candidates, many may be surprised to know such attacks were the target of Twain’s 1879 satire. “What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history, so that enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before,” he wrote in his syndicated newspaper article. Twain then announced, “I am going to own up in advance . . . and if any Congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, let it prowl.”
And own up he did, as only Twain, one of nineteenth-century America’s masters of fiction, could. Among the skeletons in his closet to which he “confessed” were these:
I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. . . . I was scared. I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. . . .
My financial views . . . do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get. . . .
I also admit that I am not a friend of the poor man. I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. . . . My campaign will be: “Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages.”
Running away from battle at Gettysburg? What made Twain think that would get a laugh, particularly back then, from either Northerners or Southerners? Therein, however, is a key that explains the political mud being slung at the time (and, as told by David Mark in Going Dirty, all the way back to nastiness and “alternative facts” being hurled by the Founding Fathers).
In the presidential campaign that preceded Twain’s piece, the Republicans’ nominee, former Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, squared off against the Democrats’ candidate, former New York governor Samuel J. Tilden. Among the accusations leveled against Tilden was that he avoided service in the Civil War other than lip service.2 Also satirized in Twain’s essay were accusations that Tilden’s fundamental financial view was to take any kind of money he could get. He was accused of tax evasion and a variety of fraudulent financial transactions, along with perjury during investigations into those accusations.3
Nor was Hayes exempt in that 1876 contest. He too was accused of shameful behavior during the Civil War—in his case, holding money for safekeeping on behalf of a soldier under his command, then keeping the money after the soldier died in battle and subsequently lying about it.4 Hayes too was accused of graft, in his case accepting congressional back pay to which he was not entitled.5 And while not accused of planning to turn workingmen into sausages, Hayes was accused of planning to deprive them of enough money for bread in order to benefit their wealthy (usually Republican) factory owners.6
In short, the jokes were keyed to current events. Still, Twain’s brief foray into the upcoming presidential contest provides further insight by virtue of being so brief. Twain could have taken the political bull by the horns and run with it, especially as he was immensely successful on stage in what would later be called stand-up comedy. Why didn’t he? Since we cannot climb inside Twain’s mind, we can only speculate, then see if those speculations add further dimensions to the issues he skewered.
Had Twain turned his newspaper piece into material he could take on tour, what had been a laugh would have become a satiric campaign. Similarly, had politicians or the press reacted with comments or jokes of their own, they too would have turned comedy into crusade. But the issue of political mud-slinging was not likely to get a lot of traction or laughs during the upcoming 1880 campaign since the 1876 election had ended up hurling more than mud—democracy itself got hurled. Tilden won more than 50 percent of the votes and a plurality of the votes in the Electoral College. After a series of backroom deals, however, Hayes emerged as the winner. Thus negative campaigning was not at the top of America’s agenda in the upcoming contest between the highly respected and incorruptible general, Winfield Scott Hancock (named after but not related to the previously eminent general) and a former general turned semi-corruptible congressman from Ohio named James Garfield.7
Moreover even a comic campaign against negative campaigning ran the risk of losing laughs to the extent that accusations such as those in the previous election turned out to be true. In the case of the winner, Hayes had in fact played fast and loose with one thousand dollars entrusted to him by a soldier named Nelson J. LeRoy. And as president, Hayes indeed turned out to be no friend to the workingman, dispatching the U.S. Army to suppress a nationwide railroad strike that ensued after repeated reductions in wages.
That Hayes oversaw policies that benefited wealthy Americans provides what may be the primary reason Twain refrained from taking this material to the stage. He was among those wealthy Americans. While Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn made Twain and his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, famous, he now lived in a grand home in tony Hartford, Connecticut. Moreover he himself had campaigned for Hayes.8
Twain may also have wondered how many laughs he could get from his predominantly well-to-do audiences, for whom things were going so swimmingly but so clearly at the expense of others. The signature “achievement” of the Hayes administration was ending Reconstruction by removing the troops that had remained in the South to enforce compliance with federal laws. Not only was the military subsequently used to battle striking workers; its departure from the South enabled the denial of rights and often deadly persecution of African Americans.
Maybe best to get the laugh and leave it at that.
Whether or not that thought was in Twain’s mind, the fact that he did not take his mock campaign essay and turn it into an act amplifies for us today the complexities the nation faced at that time.
Twenty years later Twain made another gag about seeking the presidency. Returning from a world tour of five years, he arrived less than a month before the 1900 presidential election—a rematch between Republican William McKinley, the incumbent president, and the Democrats’ charismatic orator, former Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan. Asked upon his arrival which candidate he supported, Twain replied that he was undecided and also uncertain if he was still a registered voter. “If I find that I cannot vote,” he then quipped, “I shall run for President. A patriotic American must do something around election time.”9
That was all there was to that. A quip unattached to any issue. Twain, in fact, made a point of detaching it from the issues of the day, preceding his candidacy gag by telling the reporters gathered at the pier, “Don’t ask political questions, for all I know about them is from English papers.”10 Times had changed, and Twain knew better than to set foot on what, after his long absence, was an uncertain stage.
While Twain had been abroad, President McKinley and his new running mate in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, had recently led the charge into the Spanish-American War. Even if the charges were fictitious, the United States wrested from Spain its possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. To keep or not to keep was the question of the day. In addition McKinley signed into law the annexation of Hawaii, whose queen had been overthrown in a revolution for “democracy,” spearheaded by Americans backed by the presence of the U.S. Marines. Many Americans strongly opposed the nation becoming kin with Europe’s far-flung empires. Others, McKinley and Roosevelt included, viewed such expansion as necessary for security in a transforming world.
Twain knew of this shifting shape in American views, and he experienced it within himself, telling reporters, “I think that I am an anti-imperialist. I was not, though, until some time ago, for when I first heard of the acquisition of the present Pacific possessions I thought it was a good thing for a country like America to release those people from a bondage of suffering and oppression that had lasted 200 years.”11
Traveling around the world for the past five years, however, Twain had seen lands under foreign rule, including Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), India, South Africa, and Tasmania (now part of Australia). Revealed by the tentativeness in this second candidacy gag is Twain’s awareness that imperialism may not be a laughing matter. Indeed this brief feint at candidacy revealed how the United States had changed in relation to the world but also how the world had changed Mark Twain.