American Minute with Bill Federer
Mark Twain,
Innocence Abroad
, his visit to the Middle East & his views on life
|
|
"Mark Twain"
a river measurement meaning 12-feet-deep, was the pen name of
Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
who born November 30, 1835.
Growing up on the Mississippi,
Clemens
left school at age 12 when his father died.
|
|
He became a printer's apprentice, then piloted steamboats till
the War between the States
suspended river traffic.
|
|
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
joined the Confederates, but after two weeks obtained a discharge to work for his brother Orion, who was secretary to
Nevada's Governor.
|
|
After an attempt at mining,
Clemens
became a reporter in
Virginia City, Nevada,
using the name
"Mark Twain"
for the first time.
|
|
His first popular story was
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,"
written in 1865 while he was in San Francisco.
|
|
He moved to California, and in 1866,
Mark Twain
sailed as a reporter for the
Sacramento Union
to the
Sandwich Islands (Hawaii).
|
|
In 1867, a newspaper funded
Mark Twain's
voyage to the
Mediterranean,
which he recorded in his book,
Innocents Abroad,
1869.
|
|
While on this trip,
Twain
saw the picture of his friend's sister,
Olivia Langdon
of Elmira, New York, and he fell in love.
Immediately upon his return, he met and married
Olivia.
|
|
Innocents Abroad
established
Twain's
reputation as a writer.
In it, he described
Syria
under the
Ottoman Turkish Empire:
|
|
"Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet's children and at ... the mausoleum of the
five thousand Christians who were massacred
in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks.
They say those
narrow streets ran blood for several days,
and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the
Christian quarter;
they say, further, that the stench was dreadful.
|
|
... All the
Christians
who could get away fled from the city, and the
Mohammedans
would not defile their hands by burying the 'infidel dogs.'
... The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon,
|
|
and in a short time
twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred
and their possessions laid waste ..."
|
|
Twain
added:
"How they hate a
Christian
in Damascus! -- and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.
And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again!
It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved for a thousand years ..."
|
|
Twain
continued:
"It hurts my vanity to see these pagans refuse to eat of food that has been cooked for us; or to eat from a dish we have eaten from; or to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our
Christian
lips, except by filtering the water through a rag which they put over the mouth of it or through a sponge! ...
These degraded Turks and Arabs ... When Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere."
|
|
Twain
wrote in
Innocents Abroad,
chapter 42:
"If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire.
I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell."
|
|
Mark Twain
wrote in
Innocents Abroad,
chapter 56:
"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.
Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies ... about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch."
|
|
In
Innocents Abroad,
chapter 53,
Twain
described the condition of
Jerusalem
under Ottoman Muslim rule:
"Palestine is desolate and unlovely ... Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound ...
Jerusalem
is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here ...
|
|
... The Moslems watch the Golden Gate with a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition that when it falls, Islamism will fall and with it the Ottoman Empire.
It did not grieve me any to notice that the old gate was getting a little shaky."
|
|
Twain
wrote in
Innocents Abroad,
chapter 56:
"Renowned
Jerusalem
itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur ... the wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone,
and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on
that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the Holy Cross."
|
|
Mark Twain
wrote the best-selling books:
- Tom Sawyer (1876);
- Prince and the Pauper (1882);
- Life on the Mississippi (1883);
- Huckleberry Finn (1884);
- Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889); and
- Joan of Arc (1896).
|
|
Of his reverent portrayal of Joan of Arc,
Twain
stated in 1908:
"I like
Joan of Arc
best of all my books, it is the best."
|
|
Mark Twain
started a publishing business, but it failed.
He paid off his debts by lecturing across America and England.
While in London, May of 1897, a rumor circulated that he had died.
Mark Twain
quipped to a reporter for the New York Journal, Frank Marshall White, May 31, 1897:
"The report of my death was an exaggeration."
|
|
Twain
persuaded former
President Ulysses S. Grant
to write his Civil War memoirs, which, after Grant's death, provided support for his widow, Julia Grant.
|
|
He met
Harriet Beecher Stowe
and
Frederick Douglass.
|
|
Twain
wrote to President-elect James Garfield requesting a favor, that
Frederick Douglass
be kept on as
Marshal of the District of Columbia:
"I offer this petition with peculiar pleasure and strong desire, because I so honor this man's high and blemishless character and so admire his brave, long crusade for the liberties and elevation of his race.
He is a personal friend of mine, but that is nothing to the point; his history would move me to say these things without that, and I feel them too."
|
|
Twain
personally supported
African American students,
and in 1906, co-chaired a major fundraising effort for
Booker T. Washington
and
Tuskegee University.
His admiration of gospel music led him to support
Fisk University Jubilee singers
in their efforts to raise money to keep the school open.
He was vice-president of the American Chapter of the
Congo Reform Association.
|
|
Twain
was friends with
Nikola Tesla
and spent time in his science laboratory.
|
|
Thomas Edison
visited
Twain
at his home in Redding, Connecticut, in 1909, and even filmed him.
|
|
Twain
was awarded an honorary doctorate from
Oxford University
in 1907.
|
|
Mark Twain
wrote:
- "When in doubt, tell the truth";
- "Always do right. That will gratify some of the people, and astonish the rest";
- "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it";
- "Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century."
|
|
Twain's
religious views fluctuated:
from being sarcastically irreligious, ridiculing organized religion;
to declaring "the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws";
to raising money to help build a Presbyterian Church and stating "the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works."
|
|
His daughter Clara related:
"Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond."
Answering Bible skeptics,
Mark Twain
said:
"If the Ten Commandments were not written by Moses, then they were written by another fellow of the same name."
|
|
Mark Twain
stated in 1909:
"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.'"
|
|
The day after
Halley's Comet
made its
nearest approach
to the Earth,
Mark Twain
died April 21, 1910.
His funeral was in New York's "Old Brick" Presbyterian Church.
Twain
stated:
"Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do ... Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
|
|
Of the Bible,
Twain
wrote in
Innocents Abroad,
1869:
"It is hard to make a choice of the most beautiful passage in a book which is so gemmed with beautiful passages as
the Bible;
but it is certain that not many things within its lids may take rank above the exquisite
story of Joseph.
Who taught those ancient writers their simplicity of language, their felicity of expression, their pathos, and above all, their faculty of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader and making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself?
Shakespeare is always present when one reads his book; Macaulay is present when we follow the march of his stately sentences; but the Old Testament writers are hidden from view."
|
|
In
Innocents Abroad, chapter 47,
Mark Twain
gave a further description of
the land of Israel:
"We dismounted on those shores which the feet of
the Saviour
had made holy ground ...
We left Capernaum behind us. It was only a shapeless ruin. It bore no semblance to a town. But, all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground.
From it sprang that tree of Christianity
whose broad arms overshadow so many distant lands today.
Christ
visited his old home at Nazareth, and saw His brothers Joses, Judas, James, and Simon ...
|
|
... Who wonders what passed in their minds when they saw this brother (who was only a brother to them, however He might be to others a mysterious stranger; who was a
God,
and had stood face to face with
God
above the clouds) doing miracles, with crowds of astonished people for witnesses? ...
One of the most astonishing things that has yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which
sprang the new flourishing plant of Christianity.
|
|
... The longest journey
our Saviour
ever performed was from here to
Jerusalem
- about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles ...
Leaving out two or three short journeys,
He spent His life, preaching His Gospel,
and
performing His miracles,
within a compass no larger than an ordinary county of the United States."
|
|
Mark Twain
wrote in
Innocents Abroad,
1869:
"In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens, and is
a theatre meet for great events;
meet for
the birth of a religion able to save the world."
|
|
Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
[email protected]
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|