January 8 Monday – At 21 Fifth Ave., N.Y. Sam wrote to Thomas S. Barbour resigning from the Congo Reform Assoc.

I have retired from the Congo.

I was not able to do it until this morning. For several weeks I have been trying to get back to where I started, something more than a year ago, when I told Mr. Morel I would write an article on the Congo & stop there. That I would not tie myself to any movement of any kind, nor be officially connected with a movement of any kind, in a way which would lay duties & obligations upon me; for I know myself, & I knew that the moment I should begin to feel my perfect freedom menaced, I would immediately tear myself loose & be free.

What have I been doing? Dreaming? Walking in my sleep? It looks so. I wake up & find myself tacitly committed to journeys, & speeches, & soon—perfectly appaling activities. To do those things would infallibly lay further burdens upon me, & presently I should find myself tangled up in the Congo matter, permanently, exclusively, & beyond hope of honorable escape. It freezes the blood in my veins to think of it. These energies, these persistences, are entirely out of my line & foreign to my make. My instincts & interests are merely literary, they rise no higher; & I scatter from one interest to another, lingering nowhere. I am not a bee, I am a lightning-bug.

I shall not make a second step in the Congo matter, because that would compel a third, in spite of me—& a fourth, & a fifth, & so on. I mean, a deliberate second step; what I may do upon sudden impulse is another matter—they are out of my control. If I had Morel’s splendid equipment of energy, brains, diligence, concentration, persistence—but I haven’t; he is a ’mobile, I am a wheelbarrow [MTP].

Notes: Edmund Dene Morel (originally Georges Eduard Pierre Achille Morel de Ville – he may have changed his name to get his signature to fit on a check) (1873-1924) was one of the three founders of the English Congo Reform Association; see Mar. 23, 1904 entry. As with the Anti-Imperialist League, Sam had no problem allowing the use of his name, but did not wish ongoing responsibilities.

Hawkins writes of Sam’s various motivations for resigning from the Congo Reform Assoc:

Twain’s reasons for abandoning the movement after more than a year of activity were numerous. In his Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan suggests that Twain’s devotion to Congo reform was limited by fear of offending his audience and risking another financial failure: “By 1905 his celebrity had become addictive and had begun to blunt his purpose as a public conscience” [366]. But while Twain was certainly shaken by his bankruptcy twelve years earlier, no evidence indicates that has withdrawal from the Congo movement turned on such narrow concerns. Twain did have some personal reasons for quitting, but, to his credit, they did not include anxiety over his popularity and income. Acting overzealously, the leaders of the C.R.A., who saw the beloved author as their best instrument for influencing public opinion, began putting inordinate demands on his time. …

Another, less personal, consideration finally sealed his resignation. At the beginning of 1906, the reform movement was making discouragingly little progress. Despite reformers’ pleas, the United States government refused to intervene in the Congo. Throughout his involvement, Twain had believed the United States was a party to the Berlin Act of 1885 and therefore had a legal obligation to supervise Congo rule. In January, 1906, the State Department told him he was mistaken; the United States Senate had never ratified the Berlin Act. Twain consequently got angry with the reformers, whom he believed had misinformed him, and he abruptly decided that no basis for a reform movement existed in the United States [149-150].

Sam also wrote to Seymour Eaton.

I have rec’d the circular of the Booklovers Corporation, making its time-worn appeal for the cash of gulls, in the time-worn fashion. I am sorry to see this; I have been persuading myself that you would reform—partially reform, I mean; partially—for I have never known, in the case of any petty thief, of a reform that covered the whole ground, after he had once gotten habituated to the feel of the coin in another man’s pocket. Come, you can partially reform if you’ll try. Remember what the apostle says: to wit, that while the lamp holds out to burn, the meanest swindler may return.

Yours with faint faint hope— [MTP].

Sam also wrote to Booker T. Washington.

“That suits me exactly: I will choose my subject to suit myself; & shall probably choose it that night, (22 ) on the platform. Therefore, if any one asks you what it is going to be, you can answer with truth that you don’t know & that I don’t know” [MTP].

Sam dined with Alice M. Ditson (Mrs. Charles H. Ditson) and went to a performance of Tosca [Hill 123; IVL TS 4]. Note: The NY Times advertised the Tosca performance at the Metropolitan Opera House at 8 p.m., starring Emma Eames, Caruso, Scotti, Rossi, and Dufriche [Jan. 8, p.14].

Isabel Lyon’s journal:

All day a rush and a swoop of work, letters and telephoning. This evening Mr. Clemens dined with Mrs. Ditson and her Boston friend, a delightful woman, “looks just as if she’d stepped out of the New Testament and hadn’t got used to her surroundings yet.” When he came home he slipped up to Jean’s room where we were chatting and told us how he had left the opera where they went after dinner—Tosca—and found Dr. Quintard in the lobby, who said that C.C. returns from Norfolk tomorrow. I know he had a good time even if he doesn’t like opera, for he came in with his eyes as shining and lovely and merry as they were the night he came home from the Players with the Japanese frog hanging from his button hole. Mother and I went to Cecchina’s tonight [a restaurant nearby] [MTP TS 7].

George S. Ferguson wrote from Glasgow, Scotland to Sam, asking why Clemens used the name “Ferguson” for various guides in IA —“a good old historic Scottish name…” He had read in the newspapers about his 70 party and offered his congratulations [MTP].

Frederick D. Grant wrote from Army Headquarters on Governor’s Island, NY to introduce his friend, Harry Windsor Dearborn to Sam. Dearborn and Grant were interested in building a monument to Robert Fulton [MTP].

Notes: Lyon wrote on the letter: “Mr. Clemens saw Mr. Dearborn & consented to become a director of the Fulton Monument Organization.” Inside she wrote: “Mr. Clemens went to a meeting at the Waldorf on Jan. 17 . / Feb. 12 Mr Clemens & I were in the drawing room at the Gelli portrait when the door bell rang—I suggested he might like to escape, but as he attempted to flit from the room on tip toe the alertness of Philip had opened the door too soon—Mr. Dearborn came in laughing at the way he caught Mr. Clemens in flight.”

Hugh P. McCormick for the Congo Reform Assoc. wrote to Sam [MTP]. Note: not found at MTP.

January 8 ca. – At 21 Fifth Ave., N.Y. Sam wrote again to Thomas S. Barbour. A draft fragment survives. Sam asks, “What to do with the pamphlet?”, his essay “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” that the Congo Reform Assoc. had printed. Sam thought the American branch of the Assoc. should “go out of business for the reason that the agitation of butcheries can only wring people’s hearts unavailingly…unbacked by the American government.” [MTP]. Note: Sam’s recent appeal to Theodore Roosevelt evidently did not bring fruit.

January 8 after – At 21 Fifth Ave., N.Y. Sam wrote to Edmund Dene Morel thanking him for a map sent and enclosed a copy of his recent letter to Thomas S. Barbour, who he felt worked “hard & well” but alone for the Congo Reform Assoc. in America but had no help. “He cannot land this giant enterprise by himself. It needs an organization like U. S. Steel” [MTP].