January 11 Friday – Sam’s notebook: “Boudinat Keith 3 or 4 Carnegie Hall” [NB 44 TS 3].

Note: Boudinot Keith (1859-1925) was a law partner and “leader in several reform movements” with John Brooks Leavitt, a foe of Tammany Hall, and a great-nephew of Elias Boudinot, president of the United States Congress at the close of the Revolutionary War. Keith married Dora Wheeler, daughter of Candace Thurber Wheeler, both of whom Sam was well acquainted with (see prior entries). Dora did a portrait of Clemens that hung in the Mark Twain Memorial Home in Hartford at the time of her death [NY Times Dec. 28, 1940, p. 19].

The New York Times, p. 8 ran an article by Moncure D. Conway, in reaction to Sam’s City Club remarks of Jan. 4 (in part):

MARK TWAIN, LITERATURE AND WAR.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

Mark Twain’s speech at the City Club dinner should bring to him the homage Of his confreres if only for it’s outspokenness. For myself, regarding the so-called war in Manila as an effort to lynch the humble Washingtons and Hancocks of that region I hail Mark Twain’s utterance as a sursum corda to the intellectual leaders and public teachers of America. The summons is needed. The cause of peace has certainly declined during the past fifty years. The authors who gave America its literary fame in the middle of the past century— Emerson, Longfellow, Sparks, Hawthorne, Bryant, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Motley, to name only some— were celebrants of peace. …

….

I did not hear Mark Twain’s speech and have had no opportunity to ask him if he was accurately reported but I have no doubt that he declared that a flag stained with brave and innocent blood is “polluted.” I have these many years recognized that Mark Twain’s humor is apt to feather a serious arrow, and I venture to predict that the indignant patriots who are demanding his explanations will not have long to wait. The nation has already heard the protests of some of its finest intellects among them Howells and Charles Norton, and it may be now hoped that the bugle call of Samuel Clemens will be the signal for an uprising of intellectual forces in America similar to that which in France has just laid low the militarist dragon and plucked the spoil out of its teeth.

….

MONCURE D. CONWAY.

New York, Jan. 7, 1901.