October 20 Sunday – In N.Y.C. Sam wrote on “Order of Acorns” letterhead to Joseph Johnson, Jr.

“Dear Mr. Johnson: / I forgot to say don’t do anything with the article without first giving me a chance to read the proof” [MTP].

Note: Joseph Johnson, Jr. was the president (“Great Oak”) of the Order of Acorns, sort of a political action group that supported Seth Low (1850-1916) for N.Y.C. mayor. Sam would accompany Johnson and speak on Oct. 29 with Low. See entry. Low was a leading reformer in the Progressive movement; Mayor of Brooklyn (1881-1885), President of Columbia University (1890-1901), Mayor of New York (1902-1903).

Budd writes of Sam’s involvement with the anti-Tammany Hall forces, including the Order of Acorns which supported Seth Low for Mayor and other Fusion ticket candidates:

After a Fusion ticket got rolling, Twain loudly joined the Order of Acorns, which had a journalistic cadre to marshall the ways and means of publicity. In early October 1901 he granted at least two bull’s-eye interviews and doubtlessly welcomed two cartoons that pitted him against the Tammany tiger. [see insert] Going beyond his pledged help he delivered a carefully wrought oration that was  hurried out as a supplement to Harper’s Weekly and reprinted as an Acorn pamphlet. Then, as the voting came closer, he twice perked up a noonday rally with rough-and-tumble metaphors. At Fusion headquarters, for reporters from the Tribune and Sun, he pretended eagerness to trudge around pasting up its posters. He exultantly presided at a victory rally [Nov. 6], led its parade of three thousand in a carriage, and then reviewed it at Times Square.…This campaign marked his most lively and visible splashing in the mire of “politics” [Our MT, 187].

Sam’s notebook: “Yale University 200th anniversary” [NB 44 TS 15].

Clemens may have spent the night in New York City, but the next day he was in New Haven for the Yale Bicentennial, from Oct. 20 to 24. His NB entry of Oct. 21gives a 4 p.m. train time. The ceremonies began in the morning of Oct. 20, with Joseph Twichell speaking in the college chapel, and special services with sermons in the churches on the Green. Sam likely missed most or all of these. In the afternoon Dean George P. Fisher “reviewed the history of Yale’s relation to Theology and Missions”

[The Independent (NY), Oct. 31, 1901 p. 2553; NY Times, Jun 16, 1901 p.20].