December 13 Thursday – Clemens’ A.D. of this day included: As regards the coming American Monarchy [MTP Autodict3].
Isabel Lyon’s journal:
This morning when I told the King apropos of AB’s friends that there was one of them that he didn’t like & that it was Stedman, he said, “Oh, no, I only despise him, I don’t dislike him.”
AB is going to live here in the house to be the King’s billiard player.
Strength is flowing back into my veins & I am glad to be alive.
Mr. Clemens said that the best bathing he ever did was in Etretat where he could stand out on a porch & pour buckets of sea water over himself & the water ran away through the slits in the flooring [MTP TS 149-150].
The Knickerbocker Publishing Co., N.Y.C. wrote to Sam asking to go over the sketch of his life they were preparing for their forthcoming work the National American Biography [MTP]. On or after this date Sam replied: “Can come see me / Have nothing to do with blowing my own trumpet except when I do it with my own mouth. I do it in autobiography—don’t care how degraded I am in that” [MTP].
James F. Mallinckrodt wrote from St. Louis to support Sam in his efforts at copyright legislation. “Appearing in white attire, in winter, in the capitol of the country, in any one else would have been cranky.” [MTP].
Miss Cally Thomas Ryland (1868?-1947), Richmond, Virginia’s first outstanding journalist- columnist-author, wrote from Richmond, Va. that since a young girl it had been her ambition to meet Mark Twain; now she was 35 and still wanted just as intensely to do so [MTP].
Julia Barnett Rice (Mrs. Isaac L. Rice) for the Society of Suppression of Noise, NYC wrote to ask Sam for his “help in our fight.” She enclosed editorials (not in the file) [MTP]. Note: Lyon wrote: “Perfectly willing to be on advisory board but can do no work / if younger I would.”
Of the selections from Twain’s A.D.’s, DeVoto selected about half of the materials not chosen before by Paine to be included in Mark Twain in Eruption (1940); among DeVoto’s choices, was a section entitled “The Plutocracy.” Included in that section were nine segments, the first dictated this day and titled, “The Drift Toward Centralized Power.” Sam reported the speech of Elihu Root, Secretary of State, that prophesied accumulation of power in the Federal government; Sam felt America was drifting toward monarchy; that it was human nature [61- 66].