December 23 Sunday – At 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Sam replied with thanks to the Dec. 18 of Helen Keller.
O, thank you for those lovely words!
Now as to your January visit: we must certainly meet then, & have a talk.
Another thing. You say,
“As a reformer, you know that ideas must be driven home again & again.”
Yes, I know it; & by old experience I know that speeches & documents & public meetings are a pretty poor & lame way of accomplishing it. Last year I proposed a sane way—one which I had practised with success for a quarter of a century—but I wasn’t expecting it to get any attention, & it didn’t.
Give me a battalion of 200 winsome young girls & matrons, & let me tell them what to do & how to do it, & I will be responsible for shining results. If I could mass them on the stage in front of the audience & instruct them there, I could make a public meeting take hold of itself & do something really valuable for once. Not that the real instructing would be done there, for it wouldn’t; it would be previously done privately, & merely repeated there. But it isn’t going to happen—the good old way will be stuck to: there’ll be a public meeting: with music, & prayer, & a wearying report, & a verbal description of the marvels the blind do, & 17 speeches—then the call, upon all present who are still alive, to contribute. This hoary program was invented in the idiot asylum, & will never be changed. It’s function is to breed hostility to good causes.
Some day somebody will recruit my 200—my dear beguilesome Knights of the Golden Fleece —& you will see them make good their ominous name.
Mind, we must meet! not in the grim & ghastly air of the platform, mayhap, but by the friendly fire—here at 21.
Affectionately your friend … [MTP].
Isabel Lyon’s journal: Very cold & the King started to make calls but came home when he reached 42nd St., because it would be too cold for the coachman. Later he started off to go to Lily Burbank’s & there he met Isabel Hapgood—“a devil”—who repeatedly assailed him with her anti Xian Science talk. 3 times she made her attack & he came home hating her cordially— savagely. But we had a dear dinner à deux & then music & talk about the party to come. It’s so good to hear the King plan a program & to see his sweetness. I was tired & had a pain in the top of my spine, but the evening with him banished all that [MTP TS 152].
H.B. Magill (Harry Byron Magill, b. 1872; author) wrote from Chicago on Great Northern Hotel notepaper wishing him the best in his fight for copyright legislation.
Your mission to the nation’s capitol is being closely watched and read with deep interest by the writer and by many thousands at large. It is a noble struggle for principle on your part and when achieved, as it will be, you will not personally participate in the benefits but knowing that your children will live to enjoy the fruit of your labor will give you unbounded joy and happiness in your declining years [MTP].
Mark Twain’s name was again used by a group lobbying for reform. The New York Times, p.SM4, “The Anti-Noise Society,” by Julia Barnett Rice (Mrs. Isaac L. Rice) reported:
The Anti-Noise Society
The movement to form the Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise has met with a response so general, from public officials and citizens in every walk of life, that the day seems to be at hand for a general crusade in that direction. …. A few days ago Mr. Clemens (“Mark Twain”) sent me a charming letter [not extant] through his secretary in which he expressed the wish that he were young again that he might work hard for the movement, but adding that we could use his name in the crusade against noise.