December 10 Tuesday – At 21 Fifth Ave, N.Y. Sam wrote to Dorothy Quick about his amazement at touring the Jewish Technical School for girls.
I am very sorry you didn’t see Peter Pan, you dear child, but you will see it yet. Meantime we can hunt up something else when you come.
Saturday after next? Can’t you come then—& stay over till Monday? We hope you can; & that is why I am writing now, at sleep-time, instead of waiting till tomorrow, when I am going to be busy & could be prevented.
I’ve been all over the Jewish technical school to-day, & have seen 400 girls, 14 to 16 years old, at work in the class-rooms, at all sorts of handicrafts. I think it’s a wonderful school. I wonder if we can match it anywhere. The pupils do not have to pay anything.
They make good fine gowns there, at half the price the big stores charge. Miss Lyon & my daughter are going there to drive a bargain. The girls that make the clothes get all the money, the school takes care of it. They could make clothes for you & your mother, Dorothy. The school-term is a year & a half; then the girls are able to earn their living in many commercial ways. Some of the graduates earn $1500 a year; 700 of them earn an average of $600 a year, which is an aggregate of about $400,000. But for their gratuitous training, they couldn’t earn the half of it. Every one of them has to learn how to cook, & make beds, etc.
Oh, it’s very late!
Good-night, dear, & sleep well! [MTP]. Note: this letter misdated as 10 Dec. 1908, and thus landed in MTAq p.242 instead of 1907, which is correct.
Sam also wrote to Julia B. Rice, active in the Society of Suppression of Noise.
I am with you sincerely in your crusade against the bedlam frenzies of the Fourth of July.
Will you mind my going a little deeper—a good deal deeper—into this matter? If I may speak frankly I will say that while I detest the noises & the grotesque insanities of the Day, my main quarrel is with the Day itself.
Why should Americans, of all people in the world, bow down to the Fourth of July & worship it? It is purely an English institution, no American had any part in the events it commemorates. It is as purely, & utterly & comprehensively English as is Guy Fawkes’s Day; & that Americans should claim it & celebrate it & magnify it is the largest joke the ages have produced.
…. [MTP]. Note: Sam felt it should be abolished as it was “an annual horror.”
David Dodge for American Esperanto Journal wrote to Sam [MTP].
Edgar P. Holdridge, Real Estate, NYC wrote to Sam to send the “high tribute” paid Twain by Rev. Dr. Charles F. Aked at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church: “In his sermon on ‘Humor, the fourth of the Christian virtues’ he said, ‘I thank God for such men as Mark Twain, who has written some wonderful truths’…” [MTP].
The National Clarion Cinderella Club, London wrote to Sam. (Only the envelope survives) [MTP]. Note: Sam wrote on the letter, “Compliments as a text / My selected 5 perfect ones: Oxford, Howells, Paine, Mabie, little girl. Contrast Red Dog Miner’s introduction”
Clemens’ A.D. for this day included: Dinner to Andrew Carnegie given by the Associated Societies of Engineers—the speeches, & Mr. Clemens’s remarks about Carnegie’s simplified spelling [MTP: Autodict 4].
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 continuation of his Dec. 2 dictation on Andrew Carnegie. Sam told of banquets and speechmaking and his strategies to avoid them, including a banquet honoring Carnegie. He also describes his talk on the difficulties of spelling [51-60].