March 13 Monday – At 21 Fifth Ave. in N.Y.C. Sam wrote to Susan Crane. Only the bottom of the page survives: “Sue dear, beg for me with St. Peter if you get there first. He will remember me as the young fellow who tried for his place & couldn’t pass the examinations—at that time” [MTP].
Sam also wrote to Muriel M. Pears, now in Washington, D.C.
This is indeed a joy! bless you I was beginning to believe you had gotten mislaid & maybe lost. I see it has not happened, for your letter is your own—the heart in it, & the talent, have to come from the one source, they could not be imitated by a counterfeiter. I am very glad you & are made at home & happy by our people. It cost me a pang to decline to spend Inauguration week in Washington with a family of friends, but it would have cost me a thousand pangs to go, for the welcome in every familiar face would be a reminder of other days, when so much more than half of it was for one who was at my side—& never elsewhere for half a lifetime. If Mrs. Clemens had been physically strong enough to live the social life she would have established our home there, she was so attached to the Washington people. She liked Southerners—partly because I was one, maybe.
I am grateful to the Forakers for taking care of you. Be sure & tell me when you are coming. If you act as you did before I will expose you to your mother.
Jean is up town at the language-school but I will let her see your confirmations of her judgment when she returns. Bambino [Clara’s cat] will welcome you when you come. He has not sworn an oath since you left, even when his breakfast is 3 minutes late. No one else has had such an effect upon him as this. He thinks a great deal of you—like / SLC [MTP]. Note: Joseph Benson Foraker (1846-1917), Senator Ohio (1897-1909).
Sam also wrote to Clara Henderson (Mrs. J.M. Henderson) in Chicago:
It has greatly interested me. It is a good guess at an answer to the questions involved—a better one could not be evolved, I think. But we have to infer the seven or eight incarnations, we cannot trace them back & identify them & prove them: & so we have only the terminating link, not of a known chain but of a guessed one [MTP: Cushman file]. “See attached” not in file.
Isabel Lyon’s journal: “The greater part of the day I spent with Flo and Uncle Sam up at Macy’s” [MTP: TS 44].
Joe Twichell wrote to Sam.
Dear Mark; / Here is the same thing done in slang. [MT wrote “Newspaper clipping”; not extant.]
Still I am so happy as not to be convinced. What Charley Clark told you twenty years ago of the Coo-farmers may have been, I fear was, true of a good many of them, but I don’t believe it was true of the bulk of them, or is true now. Nor do I believe that the majority of the votes that elected Bulkeley were purchased, or a half, or a quarter, or a tenth of that majority. Nor, again, for all you and Charley Warner were drawn into the league of corruption in Hawley’s interest, do I believe that the General himself was a party to it; Nor, once more, do I believe that more than a small fraction in numbers in the U.S. Senate is venal, but that, on the contrary, as a body, it is honest. Hence I do not despair of the Republic, or of the Human Race, for that matter. Dig down in history anywhere you like five hundred years, and take a look around you there, and then go down on your knees and ask forgiveness for being such a dog-goned pessimist at the opening of the Twentieth Century. …
Oh! There’s an eddy now and then, here and there, but the stream flows in that [positive] direction. Climb out of your hole, Mark; get up where you can see a distance drop your cussing and shout Glory—not, of course, without stopping once in a while to cry over the bloody fight the beaten and retreating Kuropatkin keeps up against the victor Oyama. The war isn’t ended yet… [MTP]. Note: Joe then sent family doings and a meeting upcoming that night of the Monday Evening Club.