November 4 Friday – At the Grosvenor Hotel in N.Y.C. Sam wrote to Joe Twichell.
Oh, Dear! get out of that sewer—party-politics—dear Joe. At least with your mouth. We had only two men maybe who could make speeches for the two parties & preserve their honor & their dignity. One of them is dead. Possibly there were four. I would have believed John Hay could do it. I am sorry for John Hay; sorry & ashamed. And yet I know he couldn’t help it. He wears the collar, & he had to pay the penalty. Certainly he had no more desire to stand up before a mob of confiding human incapables & debauch them than you had. Certainly he took no more real pleasure in distorting history, concealing facts, propagating immoralities, & appealing to the sordid side of human nature than did you; but he was his party’s property, & he had to climb away down & do it.
It is interesting, wonderfully interesting—the miracles which party-politics can do with a man’s mental & moral make-up. Look at McKinley, Roosevelt & yourself: in private life spotless in character; honorable, honest, just, humane, generous; scorning trickeries, treacheries, suppressions of the truth, mistranslations of the meanings of facts, the filching of credit earned by another, the condoning of crime, the glorifying of base acts: in public political life the reverse of all this. McKinley was a silverite—you concealed it. Roosevelt was a silverite—you concealed it. Parker was a silverite—you publish it. Along with a shudder & a warning: “He was unsafe then. Is he any safer now?”
Joe, even I could be guilty of such a thing as that—if I were in party-politics; I really believe it. Mr. Cleveland gave the country the gold standard; by implication you credit the matter to the Republican party.
By implication you approve the whole annual pension-scoop, concealing the fact that the bulk of the money goes to people who in no way deserve it. You imply that all the batteners upon this bribery-fund are Republicans. An indiscreet confession, since about half of them must have been Democrats before they were bought.
You as good as praise Order 78. It is true you do not shout, & you do not linger, you only whisper & skip—still, what little you do in the matter is complimentary to the crime. “It means, if it means anything,” that our outlying properties will all be given up by the Democrats, & our flag hauled down.[”] All of them? Not only the properties stolen by Mr. McKinley & Mr. Roosevelt but the properties honestly acquired? Joe, did you believe that hardy statement when you made it? Yet you made it, & there it stands in permanent print. Now what moral law would suffer if we should give up the stolen ones? But— “You know our standard-bearer. He will maintain all that we have gained”—by whatever process. Land, I believe you!
Shall we turn over “our” Canal to men who tried to defeat the treaty enabling us to build it? Oh, by no means! Let us leave it in the Presidential hands that made it ours—by methods which might even have wrung a shudder out of the seasoned McKinley.
By George, Joe, you are as handy at the game as if you had been training for it all your life. Your campaign Address is built from the ground up upon the oldest & best models. There isn’t a paragraph in it whose facts or morals will wash—not even a sentence, I believe.
But you will soon be out of this. You didn’t want to do it—that is sufficiently apparent, thanks be!—but you couldn’t well get out of it. In a few days you will be out of it, & then you can fumigate yourself & take up your legitimate work & again & resume your clean & wholesome private character once more & be happy—& useful.
I know I ought to hand you / some guff, now, as propitiation & apology for these reproaches, but on the whole I believe I won’t.
I have inquired, & find that Mitsikuri does not arrive here until tomorrow night. I shall watch out, & telephone again, for I greatly want to see him. My, but his people & the Russians are making an astonishing fight! It is the human race at its very finest highest. ; that noble race which was made out of the excrement of the angels. If God has any sense of humor, He—but no, He hasn’t; He can make ridiculous things, up to the best of us, but He doesn’t know they are ridiculous. /Always yours P. S. Nov. 4. That erasure was an ungentle slur at the human race. Ungentle, & unfair. I retract it. I wish I could learn to remember that it is unjust & dishonorable to put blame upon the human race for any of its acts. For it did not make itself, it did not make its nature, it is merely a machine, it is moved wholly by outside influences, it has no hand in creating the outside influences nor in choosing which of them it will welcome or reject, its performance is wholly automatic, it has no more mastership nor authority over its mind than it has over its stomach,which receives material from the outside & does as it pleases with it, indifferent to its proprietor’s suggestions, even, let alone his commands; wherefore, whatever the machine does —so-called crimes & infamies included,—is the personal act of its Maker, & He, solely, is responsible. I wish I could learn to pity the human race instead of censuring it & laughing at it; & I could, if the outside influence of old habit were not so strong upon my machine. It vexes me to catch myself praising the clean private citizen Roosevelt blaming the soiled President Roosevelt, when I know that neither praise nor blame is due to him for any thought or word or deed of his, he being merely a helpless & irresponsible coffee-mill ground by the hand of God [MTP]. Note: Sam reacted here to a political speech Joe gave; the election of 1904 was days away. He also referred to the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War, with a possible reference to Kakichi Mitsukuri (1857-1909) Japanese zoologist degreed from Yale in 1879, and likely had a connection with Twichell and Twain. He was also influential in public life in Japan; and the S.F. Call reported a K. Mitsukuri arriving on Sept. 13 and departing on Dec. 4. Ironically, if Sam truly believed in determinism, that man is “merely a helpless & irresponsible coffee-mill” how then could he have given such a large place in his psyche to regret and self-blame, from his boyhood on? If man has no choice, no responsibility, how then can he have regret for his actions?
Ralph W. Ashcroft wrote to Sam, after looking into The American Mechanical Cashier Co. I have called on Fairchild several times, and found him in to-day. I asked him a number of questions… I read the two Pope contracts. One of them, covering the 1,000 machines, has certainly been violated by Pope. The other only obligates the Company to pay for about $13,000. worth of tools. The Cashier Co. would be amply warranted in suing Pope for damages covering non-delivery of machines. It is liable for $13,000. worth of tools, but not for $104,000 [MTP]. Note: Ashcroft had also seen Delos McCurdy, one of Fairchild’s attorneys, who disclosed he’d advised Fairchild to sue for $250,000 [ibid.]. Sebastiano V. Cecchi, Haskard & Co. Bankers wrote to Sam about more conflict with the Countess Massiglia, who refused to take back the inventory, insisting that George Gregory Smith be present. The latter was in America; so, two witnesses, Cecchi and a notary went to the Quarto “expecting that, at last, we would dispose of this veritable white elephant!” Still, the Countess refused, the lease ending Oct. 31. The rest of the letter is a long accounting of details relative to the villa, and the mercurial Countess [MTP]. Note: See Gribben 48, 721