(Page 471)
After returning from his visit to Hartford, Sam Clemens checked into the fashionable Everett House on Union Square in New York City. He visited Moses Beach at both his home on Columbia Street in Brooklyn and his summer house near Poughkeepsie, New York, to choose some of the photographs William James had taken during the Quaker City voyage for reproduction in The Innocents Abroad (1869), but because there were “such a multitude of them” Sam finally suggested that Elisha Bliss’s art editors make the selections. He had other plans—particularly to make his long-delayed first trip late in August to the Langdon home in Elmira, New York, a handsome brownstone mansion situated on three acres of prime real estate near downtown. With a population of about sixteen thousand, about the same size as Honolulu, the city was a major transportation center, a crossroads much like Hannibal had been in the 1850s, and a hub for both passenger and freight lines with a canal link between the Susquehanna and Chemung Rivers and the Erie Canal. Before the Civil War, moreover, Elmira was an important stop on the Underground Railroad—the Langdon mansion was connected by a tunnel to Park Church across Main Street and used to conceal fugitive slaves en route to Canada and freedom—and hosted such prominent abolitionist lecturers as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garison, and Wendell Phillips. During the war, a prisoner camp (Hellmira), the (im)moral equivalent of the rebel camp in Andersonville, South Carolina, had been located about a mile from town, where over twelve thousand captured rebel soldiers were incarcerated in squalid conditions and over three thousand of them died.' Sam traveled to Elmira ostensibly to honor the invitation to visit extended to him the previous December by the Langdon family. He rekindled his friendship with Charley and Jervis Langdon and was introduced to Charley's mother, his older sister Susan, and her husband Theodore Crane.
(Page 475)
Sam and Charley spent a few days in Cleveland, where they were the guests of honor at a reception hosted by Abel and Mary Fairbanks at their home on St. Clair Street in the tony Bratenahl neighborhood, Charley, the former Interrogation Point, was “a good traveling comrade,” Sam reported to Livy, ‘& if he has any unworthy traits in his nature the partiality born of old companionship has blinded me to them.” Though he was never particularly fond of Abel Fairbanks, he was impressed by Cleveland, “a stirring, enterprising young city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.” His introduction to the local gentry in the mansions of Elmira and Cleveland seems to have turned his head, Whereas he had referred with populist contempt to merchant “princes of shoddy” in one of his Alta California letters in the spring of 1867, he now admired the fashionable houses along so-called Millionaires’ Row on Euclid Avenue, “one of the finest streets in America.” The homes there cost “$100,000 to ‘come in.’ Therefore, none of your poor white trash can live in that street.”
Charley returned from Cleveland to Elmira, and Sam continued to St, Louis to visit his mother and sister for the first time since he left for the West in 1861..
(Page 479)
Against an uncertain future, Sam needed to bank as much money as possible. He launched a four-month, eight-state, forty-three-city tour on November 17 showcasing the third version of his Quaker City lecture, “The American Vandal Abroad.” He gleaned his text from the manuscript of The Innocents Abroad and, to forestall any criticism, he omitted all derisive comments about the pilgrims and, after promising his sister Pamela that “there would be no scoffing at sacred things in my books or lectures,” he deleted virtually all references to the Holy Land. He booked some of the dates on his own, while he depended upon the Associated Western Literary Societies in Dubuque, Iowa, and the American Literary Bureau in New York to schedule most of the engagements. He charged a standard hundred-dollar speaking fee per date and paid his own expenses. As a result, his lectures were not particularly remunerative. While he bragged publicly about his ‘salary of twenty-six hundred dollars a month,” he confessed to his sister that “I spend about half as much money as I make.” He likely cleared less than three thousand dollars during the season.!? Not yet a headliner like Henry Ward Beecher, Anna Dickinson, or Wendell Phillips, who routinely were paid upwards of four hundred dollars per appearance, Sam was mostly booked to speak in the Midwest and the East in small and midsize cities rather than in the metropolises of Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia.
He opened his season at Case Hall in Cleveland, with Solon and Emily Severance in the audience, where he predictably enough received a boost from Mary Fairbanks’s favorable notice in the Cleveland Herald. She applauded Sams “quaint utterances,” his recitation of “funny incidents,” and the gems of beautiful descriptions which sparkled all through his lecture. We expected to be amused, but we were taken by surprise when he carried us on the wings of his redundant fancy, away to the ruins, the cathedrals, and the monuments of the old world. There are some passages of gorgeous word painting which haunt us like a remembered picture. We congratulate Mr, Twain upon having taken the tide of public favor “at the flood” in the lecture field, and having conclusively proved that a man may be a humorist without being a clown.
(Page 512-514): At the Express
He certainly took his duties seriously, at least at first. Unlike the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, the Buffalo Express could not survive on advertising revenue alone. It was the smallest of three local English-language dailies, with a circulation a decade later estimated at about four thousand compared to the forty-three hundred of the Courier and the sixty-five hundred of the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser. Then again, the Express had the most room to grow. No longer a beat reporter but a co-owner, Sam shared responsibility for making payroll in a competitive market. That is, he could not afford to be a genial, permissive employer like Goodman of the Enterprise, a newspaper that faced far fewer financial challenges than the Express. Berry remembered that Sam was “a quiet, reserved and irritable man’ who “gave his fellow citizens little opportunity to annoy him with their attentions or questions.” Similarly, Selkirk reminisced in 1925 that Sam ‘confined his humor to his writings. He was a very ordinary chap otherwise and was not given to wise cracking or the amusement of his associates.”
Sam was also quick to introduce some changes to the paper. He worked with the print shop foreman to eliminate scare headlines by reducing their font size and in consequence, he bragged, “the paper is vastly improved in appearance. I have annihilated all the glaring thunder-&-lightning headings over the telegraphic news & made that department look quiet & respectable.”
He schooled the news staff in a more objective writing style: to “modify the adjectives, curtail their philosophical reflections & leave out the slang.” As a first-time employer, Sam cracked the proverbial whip over his underlings. He never suffered fools gladly, but he managed his Buffalo staff by a set of rules more like those he had known in San Francisco than in Virginia City. That is, the Express was necessarily run on more strictly business principles than the Enterprise. “The manner in which he wielded the journalistic scepter was more that of an impatient autocrat than an humble American citizen, according to Berry. “No man detested loafers more than Mr. Clemens, and assuredly no man could be more pitiless in his treatment of bores. He was vigorous in his denunciation of that class of people who aimlessly and impudently intrude their constant presence in an editorial room.”
Sam also shifted the editorial position of the Express, a nominally Republican paper, vis-a-vis a local coal monopoly of which Jervis Langdon’s company was a part. Whereas the Express had previously defended a citizen cooperative organized to sell cheap coal, as soon as Sam became its managing editor the newspaper muted its criticism of the Anthracite Coal Association and indicted the “unreasonable demands” of the coal miners’ union. “Up to the present time,’ he announced in an unsigned editorial in the August 20 issue, “we have heard only the people's side of the coal question, though there could be no doubt that the coal men had a side also.” In the same issue, the Express printed a letter from John De La Fletcher Slee, Jervis Langdon's manager in Buffalo, defending the practices of the association. On September 1 the Buffalo Courier noted that a “change seems to have come over” the Express “in reference to the coal monopoly” and asked “the reason for it.” Sam complained to Livy about this “sneaking little communication,” grumbled that the “effrontery of these people transcends everything I ever heard of,” and warned that if George Deuther, one of the organizers of the Citizen's Mutual Coal Mining, Purchasing, and Sale Company, “don’t go mighty slow I will let off a blast at him some day that will lift the hair off his head & loosen some of his teeth.” He planned to protect at all costs the interests of his financial angel and future father-in-law. That is, in the first weeks of his part ownership of the Express Sam seemed ready to sacrifice democratic principle to his newfound sobriety and respectability, The following March he published a second unsigned, pro-monopoly, antilabor editorial in the paper in which he decried “the spectacle of a legislature delivering into the hands of an irresponsible mob the actual control of property belonging wholly to their employers.” In this article Sam betrayed the same anti-Hibernian prejudice first evident in his reporting for the San Francisco Morning Call in late 1864. Much as the Irish had threatened the Chinese in California, the Molly Maguires, an organization dominated by Irish activists, were “an irresponsible society of men who hold meetings, pass laws, and enforce them by the agencies of terrorism and blood” in the coal mining districts of Pennsylvania.“’ During his courtship, that is, Sam began to express a brand of antiunion rhetoric at odds with his normal affinity for the working class.
From page 520, Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands:
Sam publicly announced his change of plans in the Express on September 11: ‘after recently withdrawing from the lecture field for next Winter, I have entered it again (until Jan. 10), because I was not able to cancel all my appointments, it being too late, now, to find lecturers to fill them.” With his change in plans, he canceled his contemplated West Coast trip and discarded the prospect of speaking on “Curiosities of California.” Instead, he switched the topic and title of his winter lecture to “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands,’ a reworked version of his old talk on Hawaii. By September 27 he acknowledged to Bliss that, while he liked “newspapering very well, as far as I have got,’ he would “adjourn, a week hence, to commence preparing my lecture” in Elmira.” He left Buffalo and the inner sanctum of the Express for Elmira and the Langdon mansion on the evening of September 30 and, though he mailed occasional contributions to the newspaper while on tour, he did not resume his editorial duties until after his wedding the following February 2.