The Chris Moeller Archives

Samuel Clemens, late in his life, believed that his private thoughts on Christianity and American imperialism were so far out of the mainstream in his place and time that he took them down on paper and took legal action to insure that they would not be presented to the world until a full 100 years after his death. (They subsequently were published, right on time, in 2010.) Yet these opinions can be found, in form, throughout his many works of both fiction and non-fiction.

In a matter of hours this weekend, I read "Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands," travel literature by Clemens that precedes even his first published book. "Roughing It" is actually a collection of 25 articles written in 1866 when Clemens was working as an assignment reporter for the Sacramento Union, then among the most prominent newspapers in the West. Only three years earlier, he had adopted the pen name "Mark Twain."

These dispatches were written during a journey to the Hawaiian Islands (then commonly referred to as the Sandwich Islands in the Anglo world) that seemed to have a most extraordinary impact on his future belief system and writings. When he sat down to write his autobiography years later, around the turn of the 20th Century, the Spanish-American War had been in the recent headlines. It was during this little U.S. military adventure that President William McKinley and Congress annexed Hawaii, not to mention Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other points South and West that were primarily populated by brown peoples. Twain's exploration of Hawaii a generation earlier definitely served as a starting point for the time when he would expound in print on themes of American (and British) imperialism, and examine the impact of Christian missionaries ceaselessly on the march around the world.

In these self-censored memoirs late in the century, Clemens referred to American soldiers as "uniformed assassins," and described their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” in the Philippines as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”

Reading "Roughing It," which incidentally was not just published in Twain's own time, but very early in his career, you can see the roots of his anti-imperialist and anti-religious attitudes, though they're typically cloaked in Twain's humor and sense of the absurd. It's especially evident when the author is giving historical context to what he calls the "last battle.. for idolatry" between the islanders and their superstitious pagan priests during the late 18th Century. He reports that British Captain James Cook had recently been killed by the islanders when they discovered that the seaman had only been pretending to be the god Lono, and idols were falling all around. The priests, having been removed from "the fattest offices in the land," revolted against the newly-enlightened island royalty.

Mark Twain's attitudes on these subjects were actually very well-known in his time in that he served as president of a prominent anti-imperialist organization, and gently mocked Biblical passions on stage and in print, but his words, we now know, were much harsher on both subjects when he was in private quarters. The public figure, Twain, used humor to convey his feelings. The private man, Clemens, was royally pissed.

This makes the "Roughing It" entries from Hawaii a fun read. Only one year after the Civil War, and at only 30 years of age, Samuel Clemens was already in the process of becoming the character for which he would eventually be legacied, the critical observer of a nation that Faulkner would label during the next century "the father of American literature." Clemens was a satirist and secularist disdainful of religious evangelism, and an outright enemy of the belief in an American or Christian cultural superiority. These attitudes shaped both his sense of comedy and his righteous anger, and they're the reasons he's remembered with almost universal admiration today. He's remarkably a man well ahead of his time, especially when we consider that even prominent academics of the day, and certainly the politicians, believed collectively and wholeheartedly in the concept of white supremacy, and even a scientific justification for it.

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I enjoyed this passage from the book also: