You know, Sam Clemens wasn’t born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But he tried to install one a few times. He failed about as often as not—with his writing and some publishing pulling him up, only to suffer from speculations and investments that sank him. At about age 60, he finally got himself stuck on a shoal so badly that he was forced to go back on the lecture tour to pay off his debts and to get his beloved family afloat.

In the great Ken Burns film “Mark Twain,”[1] we learn that the author set out to follow the equator for his final tour. He was then aging, in desperate need of cash, and his wife was in ill-health, when he got a stark reminder that his troubles made a very small pile next to many poor souls who had no lecture tours to bail with and no ships to float.

From Australia, through India and especially in Africa, Mark Twain saw the cruel cost to native people as colonial powers carved up continents to expand their empires.

Without doubt he was reminded of the history he witnessed as a boy in Hannibal, MO., when the cruelty of slavery was equal to King Leopold’s unconscionable horrors committed in the Congo, known as “The Crown Jewell of the Belgian Empire.”

Mark Twain noted, “In many countries we have chained the savage and starved him to death. In more than one country we have hunted the savage and his little children and their mothers with dogs and guns through the woods for an afternoon sport. In many countries we have taken the savage’s land from him and made him our slave and lashed him every day and broken his pride and made death his only friend and punished him until he dropped in his tracks. There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than other savages.”

In the film, writer Russell Banks remarks, “Nothing human shocked Twain except slavery and racism.” Mark Twain wrote so vehemently against King Leopold’s cruel empire building that no newspaper would print it. As for America, well, read Huckleberry Finn and decide.

Image: DVD cover for the Ken Burns film “Mark Twain”[2]

“To be good is noble, but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.” (Mark Twain) [3]

“I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” (Mark Twain, quoted in A Pen Warmed Up in Hell) [4]

[1] Available at Multnomah County Library: https://multcolib.org/ and most likely at your neighborhood libraries!

[2] Found on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/MarkTwainAuthor where over 1.5 million followers still hang on Mark Twain’s every word

[3] See: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/marktwain122508.html

[4] See: http://www.twainquotes.com/Imperialism.html