Mark Twain for President
In the year 1900 Mark Twain returned from five years abroad, and he was unsure of his eligibility to vote in the upcoming presidential election. He told a New York Herald reporter that if it turned out he couldn’t vote, “I shall run for President. A patriotic American must do something around election time, and that’s about the only thing political that is left for me.”
It’s not the first time Twain (jokingly) hinted at a presidential run. In 1879, in a widely syndicated piece, he “announced” his candidacy and simultaneously preempted opposition by confessing to various past misdeeds.
“Mark Twain as a Presidential Candidate” appeared in 1879, the year before the race between James A. Garfield, the Republican candidate, and Winfield Scott Hancock, the Democrat. Although Twain found much to ridicule in politics and politicians, he was hardly reluctant to get involved or curry favor. A jubilant supporter of Garfield’s bid for the presidency, he delivered a mocking “funeral oration” for the Democratic Party at an election night victory celebration in Hartford. (His somber tone initially fooled many in the audience.) In Boston for another celebration four days later, he recounted the excitement of the campaign:
. . . everybody thought a thunderbolt would be launched out of the political sky. I judged it would hit somebody, and believed that somebody would be the Democratic party, and that it would hit them faithfully. I did not believe we had much to fear on the Republican side, because I believed we had a good and trustworthy lightning rod in James A. Garfield.
In January 1881 Twain wrote “as a simple citizen” to President-elect Garfield and urged him to retain Frederick Douglass “in his present office as the Marshall [sic] of the District of Columbia.” As U.S. Marshal, Douglass presided over the inauguration of President Garfield, leading him into the Capitol for the ceremony on March 4. Before his first year as President was cut short by assassination, Garfield appointed Douglass as the District of Columbia’s first African American Recorder of Deeds.
Coincidentally, on the day Garfield was shot (July 2, 1881), Mrs. Clemens received a disturbing letter from a friend in London, consoling her for Mark Twain’s death in Australia. (As it happens, the man Down Under was an impostor.) Twain immediately sent a response, “Being dead I might be excused from writing letters, but I am not that kind of a corpse. May I never be so dead as to neglect the hail of a friend from a far land.”
Toward the end of his life, Twain summed up his views on politics: “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet”—and over the course of his career he gladly filled the role of maître d’.
* We refer to ourselves as we with hesitation, knowing that the following quote is often attributed to Twain: “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial we.” But, with some relief, we have confirmed that there’s no evidence Twain ever said it.
* * *
A Presidential Candidate
I have pretty much made up my mind to run for President. What the country wants is a candidate who cannot be injured by investigation of his past history, so that the enemies of the party will be unable to rake up anything against him that nobody ever heard of before. If you know the worst about a candidate, to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated. Now I am going to enter the field with an open record. I am going to own up in advance to all the wickedness I have done, and if any Congressional committee is disposed to prowl around my biography in the hope of discovering any dark and deadly deed that I have secreted, why—let it prowl.
In the first place, I admit that I treed a rheumatic grandfather of mine in the winter of 1850. He was old and inexpert in climbing trees, but with the heartless brutality that is characteristic of me I ran him out of the front door in his nightshirt at the point of a shotgun, and caused him to bowl up a maple tree, where he remained all night, while I emptied shot into his legs. I did this because he snored. I will do it again if I ever have another grandfather. I am as inhuman now as I was in 1850. I candidly acknowledge that I ran away at the battle of Gettysburg. My friends have tried to smooth over this fact by asserting that I did so for the purpose of imitating Washington, who went into the woods at Valley Forge for the purpose of saying his prayers. It was a miserable subterfuge. I struck out in a straight line for the Tropic of Cancer because I was scared. I wanted my country saved, but I preferred to have somebody else save it. I entertain that preference yet. If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon’s mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose
is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me to be Napoleonic in its grandeur. My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get.
The rumor that I buried a dead aunt under my grapevine was correct. The vine needed fertilizing, my aunt had to be buried, and I dedicated her to this high purpose. Does that unfit me for the Presidency? The Constitution of our country does not say so. No other citizen was ever considered unworthy of this office because he enriched his grapevines with his dead relatives. Why should I be selected as the first victim of an absurd prejudice? I admit also that I am not a friend of the poor man. I regard the poor man, in his present condition, as so much wasted raw material. Cut up and properly canned, he might be made useful to fatten the natives of the cannibal islands and to improve our export trade with that region. I shall recom-
mend legislation upon the subject in my first message. My campaign cry will be: “Desiccate the poor workingman; stuff him into sausages.”
These are about the worst parts of my record. On them I come before the country. If my country don’t want me, I will go back again. But I recommend myself as a safe man—a man who starts from the basis of total depravity and proposes to be fiendish to the last.
| 
