Ed note: Ron Chernow’s new 1100 page biography is very entertaining if you like the cheerful often biting approach Twain uses to bring us all down to size–particularly politicians and preachers. I’m only 10% along in my reading, but highly amused with both Twain and the incisive analysis of Chernow.
Chernow, Ron. Mark Twain (p. 141). Penguin Publishing Group.
Just how far Twain had journeyed from his political origins in a border state grew abundantly clear a year later when he wrote a newspaper piece, “The White House Funeral,” that gave an imaginary version of Andrew Johnson’s final speech to his cabinet. It was a savage burlesque that would have had Radical Republicans brigades standing in applause, for it named the many sins they ascribed to the outgoing president. “My great deeds speak for themselves. I vetoed the Reconstruction acts; I vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau; I vetoed civil liberty; I vetoed Stanton; I vetoed everything & everybody that the malignant Northern hordes approved; I hugged traitors to my bosom; I pardoned them by regiments & brigades…I smiled upon the Ku-Klux, I delivered the Union men of the south & their belongings over to murder, robbery, & arson; I filled the Government offices all over this whole land with the vilest scum that could be scraped from the political gutters & the ranks of the Union haters.”[24]