MARK TWAIN, FREETHOUGHT, AND ANTI-IMPERIALISM

By NathaN G. alexaNder

At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States turned toward empire. Since the nation’s founding, it had gradually enlarged itself by gobbling up more and more surrounding areas, but the end of the century was a time when Western powers were adding far flung territories to their growing empires. The United States was no different, annexing Hawaii in 1894 and fighting Spain in 1898, forcing them out of Cuba and in turn also acquiring the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. From there, the United States defeated the Filipinos in a war lasting from 1899 to 1902. Religion played an important part in justifying these imperial conflicts. President William McKinley, for example, said that the war against the Philippines came from a humanitarian desire to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos.

As with today, these foreign wars did not go unchallenged. Perhaps foremost among the critics of empire at this time was the famous novelist Mark Twain. Twain’s beloved novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are well-known, yet his political and religious views remain less so. Twain was a freethinker, something that impacted his views about politics. In particular, here I look at how his opposition to imperialism overlapped with his criticism of Christianity. This was also true for other freethinkers at this time as well.

In general, American freethinkers’ thinking about imperial warfare shifted based on their nation’s enemy. Initially, freethinkers, including Twain, cheered on the American war against Catholic Spain, in Cuba and the Philippines, since this was thought to be a war of liberation against an oppressive power. The Americans’ fight against the Filipinos, however, was greeted with much less enthusiasm from American freethinkers, especially as the war took on a missionary character and reports of atrocities committed by American soldiers were brought to light. No longer was the United States the champion of oppressed peoples against the hated Catholic Spanish, but had become an oppressor itself, no different from any

– Mark Twain, quoted in the New York Herald, OctOber 15, 1900

other Christian power. The changing role of religion was thus critical to the way in which freethinkers responded to these conflicts.

Twain (whose real name was Samuel Clemens) was born in Missouri in 1835 and as a child attended a Presbyterian church with his mother, even though his father was probably a freethinker. Twain’s journey away from religion was not straightforward. Even as a young man, he harbored skepticism about the harsh brand of Christianity from his youth, but he devoted himself to Christianity in the 1860s, during the courtship of his wife, Olivia, who came from a religious family. While living in Connecticut in the 1870s, Twain developed one of the strongest friendships of his life with the Reverend Joseph Twichell. In the late 1870s, Twain appeared to confide to Twichell that he could no longer believe in orthodox Christianity. The two nonetheless remained close friends throughout the rest of their lives and Twain continued to attend Twichell’s church even as he drifted further from Christianity.

Albert Bigelow Paine’s early biography of Twain includes the text of a document Twain wrote sometime in the early 1880s, in which Twain wrote that while he believed in God, he did not believe that this god ever communicated to humans, meaning that the Bible was “imagined and written by man.” Twain also rejected the idea that God intervened in the world as well as the idea of eternal punishment. He left open the possibility of an afterlife, yet expressed indifference to the question. These views, Paine suggested, did not change during Twain’s final years. Indeed, from the 1890s until his death in 1910, Twain expressed increasingly negative and pessimistic views about humanity and religion. In some ways, this pessimism reflected his personal circumstances, including his financial hardships during the 1890s as well as the deaths of his daughter Susy in 1896 and his wife in 1904. This period resulted in the collection of irreligious essays called Letters from the Earth, written in the first decade of the twentieth century, but not published until 1962. By the end of his life, Twain had strayed far from Christian orthodoxy, even if he never openly declared himself a freethinker and kept some of his most critical views of religion unpublished. t the time of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Twain was living in Europe. Nonetheless he wrote in June 1898 to Joseph Twichell about his support for the war: “I have never enjoyed a war… as I am enjoying this one.” This was because the United States seemed to be fighting for Cuban freedom: “It is a worthy thing to fight for one’s freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man’s.”

Twain was influenced by the growing freethought scene at the end of the nineteenth century, particularly the most famous freethinker, Robert Ingersoll. Twain wrote glowingly about Ingersoll’s rhetorical prowess and, as the scholar John Bird argues in another article in this issue, Twain actually plagiarized many of Ingersoll’s ideas in his own irreligious writings. Even if one does not accept the charge of plagiarism in its entirety, it is clear that Twain owed much to Ingersoll. Twain never formally joined the freethought movement, but he was a subscriber to the Truth Seeker, according to George Macdonald. Macdonald also confirmed, on Twain’s death, that Twain was a fellow freethinker and that his views on religion were essentially the same as Ingersoll’s. It is not surprising there fore that Twain and other freethinkers’ views of imperialism contain many of the same themes.

Twain returned to the United States in October 1900 after having spent several years abroad. It was during this period abroad that Twain wrote Following the Equator (1897), an account of his travels through the British colonies of Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. In these writings, Twain was deeply critical of British imperial rule and expressed sympathy for the plight of the indigenous people. It was in this book that Twain quipped: “There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” Here Twain appeared to question a clear racial hierarchy, with whites inevitably on top.

Even if he was critical of other Western nations’ disastrous attempts at bringing civilization, he could not yet imagine his own country in this same critical light. By the time Twain returned from his travels, Spain had been defeated. In an interview soon after his return, Twain recollected that he used to be “a red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific. … Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself?” In Twain’s view, the United States should liberate the Filipinos, who had been oppressed for 300 years, just as the nation had liberated the Cubans. The United States should “put a miniature of the American constitution afloat in the Pacific, [and] start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world.”

But after “carefully” reading the Treaty of Paris, which ended the war and which saw the United States purchase the Philippines from Spain for $20 million, Twain’s opinion changed: “I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.” More aggravating still was the provision ensuring the Americans would respect Spanish property rights, which meant that the country would “maintain and protect the abominable system established in the Philippines by the Friars.” The Catholic friars, who had long helped govern the country over the 300 years of Spanish rule, used their power to acquire large land-holdings, marking them out as prime targets for Filipino nationalists who denounced their corruption and political influence. Twain concluded by saying: “It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make these people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Twain soon joined the Anti-Imperialist League, founded in 1898, and became a Vice President, serving from 1901 to his death in 1910. While the role was largely symbolic, Twain turned his pen in support of their cause. Among his published writings included “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), which imagined a satirical explanation about the necessity of imperialism to an uncivilized subject, the person in darkness referred to in the title. “A Defence of General Funston” (1902) meanwhile gave a tongue-in-cheek justification for American General Frederick Funston’s underhanded capture of the Filipino resistance leader Emilio Aguinaldo through feigning illness and surrender. Some of Twain’s most scathing criticisms of American imperialism were, however, left unpublished by Twain because he feared they were too controversial and, like some of his irreligious works, were only published after his death. In this, Twain differed from the other freethinkers discussed below, who felt no need for self-censorship.

Common to all Twain’s anti-imperialist writings was a belief that the United States’ ideals were being betrayed by their actions in the Philippines. Furthermore, the cherished values of citizenship and freedom of speech were being eroded by a stifling patriotism that sought to crush all dissent in the name of supporting one’s country regardless of the righteousness of its actions. While similar ideas were also put forth by other anti-imperialists, of particular relevance here are the irreligious threads running through Twain’s anti-imperialist writings. As we saw, Twain’s initial disagreement with the Treaty of Paris was based partly on the issue of the Catholic friars in the Philippines, and this theme would re-emerge in other works.

In Twain’s unpublished work, “The Stupendous Procession,” written in early 1901, Twain described a procession of symbolic figures representing various nations. The American procession included a “Fat Spanish Friar wrapped in the Treaty of Paris — labeled ‘This is Nuts for Us.’ Grouped about him, 16 recent children with wet-nurses. Banner, inscribed — ‘Under the Treaty-protection we can start our population-factories again.’” This is a reference to the common allegation that the friars fathered illegitimate children with Filipino women.

Twain’s dislike of the friars was part of a larger resentment of all missionary activity, in which, he thought, arrogant and obnoxious Christians forced their religion upon helpless people. This is seen most clearly in “To The Person Sitting in Darkness,” which heavily criticized the Reverend William Ament, an American missionary to China. Following the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, which was a violent uprising by the Chinese against foreign powers exploiting their country, Ament forcibly collected compensation for Western missionary losses during the conflict – compensation that ultimately totalled over thirteen times the value of the actual property lost. Twain pulled no punches against Ament, whose acts of extortion condemned “pauper peasants … and their women and innocent children to inevitable starvation and lingering death, in order that the blood-money so acquired might be ‘used for the propagation of the Gospel’.”

Twain’s anti-imperialist writings also sought to emphasize that Christians were the ones behind the violent atrocities committed in the Philippines. Another unpublished essay condemned the “Moro Massacre” of 1906, in which, even years after the formal end of the war, several hundred Filipinos were killed by US forces in what was supposedly a battle, but left nearly everyone on the Filipino side dead. Repeatedly, Twain highlighted that the soldiers were Christian. In one place, he called them “Christian butchers”; in another, he mockingly noted that, given the almost 100 percent fatality rate for the enemy, “[t]his is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.”

“The War Prayer,” from 1905 but unpublished during his life, showed that religion mixed with nationalism could dull people’s moral senses. The work described how “in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles, beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.” Twain then described a scene in which a stranger — declaring himself God’s messenger — entered the church and rebuked the preacher for praying for the victory of his own country. Such a prayer, the stranger said, had hidden consequences. The unspoken words of that prayer should really say, for example: “O Lord, our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead.”

Twain’s conclusion to the story gives the impression that the stranger’s speech was ultimately in vain and that patriotism was too great a foe to overcome: “It was believed afterwards, that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.”

Other freethinkers followed Twain’s pattern of initial support for the war against the Spanish, to opposition to the war against the Philippines. The “Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll supported the fight against Spain on behalf of the Cubans, even if he also had geopolitical interests in mind, in addition to his desire to spread American ideals. When asked in an 1899 interview whether he favored expansion, Ingersoll replied, “Yes, I have always wanted more — I love to see the Republic grow.” He hoped that the Caribbean would in time belong to the United States, so long as the people there wanted it as well. As the United States and Spain grew closer to war, he declared that “all my sympathies are with the Cubans.”

While Ingersoll was typically the champion of the underdog, he had a further motivation for supporting the Cuban struggle against the Spanish, namely that Spain was a Catholic country which “has always been exceedingly religious and exceedingly cruel.” This was a sentiment shared by others. The Truth Seeker editor Eugene Macdonald said that because of the backwardness and religiousness of Spain, the war was “a battle of the nineteenth century against the sixteenth.”

The initial fight to kick Spain out of the Philippines was seen in much the same light as that in Cuba: a fight on behalf of an oppressed people against a cruel, Catholic nation. A cartoon by Watson Heston, the resident cartoonist of the Truth Seeker, entitled “What Will Uncle Sam Do About It?,” encouraged American intervention in defense of the Philippines. The cartoon showed a primitive-looking Filipino, weighed down by a white Catholic friar strapped to his back, reaching out to Uncle Sam for help (figure 1).

Following the purchase of the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris of December 1898, there were a few months of peace before war broke out between the Filipinos and the

Americans. During this time, freethinkers imagined that the new territory might be transformed in a secular image. In this way, they mirrored Protestant missionaries, who similarly looked upon the Philippines as ripe ground for proselytizing. For example, T.B. Wakeman, a prominent freethinker, wrote in the Free Thought Magazine about the need for “the introduction of Liberal, scientific, and secular literature among those newly-awakened people as fast as they can learn to read.”

Robert Ingersoll too was eager to bring the benefits of secular civilization to the Filipinos, yet he was careful to point out that while he favored expansion, he did not support it without the consent of the subject people. The Philippines might have great economic value to the United States, but, as Ingersoll said, this was ultimately unimportant: “We must do right. We must act nobly toward the Filipinos, whether we get the islands or not. I would like to see peace between us and the Filipinos; peace honorable to both; peace based on reason instead of force.”

While Ingersoll had supported the fight in the Philippines against Spain, he reacted angrily to the outbreak of war against the Filipinos. For Ingersoll, territorial ac- quisition had to be with the consent of the people, and this clearly failed his test. In an interview on February 20, 1899, two weeks after the start of the war, Ingersoll called it “a great mistake — a blunder — almost a crime.” Ingersoll insisted that “[w]e had no right to buy, because Spain had no right to sell the Philippines. We acquired no rights on those islands by whipping Spain.” On July 20, 1899, Ingersoll wrote to an Illinois newspaper: “It is true that I think the treatment of the Filipinos wrong — foolish. It is also true that I do not want the Filipinos if they do not want us. I believe in expansion — if it is honest.”

Ingersoll died a day later, before the fighting in the Philippines shifted from a conventional war to one based on guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics later in the year. The subsequent years saw atrocities committed by American soldiers come to light. In particular, the use of scorched earth tactics, the indiscriminate killing of Filipino civilians, and the “water cure” method of torture, in which prisoners were forced to ingest large quantities of water, all became known among the American reading public. Had Ingersoll lived longer, it seems likely he would have criticized these actions in a similar manner to Twain.

While Ingersoll died before the brutal realities of the war could be fully realized, other freethinkers took up criticism after his death. If freethinkers were initially supportive of the prospects of a (secular) civilizing mission, they soon came to realize – like Twain – that such a prospect was fraught with problems, not least because Christians would inevitably take the lead at reform.

During the war, some Americans patronizingly suggested that the nation had a duty to uplift the supposedly backward Filipinos, dubbed “our little brown brothers.” Imperialists also interpreted Rudyard Kipling’s poem, the “White Man’s Burden,” written on the onset of the war with the Philippines, as calling for whites to take up the burden of civilizing the backward nations of the world. Freethinkers were highly critical of such sentiments and mocked the idea of a white man’s burden. Because freethinkers found so much to dislike about their own society, largely due to its Christian nature, they were skeptical of arguments about the innate superiority of the United States. Watson Heston, who as we saw above was initially supportive of American intervention in the Philippines, was quick to deploy his artistic talents against the idea of the white man’s burden. In one cartoon, he depicted a white man in a foreign land, who was barely able to carry the various packages strapped to his back — the literal white man’s burden, in this case — which were labeled, for example, “Preacher Salaries,” “Nunnery,” “Faith,” and “Religion.” The Filipinos in the scene meanwhile look unimpressed by the man’s offerings (figure 2).

Anti-imperialists also published a number of satirical takes on Kipling’s poem. One such came from Charles G. Brown in the Free Thought Magazine. The poem described how “Uncle Sam, who felt the burden / Of the white man on his shoulders,” freed Cuba from the grip of the Spanish, “But the Cubans now are asking / Uncle Samuel, not the Spaniard / For the freedom they fought for, / For the freedom that was promised.” The same situation occurred in the Philippines. The United States defeated Spain and purchased the islands, “But the wicked Fili- pinos / Would not ratify the bargain; / What they fought for was their freedom, / Not a formal change of masters.”

As the war against the Filipinos turned into a counterinsurgency operation, a host of atrocities followed. For freethinkers, these atrocities often went hand-in-hand with missionary evangelism. A cartoon by Ryan Walker, who briefly replaced Heston as the cartoonist for the Truth Seeker, showed a group of Christian missionaries arriving on an island by boat, while on the shore a Filipino man was forced down by two soldiers, with one wearing a sign that said, “water cure.” The caption below read: “The Little Brown Man: If I embrace the religion those Holy Men are bringing with them, I wonder how long before I will get to be as gentle and civilized as these philanthropists that have got hold of me now” (figure 3).

Twain and his fellow freethinkers were, of course, ultimately unsuccessful at turning the tide against the imperialist goals of their country. Their numbers were too small to have an influence at the ballot box and their iconoclastic arguments were too unpalatable for most Americans. Still, the importance of these anti-imperialist arguments lies in the fact that they pointed the way to a path not yet widely trekked: one that questioned the innate superiority of Christian American civilization and the resulting right to rule over other nations.

NAtHAN G. ALeXANDer is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is currently completing a book about atheists and race in the United States and Britain in the nineteenth century.

An expanded version of this article was first published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in July 2018.