Ron Chernow
Appearances
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
It seems like there are a lot of smiling faces of whites in the crowd. That turned out to that was kind of one topic that was a bridge too far for him to do.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
I saw in your resume, Conan, that you had studied history at Harvard and I had studied literature at Yale. So you were in training for my career and I was in training for your career.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
that we have two sets of ideas. We have our secret and sincere positions on things, and then we have the positions that we take publicly for the sake of our own safety. He said that kind of life makes cowards of us all, the need to support our families. We're afraid to voice things. He also felt that politically, we all like to imagine that we're voicing original ideas,
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
When, in fact, he said, you know, 99% of the time we are voicing ideas that we picked up from party leaders, from party organs that were kind of parroting things.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He writes a letter at one point to his family. He says, I have to move, move, move, exclamation point. And there is something driving him. I mean, one of many contradictions of Mark Twain is he always described himself as lazy. But we know Tom and Huck in the Mississippi. He published two dozen books in his lifetime.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 magazine articles, filled up 50 notebooks, gave thousands of interviews, gave thousands of speeches. And I, of course, had to go through all of this. And he was very aware of his own nature. He said, my emotions veer from one extreme to another.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah. And I mean, there was it was interesting because there were a lot of characteristics. He was, you know, he claimed that he was lazy, but then he would go through kind of this hyper focused period. He could be very scattered and disorganized, particularly before he met his wife, who really cleaned up his people.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
You know, people would walk into his room and there would be, you know, scraps of writing everywhere. There'd be, you know, pipes and cigars everywhere. It would be a complete mess. I did describe this to a psychiatrist friend who immediately said, you know, about attention deficit disorder. I try not to use contemporary psychological language.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
It seems inappropriate to project that, you know, back into the past. But there's something like that, you know, that's clearly going on. But I got very fascinated by the business investments. In fact, at one point in the book, I said it was sometimes hard to tell whether Mark Twain was a literary man with business sidelines or a businessman with literary sidelines.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He said, I have to speculate, such being my nature. He admits late in his life, after he's lost several fortunes, he said, I was always the easy prey of the cheap adventurer. And there was something very, very compulsive about the speculation because the tragedy of the story is, you know, here's a man who made a fortune in book royalties. He made a fortune in lecture fees.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He marries an heiress from upstate New York. To a coal fortune. Coal and rail and timber. They're living in a 25-room mansion in Hartford with six servants. He blows his own fortune. He blows Livy's inheritance. they're forced into exile to economize in Europe for nine years. Because it's cheaper to live in Europe. Cheaper to live in Europe.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But still, you know, they're living like in a, you know, 28 room villa in Florence to quote unquote economize. Yeah. You know, they're living in a... There's no Airbnb. There's no Airbnb.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Then they're living in a very lavish suite of hotel rooms in Vienna. In fact, they go on one trip to Europe and they buy so many objects to beautify their house in Hartford that they come back with like 12 crates and 25 boxes of things. They were like the original consumers. And Livy was usually the restraining force on Twain's worst excesses. But she herself was the original shopper.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And she wrote a very beautiful letter to her mother at one point and said, it's terrible how attached we become to material things. So here was a man, a couple, who should have had a lovely, placid life, had everything in the world. He had talent. He was making an enormous amount of money. He'd married into an enormous amount of-
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And actually the most famous American in the world. In the world, yeah. But particularly in the United States, he was so fascinated that if he walked into a restaurant theater, everyone would stand up and applaud. He was that famous. Well, it happens.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But you know, it's all, you know, the problems are self-inflicted wounds.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
No, he couldn't get it out of his system. You know, when he was a young writer in San Francisco, he was about the same age as Bret Hart. Remember Bret Hart, the outcast of Poker Flash? Yep, yep.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Who was the celebrity at the time and who Mark Twain thought was the most celebrated, maybe the greatest, you know, writer of the time. They became very, very close friends. They later collaborated on a play, and Bret Hart was having money difficulties, came and lived in Mark Twain's house in Hartford. He said things about the house that Mark Twain didn't like.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He said things about Livy, the wife that... Dwayne didn't like. And Mark Twain then turned on him. He would like fall in love with people. And then he would become severely disillusioned so that, you know, he finally says at Bret Hart, he never had an idea that he came by honestly. He said that he was a man without a country. No, that's too strong a term. He was an invertebrate without a country.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And there was no one who was better at put-downs than Mark Twain. But you know, one of the things that I could not figure out about him, we all have these experiences with people where we're suddenly disillusioned with them and maybe tell them off. But when we do tell them off, It gets it out of our system, and then we sort of calm down and we move on with our life.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Mark Twain would not let it go. And if you can't let it go, the one who's going to end up being victimized by it is not the other person it's going to be.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
that he keeps probing again, again, again. I could not figure out. I don't know if any psychiatrist could figure out. I mean, he's late in life. He's very disillusioned with the two most important people working for him, a man named Ralph Ashcroft and a woman named Isabel Lyon, who was his private secretary. When he becomes disillusioned with them, he ends up writing a 400-page manuscript entitled
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
you know, and he says about Isabel, who had been his... He is so close to her. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
A diss track. She was a brute, a simple, heartless brute. She was an insect.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, and he's suffering terribly from carbuncles. I mean, it was really grueling for him to do it. But particularly, Livy felt that... There was this terrible stigma attached to bankruptcy. You know, for her, it was a real question of honor.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And in fact, you know, the eldest daughter, Susie, died at 24 of bacterial meningitis and When they finally paid off the last of the debts, Livy writes that the happiest day that she'd had since her daughter died was the day that they paid off the last of the creditors. In fact, there's an interesting moment. Twain became very good friends with the Standard Oil mogul named Henry Rogers.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And Rogers is kind of running rings around the creditors. He was a very, very shrewd Wall Street operator.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, he was helping Twain out. And Twain, you know, in New York, writes very proudly to Libby, who was then in Paris, describing the way that... Rogers has handled the creditors and Libby writes back. She said, I'm upset by the way we're handling the creditors. She really felt that they owed the creditors and they should be treating the creditors with much more
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah. People, you know, people always say to me at events, Mr. Chernow, did you imagine as you were writing the book that it was going to end up as a hip hop musical? And I always say, I think the question answers itself.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
dignity and uh and and respect but it's an amazing story because it did take several years to pay off the debts but you know what amazed me conan okay so he goes through this terrible grueling it was a 12 or 13 month round the world um tour and then they're living in um vienna And he discovers that there is this patent for a new process for printing on carpets and textiles and tapestries.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He hears about this new invention. He goes to the American consulate and he spends a day reading up on this industry. He's known nothing about this before. After 24 hours, he's convinced that he's the world's leading authority on this.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And he writes a letter to his friend, Henry Rogers, who is one of the main moguls of Standard Oil. And he suggests that they buy up the worldwide patents. The device was called the Raster. He said, we should buy the worldwide patents for this. He said, people will call it a trust. this global monopoly they will have. But we mustn't mind that. You know, people will talk, but that's okay.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And so he's gone from knowing nothing about this to suddenly imagining that he's going to be the head of a global monopoly.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, I mean, he says that anyone who's not a pessimist is a damn fool. He actually says there was no life ever worth living. No life was worth living. It was worth living. And he was asked if he would like to live his life all over again. He said, I would like to relive my youth and then drown myself. He made this statement that the... Only gift that God gave to the race was youth.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He felt that everything else after that was bitterness and disappointment. And he's always kind of pining for this lost paradise of his youth, which is why he wrote so powerfully about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which of course has much darker tones to it. But it's a bit of a paradox because he had this adoring wife. He could not have had a better wife than Libby.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, and actually one of the interesting parts of the story is Twain said when they first met that he, Twain, was a mighty, coarse, rough customer. And she took this man and she really, because he'd come from this little backwater town, she made him presentable in polite society. And he really didn't know how to do it. She helped him with what we would today call the anger management.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He had a terrible temper. So he would very often, if he was angry, he would sit down and he would write a very, you know, impetuous note telling somebody off. And she trained him when he did that, not to send a letter, but to stash it in the drawer and wait a few days. And then when he would cool off, and I can't tell you how many letters there are, you know, in his archives.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
where the morning after a dinner party, he would write to someone who'd been at the dinner party. The madam tells me that I might have been a little brusque and sharp at dinner last night, and I really didn't intend to offend you. In fact, the daughters laughingly called this mother dusting father off. In fact, it reached the point where they had this system of cards at a dinner table.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
So a red card flashed to Mark Twain meant, are you going to monopolize that woman sitting on your right the whole time? A blue card meant, are you going to sit back and not say anything the entire dinner? So she's kind of guiding him.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But, you know, in fact, he said, because, you know, he said, Livy edited my manuscripts and then she edited me. And she kind of really gave him a life. And, you know, in many ways, she was a long-suffering wife. He loses her inheritance. We have extensive correspondence between them. she never, never threw it in his face.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
The saddest one is that he and Libby, their first child was a boy who was named Langdon, which was her maiden name. Langdon died at 18 months. What happened was that they were at the Langdon place in Elmira, New York. And one chilly morning in May, they went out driving, and Twain felt that he had not wrapped the baby up enough in this chilly weather. And they came back, and the baby had a cold.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But then the baby recovered, and they went to Hartford. And after they went to Hartford, the baby died of diphtheria. Mark Twain told William Dean Howells, who was his closest literary friend, he said, I killed Langdon. He was convinced that that ride in the carriage... When it was emphatically not that. Emphatically, yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
In fact, his sister-in-law, Sue Crane, afterwards said, you know, they left Elmira and went to Hartford because the baby was better. The baby was fine. So he had this tendency... to flagellate himself, you know, and take responsibility. And it was really kind of crazy, you know, what happened with Susie, the eldest daughter, that he was not, you know, there at the time.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
They had just come back from this round-the-world tour. There was no cure for meningitis at the time. You know, his being there would not really have helped Mattis, and in fact, she was sort of delirious and...
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And then, of course, it became one of the most... No, in fact, you know, with that song, a few months earlier, he had come to my brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and he sat on my couch and he started snapping his fingers and he did the opening number of the song. And when he finished, he said, what do you think? I said, well, you've taken the first 40 pages of my book
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
It's interesting, you know, because he's a novelist, and I think that he himself becomes a character perhaps greater than any of his creations. I think the life he lives is a story actually more dramatic than any that he... And it's full of light and shadow because it's full of literary triumphs, to be sure, full of personal calamities.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And I haven't had a chance to tell you just how much I loved your speech. that you gave for the Mark Twain Award because I think that I was so glad just the tone of it because Mark Twain was much more than just a humorist. He was a sage. He was a moralist.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He was a conscience of the person. I think that you really touched on that very, very exactly. But it's interesting because we know Mark Twain as a humorist and we tend to think of him with the white suit and the cigar. But Mark Twain said a couple of things about life. He said, life is a tragedy with comedy distributed here and there only to heighten and magnify the pain by contrast.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Unbelievable. And then he also said that life is a fever dream. with sweetness embittered by sorrow and pleasure poisoned by pain. I know you're all going to go off and jump off a bridge after I tell you these comments that he made.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
and you've condensed it into a four-minute song. And I said, that's rather amazing. But what I was thinking, and I didn't say to him, I said, this is kind of embarrassing that it took me 40 pages to say what this guy has done in four minutes. And then a few months later, he said, go on YouTube. I performed it at the White House.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He has this kind of deterministic view that we're just kind of machines, and there are stimuli, and we react to it, that we're really not creating anything. The funny thing is, Conan, that someone reading that, if it had not been written by Mark Twain, they would have said, well, what about Mark Twain?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Mark Twain would have been the best example of the fact that there is true originality in the world. world.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, he actually gets up after... And can't let that go. No, he can't let it go. Yeah, and he gets up after he's watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet with a friend, and he gets up at the end and he says to the friend, that was the best thing Francis Bacon ever wrote.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He was convinced that his discovery that Francis Bacon had written it said it's the great discovery of the age.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He loved the play. And I think what misled him is that as Mark Twain became famous, reporters were constantly flocking to Hannibal, Missouri and other places that he had lived. So like everyone who ever knew Mark Twain was interviewed 25 times. And he couldn't figure out why there wasn't
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
that same kind of trove, you know, of anecdotes and why weren't the people in Stratford telling all these stories about, um, if Shakespeare was doing all this, why weren't they writing?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
It was a different media environment, you know, and his life was covered so extensively. Uh, and, uh, you know, with the kind of a handful of stories about, uh, but if Shakespeare lived in a different media environment, you know, we would know everything about him.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But so, you know, Mark Twain wrongly extrapolated from it to Elizabethan times, but he actually wrote this book called The Shakespeare Dead that he thought was going to, you know, set the world on fire. It didn't. He also thought that John Bunyan had not written Pilgrim's Progress. He thought John Milton was, but... Maybe he didn't write his own works.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
So there he is, not only performing it at the White House, but he got a standing ovation from Barack and Michelle Obama. And I thought to myself, I'm really strapped to a rocket with this guy. He's written one song in the show, and he's already performed it at the White House and gotten the standing ovation from the president and first lady.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Hello, my name is Ron Chernow. And I feel very, very warmly about anyone who has won the Mark Twain Award for American Humor. Oh, wow. Including our friend Conan O'Brien. So it's a delight to be here.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Well, I'm so curious if you were alive today, if I can get to ask you a question. If I was alive today? That with Mark Twain, there was just no filter whatsoever. There was no kind of political correctness. He really felt as a satirist that everything was fair game.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
So that, for instance, you know, when he wrote his first book, which turned out to be his bestselling book called The Innocents Abroad, you know, he went with these tourists, kind of early tourist crews to Europe and the Holy Land. And he's just sounding off on all these things there in Italy. and he's making jokes about dwarves.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He said, you know, if you want to see, you know, dwarves retail, go to Milan. If you want to see dwarves wholesale, go to Genoa. You know, all of these different things. Well, no one today would dare to make these sorts of jokes. And he really felt that the whole world was his, you know, field for humor.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And I wonder how he would function today, you know, where we're much more sensitive, you know, about... offending different groups.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, you know, Mark Twain is a type of writer almost inconceivable today. He had no inhibitions. He felt no need to have any inhibitions.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of a good example of kind of the difference between things were perceived then and now. Because he collects, and that was the term that he used, that he collected a dozen of these girls. He called them his angelfish. They became members of his aquarium club.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He was very careful to incorporate the mothers, the grandmothers into this. There was nothing secretive. He actually flaunted it. Actually, one of the girls, Dorothy Quick, he met on the transatlantic liner. And when it docked in New York, there would always be, you know, a scrum of reporters waiting for Mark Twain in New York. And he gets off the boat with this 11-year-old girl.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And the next day, newspapers across the country, you know, the headlines are, Mark Twain captive of little girl. You know, and people found this. a very kind of charming, endearing accent. Oh, Mark Twain, you know, he's written beautiful books about American children. Of course, he loves it. So far from being secretive about it, you know, he flaunted it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
In fact, I tell the story in the book that one of his friends, who was a famous actress, you know, came to dinner one day dressed as a 12-year-old girl, you know, with kind of buttons and bows and everything because she wanted to be one of his angelfish. So this is the way it was kind of handled. People were reacting in this kind of very jovial way to it.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Whereas we look at this behavior now and it's, you know, very disturbing, very, you know, odd and disquieting. He never acted on it. I mean, it's very different. When I was doing the research, I read a book about, you know, Lewis Carroll in the case of, Lewis Carroll, where superficially might seem similar, but Lewis Carroll collected nude photos and nude drawings of the girls.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
There was nothing like that with Twain. What the underlying dynamic was, I really don't know. But he had kind of enough control over himself. But he liked it. He would read aloud to them. They would play pool together. He did announce during his last three, four years of life, he said, I worked hard enough in my life. I just now want to play, you know, so it was like kind of a second childhood.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But it's really strange and weird. I mean, I'm not here to defend it. It's really kind of very creepy. And I think that everyone who reads the book will have that reaction to it. But I also kind of have to describe in fairness to him, you know, what it was and what it wasn't.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
You had a wonderful line in your Kennedy science speeches that talked about the colossal mess of being human. You know, that's kind of what Twain is about. You know, he was once asked, how he knew so much about human nature because he traveled a lot. He met a lot of people. He said, oh, no, no, I look into myself. He felt that every human being has all of nature inside himself or herself.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And I think that that's true, that we can feel that we act on certain impulses, but we have inside of us almost every impulse. I think it's why you even, you know, watch a movie about some crime or something, and we can sort of imagine one side of ourself can identify with it. We control that. So you want to kill and kill again. No, no. Are we getting this?
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
I've been accused of a lot of things, not yet of being a serial killer, but somehow... Hold on a second.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
where we were then and it's also somewhat about where we are now so i i congratulate you and uh huge thrill to have you on the podcast because um i love this stuff oh i feel like it's it's it's a privilege to to be with you and the whole group today and i feel like you really have done honor to the book and to to mark twain so thank you for reading it and reading it so closely and attentively it's really been a great experience i guess we all win then
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Absolutely. One of the things that attracted me to the grand story was that I felt that all the people that I had written about up until that point were kind of built for success. I mean, you read about the early years of Alexander Hamilton. He has a focus, a discipline, and drive intelligence. You know, if he didn't do what, you know, he ended up doing, he would have succeeded at something.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah. And even John D. Rockefeller, when he's, you know, a young clerk on the Cleveland docks, he said, I was after something big. Whereas, you know, 50, 100 pages into Ulysses S. Grant, you figure this guy's going to end up a footnote in history at best. And so I was attracted to the idea of writing about failure. I had written about so much success. And after
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
As we all know, life is much more about failure for most of us than success. And so with Grant, suddenly the Civil War comes along. He had West Point. He'd been in the Mexican War. He stood out all this military lore in his head. But he's working in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois, where he's working as a clerk junior to his two younger brothers. You can imagine how that felt.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
the war breaks out there's a tremendous shortage particularly in the north of you know trained officers and he suddenly meshes with his historical moment you know and then he rises and rises and rises but he's almost 40 at that point he could easily have ended up living a life of total you know obscurity And I think this is one of the things that inspired a lot of people reading the story.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
You know, we all feel that we have something special inside of us if only the right set of circumstances, you know, happens. And Grant is kind of the greatest example of that.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, I mean, he's born into a slave-holding family in a slave-owning town in a slave-owning state. Okay, he's born in Hannibal, which is tucked all the way up in the northeast corner of Missouri. It's right on the Mississippi River.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
So it's then and now a rather isolated rural area, except here is this broad, shining, magnificent waterway that's kind of bringing once or twice a day the world through Hannibal and And pouring off those steamboats might be circus players, it might be traveling salesmen, it might be a minstrel show, whatever.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
He sees the whole world passing through him and it kind of begins to give him an intimation of a wider world. But you're right. I mean, going through his letters, you know, when he's a teenager, not only statements kind of crude and racist about, you know, blacks, but Chinese, I mean, you name it. Yeah.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And this man grows an inconceivable amount in the course of his life, you know, from growing up in this, you know, small town, backwater, and he has all the prejudices, you know, of the general environment, and he becomes so much more enlightened and tolerant a figure.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because he fairly early on becomes America's most popular and beloved humorist. And he recognizes that it's something of a trap. He's always afraid of kind of alienating his readers, particularly alienating his southern readers, because he had very, very strong views on not just politics, religion, and a lot of other things.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
But as his life goes on, I really feel by the end of his life, he's become the conscience of American society, that he's dared to articulate all of those things that he was afraid to say. And I think that part of his power is he says things that all of us are thinking but won't say out loud.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And you mentioned, you know, his views on imperialism because at the beginning of the Spanish-American War, he's actually very much on the side of the U.S. He feels that we're defending these, you know, Cuban rebels against their Spanish overlords and we take over the Philippines.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
And he again, idealistically imagines that we're going to liberate, you know, rather than subjugate the Philippine people. And he gets up at a dinner in New York. He was very often the toast master. He was kind of the perfect person to host a banquet. And he gets up there and he says that our soldiers in the Philippines are marching with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. Well,
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
We all know, because we've all lived through wars, we know how difficult it is to criticize your own government and your own country. During a war. During a war, yeah. And people in the audience gasped. In fact, another, you know, one of the organizers of this event immediately rushed up to the podium and said, no, our soldiers are not, you know, marching.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
With disgraced muskets under a polluted flag. And, you know, increasingly as he goes on, he's willing to take the heat. He's willing to make the enemies. And one of the interesting things, one of many interesting things about doing this book is we all like to think as people get older, they become more mellow in their views. Twain becomes more rabid.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
In his rage, and he's not only taking on America and the Philippines, he's writing pamphlets against the Russian czar. He's writing pamphlets against King Leopold II of Belgium for his behavior in the Congo Free State. He's campaigning against municipal corruption in New York. He's writing pamphlets defending the Jews. He's speaking out. Uh, in favor of women's suffrage, et cetera, et cetera.
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
yeah that was actually you know on so many things he became outspoken that was one where he finally drew back because originally he he was collecting a lot of clippings about lynchings in the united states including in his own town of hannibal and he had originally planned and proposed to his publisher that he was going to do a history of lynching in the united states he ends up writing an essay the united states have lynched him which unfortunately did not get published during his lifetime it was published 13 years
Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend
Ron Chernow
after he died. And what he writes is that he tries to analyze the psychology of lynch mobs. And he says that it's really just kind of a few sadistic individuals who are instigating the crowd. And he says that most of the people are cowards who are coerced into it. I don't know if that's true. I say in the book, actually, when you look at Photos of a lot of lynchings.