Ron Chernow
speaker
176 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Ron Chernow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
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.
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
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.
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.
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,
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-
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.
But you know, it's all, you know, the problems are self-inflicted wounds.
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.
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