United States of Lyncherdom  

BRIAN: It’s been 30 years since Hustler v. Falwell and it’s safe to say political satire in America is alive and well. Since the election of Donald Trump, comedy shows like Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, and The Daily Show have enjoyed a surge in popularity by skewering American politics.

JOANNE: So today we’re revisiting some of our stories on the history of satire in America.

ED: We’ll talk about why conservative satire doesn’t seem to get the same traction as SNL and Stephen Colbert, we’ll explore the roots of America’s unique style of political satire, and we’ll talk to two satirists of history.

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JOANNE: But first, a topic so charged that even one of America’s greatest satirists backed away.

ED: In 1901, Mark Twain read a newspaper story about a lynching in Missouri. Twain was appalled, not only at the gruesome act, but also by the growing number of lynchings in the American South. So he sat down at his typewriter and pounded out a response. What, he asked, could possibly provoke Americans to commit such a grotesque act of violence?

ACTOR AS MARK TWAIN: Is it because men think a lurid and terrible punishment a more forcible object lesson and a more effective deterrent than a sober and colorless hanging done privately in a jail would be?

JOANNE: Twain then switched from moral outrage to sarcasm and offered a solution to the crime of lynching. Stephen Railton is a Twain scholar at the University of Virginia. He says Twain pointed to one group of Americans who could stop lynchings.

STEPHEN RAILTON: The missionaries, the Christian missionaries, who were in China.

JOANNE: There were hundreds of Protestant missionaries scattered across China in the early 20th century.

STEPHEN RAILTON: Spreading civilization was what they said, he said that was the worst gift we could possibly give anybody– our civilization.

JOANNE: Twain’s sarcastic solution was to unleash that so-called civilization on the God-fearing American South. So instead of saving Chinese souls, these missionaries would save the souls of their fellow Americans.

ACTOR AS MARK TWAIN: We implore them to come back and help us in our need. They have the martyr spirit, and nothing but the martyr spirit can brave a lynching mob, and cow it and scatter it.

MALE SPEAKER: Twain planned to publish the essay in an anthology chronicling lynching in America.

STEPHEN RAILTON: He sent the idea for this book, along with the essay, to his publisher, a guy named Bliss. And Bliss wrote him back, as Twain explained to a friend, to say that if they published that book, he wouldn’t have even half a friend left in the South.

MALE SPEAKER: Twain never published the United States of Lyncherdom, though it recently enjoyed a renewed burst of publicity in the wake of the racially motivated mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. Twain’s self-censorship might seem odd to many Americans. After all, Railton says he didn’t shy away from satirizing racism in the American South in works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. So I asked, why did Twain publish that critique, but he pulled his punches when it came to his lynching essay?

STEPHEN RAILTON: If you’re writing Huck Finn in the 1880s and you’re making fun of the antebellum South 50 years ago, nobody in your audience is going to identify with the people along that river.

MALE SPEAKER: Ah, so he used history.

STEPHEN RAILTON: Used the past, use distance in time or distance in space as a way of creating safe targets to be both funny and satirical. That was the formula for his great success. And all his work takes some other place or some other time as it’s setting.

He was best known to his contemporaries for his travel books. His first book and his biggest success in the course of his lifetime was a book about going to Europe and the Holy Land right after the Civil War called Innocents Abroad where he makes fun of the Catholics in Italy and the Arabs in the Holy Land. But the older he got and the more success he had, the more he wanted to really express what he felt about his world. Not about the past or some other world.

And that’s the kind of thing that the United States of Lyncherdom is. But he always felt very vulnerable when he started in that direction toward confronting his audience with their own failures. And in many cases, like this particular essay, at the last minute he lost his nerve and decided to put it in a box.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, I’m curious about this business of writing something and not publishing it. How many other things did Mark Twain write and not publish?

STEPHEN RAILTON: A lot. More and more as his career went on, the manuscripts just piled up. Not long after his death his literary executor began publishing them, but there are still many things that are unpublished. One of the most frequently reproduced pieces from the whole of Mark Twain’s career these days is a very short and amazingly powerful critique of war called The War Prayer, which he wrote four years after The United States of Lyncherdom.

It’s set in a country that’s about to go to war and it describes a church service in which the minister prays fervently for the troops to be successful in war, for God to bless the cause and the flag. And in the middle of that service, an angel comes down from God to say, do you know what you’re really praying for? You’re praying for widows. You’re praying for destroyed homes. You’re praying for refugees. And when the United States was in Vietnam, for example, or when the United States went into Iraq, The War Prayer showed up all over the place. It’s been probably reproduced as often as Huck Finn, but Mark Twain never published it.

MALE SPEAKER: Why would it have been so dangerous to publish in 1905?

STEPHEN RAILTON: Well, Mark Twain was extremely sensitive about risking all that he had earned, the fame, and the popularity, and the financial success, by entertaining his audience. So he was always worried that he could lose all of that very quickly if he said something that would offend rather than entertain that audience. What he said was, I have told the truth too plainly in that piece, and that’s something no man can afford to do until I am dead. So– but he felt that about a lot of things.

Mark Twain’s contemporaries knew that he was a satirist, knew that he was a critic of a lot of things, like shams and hypocrisies. But they had no idea what he really thought about an awful lot of things. We still don’t know exactly what Sam Clemens– that’s the distinction I like to make. That the difference between what Sam Clemens thought and what Mark Twain was allowed to say. And Mark Twain is a very carefully performed an edited version of Sam Clemens.

MALE SPEAKER: Well, Steve, thank you for joining us today on BackStory.

STEPHEN RAILTON: It was a pleasure.

ED AYERS: Stephen Railton is an English professor at the University of Virginia and the author of Mark Twain: A Short Introduction.