Happy birthday Mark Twain

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by the Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power.

1835 Mark Twain (d. April 21, 1910), anti-war, anti-imperialist American humorist and novelist (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The War Prayer).

On October 24, 1901, when US Marines landed in Samar during the Philippine-American War (sometimes rather patronisingly referred to as the Philippine Insurrection), Brigadier General 'Hell-roaring Jake' Smith issued his orders: "I wish you to burn and kill; the more you burn and kill, the better it will please me."

Some Americans, notably Mark Twain, strongly objected to the annexation of the Philippines. (Many other Americans mistakenly thought that the Philippines wanted to be 'liberated' the United States.) Twain was, in fact, the most prominent literary opponent of the bloody war and imperialism in general, and served as a vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death. His short story 'The War Prayer', which we reproduce in the Scriptorium, remains one of the world's great pro-peace pieces of literature.

On December 17, 1877, when the Atlantic Monthly gave a party to celebrate the 70th birthday of John Greenleaf Whittier, American Quaker poet, abolitionist and reformer, Twain, in a speech, shocked the diners by comparing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, (all guests) to three drunken tramps in the Sierras ...

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