The following book review for the Mark Twain Forum was written by Terry
Oggel.

Barbara Schmidt
~~~~~

BOOK REVIEW

Shaw, Angel Velasco and Luis H. Francia (eds.). _Vestiges of War: The
Philippine American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999_.
New York University Press, 2003. Pp. 468. Softcover. $29.95. ISBN
0-8147-9791-1.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Terry Oggel ([log in to unmask])
Virginia Commonwealth University

Copyright (c) 2003 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

For students of Mark Twain, the chief interest in this oversize,
elaborately illustrated volume is Jim Zwick's "Mark Twain's
Anti-Imperialist Writings in the 'American Century'" (pp. 28-56) and the
accompanying reprint of Mark Twain's 1901 anti-imperialist essay "To the
Person Sitting in Darkness" (pp. 57-68). The entire volume commands
attention, however, more these days than usual. It is comprised of 50
pieces in multiple media--poems, visual essays, scholastic essays with
documentation, literary essays, video and play scripts, a painting, and one
polemical essay (Twain's). These are gathered into five clusters arranged
more or less chronologically: "The Object of Colonial Desire" (where the
Zwick and Twain essays are), "The Body Count: The War and Its
Consequences," "Looking the Other Way: The Cultural Fallout," "View from
the Diaspora," and "The Past Meets the Present." An index affords access to
topics and people across all the sections, aiding significantly the
volume's research and reference potential. Throughout, but especially in
the fourth section, the pieces are globally inclusive, with authors and
topics drawn from Vietnam, Germany, Guam, China, and Korea in addition to
the Philippines and the United States. The volume's size, its artwork and
its handsome appearance might give a first impression that it is
decorative. But the contents say otherwise. It is earnest and even mournful
in places. Its dedication is to "all the innocent casualties, living or
dead, of a war that should never have happened."

The objective that unifies the various pieces in _Vestiges_, as the
Philippino-American editors make clear in their introductory essays, is to
begin to recover two strands that have been lost: the history of the war
itself, along with its aftermath, including "American colonialism [and]
subsequent U.S. interventions after colonial rule through to today"; and
the parallel history of the efforts world-wide to speak out against these
intrusions (xi). Twain addresses the former; Zwick the latter. His piece is
one of many that comment on one hundred years of "marginalization and
mainstream censorship" (xi). From the distance of a century, the editors
and contributors probe the conflicting undercurrents of imperialism and its
consequences--identity and alienation, redemption and guilt, loyalty and
betrayal--conflicts exacerbated by suppression, not only in the United
States but in the Philippines, too. They point to the silences in the press
and in school textbooks and histories. In this context, Shaw highlights the
essays by Zwick and the "legendary satirist" Mark Twain which together
"offer compelling criticism across the generations of what Twain labels
'the blessings of civilization'" (xii).

To my surprise, the idea of including "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"
was not Zwick's. It seems that both editors are Twain aficionados. The
volume is far richer for it. Surrounded by pieces written in retrospect,
Twain's composition, coeval with the war, substantiates and authenticates
them. While it "fits in" with them, the very features that show its
contemporaneity--its topical references, and its locutions and
vocabulary--make it stand apart, too. It's edgier and sharper than its
companions. It appeals to the mind, like most of them, but unlike most of
them, it also appeals to the soul.

Mark Twain's opposition to American imperialism and to this war in
particular is familiar territory for Zwick, for these are exactly the Twain
writings that have most interested him since 1992 when he rescued many of
them from obscurity with his book _Weapons of Satire_, containing a broad
assortment of 35 newspaper interviews, speeches, essays, publicity
announcements and the like in which Twain protested American intervention
in the conflict. Many of the pieces had not been printed before. In the
decade since, Zwick has published further on Twain's anti-imperialism, and
along the way he has created a wide-reaching, multi-layered website,
http://www.boondocksnet.com/, that is doubtless the single best electronic
resource on anti-imperialism in general and on Mark Twain's
anti-imperialist writings in particular.

Here in his _Vestiges_ piece, Zwick's interest is, first, in the
suppression of Twain's Philippine-American War writings, and, second, in
the political uses (some legitimate and some not) that these writings have
been put to. Though the situation is much better now, Zwick believes that
Twain's protests are still "relatively unknown today" because of the
"nation's inability to deal with that part of its past" (38). That seems
true, for we know that much of the censorship of Twain's writings was
perpetrated by two powerful people who, while vigorously opposed to
allowing his political and social views be read by the public were
aggressively interested in using him to advance their own reputations and
financial gain.

The two notorious figures here were Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's first
literary executor, and, after he died, Clara Clemens, the author's only
surviving daughter. If Clara never made explicit what prompted her to
censor her father's writings, certainly Paine did and cupidity does not
seem to be too strong a term to describe his motives. Zwick cites with
great effectiveness a blindingly blatant letter Paine wrote in 1926 to
Twain's publisher, Harper and Brothers, saying that no one should be
allowed to write about Twain for "'as long as we can prevent it.'" If
others are allowed to write about him, Paine continued, "'the Mark Twain
that we have "preserved"--the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark
Twain--will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark
Twain property will depreciate'" (44).

Much of Zwick's essay is a study of the combined effect that Paine's and
Clara's thwarting control had on Twain's texts and reputation for more than
half a century. To be sure, Paine began his publishing on Twain
forthrightly enough--his biography of the writer in 1912 contained no
glaring censorship--but one by one the following books deleted information
and presented falsified texts, from Twain's letters (1917) to his notebook
(1935). In _Europe and Elsewhere_(1923), Paine brazenly altered "To the
Person Sitting in Darkness," a work that Twain himself had seen through the
press. Paine's censorship was most egregious in his notebook volume,
brought out during the rise of fascism in Europe. Where he didn't remove
Twain's critical references to war entirely, he made changes that distorted
Twain's views, changes that were all the more insidious in the light of
Paine's explicit assurance that "'nothing has been modified, nothing
changed"' (46).

Following Paine's death in 1937, Clara assumed responsibility for
maintaining the public view of her father. Her most notable contribution to
this nefarious activity occurred in 1939 when she refused publication of
_Letters from the Earth_, the collection of social and religious commentary
prepared by Bernard DeVoto, Paine's successor as Twain's literary executor.
It was not until she died in 1962 that more than a half-century of control
devoted to preserving the "traditional Mark Twain" and the "Harper Mark
Twain property" finally ended.

It must be remembered, however, that Paine and Clara weren't the first to
keep Twain's anti-war writings from the public. The author himself
contributed to the suppression. On his own, Twain decided against
publishing pieces like "The Stupendous Procession" and "As Regards
Patriotism." His favorite explanation was that "None but the dead are
permitted to tell the truth" (47). The Harper brothers were also
restrictive. They rejected strong pieces like "King Leopold's Soliloquy"
and "The War Prayer." Zwick says that for one reason or another, during his
lifetime "only a fraction" of what Twain wrote about imperialism was
published (43).

What Mark Twain did publish, though, was enough to earn him an intimidating
reputation. His emergence on the battlefield over imperialism began upon
his return to the United States in October 1900 when he became a member of
the Anti-Imperialist League. There he joined such outspoken opponents as
Jane Addams, Samuel Gompers, Andrew Carnegie and William James. A few like
the southern segregationist Benjamin R. Tillman also joined until they
could be sure that imperialism didn't mean United States citizenship for
Filipinos. Zwick delineates this curious blend of motivations well, noting
that, "Imperialists and racist anti-imperialists were not far apart here"
(42). Thus, American military-backed imperialism sought to deny Filipinos
self-government while segregationist violence in the South sought to
disenfranchise American blacks.

This combination of causes doubly fired Mark Twain's formidable creative
energy, and once he got started it was next to impossible for him to stop.
He continued to speak out against imperialism in interviews and public
statements until at least November 1907. His involvement with public issues
during his late years was so well known, in fact, that it amounted to a
kind of second career. By the time of his death, as Zwick observes, he was
as widely recognized for these writings as he was for his fictions,
configuring a writing career so unusual that an integrated understanding of
it still eludes critics and biographers.

Zwick's chronicling of the long duration of Paine-Clara control contributes
useful information to our understanding of this unhappy saga. When he turns
his attention to the uses that some political ideologies have made of
Twain's anti-imperialism, however, he engages a fresh aspect of Twain's
political writing that leads Zwick to delineate the fine line a democracy
must walk between self-criticism and self-defense. Beginning in 1947 and
peaking more than a decade later when it was front page news in the _New
York Times_, Soviet critics, accusing the United States of being an
imperialist nation, charged the American government as well as some Twain
editors (like Charles Neider) of suppressing Mark Twain's anti-imperialist
writings. As the subject of an international debate, therefore, Twain's
protest writings (albeit still in their expurgated form) experienced
"banner years" in 1961 and 1962, the years of the Bay of Pigs invasion of
Cuba, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the early escalation of American
involvement in Vietnam (49). And the writings continued their prominence
during the Vietnam conflict the following decade, and carried on into the
1980s and early 1990s during United States military intervention in
Nicaragua and the Gulf War.

_Vestiges_ grew out of exhibitions and conferences on the
Philippine-American War at the Guggenheim and New York University arranged
by the editors in February 1999, the centenary of the beginning of the war.
That accounts, apparently (no one explains it), for that year in the
subtitle. The volume was no doubt scheduled for publication soon
thereafter, and that would have been salutary for appearing when it does
with scarcely a mention of all that has happened since September 11, 2001,
makes the collection seem curiously truncated. The only indications I could
spot that the editors sensed this omission appear in brief, late-added
comments to their introductory essays. Thus, the volume could be said to
abet the woeful condition it derides by helping to "hide" some of the
aftermath of the imperial dream. But that wasn't the only embarrassing
omission, for Francia informs us ruefully that in February 1999 the
Philippine government neglected to commemorate the centennial of the
outbreak of the war. All the more reason, therefore, that the volume should
have been revised as soon as the editors and the NYU Press knew that it
wouldn't be published promptly. As the book stands, one reads the subtitle
and wonders what the editors were thinking by seeming to suggest that the
"aftermath" was all over in 1999.

The Philippine archipelago has been an "object of desire" for the west at
least since Ferdinand Magellan stopped there in 1522 to proselytize for
Christianity during his attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Most natives
who failed to accept "the blessings of civilization" were killed. But some
resisted the choice to convert or die, and not unsuccessfully--Magellan
died at the hands of Muslims on the island of Mactan. No "aftermath"
problem there. That part of the islands remains Muslim to this day.
_____

Terry Oggel is professor English at Virginia Commonwealth University in
Richmond, Virginia.