Twain Casts a Jaundiced Eye on D.C.

.c The Associated Press

 By LAWRENCE L. KNUTSON

WASHINGTON (AP) - The man had ridiculed London and Paris and Rome and all
the
ancient capitals of Europe. What would Mark Twain make of the politicians
who
held the power in Washington?

Could anyone, even the senator who gave him a job, expect that Twain would
quietly sit behind a desk and not find inspiration for lines like this:
``There is no distinctly native American criminal class, except Congress.''

Twain would mine the political vein and extract his own slant on humor for
the rest of his life.

``Reader, suppose you were an idiot?'' he asked in his autobiography. ``And
suppose you were a member of Congress? But I repeat myself.''

Twain was 31 when he arrived in Washington in 1867, fresh from a grand tour
of Europe and the Holy Land in company with a band of wide-eyed fellow
Americans. In two years he would distill the experience as a popular book,
``Innocents Abroad.''

But for the moment, he needed a respite and a means of earning a living
apart
from the constant travel required by the lecture circuit.

An acquaintance, Republican Sen. William Stewart of Nevada, offered him a
Washington job. Twain became Stewart's secretary on the promise he could
continue his literary and journalistic pursuits.

The pursuit of official Washington began almost at once.

``Right here in this ... fountainhead of law - in this great factory where
are forged those rules that create good order and compel virtue and honesty
in the other communities of the land, rascality achieves its highest
perfection,'' Twain proclaimed in a March 1868 ``Letter from Washington''
published in the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nev.

The next month in the same newspaper Twain wrote this: ``What a rotten,
rotten and unspeakably nasty concern this nest of departments is, with its
brainless battalions of Congressional poor-relation clerks ..

All of that helped form the underpinnings of the book Twain and his friend,
Charles Dudley Warner, would publish in 1873. The novel's title, ``The
Gilded
Age,'' would give its name to an era of American history associated with
graft, greed and corruption.

The Washington Twain knew is reflected in the novel. The Capitol is a ``long
snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees.'' The city's streets are so
muddy that the city fathers might well ``dilute the mud a little more and
use
them for canals.'' The unfinished Washington Monument ``has the aspect of a
factory chimney with the top broken off.''

Deciding that most of the city's people of influence spent much time finding
jobs for otherwise unemployable relatives and friends, Twain called the
capital ``the grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless.''

The novel's villain is Sen. Abner Dilworthy, a vote-buying politician
portrayed as ``a pious hypocrite, a sleek, oily fraud, a reptile who
manipulates temperance movements, prayer meetings, Sunday schools, public
charities, missionary enterprises, all for his private benefit.''

Here, from ``The Gilded Age'' and other sources, is a sampling of Twain's
thoroughly cynical musings on Congress and public life:

Congress: ``To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature
Congressman.'' New York Tribune, 1873.

Congressmen: ``Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.''

Washington, D.C.: ``I believe that the Prince of Darkness could start a
branch of hell in the District of Columbia (if he has not already done it)
and carry it on unimpeached by the Congress of the United States, even
though
the Constitution were bristling with articles forbidding hells in this
country.'' Letter from Washington, 1868.

Public servants: ``Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft.''

Senator: ``Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time''

Vote: ``The only commodity that is peddleable without a license.''

Whiskey: ``Whiskey is carried into (congressional) committee rooms in
demijohns and carried out in demagogues.''

Twain might have given up on the Congress of his time, but he clearly hadn't
despaired of democratic government - if the nation's citizens were vigilant.

``Every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial
policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their
execution,'' he wrote.

And late in life he gave this answer to a letter writer's question:

``Yes, you are right - I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of
trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.''

EDITOR'S NOTE - Lawrence L. Knutson has covered the White House, Congress
and
Washington's history for more than 30 years.