I've recently been picking around in the autobiography and it has occurred to me that conversations between these two men, in regards to politics, may have been a bit "guarded". I just noted a comment Rogers made to Clemens in a letter sometime around November of 1896, how happy he was that McKinley had been elected. Just by coincidence I was reading in the autobiography Twain's conversation with the Russian revolutionist, Tchaykoffsky,(3/30/1906) his rather scathing comment combining McKinley, Roosevelt and Jay Gould. "...have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that; that our people have no ideals now that are worthy of consideration..." I haven't had the opportunity to read the letters between these two men but I am given to understand that they were fast friends.