After studying Mark Twain's involvement with the Anti-Imperialist League, I am now working on a dissertation about the Anti-Imperialist League more generally and have found some things that I think raise interesting issues about Twain's later writings. Most criticism seems to attribute the "darkness" of Twain's later writings to his personal tragedies. I recently found this interpretation summed up in Frederic Cople Jaher's _Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885-1918_ (New York: The Free Press, 1964). Jaher differentiates Twain from other anti-imperialist cataclysmic thinkers by saying that "Twain's estrangement...was personal. He had never joined abortive crusades or belonged to defeated movements--his tragedy was death, illness in the family, and financial failure." That seems to sum up the "personal tragedy" view but, as we now know, Twain did join "abortive crusades" and "defeated movements"--not just the Anti-Imperialist League but the Congo Reform Association and other contemporary reform movements. What this leads me to is the idea that Twain's later writings should be reassessed in light of his organizational involvements. The Anti-Imperialist League, for example, published a number of tracts with stark contrasts between "Republic or Empire" that were not unlike some that Twain himself wrote (especially his "Passage from 'Outlines of History'" that first appeared in _Letters from the Earth_). How can we determine the extent to which such writings by Twain were inspired by personal tragedy or were just part of a discussion that was going on within the country at large and in which he participated? Biographies of others in the anti-imperialist movement do not try to make such a distinction, partly because far less is known about their private lives than is known about Twain. But many of them suffered nervous breakdowns and had other traumas in their lives that are generally attributed to their opposition to imperialism. Knowing about Twain, I feel like I need to be skeptical and not attribute cause so easily. But Twain also demonstrates the complexity involved. Any suggestions? In the William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., Family Papers in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, I found a copy of the card version of Twain's "Salutation Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth" that has William Lloyd Garrison, Jr's initials written in after the final couplet ("Give her the glass; it may from error free her / When she shall see herself as others see her."), apparently indicating that he wrote the final couplet. I tried to find some corroborating evidence in Garrison's correspondence but was not able to find any. Has anyone else found anything related to this piece that would indicate who wrote the couplet? I also examined the record books of the New England Anti-Imperialist League which generally recorded all of its publications and found that this card was not mentioned there. It appears that Albert S. Parsons, who was then the chair of the League's executive committee and is attributed on the card as its publisher, published the card on his own. Garrison was a vice president of the League and wrote a couple of pamphlets of anti-imperialist sonnets so if he did write the couplet it would be consistent with other things he was doing at the time. Jim Zwick