Speech of Samuel Clemens, National Peace Party Presidential Candidate, Cincinnati, September 19, 1896
… I’ll give one thing to the war party, they’re always ready with a new story. Last year it was the Amazon, until we learned what they were really after down there. Then it was Hawaii, until that blew up in their face. Now it’s Tonga.
Tonga, gents. How many of you had heard of it before our would-be myrmidons started chattering about it? I’ll confess I hadn’t. If you can find Tonga on a map, please give me your map, because you’ve got a better one than I do.
Granted, we can’t discount what happened there. A hundred American sailors killed – that’s not something we can just sweep under the rug. But going to war? That reminds me of a gent I met once in Texas. He was in the saloon one day, and a mosquito landed on his hand and stung him. He didn’t like that one bit. So he took his revolver and shot the skeeter six times, and as they were taking him to the hospital, he said “I sure showed
that sumbitch.”
Make no mistake, that’s what it would be. Because the war party isn’t talking about fighting Tonga, or at least not just that. They’re talking about fighting Britain
over Tonga, or maybe France, or maybe both. I guess fighting both of them makes sense, because they both have exactly the same amount to do with the massacre of our sailors – that is, nothing. But if we do that, then we’d be sending hundreds of thousands of our boys to early graves and millions more to be maimed. That’s what I’d call shooting ourselves in the hand to swat a fly. Hell, we’d be lucky if we don’t shoot ourselves in the head.
Bad idea, right? And it’s an even worse idea given that we’re actually doing something about Tonga. I’m running against Bill Chandler, but he handled this one right. He went to the people we’ve been talking to about the Pacific for the last six months – the same ones the war party wants us to fight – and they all went to the king of Tonga together. Our sailors’ families got compensation. The people who murdered them will be tried and punished. There’s a commission in place to make sure nothing like that happens again.
Our rocking-chair warriors call that weak-kneed. I call it smart. Instead of sending thousands of young men to die for nothing, we worked with our neighbors and got justice without firing a shot. Just think – if the Europeans had tried that in ’93, millions of their sons might be alive today…
… I’ve heard it from the other direction too. Some folks have said to me, “The war’s almost over, what do we need a Peace Party for?” Well, I’ve got two answers to that. The first one is that this is exactly when it’s most tempting to jump in. Now’s the time to join the winning team and grab some of the spoils, or join the losing side and see if we can turn things around. There are even those saying that this is our last chance to pick something up for ourselves while everyone else is distracted.
And the second reason is – well, this won’t be the last war men ever fight. I’m a Christian, and I believe in the perfectibility of mankind, but I also believe in original sin, and as long as we’re a fallen race, we’re going to find things to fight over. That’s why we still need a Peace Party – not just to keep us out of this war, but to make sure we don’t join the next one, and to support things like that Turkish plan for a world court which might keep wars from happening. That’s why I’m looking forward to your vote six weeks from now, and that’s why I hope you cast that vote for peace…
Oyster Bay, October 15, 1896
The water of Cold Spring Harbor was chilly this time of year, but that was welcome after a five-mile run. Theodore Roosevelt shook off his shoes and tunic and plunged into the surf, angling under the waves like a porpoise before coming up for air.
“Come on in, Jimmy!” he shouted. “What are you, afraid of a little cold?” His long-suffering secretary tiptoed to the edge of the water, knowing that a refusal would only get him splashed for his trouble.
“Any more letters today, sir?”
Roosevelt ducked his head underwater again and held it there for a long moment, thinking. Just as Jimmy was about to plunge in to rescue him, clothes and all, he surfaced, shaking droplets of water from his hair.
“Yes there are. Do we have a final copy of the Tonga essay? Good, I need it sent off today – the usual list of papers. We need to tell Barker that yes, he should push for a Progressive senator if the party holds the balance of power in the state legislature. And we need to answer James Weaver’s letter: ‘The National Peace Party will work with any party before or after the election, so long as they commit to keeping our nation out of the war at any cost.’”
“Very well, sir.” The secretary made notes on the pad that he’d carried with him throughout the morning run.
It’s nice that Weaver’s courting us, Roosevelt thought, once again finding solitude under the harbor’s surface,
but I only hope we’re in a position to make bargains. It was hard to predict how a five-way election would go, or if anyone would win it outright. A few months ago, he’d thought that Chandler might, but the Populists had bridged the gap between the agrarian South and Midwest and the unions of New York and Chicago, and they were eating into both the Republican and Democratic vote. The Progressives didn’t seem to be doing as well, but they were also strong in some traditionally Republican states, and between Pattison and Weaver, neither major candidate might win an electoral majority. And if that happened, and if the Peace Party could cobble together a few electoral votes and Congressmen, they’d be part of the horse-trading…
He swam out into the harbor, leaving Jimmy behind, wondering how that would work. Coalition politics wasn’t what the United States was used to, and he wasn’t sure whether the American party leaders even knew how to do that kind of bargaining. He suspected that he and Clemens, for all they were political neophytes, might be better at it than most; they’d at least traveled to countries where such things were done.
He’d gone a few hundred feet from shore when he began to feel the chill, and he remembered that there was an undertow somewhere.
No need to make Jimmy any more anxious than necessary, he thought, and turned around. A minute or two later he was stamping onto the shore, accepting the towel that his secretary threw over his shoulders and making his way up to the house.
“After you get those letters out, you can take the morning off,” he said. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.”
“Very well, sir. Will you be having breakfast with Mr. Bennett?”
Roosevelt picked up his pace at the mention of the actor who’d been his beau-of-the-moment for the past five years. “Of course.”
“I’ll let the kitchen know, then.”
Charleston, November 3, 1896
Harriet Tubman sat on a couch in the union hall and watched the people swirl around her. It was getting late, and she really ought to close her eyes, but the people on their endless errands and the snatches of conversations made it feel like she was dreaming already.
She’d been around elections since the last war, so none of what was happening was new to her, but it was amazing how much things could change while still being the same. She remembered the provisional election in ’63, taking votes by battalion and by farmstead and carrying the ballots through Confederate lines. She remembered the times when it had taken days to learn who’d won a state election, and sometimes weeks to learn who’d won a national one. But now there was the telegraph and the telephone, and she’d know by morning who the president was and who California had voted into Congress.
It seemed now like all those years, and even all the years before, were coming together: her childhood as a slave, the Underground Railroad, the uprising, the long years rebuilding South Carolina into something that freedmen everywhere could look on with pride. She’d had strong dreams since that time when her master had hit her on the head, dreams of leading her people to glory, and at this moment she felt that she was in the middle of one of them. But it was everyone else’s dream she was living now, the voters’ dream, and only they would say whether they’d chosen her as their prophet.
“We’ve got some more numbers, Miss Harriet.” It was some young man a third her age with a sheaf of papers in his hand. Didn’t he know she didn’t care right now? Didn’t he know she had other things on her mind, and that she could wait until morning?
“You’re running just behind Talmadge,” he went on, oblivious. “But the city isn’t in yet, and neither are the islands.”
She nodded as if she understood, and then a moment later, she did. The low-country vote went to whoever won the Circles, and a few more of them had gone for Talmadge than for her – loyalty to the Republican Party died very hard in the lowlands, even when Moses was the other candidate. But the Sea Island Gullah and the city voters were more independent, and of course the whites didn’t care about the Circles one way or the other.
Wouldn’t it be funny if they were the ones who put me over?
As she finished the thought, she realized that she’d shaken out of her reverie, and that she was suddenly interested in the papers the young man was carrying. She leaned forward and took them with one hand, moving them to where they both could see.
Chandler’s won New England – well, of course he would. Weaver’s got North Carolina, and the Democrats and Progressives are fighting hard in New York. Rebecca Felton going to the House from Georgia… my, my. It looked like Harriet’s friend and nemesis had won a close four-way race for the Progressives – imagine that, the first woman in Congress coming from a state where women couldn’t even vote.
Well, let’s see if I’m the second, because if I am, there’ll be some debates on the House floor that everyone will remember.
“Some city returns coming in,” said another party worker, a woman – Harriet strained her memory, and recalled that her name was Lydia. She was in her early twenties, a doctor’s daughter, from the freedman upper class that had grown up in Charleston since the war.
Pretty, too, not that it matters. I wonder what she’d think if she knew how much she reminded me of all the plantation misses back when I was a child.
“Come on, child, don’t keep it to yourself.”
“You’re beating Talmadge two to one south of Broad, and three to one over by the docks.” There were a lot of immigrants in the port district, and many people who made their living in the Haiti and Sierra Leone trades, and peace was good for business. “That puts you sixty votes ahead districtwide.”
“A landslide, if I don’t mistake it.”
“It’ll get better. The low country’s nearly all in, and Talmadge doesn’t have too many strongholds in the city.”
And damned if it didn’t happen just that way – Harriet lost a few city precincts in the next two hours, but she won a lot more, and the Sea Islands gave her a narrow majority. At two in the morning, she was ahead by eleven hundred votes out of forty thousand, and Talmadge was on the phone congratulating her on her victory.
It was like a dream again, for a woman who’d been many things in her seventy-six years.
But will it be a flight to glory? I’ll have to take it day by day.
Results of the American General Election of 1896
Chandler (Republican): 183 EV - 5,156,879 popular votes
Blackburn (Democrat): 167 EV - 4,387,515 popular votes
Weaver (People’s): 54 EV - 3,105,160 popular votes
Pattison (Progressive): 32 EV - 1,622,370 popular votes
Clemens (Peace): 7 EV - 1,009,128 popular votes
House (357 seats; 189 for majority)
Republican 139
Democratic 126
People’s 55
Progressive 30
Peace 7
(State delegations: Republican 17; Democratic 14; People’s 3; Progressive 2; no majority 7)
Senate (86 seats; 43/44 for majority)
Republican 34
Democratic 32
People’s 8
Progressive 10
Peace 2
