In the winter of 1906, Mark Twain was a tired and grieving man. He was 71. The past dozen years had been brutal.
He had gone bankrupt in the mid-1890s. Then his 24-year-old daughter died from spinal meningitis. Then his beloved wife, Olivia, suffered through years of heart trouble before dying at age 58 in 1904. The couple’s infant son had died decades earlier, and another daughter, Jean, had epilepsy and other health problems.
So, on the frigid D.C. morning of Dec. 7, 1906, when he walked into a copyright hearing at the Library of Congress, one might have expected to see a fading and stooped celebrity, sour faced and grim.
Instead, Twain whipped off his overcoat to reveal a shocking new look: a resplendent white three-piece suit, matching his unruly shock of white hair and bushy moustache and eyebrows. It was a peacock moment, a sardonic splash that delighted the press at the time and would come to define his image for the ages.
“Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head,” wrote William Dean Howells, his friend and fellow novelist. “It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup.”
“I have reached the age where dark clothes have a depressing effect on me,” Twain quipped to The Washington Post. “I prefer light clothing, colors, like those worn by the ladies at the opera.”
His stunt so completely upstaged the hearing that the Post’s story the next day was headlined simply “Twain’s Fancy Suit.”
“The effect was decidedly startling; it fairly made one shiver to look at him,” the paper wrote.
But there was an important footnote to this triumphant moment. Twain’s career had so tanked during the previous decade that, had it been up to him, he wouldn’t have been at the hearing at all.
His bankruptcy in the wake of the Depression of 1893 (often called the Panic of 1893) was so profound — he claimed in his autobiography that there were 96 creditors he had to repay — that he wanted to give his copyrights back to publishers to help pay them off.
That was stunning. Twain, born Samuel L. Clemens in Missouri, was one of the nation’s most famous and popular personalities. His nation- and globe-trotting adventures had resulted in wildly popular books and speaking tours. He had turned the Mississippi River into a channel of American mythology and created iconic characters such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Given this success, his works had been pirated around the globe, and he was vociferous in the need for copyright protection.
“Among American authors, Samuel L. Clemens was doubtless the most celebrated and certainly the most militant to espouse the cause of international copyright,” wrote Edward Hudon, assistant librarian of the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1966 American Bar Association Journal article titled “Mark Twain and the Copyright Dilemma.”
And in 1893, this “militant” wanted to give away his copyrights for debt relief?
Henry H. Rogers, Twain’s friend, financial advisor and a principal of Standard Oil, refused to let him do it.
“He insisted they were a great asset,” Twain wrote years later in his autobiography. “I said they were not an asset at all; I couldn’t even give them away. He said, wait — let the panic subside and business revive, and I would see they would be worth more than they ever had been worth before.”
As everyone today knows, Rogers was correct. Twain went on a two-year worldwide speaking tour, paid off his debts and, more than a century later, his reputation is secure in world literature.
“I am grateful to his memory for many a kindness and many a good service he did me,” Twain later wrote of Rogers, “but gratefulest (sic) of all for the saving of my copyrights — a service which saved me and my family from want and assured us permanent comfort and prosperity.”
Twain was at the Dec. 7 hearing to testify in favor of a bill before Congress that would extend copyright of an author’s work from their lifetime plus a maximum of 42 years to a protection of lifetime plus 50 years. It didn’t pass that session and wouldn’t until seven decades later. (Today, it’s lifetime plus 70 years).
But Twain’s suit did win the day and went on to its own afterlife. A few days after the hearing, he posed for photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in the suit (or one very much like it) and often wore it for public appearances. There is a photograph of he and Rogers standing together; Twain is again wearing the white suit.
After his death in 1910, impersonators began to wear it as an automatic prop (much like Abe Lincoln is associated with a dark suit and stovepipe hat). Actor Hal Holbrook famously donned the suit for his one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” which he performed off and on for six decades, from 1954 until 2017.
Holbrook won both a Tony and Emmy award for this potrayal, and his impersonation of Twain in the suit, along with the famous photographs of him in it, became ingrained in pop culture as the defining image of Mark Twain.
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Comments
First, my late wife and I attended a performance of “Mark Twin Tonight” by Hal Holbrook, at the Christopher Newport University theater, in Newport News, Virginia. I remember it still, and remember it well. I can identify with Twain somewhat. My wife of almost sixty-four years passed away four years ago, and I mourn her still. My eldest son lives with me now, has kidney failure, and i take him to and from dialysis three days a week. Plus, I almost had to declare bankruptcy myself, and am struggling to pay off my creditors. Additionally, I am the seventh of eleven children, and eight of my siblings have passed on. I turned eighty-seven last June, outliving even my Presbyterian Minister grandfather, and have even written a few books — but nothing at all like Mark Twain’s. Now, to use a Yiddish word, I just keep schlepping along.