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Mark Twain, the NYPD, & San Francisco Vigilantesyoutu.be A short mini-doc by Dr. Matt Seybold looks at the antagonistic relationship Mark Twain maintained with municipal police forces. Repeatedly, Twain used his platforms to denounce racialized policing and his public crusade got him harassed and arrested. It also got one Chief fired.
Matt Seybold, "Twain, Redpath, & the Vigilante Origins of American Police," Trouble Begins Fall 2020youtu.be During the mid-1860s, Mark Twain waged a prolonged and inflammatory media war against the San Francisco Police. By some accounts his campaign led directly to the replacement of the SFPD’s longtime Commissioner, as well as broader reforms which were later adopted by departments across the nation. During the same years Twain was excoriating the SFPD, his future publicist, James Redpath, was participating in the occupation and reconstruction of Confederate Charleston. From Redpath’s perspective, the prosperity of Charleston after the Civil War depended upon annihilating the institutions of its past, including the police force which had been formed explicitly to patrol and punish the enslaved population. In his talk, Dr. Seybold uses Twain and Redpath as lenses for comparing the history of policing in these two U.S. cities, separated by nearly 3,000 miles, as well as by contrasting demographics, economies, and cultural institutions. What can their histories teach us about the often antagonistic relationship between the media and the police in our own time?
Matt Seybold, "Mark Twain, Abolitionist"youtu.be Presented on October 1, 2022 in the Quarry Farm Barn as part of The Ninth Quarry Farm Symposium "Abolition Studies." "“Let us abolish policemen who carry revolvers and clubs,” Mark Twain said, no doubt relishing a pregnant pause, before adding, “and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on spring and love.” Twain was, ostensibly, toasting Republican Governor of New York, Benjamin Odell, who in the first year of his first term has succeeded in pressing through a controversial bill which reorganized the command of municipal police forces and, according to its critics, was designed to facilitate increased voter suppression in urban neighborhoods that were Democratic strongholds. Looking out from the dais across the ballroom of the Lotus Club, Twain would have seen nothing but the faces of New York’s Republican establishment. In attendance were congressmen, wealthy donors, and the recently inaugurated Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, who had first imagined the bill when he presided over the NYC Board of Police Commissioners. Whoever invited Twain, the most sought-after toastmaster of the day,
had not done their research. In truth, there was likely nobody in the
room, save Twain himself, who could remember what Twain had written
34 years earlier, on the day he was released from an NYPD holding cell:
“I am glad I got into the Station House, because it will teach me to never
so far forget all moral principle as to compliment a police force again.” My paper will focus on how Twain learned his deep distrust of the emergent American myth which characterized
police as personifications of justice and peace, in spite of their monopoly on violence. In the earliest stages of his
celebrity, he lead a reform movement against the violent, vigilante SFPD, who had staged a bloody coup d’etat
over the duly-elected municipal government. This oft-overlooked event in Twain’s career reveals much about the
origins of U.S. police forces, the racialization of policing, and the crucial role of “media witnessing,” as Alissa
Richardson theorizes it in BEARING WHITENESS WHILE BLACK (Oxford UP, 2021). Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as
resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, editor of MarkTwainStudies.org, and producer of THE AMERICAN VANDAL Podcast. He is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and a
2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Literary Studies & Economics in The New Gilded Age.” Other
recent publications can be found in Aeon, American Literary Realism, American Studies, Leviathan, Los Angeles
Review of Books, Mark Twain Annual, The Cambridge Companion to Literature & Economics, and The John Hopkins
Guide To Critical & Cultural Theory.
Matt Seybold, "Frazier's Smartphone & Twain's Notepad: The Vigilante Origin of American Police"youtu.be Presented on August 6, 2022 on the Elmira College campus as part of Elmira 2022: The Ninth International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies. “Let us abolish policemen who carry revolvers and clubs,” Mark Twain said, no doubt relishing a pregnant pause - as there was, by his own account, nothing more effective - before adding, “and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on spring and love.”
Twain was, ostensibly, toasting Republican Governor of New York, Benjamin Odell, who in the first year of his first term has succeeded in pressing through a controversial bill which reorganized the command of municipal police forces and, according to its critics, was designed to facilitate increased voter suppression in urban neighborhoods that were Democratic strongholds.
Looking out from the dais across the ballroom of the Lotus Club, Twain would have seen nothing but the faces of New York’s Republican establishment. In attendance were congressmen, wealthy donors, and the recently-inaugurated Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, who had first imagined the bill when he presided over the NYC Board of Police Commissioners. The club was also replete with state legislators, enjoying their eighth consecutive session of GOP control over both houses. And, on this occasion, they were joined by commissioners, superintendents, precinct captains, and other officers from the NYPD.
Whoever invited Twain, the most sought-after toastmaster of the day, clearly had not done their research. In truth, there was likely nobody in the room, save Twain himself, who could remember what Twain had written 34 years earlier, on the day he was released from an NYPD holding cell: “I am glad I got into the Station House, because it will teach me to never so far forget all moral principle as to compliment a police force again.”
These words would be published in the SAN FRANCISCO ALTA CALIFORNIA in June of 1867. More even than they were a provocation of the NYPD, who he accused of arresting him on false pretenses, they were Twain’s parting shot at the San Francisco Police, with whom he had long been feuding. It was in San Francisco that Twain learned his deep distrust of the emergent American myth which characterized police as personifications of justice and peace, in spite of their monopoly on violence. It was also where he came to recognize the relationship between the police and a free press as inherently an oppositional one.
My paper will focus on how Twain, in the earliest stages of his celebrity, used his access to the presses and other bully pulpits of the wildcat era to lead a reform movement against the violent, vigilante SFPD, who only a decade earlier had staged a bloody coup d’etat over the duly-elected municipal government. This oft-overlooked event in Twain’s career reveals much about the origins of modern U.S. police forces, the racialization of policing, and the crucial role mass media has always played in “witnessing,” as Alissa Richardson theorizes it in BEARING WITNESS WHILE BLACK (Oxford UP, 2020).