Mark Twain’s “Long and Fictitious Interview”

In a speech delivered in late February or early March 1906, Mark Twain refers to “a long and fictitious interview, pretending to come from me”¹ that was published in a New York newspaper.² I believe I have located that interview, and it seems that its author fabricated more than just Twain’s words.

The interview in question appears on page three of the March 10 edition of the New York American and Journal, titled “Mrs. Astor Injures Mark Twain’s Feelings,” with no author listed. Below the title is the following quote and attribution:

“The men who have amassed their millions in all sorts of ways have not had advantages in their youth; they have never had the college education without which no man can be a gentleman.”

—Mrs. Astor, in an interview before she sailed

The “fictitious interview” that follows is a response to this quote. With a Twainian lilt, and incorporating some of the famed author’s subjects and themes, the author has Twain express offense at the suggestion that a person must have a college education to be a gentleman (“It’s enough to take the heart out of a man and make him scorn the world”), offer his own definition of a gentleman, and tell an illustrative anecdote about a charitable miner.³

The Mrs. Astor who supposedly uttered the offending words was Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor (1830–1908), wife of William Backhouse Astor, Jr., a grandson of John Jacob Astor, one of the first multi-millionaires in U.S. history. Greg King describes how she “controlled [New York] society and excluded those families whom she considered uncouth parvenus.”⁴ If one were going to attempt to set two public personas against one another for the purpose of generating copy, it would be hard to imagine two better opposing figures than Mrs. Astor and Mark Twain.

One problem, though, is that Mrs. Astor was not in the habit of granting interviews, and the “gentleman” quote is almost certainly as fictitious as the words attributed to Twain. She sailed to Europe aboard the Kronprinz Wilhelm on March 8, 1902,⁵ yet a search of the three leading New York dailies—the Tribune, the Times, and the Herald—reveals no such interview. Further, King refers to an interview published in the Times on September 9, 1908, shortly before her death, as the “first—and only” one she ever gave.⁶

If the author of the Twain interview sought publicity for an invented conflict, he found a measure of success. Mentions of Mrs. Astor’s remark in March 1902, some including excerpts of Twain’s supposed response, can be found in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Ogdensburg News, Syracuse Evening Herald, Ithaca Daily News, and Amsterdam Evening Recorder. The Ogdensburg article reports that a University of Chicago professor, James Westphal Thompson, spoke of Mrs. Astor’s remark in his class, saying, “Such a statement as Mrs. Astor is said to have made fairly makes my blood boil.”⁷ The Syracuse Evening Herald article specifies that Mrs. Astor made her remarks “on the eve of her recent departure for Europe,” but calls the reliability of their source into question: “Possibly, we should say probably, Mrs. Astor has been misreported.”⁸ Before the end of the month, it seems, Mrs. Astor’s remark was a kind of New York in-joke, as the Amsterdam Evening Recorder, in its “Tea Table Talk” section on March 21 printed, in a lone item without any further context, “How about those fellows who have worked their way through college? Are they gentlemen, Mrs. Astor?”⁹

If we are to believe Twain in the speech in which he refers to the interview, the most serious effects of the manufactured conflict were to occur years later. In the 1906 speech, Twain says he has received a telegram from an Illinois newspaper asking, “In what book of yours will we find a definition of a gentleman?”¹⁰ According to Twain, the question arose because “a citizen of Joplin, Missouri, who had just died, had left $10,000 to be devoted to the dissemination, among...