Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which Mark Twain published in the North American Review in 1901, attacks Western imperialism as it was manifesting itself in South Africa, China, Cuba, and the Philippines. It names its villains – McKinley, Joseph Chamberlain, the Kaiser, the Czar – and their instruments, especially the Reverend William Ament, a Congregationalist minister who was affiliated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Although the essay encountered hostility from a number of pro-imperialist groups, the most outraged were the missionaries, who took it as a direct attack on their program to bring Christianity to the heathen abroad. And even though subsequent readers have suggested that Twain was using the missionary enterprise as an example of an imperialist project rather than as the core of his attack, their perception may have been the right one. By the start of the twentieth century, Twain, whose feelings about religion generally and about missionaries specifically had always been ambivalent, may have felt that “imperialist” and “Christian” had come to mean the same thing.This essay will examine the intersection of American Christianity and imperialism in Mark Twain's writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I am particularly interested in the ways that Twain perceived the confluence of two hitherto separate strains of ... log in or subscribe to read full text