The War-Prayer

Mark Twain Studies Vol. 2 “The War-Prayer”: Samuel Clemens and 9/11 Michael J. KISKIS During the summer of 2001 I agreed to prepare a lecture for the coming fall semester on the Enlightenment and its effect on the development of liberal thought. Since my spe- cialty is American literature, I decided that I would focus on various trends in American writing that contributed to a tradition of liberalism in its purest sense—an openness to ways of thinking and a break from fundamentalist religious or social faith. The talk would be a long sweep and take its motto from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty: But the peculiar evil in silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation: those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benet, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. (Mill 20) The collision seemed most important, and I set about lining up writers and examples from their writings that helped to underscore the passage from fundamentalism to liberal- ism, a passage that would offer a look at John Winthrop, Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. At the end, I would jump to the 20th century for Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement address to the graduating class of Bennington College. Vonnegut’s simple comment: “We don’t need more information. We don’t need bigger brains. All that is required is that we become less selsh than we are” (168). In the fall, I lectured to an audience of roughly 150 junior and senior level students at Elmira College who were then enrolled in COR 3000: The Evolution of Modern Times. I had given such a lecture before; however, the events of September 11, 2001, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, pushed me to revise my talk. I decided to end my formal presentation by discussing Samuel Clemens’ (Mark Twain’s) brief “As Re- gards Patriotism” and “Corn-pone Opinions,” and by reading the entire text of “The War- Prayer.” Two weeks after the attacks, a numb reality had set in on campus. The College had held a memorial service; students were closing themselves in the cocoon of studying and campus events. I hoped to use the opportunity to offer a lesson in reading both to

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