THEN THERE WAS another hitch in the operations of Webster & Company. In the summer of 1885, Webster became suspicious of Frank Scott, the company’s bookkeeper and cashier. Some unsigned letters sent to company higher-ups claimed Scott was a thief. Webster was also aware that Scott had begun to speculate on Wall Street. Webster alerted Twain to his suspicions and told him that he intended to trap the scoundrel. Webster seemed almost too eager to do so, as it offered him “a chance to play detective,” Twain said, “and snoop and spy around and catch somebody committing sin.” Webster “was very fond of detective work” and seems to have seen himself “about on a level with Sherlock Holmes.”
Webster’s plan was “to pass some marked banknotes through his hands and see if they would stick,” but this proved unnecessary. Fred Grant, the general’s son and a member of Webster & Company’s board, lost patience with the way the company was handling the investigation and showed up unannounced one day with his own team of accountants. When they began going over the ledgers, the “color went out of poor Scott’s face, and he looked very sick,” Twain said. “He excused himself from further attendance—said he would go home and lie down.”
Webster’s suspicions were well founded. Scott had made off with $25,000—or $611,000 these days. In March 1887, he turned himself in, confessed to the crime, and was sentenced in April to six years’ hard labor at the New York penitentiary at Sing Sing. Now it was Twain’s turn to engage in a little detective work. He instructed Webster to hire detectives to find out where Scott had hidden the money and to get it back. He surely couldn’t have spent it all. If the detectives couldn’t locate the missing greenbacks, Webster was to dispose of all of Scott’s personal property, including the house he was building in Roseville, New Jersey, “the finest suburb of Newark.” The house was sold in November. There’s no evidence Twain ever hired any detectives or found any greenbacks under the floorboards, but somehow the company successfully recovered about $8,000 of the missing $25,000.
Three years later, Twain and Webster petitioned New York Governor David Hill for Scott’s pardon. After Scott had served more than half of his sentence, Twain and Webster again petitioned the governor, this time for the embezzler’s release so he could support his wife and children. Scott’s sentence was commuted in late December 1890 to time served.
For some reason Twain seems to have taken pity on Scott, but not on Webster. If his nephew had been a more hands-on supervisor, Twain decided, Scott’s thievery would have been detected much earlier, at less of a loss to the company. Ideally, Scott would never have been hired at all. A competent background check—the kind conducted by HR departments today—would have eliminated the man from consideration. “It was easy to trace him from employment to employment,” Twain wrote. “In fact you could trace him from one employment to the next by the stolen money which he had dripped along the road.”
WEBSTER & COMPANY was now struggling, even without Scott’s embezzlement. The firm was never able to duplicate the success of Grant’s memoir. Not for lack of trying, though. It published McClellan’s Own Story by George McClellan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, and Memoirs of Gen. W. T. Sherman. In 1888, Frederick J. Hall, who was hired as a stenographer at the firm and who would ultimately replace Webster when his health broke down, returned from meetings with sales agents with bad news. “War literature of any kind and no matter by whom written is played out,” Hall told Twain. There was “not a man today who could write another book on the war and sell 5,000 in the whole country.” (In fact, the whole subscription book business model was becoming obsolete. The use of sales agents made for high overhead, and more small towns now had bookstores. In time, Webster & Company abandoned the subscription model altogether.)
Among other poor decisions, Twain insisted on publishing a book of sermons by the Reverend Nathaniel J. Burton, a Hartford neighbor, even though Webster tried to talk him out of it. Webster’s son remembered that dispute with rueful amusement. “Probably everybody on the block would have bought the book,” Samuel Webster wrote. “Or borrowed it.” Other titles weren’t much more promising. The Biography of Ephraim McDowell, M.D. (“Father of Ovariotomy”); One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs; A Perplexed Philosopher: Being an Examination of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Various Utterances on the Land Question; and The Speech of Monkeys, in Two Parts seem not to have excited the farmers and their wives when sales agents called. (It’s not clear what the sales figures were for another Webster book, William Schmidt’s The Flowing Bowl: What and When to Drink, but it probably got well used around the office.)
A color catalog of William Thompson Walters’s collection of Old Masters’ paintings, which Twain said would be “infinitely grander & finer than any ever issued in any country in the world,” was to bring in $700,000 or $800,000 in profits. Twain said there was “reputation in it for us—and cash.” He called it a “greenback-mine.” Webster & Company never issued the book, although a version was published in 1897, three years after Twain’s firm ceased operations.
While some of the publisher’s books sold well, such as Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, these earnings could hardly cover the costs of all the titles that sold poorly. The most prestigious offering was a massive eleven-volume Library of American Literature, which included material from 1,200 other authors, including Hawthorne, Longfellow, and Melville. There were more than 2,600 selections and over 300 full-page illustrations, the whole kit and caboodle to be sold on the subscription model. Richard Zacks, in Chasing the Last Laugh, does an admirable job summing up the project’s flaw.
Customers had to pay only the first $3 monthly installment of the $33 cover price to receive the entire set, but it cost the company $13 to print, bind and ship, and another $12 in commission to the agents. The publisher was $22 in the red on every sale, and, as the economy soured, customers increasingly stopped paying installments. Delinquent payments ballooned from $28,862 in 1891 to $67,795 in 1892.
Fred Hall, Webster’s assistant, explained the problem this way: “The faster installment orders came in, the faster our capital shrank, until our prosperity became embarrassing.” Finally, there wasn’t much gain for the company even in the books that were profitable in the near term, and for this reason: Twain had insisted on pumping profits from the publishing company into the Paige Compositor operation, while the inventor continued to pursue its perfection. This business model, as we’d say today, was not sustainable.
The daily pressure of operating under these extremely stressful conditions eventually took its toll on Webster. First, there was a nagging cough, then nerve pain. “I am not whining,” he wrote, “but I have actually ruined my health by the hard work I did two years ago” on Grant’s memoir. As early as the summer of 1887, Webster was suffering from symptoms of neuralgia. His mental state was deteriorating rapidly, partly from the stress of working for such a demanding and capricious boss who seemed incapable of focusing on the core business of book publishing. Webster was becoming increasingly irritable, and “the slightest thing would bring an outburst,” his son recalled.
Webster could come to the office only sporadically and admitted he was no longer able to earn his salary. In February 1888, after he had what his son called a breakdown, he was convinced to retire and sold his share in the publishing company for $12,000. “How long he has been a lunatic I do not know,” Twain said, but he too traced it to the year they were gearing up to release the Grant book. Twain was never able to admit (or maybe recognize) that he could be a difficult employer, but even he admitted to Webster that it had been “an exceedingly hard summer” for him.
Webster was only in his midthirties when he left the company and returned to Fredonia. There he opened a museum of some kind in his house and built a cupola with a revolving top equipped with a telescope. He was just thirty-nine when he died in April of 1891, after what a newspaper obituary described as “an attack of grip, which led to peritonitis and hemorrhage, and caused death.” On his tombstone he wan
ted the words, “Publisher of Gen. Grant’s Memoirs & Knighted by the Pope.” As it turned out, Mrs. Webster exercised her veto power as his widow and put the kibosh on her late husband’s wish.
THE MAN WEBSTER sold his share in the company to was Fred Hall, the stenographer who had risen to partner. By February 1888, Hall had taken charge of the company. He had been in the office long enough to have some sense of what this greater responsibility—and closer connection to the boss—might involve. Back when Hall first took over, Webster hoped his successor would succeed where he had not—and that whenever Hall became thoroughly absorbed in some publishing venture that might rescue the struggling company, Twain wouldn’t “want him to drop it or neglect it to revive that ‘patent baby clamp’ business.”
Twain, for his part, was optimistic about their relationship. “You and I,” he told Hall, “will never have any trouble.”
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“Get Me Out of Business!”
Twain’s vow that he and Hall would never have any trouble was made in all sincerity. Twain trusted the new head of Webster & Company, and their relationship remained strong throughout the six years—from 1888 through 1894—that Hall oversaw the firm’s day-to-day operations. These were difficult times. The publishing company’s troubles deepened. The debts piled up. But Hall’s efforts to make the firm profitable again seem to have touched Twain as those of Webster and other business associates had not. After one unspecified setback, Twain wrote to Hall that Livy
is deeply distressed, for she thinks I have been blaming you or finding fault with you about something. But most surely that cannot be. I tell [Livy] that although I am prone to write hasty and regrettable things to other people I am not a bit likely to write such things to you. I can’t believe I have done anything so ungrateful. If I have, pile coals of fire upon my head, for I deserve it. You have done magnificently with the business, & we must raise the money [to pay the debts] somehow to enable you to reap a reward for all that labor.
This was the period when events that became known as the Panic of 1893 began to cripple the nation’s economy. In June of that year, the stock market crashed, as 500 banks and 16,000 businesses closed their doors. Mines closed, including some of those run by Livy’s family; at some that remained open, miners walked off the job. One in four Americans was unemployed, yet Webster & Company continued to operate. Twain praised Hall for managing to “keep the ship afloat in the storm that had seen fleets and fleets go down.”
So that Hall could have as much working capital as possible, Twain added, “Mrs. Clemens says I must tell you not to send us any money for a month or two.” They would have to get the money—about $500 a month, it seems—from other sources.
These letters to Hall, written in early 1893, were sent from a dilapidated villa outside Florence, Italy. Two years earlier, Twain and Livy had once again come to the conclusion that they could no longer afford to live in Hartford, which had been their home for almost eighteen years. Besides financial worries, Twain was suffering from what medical science in his day called rheumatism. The pain in his right arm, the one he used for writing, was debilitating. This was especially worrisome since he was working on The American Claimant, written in haste, for quick money. Twain told Howells he “hoped to sell 100,000 copies of it—no, I mean, 1,000,000.” Desperate to keep writing despite the pain in his arm, Twain tried dictating the convoluted farce into an early phonographic recording device. He found this “so awkward for me and so irritating that I not only curse and swear all the time I am dictating, but am impatient and dissatisfied because God has given me only one tongue to curse and swear with.” Finally completed in 1891 and published by Webster & Company in 1892, The American Claimant had only meager sales.
Livy, who was now forty-seven, had suffered from various illnesses her whole life and, besides rheumatism of her own, was showing signs of heart problems. Livy’s physicians recommended the healing waters of Europe’s health spas, so Livy and Twain would once more move to Europe. For ready money, Twain secured contracts to write travel articles for American newspapers. They rented out the mansion in Hartford and, on June 6, 1891, sailed for Europe on the Gascogne, a steamer “about the same length,” Twain said, “as the City of New York.” (A big ship was probably a good idea, since the family left New York with twenty-five pieces of luggage.)
Twain told Howells he didn’t know how long they would remain in Europe.
I have a vote but I don’t cast it. I’m going to do whatever the others desire, with leave to change their mind, without prejudice, whenever they want to. Travel no longer has any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven & hell, & I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of these.
For the next two years, they would more or less wander about the Continent, renting apartments and villas in Italy, Germany, and France. Twain called Aix-en-Provence “the Paradise of the Rheumatics.” Germany was “the disease world’s bathhouse.” They managed to do their share of socializing—Europeans loved Twain’s books, and he was recognized wherever they went—but Livy cut household expenses wherever possible. Embarrassed by the increasingly shabby apartments that were all they could afford, they preferred dinners as others’ guests to entertaining in their own home as they once had. At one “private feed,” as Twain called it, he was seated next to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who “had commanded my presence.” The evening did not go well. During dinner, Twain made the unforgiveable faux pas of “making a joyful exclamation of welcome” when the potato was served, without waiting for the kaiser to speak first. Wilhelm II “honestly tried to pretend not to be shocked and outraged, but he plainly was,” as were the other six grandees at the table. That was at half past six. The “frost did not get out of the atmosphere” until midnight.
THERE SEEMED A CHILL wherever the family went. Their quarters during these times tended to be dark and drafty, and their spirits sagged. Back when the Paige Compositor was first shown to be able to justify a line of type, Twain had felt a surge of giddy optimism. But that was in early 1889. Four years had come and gone since then, and, to Twain’s increasing anger and impatience with Paige, the machine was still being “perfected.” It was years from being ready for use by the newspapers, and other firms were already marketing competitive machines. Just before she died in late 1890, Livy’s mother had given Twain $10,000 to invest in the machine that he now called “that baby with the Gargantuan appetite.”
By the time the family left for Europe in 1891, Twain had invested $74,000 in Webster & Company and $175,000 in the Paige Compositor. Any royalties from Twain’s own books went right back into the publishing company, while any other company profits went to bankroll the Paige Compositor. To keep Webster & Company going, Hall had borrowed money from the Mount Morris Bank in Manhattan. The total indebtedness to the bank now came to $30,000. Of that sum, Twain was personally on the hook for $6,000. The bank refused to renegotiate the loans and would soon call them in. Hall was trying to raise additional capital, but, he told Twain, the money market was “beyond description.” Twain was still investing $3,000 a month in the company, as well as paying Paige a $7,000 annual salary. Unable to sleep for worrying, Twain would get out of bed at night and pace the floor.*
THE ONLY HOPE now seemed to rest with “that baby with the Gargantuan appetite.”
As always, Paige was insistent that all their efforts would soon pay off, but Twain, who persisted in his belief in the machine’s commercial possibilities, had begun to lose all faith in the brilliant tinkerer’s ability to finish his work. The machine “is superb, it is perfect, it can do 10 men’s work. It is worth billions,” he told Orion, sounding just like their father when he talked about the Tennessee real estate. And “when the pig-headed lunatic, its inventor, dies, it will instantly be capitalized & make the Clemens children rich.”
Paige, however, showed no signs of illness, which Twain struggled mightily to overlook. In May 1892, the invent
or reported that he had found a group of investors in Chicago. They were eager not only to invest $3 million in the compositor but would manufacture the machines themselves—fifty in all. With their backing, the Paige Compositor would be demonstrated at the World’s Columbian Exhibition, which was to open in Chicago in May 1893. The World’s Fair, as it came to be known, would be a showcase for all manner of technological innovations: Westinghouse’s electrical lighting, Edison’s kinetoscope, an electrical kitchen with automatic dishwasher—even the “clasp locker,” which eventually became the zipper. The publicity and marketing possibilities were incalculable. Twain, while encouraged, remained somewhat skeptical. Livy was thrilled. “It does not seem credible that we are really going to have money to spend,” she told him. “Well I tell you I think I will jump around and spend money just for fun, and give a little away if we really get some.”
Eager to see for himself what Paige and the Chicago investors were up to, Twain in late March sailed for America on the Kaiser Wilhelm. He spent a few days in New York City, where he had dinner with Andrew Carnegie at the tycoon’s home. Carnegie, who ranks second only to John D. Rockefeller on Malcolm Gladwell’s list of the richest men in the history of the world (see Chapter 1), was well positioned to be the savior of the Paige Compositor. Twain urged Carnegie to invest in the typesetting machine, reminding the steel magnate of the old adage about not putting all your eggs in one basket. “That’s a mistake,” Carnegie said. “Put all your eggs in one basket—and watch that basket.” This would not be the last time Twain failed to lure Carnegie into one of his schemes, which might be why Carnegie was rich and Twain was not.
How Not to Get Rich Page 12