The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism

by Mark Zwonitzer Narrated by Joe Barrett

Overview

John Hay, Lincoln's private secretary and later secretary of state under presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens, famous as "Mark Twain,"*grew up fifty miles apart on the banks of the Mississippi River in the same rural antebellum stew of race, class, and want. This shared history drew them together in the late 1860s, and their mutual admiration never waned in spite of sharp differences.

In*The Statesman and the Storyteller, the last decade of their lives play out against the tumultuous events of the day, as the United States government begins to aggressively pursue a policy of imperialism, overthrowing the duly elected queen of Hawaii; violently wresting Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines away from Spain; and finally supporting a revolution to clear a path for the building of the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal.

Stunning in its relevance, The Statesman and the Storyteller*explores the tactics of America's earliest global policies and their influence on U.S. actions for years to follow. Ultimately, it is the very human rendering of Clemens and Hay that distinguishes Zwonitzer's work, providing profound insights into the lives of two men who helped define their era.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2016
Documentarian Zwonitzer examines the split in an otherwise warm acquaintance between John Hay—an aide to Abraham Lincoln before becoming his secretary of state—and Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain), in this puzzlingly conceived account. The relationship between the two cooled around 1900 over America’s imperialist war in the Philippines, which Hay, as senior American statesman, helped direct for presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Clemens concluded that the U.S. had gone too far in trying to defeat the Philippine rebels and went public with his criticism. Unfortunately, that’s weak scaffolding for a book, and as winningly as Zwonitzer unfolds the tale, it’s really a parallel biography of two men whose lives scarcely interacted in significant ways. Given Zwonitzer’s interest in the Spanish-American War, his focus should have been on Hay, who has recently been the subject of John Taliaferro’s fine biography All the Great Prizes. Clemens, while brilliantly described, seems an afterthought and incidental to the main action. What Zwonitzer accomplishes is adding novelistic color to his rendering of both men in their years of friendship. Zwonitzer makes all of his subjects here spring alive, and the book is a delightful read, even if the central conceit doesn’t fully work. Agent: Philippa Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May)

From the Publisher

In The Statesman and the Storyteller, Mark Zwonitzer, a documentary film producer, director and writer, provides an engaging narrative of the last decade of the parallel lives of America's most illustrious writer and one of the nation's most influential secretaries of state. Set in the context of the emergence of the United States as a world power, the book is also a vivid and at times moving account of patriotism, honor, integrity and family tragedy.” ─Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Compelling…it makes that decade come alive, with interesting doses of arcane history.” ─St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“…a jam-packed, engrossing epic of American political and diplomatic history…. Zwonitzer handles all this material superbly, giving us a cornucopia of social and atmospheric detail without losing sight of the big picture. [He] deploys his glittering cast to near-novelistic effect.” ─Bookforum

“A compelling narrative, opening rare insight into an exceptional friendship played out in the shadow of epoch-making geopolitics.” ─Booklist (starred) 

“Absorbing….This book is so well written I did not want it to end. With exhaustive research and superlative descriptive skills, Zwonitzer is able to capture mood and tone, bringing his prolific and often-profiled subjects to life and leading the reader to consistently feel present in the moment.” ─BookPage

“The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism is an engaging, funny and heartbreaking history, well worth its 547 pages of narrative text.” ─Durham Herald-Sun

“In this wonderful new history, America’s true emergence as a real global player at the end of the nineteenth century is explored through two titans of the age—Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, John Hay, and America’s (maybe the world’s) best known writer, Mark Twain. Part Great Men, part Forces of Nature, Zwonitzer’s book convinces that changes in the fate of nations often happens ‘all at once, spurred by the need to adapt quickly to extraordinary events—or be crushed by them.’” ─Manhattan Book Review

“The Statesman and the Storyteller is one of the best and most enjoyable books I have ever read in my life, on any subject and in any genre.  Samuel Clemens made "Mark Twain" into an icon and a family business, but here Mark Zwonitzer gives us Clemens himself, in full, deep, dark color.  John Hay is enjoying a new round of political influence now, as the Republican party revives his memory to try to inspire a post-Bush-Cheney conservative foreign policy renaissance.  But here is Hay in life and in the politics of his time, seen as clearly as we have ever seen him: challenged and brilliant and human.  Zwonitzer has discovered that Clemens and Hay's intersection as friends and conflicted patriots in complicated times is one of the great personal stories of American political history. What a wonderful story, what a riveting book.” ─Rachel Maddow, Host of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show

“Mark Zwonitzer’s book is the wonderfully rich story of two dramatically different, but compellingly interesting men, whose friendship and achievements encompass America’s rise to wealth and world power at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th. His sharp eye for detail, his ability to turn history and biography into story, and his ability to bring not only the protagonists, but the people around them, into vivid drama makes this a deeply insightful and satisfying book.” ─Michael Korda, author of CLOUDS OF GLORY and HERO

“The parallel lives of two of America’s greatest sons will make you want to cheer. It will bring tears to the eyes of even the most hard-hearted political cynic.” ─James McBride, author of The Good Lord Bird

“Set at the dawn of the United States’ rise to world power, this well told and moving story about the unexpected relationship of an artist and a political leader should help readers understand how we came to be what we are today." ─Bob Kerrey, former US senator, author of When I Was a Young Man

Library Journal

02/01/2016
Zwonitzer (coauthor, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?) presents, in a lengthy narrative framework, little-known facts about two relatively well-known men—John Hay, ambassador to the UK and subsequently secretary of state, and Mark Twain, author and cultural critic—focusing on the last years of their lives, 1895–1905. On a friendly basis through occasional correspondence for 38 years, the two men lived parallel lives that rarely intersected physically, despite Twain's onetime offers to partner and travel with Hay. Even when both resided in London during Hay's period as ambassador, they maintained their distance, reflecting their opposing roles in society, one as an official representative and the other as a professional contrarian. Differing in personality (though both originally from the frontier Midwest) and viewpoint (especially after America's expansion in the 20th century), they and their families combatted recurrent physical ailments, which the author details in depth. VERDICT Readers will appreciate learning about the contextualized experiences of these exemplars of the literary and diplomatic classes of their time. Those further interested in America's international military and commercial roles would also benefit from Philip McFarland's Mark Twain and the Colonel.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile

Zwonitzer follows the lives of old friends John Hay and Mark Twain as they achieved international prominence late in life, also paying significant attention to Theodore Roosevelt. Narrator Joe Barrett’s strength is his skill in expressing the sense of the text and telling the story naturally. His voice is curiously husky, almost hoarse, at times sounding strained, but that doesn’t distract or impede his ability to tell the story or to indicate different speakers, such as Twain, or Britons, or women. His accents, though somewhat unconvincing, at least serve as indicators (of national origin, etc.); his best effort is the slight drawl he gives to Twain. Overall, Barrett’s intelligence and ability to control expression and pacing keep this history pleasantly listenable throughout. W.M. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-01-02
American politics revealed through the lives of two indelible figures. Documentary film producer and writer Zwonitzer (co-author: Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone?: The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music, 2002) plies his considerable talent at storytelling in this vivid dual biography of statesman John Hay (1838-1905) and 19th-century America's most famous writer, Mark Twain (1835-1910). The author's choice of these two men seems somewhat arbitrary: although both grew up in "remote and brutish Mississippi River towns," their relationship "was not one of great intimacy and was even a tad distant." After they met in the 1860s, they rarely saw one another. Temperamentally, Zwonitzer notes, they were "very different sorts of men." Hay was refined and diplomatic and had married into significant wealth. Twain, volatile and impetuous, was dogged by debt. They differed politically, too: Hay, who had been Lincoln's secretary, was "a Republican in the original party sense: a defender of government by educated and accomplished white men"; Twain "was a small-d-democrat and skeptical that anybody in power would long remain interested in the common good." From 1895 to 1905, Hay was involved most directly in the country's transformation as ambassador to England and secretary of state under William McKinley and, after McKinley's assassination, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1898, America engaged in war with Spain over Cuba; Spain capitulated after a few weeks, ceding the Philippines to the U.S. The annexation of Hawaii soon followed. Hay's negotiations with British and European leaders put him in the center of world affairs. But "Hay needed no office in order to wield influence," his friend Henry Adams commented. "For him, influence lay about the streets, waiting for him to stoop to it." Because Twain's waning years are well-known—tireless efforts to earn money, sadness over the deaths of two daughters and his wife—Hay emerges as the fresher figure in Zwonitzer's pages. A brisk and entertaining historical narrative.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170098019
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	04/26/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

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