When Mark Twain came to Janesville, WI

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
--Mark Twain

125 years ago, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York, the Washington Monument was dedicated, and Ulysses S. Grant died after winning the Civil War as military commander and serving as President of the United States.

It was also the year that Mark Twain came to Janesville and lectured at Myers Opera House (which later become a movie theater and was torn down in 1977).

Mark Twain is as relevant today as he was 100 years ago. Like many of us, he loved the latest gadgets and inventions. For example, he was one of the first adopters of the typewriter and telephone. And like us, he had the feeling that life was getting too complicated when he wrote: “Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.”

Twain could be gently humorous and uproariously funny. But as the Chicago Sun Times noted he also could be “raw, jeering, and pulverizing.” The New York Times added: “the attitude is that of Swift, the intellectual contempt is that of Voltaire, and the imagination is that of one of the great masters of American writing.”