Todd N. Thompson, "Seward's Real Estate Transactions": Comic Imperialism int he Reconstruction Era"

FULL TITLE: "'Mr. Seward's Real Estate Transactions': Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era"
Presented on October 12, 2024 in the Quarry Farm Barn as part of The Eleventh Quarry Farm Symposium "Gilded Ages: Humor, Literature, and Society."
On December 26, 1867, the Wilmington DAILY COMMERCIAL reprinted a Mark Twain piece titled “Mr. Seward’s Real Estate Transactions,” in which Twain purports to seek “any information respecting such islands, if any, as the Government is going to purchase.” Twain is asking, he says, for his uncle, who has already tried and failed to settle on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, which Secretary of State William Seward had attempted to purchase in 1865. His uncle had also “tried Walrussia,” aka Alaska, which the US bought from Russia early in 1867; “but the bears kept after him so much and kept him so on the jump, as it were, that he had to leave the country.” Twain ends the letter by asking about prospects in Puerto Rico, which his uncle “has heard that Government is thinking about buying.”
Twain’s letter derives humor from Seward’s postwar spending spree, during which the U.S. Secretary of State attempted to negotiate the purchase of several territories, including, unsuccessfully, the Danish West Indies (today’s U.S. Virgin Islands) and the Samaná Bay in the Dominican Republic, and, more successfully, Alaska. By 1867 the U.S. Navy also occupied the Midway Atoll, northwest of Hawai’i. My talk will consider comic and satiric treatments of Seward’s land grabs as they appeared in the popular press. I will trace how an epithet for Alaska territory, “Walrussia,” gained traction during Seward’s 1867 negotiations with Russia for that territory. In analyzing over 600 newspaper mentions of the term between 1867 and 1886, I will demonstrate the transmutation of a joke from satire to humor to tacit acceptance as serious, and then put the use of that nickname into comic conversation with other humor about US expansionism in Alaska and the Caribbean. In doing so, I will situate Seward’s imperial acquisitiveness as prefiguring on a national level the greed of individual capitalist robber barons that would soon come to define the Gilded Age in the United States.
Todd Nathan Thompson is Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a Contributing Editor to STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR. Todd is author of A LAUGHABLE EMPIRE: THE US IMAGINES THE PACIFIC WORLD, 1840-1890 (Penn State University Press, 2023) and THE NATIONAL JOKER: ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE POLITICS OF SATIRE (Southern Illinois University Press, 2015). Todd has earned research fellowships through the Center for Mark Twain Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Clements Library, and the Lilly Library. His work on political satire and pre-1900 American literature has also appeared in AMERICAN PERIODICALS, SCHOLARLY EDITING, EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE, ESQ, NINETEENTH-CENTURY PROSE, TEACHING AMERICAN LITERATURE, THE MARK TWAIN ANNUAL, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a new book project, tentatively titled “Manifest Jestiny: Comic Cartography and Humor as US Foreign Policy, 1840-1870.” Todd serves as Executive Director of the American Humor Studies Association and Contributing Editor to STUDIES IN AMERICAN HUMOR. At IUP, Todd teaches graduate and undergraduate literature and writing courses, including classes on humor and satire, literature and activism, and pre-1900 American literature.