The Mark Twain Scupture

That’s certainly how it often seemed to the figure seated before you; Missouri’s own native son, and as fine a writer as this nation has ever produced. Mr. Samuel Langhorn Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Let’s pause next to him for a moment. While Twain is best known for his books about children, Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in particular, the breadth of his opinion of America was decidedly un-childlike. A tireless critic of our national hubris and its consequent folly, he spent his later years increasingly befuddled, ultimately settling in on a point of view that has never gained much traction in the American personality. 

Pessimism. Twain, for all his travels and experiences and successes, found himself ultimately confounded by America and Americans. All while being one of its most celebrated sons. His scorn didn’t stop at the water’s edge however; he was always careful to extend his ominous view of human nature to the whole of the species. But he couldn’t help but be hardest on his fellow countrymen, likely out of a familial sense of comradely love. “Why,” he seemed to ask over and over again, “do American’s always learn things the hard way, but then forget the lesson? Why, after all our history has taught us about ourselves, are we so quick to forget? And forget again. And again. And again. And again.” 

Optimism. It’s that damned American optimism. Just as likely to tell you a bad thing is good as a good thing is bad. 

Let’s keep heading west. Up ahead on the corner is the Coates Hotel, and the story it tells is one that encapsulates those bizarre American contradictions so well. Cross Central street, and we’ll walk along 10th for a block.

The hotel is across the street at the end of the block. Red bricks with dark green window accents. This is the second iteration of the Coates Hotel, the first lost to progress. Of course. At its heyday it was a prestigious meeting place for the political and business elite in town. Theodore Roosevelt once stayed here. As did Grover Cleveland. The man who built the hotel, Kersey Coates, was a moral savior of sorts in Kansas City’s history, a self appointed praetorian in service of emancipation. Before Kansas City was Kansas City, it was the town of Kansas, and the westernmost reach of what was called “little dixie”. Little Dixie was a slave expansion project, an attempt to extend the South’s hegemony both North and West by settlers into the Missouri Territory. Throughout the early part of the 19th century, Little Dixie spread like a red smear across the center of Missouri, and southern sympathies were strong in the town at the outbreak of the Civil War, due in no small part to the vicious border war waged by Quantrill’s raiders and the righteous abolitionist Jayhawkers of Kansas.