It is your patriotic duty to buy this book

I wonder how that slogan would work today?

Today's newsletter begins with the fact that one of the most celebrated authors in U.S. history, Mark Twain, has long been suspected of having ghostwritten The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

The main arguments, for and against:

• For: Twain owned the publishing company that brought Grant's memoirs to life in July 1885 and some historians say the book is just too well-written for Grant to have done it himself. They suspected Twain did a lot more "editing" on Grant's book than either man would admit.

• Against: Twain was insanely busy at this point, In fact, he wrote and published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn only six months before the Grant memoir. Could anyone have actually done both at the same time?

Regardless of the disputed authorship, Twain was definitely behind the marketing, and he proved himself to be a bit of a genius.

Photo by Giammarco Boscaro on Unsplash

Quick background: Twain and Grant first met shortly after the Civil War, when just about everyone in the North (Twain included!) idolized Grant for having led the Union army to victory.

The two men became closer friends in the late 1870s, after Twain had become a celebrated author and Grant had served two terms as president.

As one writer observed:

How could an irreverent, mercurial genius such as Twain hitch so well with the self-contained Grant, a man so shy that he blushed to the roots of his hair when given a compliment?

The relationship between the extroverted humorist and the stolid soldier defies logic, yet it worked.

By 1884, however, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer (incurable by 19th Century medicine), and was nearly destitute after a worldwide tour and some bad business deals. Even after selling his Civil War mementos, he was still broke.

Despite his failing health, Grant was desperate to find a way to provide for his family before he passed. So like many modern leaders and celebrities, he looked for a lucrative publishing deal for his memoirs.

Twain had started a publishing firm with his nephew, and he offered the ex-president advantageous terms. The manuscript was finished just days before Grant's death in 1885.

The keys to how Twain pulled it off included:

1. First, a serious focus on the North, where Grant's book was clearly going to be better received than in the South.

2. Second, Twain put together a network of 10,000 sales agents, many of whom were Union army veterans. Those sales agents sold books first to friends and relatives, then used a script that Twain himself had written to engage a broader audience of customers.

3. Third, Twain priced the book very high: the equivalent of $100 to $300 today, per leather-bound, two-volume copy. The strategy here was both to maximize revenue, and also to create a feeling of "if it costs this much, it must be good!"

There was also the fortunate/unfortunate timing. Northern newspapers had written story after story about Grant's race to finish his memoirs before his death—at Twain's suggestion, no doubt.

Since Grant did in fact die just before the book was published, Twain's army of veterans wore their old Union uniforms (if they still fit!) and pitched the idea of buying the book as a patriotic duty.

It worked! The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant sold 350,000 editions, largely because of Twain's sales and marketing plan. (The copyright is long gone, of course, so if you’d like to peruse the book, you can do so here.)

Those numbers would thrill most authors today and they're even more impressive considering that the U.S. population back then was less than one-sixth of what it is now.

Grant's royalties freed his widow from financial concerns. (From a literary and historical standpoint, it's a good book and adds a lot to what we know about decision-making during the Civil War).

Twain made a lot of money, too, although he lost almost all of it later. Then he made it back, then lost it again, then made it back.

He was always a much better writer than he was an investor.

But as an entrepreneur? Highly underrated.

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7 other things worth knowing today

(Last minute: You’ll probably know more about this Thursday morning, an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines regional jet at Reagan National Airport in Washington. I suspect this link will be updated: NBC Washington.)

The first item today is why (yet again) it will not work for me to react to everything out of the Trump administration in this newsletter once a day, 5 days a week, for the next four years. Stay tuned, I have a plan; I just need a bit more time to roll it all out. Anyway:

• The White House Office on Wednesday rescinded its order for a "temporary pause" on federal funding that had unleashed major confusion across the country on Monday evening, and had been temporarily enjoined by a judge. It's an astonishing reversal, a day after top officials defended the funding freeze as necessary to ensure all government spending was aligned with the president's vision. No matter what you think of this, we went from "Very Big Thing," to "Temporarily Not a Thing," to "Not a Thing at All, at Least For Now" in 36 hours. (Axios)

• Interesting story about Elon Musk's influence so far in DC, suggesting that he (and Silicon Valley associates) are responsible for a lot of the big decisions Trump has made so far including the "buyout" offer for all federal employees that uses the same language Musk used at Twitter, and supposedly even the decision to pardon or commute all January 6 defendants including the ones who assaulted cops, instead of looking at cases one-by-one. (NY Times)

• At least 30 people were killed at the world's largest religious gathering, the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela in northern India, after devotees on the riverbanks in the city of Prayagraj were trampled by other pilgrims rushing to take part in a sacred day of ritual bathing. News of the accident did little to discourage the huge crowds thronging the venue; more than 50 million had bathed by 14:00 local time. (BBC)

• An overwhelming majority of Greenlanders have rejected the idea of becoming part of the USA, according to an opinion poll. The first survey of Greenlanders since ... well, you know .. found that 85% did not want to leave the Kingdom of Denmark. Just 6% said they liked the idea; 9% said they weren't sure. (Financial Times)

• Speaking of cold places I have never visited: As the U.S. shivered through polar vortex, one state was unusually warm: Alaska. (Washington Post)

• OpenAI and Microsoft say Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has stolen their market share and, possibly, portions of their code. It’s ironic to say the least given that ChatGPT's founders basically say it can't exist without free access to all the copyrighted data in the world. OpenAI told The Financial Times that it had evidence DeepSeek used what it called “distillation” to build its wildly successful chatbot. (Gizmodo)

• Humans are known to invent private hand gestures (like how you might have a signal you share with a friend or loved one). Chimps in the wild do, too, a new study suggests. (NY Times)