Mark of Distinction

Thanks to a fund established by the Centennial Class of 1945, Baylor English professor Dr. Joe Fulton recently completed research on Mark Twain that he wasn't sure he could ever afford.

Forty years after their graduation from Baylor, members from the Class of 1945 gathered together to establish a fund that would leave a legacy at Baylor. And in 1986, the Centennial Professorship was born.

"I was asked to make a recommendation to the class," says Dr. Bettye McDonald Caldwell, the Centennial Class secretary. "And I feel very strongly that a fund that provides the opportunity for professors to travel and research was very important."

Every year, Baylor professors compete for the title of Centennial Professor and the accompanying funds. Applications are reviewed by the Centennial Professorship Review Committee, which is appointed by the university president. The amount of the award in the past has generally been around $3,000, but the only limit on the amount is that it cannot exceed the income earned by the fund in that year, according to Donna Price of Baylor's Office of Donor Relations in University Development.

"It's a great award because it gives professors the opportunity to travel and do research they couldn't otherwise do," said Fulton, the 2007-08 Centennial Professor. "It really goes to the legacy of the Class of 1945."

Fulton recently completed researching Mark Twain's writings during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Using the funds from the Centennial Professor award, Fulton traveled to Nevada to research lost newspaper articles written by Twain. Early in his career, the icon of American literature made a living as a newspaper reporter in the Nevada Territory, but he destroyed his personal copies of his articles after the Civil War ended.

"I went to Virginia City, which was very exciting because that is where Twain became Twain," Fulton said. "That's where Samuel Langhorne Clemens first wrote the name Mark Twain in one of his newspaper articles. I walked the streets. I saw the desk that he used to write that name Mark Twain. That was very exciting."

Fulton discovered that Twain struggled with his personal feelings over the war as a native of the border state of Missouri. Twain eventually moved to Nevada, where his Republican brother had been appointed secretary to the governor of the Nevada Territory. More than one hundred years later, in Carson City, Nevada, Fulton researched old newspapers line by line and page by page.

"I wanted to try to really piece together the political environment that Twain was writing in," says Fulton. "One of the things I found was the admiration that rival newspapers had for Twain. But they also had a sense of envy, irritation, and annoyance for him. He became known for pulling hoaxes on people."

According to Fulton, Twain was writing fiction even before he was a fiction writer. Twain would publish satirical news pieces that seemed true, but were actually political statements. During this period, he wrote articles that were pro-Confederacy and sometimes irreverent toward Abraham Lincoln, even after his assassination. But Twain and Lincoln shared something as sons of border states.

"Twain felt the Civil War in a very personal way," Fulton says. "One of the things he said about Lincoln was 'Lincoln knew the Civil War like the tearing apart of his own soul.' When he said that about Lincoln, Twain was really saying that about himself."

Eventually, of course, Twain became very important as an advocate for racial justice by confronting these issues with works like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

"Twain was from a state where slavery was allowed, and his family owned slaves," says Fulton. "That is where he begins, but that is not where he ends. Everything he had been told during his childhood about race and about slavery was wrong. The Civil War destroyed the basis for those ideas, and Twain went through a great deal of soul searching. Most Northerners wanted to forget about the issue after the war, but Twain felt a sense of responsibility to write about these things because he had been a part of the unjust system."

Fulton recently finished a book chronicling his research titled The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwacker Became the Lincoln of our Literature. Prior to Fulton’s work, a compilation of these writings of Twain had never been published. And it would not have been possible without a gift from the Baylor Class of 1945.