On this day: Mark Twain spoke to Congress

December 7: On this day in 1906, Mark Twain spoke in Washington before a Congressional Committee on patents, arguing for a proposed bill establishing copyright at life + fifty years. Other eminent authors and musicians spoke - John Philip Sousa, for example - but Twain, just turned seventy-one and an advocate of copyright law for decades, got all the attention. This was due to his fame, his entertainment value and his white suit - the debut of the iconic garb which Twain wore over his remaining three-and-a-half-years. "Nothing could have been more dramatic," wrote William Dean Howells, "than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head." Given the next day's New York Timesheadline, "MT in White Amuses Congressmen," the new suit may have been counter-productive to the copyright cause - or perhaps just counter to earlier statements:

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.   (from Twain's Following the Equator, a collection of travel pieces published in 1897)