Initially, he had supported the war. "I said to myself, here are a people who have suffered," Twain explained, echoing the White House's rationale for action. "We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American constitution afloat... start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world."

"But I have thought some more, since then," he said. Upon reading the 1898 Treaty of Paris and questioning the official motives for war, Twain concluded: "We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem."

"And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

Actually, he was opposing the U.S. policy in the Philippines following the Spanish-American War but, apparently, things haven't changed all that much in a century.

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Bev and Jerry