Anti-Imperialism in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee

Introduction: Twain Beyond the Humorist

To most readers of his works in the 21st century, Mark Twain is probably best known as a humorist — someone who, by deft use of language, entertainingly offbeat characters, and the more-than-occasional plot twist, can keep us reading and laughing to the end. But he was in fact far more than simply a humorist. His work — from short stories like "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" to novels like Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court — was as much social commentary and an attempt to right the wrongs of the world he saw around him as it was any attempt to make people laugh. This paper examines the ways in which Twain used wit, repartee, and an engaging cast of characters in Connecticut Yankee to make a strong statement against imperialism.

While some of Twain's work is still recognized as containing an element of social commentary — such as the clearly anti-slavery tone of Huckleberry Finn or the anti-imperialist tenor of Connecticut Yankee — much of it is not. There are at least two reasons for this. The first is that history has to some extent made Twain's protests seem less like protests and more like simple truth.

When we read in "As Regards Patriotism" his warnings against the ways in which calls to protect "homeland security" can take one very far from democracy, or when we read in Huckleberry Finn the plea Twain made not simply against slavery (which had, after all, ended twenty years before that book was published) but more importantly for the treatment of Black Americans as just as important as anyone else, we accept such statements as being what any ordinarily decent person should believe rather than as any sort of radicalism.

The social causes that Twain championed in his writings — which all came down one way or another to a universal respect for people's individual and civil rights — are now the causes of much of the civilized world. As a result, we fail to give him enough credit for speaking out at a time when far fewer people would have agreed with him. A Connecticut Yankee no longer surprises us with its message that colonization (in the novel, of the past by the future; in the real world, of the Philippines by Spain and the United States) can have unintended and terrible consequences.

Twain's novel suggests that when different peoples come together, the one with the simpler weapons will always lose: it takes only a handful of imperialists — and indeed in the novel it takes only one — to lay waste to the structure of an entire culture. The message of the novel is that meddling is bound to lead to terrible consequences, though a secondary reading might well suggest that such imperialist meddling is also inevitable.

The novel, published in 1889, tells the story of a superintendent of a Hartford arms factory who receives a blow on the head that transports him back in time to King Arthur's Court. He uses his modern know-how and Yankee ingenuity to thwart the superstitious inhabitants of the medieval world — and especially the practice of chivalry and the institution of the Church. He is eventually returned to the present by another blow to the head, but the world he leaves behind is already irrevocably changed.

Anti-Imperialist in Concept

The entire concept of Connecticut Yankee is anti-imperialist, which is why we can still hear Twain's original tone in the work — unlike in so many other pieces he wrote. If Twain's work in general does not sound anti-imperialist to readers nearly a century after his death, it is because the degree of social criticism he intended his readers to hear simply is not there. It was excised by Albert Bigelow Paine, his official biographer and first literary executor, a man who wished Twain to be remembered as a gently witty American folk humorist — and not a raging anti-imperialist (Foner 140–42).

This anti-imperialism ran strongly through many of Twain's works, twinned almost always with sharp criticism of war itself. We see it embedded in Connecticut Yankee — as in Chapter 39, in which Twain describes the joust between the knights and the Yankees in a way that makes all ceremonial displays of violence, including imperialist wars, seem absurd, as Zwick (1992) argues.

Twain understands that imperialism can never be a winning proposition because it leads to an endless series of aggressive steps. He tells us as much in Chapter 19, comparing the imperialist enterprise to shaky speculation in the futures market:

"Well, well, well — now who would ever have thought it? One whole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy, it was an elegant haul. Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there IS money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it as a business, for I wouldn't. No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knight-errantry line — now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a corner in pork, that's all, and you can't make anything else out of it. You're rich — yes — suddenly rich — for about a day, maybe a week; then somebody corners the market on YOU, and down goes your bucketshop; ain't that so, Sandy?"

Paine worried about such openly political statements, fearing that Twain would become much less marketable if people viewed him as a political writer rather than simply as a humorist. For all that Twain's writings and diatribes seem almost tame to us today, contemporary criticism gives us a good sense of how seriously his anti-imperialist writings were taken, as Hoffman argues (pp. 90–92).

Paine's editions of Twain's writings were relied upon as authentic texts by both scholars and general readers alike, but they were products of a deliberate effort to reshape Twain's image. Passages that did not fit the image Paine wanted to promote were censored before publication. In a 1926 letter, Paine suggested to an editor at Harper & Brothers that no one else should be allowed to write about Mark Twain "as long as we can prevent it." He argued that if others were allowed to write about him, "the Mark Twain that we have 'preserved' — the Mark Twain that we knew, the traditional Mark Twain — will begin to fade and change, and with that process the Harper Mark Twain property will depreciate."

From Humorist to Political Commentator

In fact, Twain had begun his writing career as almost a purebred humorist; his shift to a more overtly political stance only came during the 1890s and early 1900s. That shift was noted at the time. Essayist William Dean Howells wrote a piece titled "Mark Twain: An Inquiry" in the North American Review in February 1901, making a plea to preserve in the public imagination the Mark Twain who was only a humorist:

"What we all should wish to do is to keep Mark Twain what he has always been: a comic force unique in the power of charming us out of our cares and troubles, united with as potent an ethic sense of the duties, public and private, which no man denies in himself without being false to other men. I think we may hope for the best he can do to help us deserve our self-respect, without forming Mark Twain societies to read philanthropic meanings into his jokes, or studying the Jumping Frog as the allegory of an imperializing republic. I trust the time may be far distant when the Meditation at the Tomb of Adam shall be memorized and declaimed by ingenuous Youth as a mystical appeal for human solidarity."

But there were far too many cares and troubles in the world, as far as Twain was concerned, for him to remain simply a humorist. He was especially incensed that those who were colonized were often, if not exactly eager to lose their liberty, far too accepting of their secondary status. While — as we see in an essay like "As Regards Patriotism" — Twain holds in highest contempt those who are the aggressors, he has little sympathy for those who do not continue to fight for their freedom. We see in the following passage from Chapter 13 his pity but also his contempt for freemen who have been effectively colonized by the nobles yet remain reverential rather than rebellious:

"These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their talk with me were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families — including the voter's; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation's families — INCLUDING HIS OWN."

In Connecticut Yankee, Twain argues that the only way in which the damage brought about by imperialism can be undone is through wholesale destruction. Yet the scene in which all of transplanted modernity is dynamited in Chapter 42 is not as unambiguous as it might seem on a first reading. Indeed, the entire book is more subtle and ambiguous on a second reading than on a first. The meddling of the Yankee and his arrogance toward those who know less and possess less sophisticated technology remind us of the perils of thinking that we know better than others how to run their lives.

But — and this is an important caveat — it is in fact the case that the Yankee knows things that the court members do not. If we look beneath the surface satire and wit, we see that Twain is asking us to consider the nature of imperialism in a disinterested way. Certainly, overall it is wrong on moral grounds alone to abrogate the rights of others in order to gain access to their territory, their labor, and the wealth they can produce, as Twain argues in this novel as well as in a number of his short stories and essays.

But it is also true that imperialist forces usually bring with them superior technologies. Twain admits this is the case — he scarcely could argue otherwise — even as he reminds us that saving the "savages" from themselves is no moral justification for action. Thus we recognize in the scene at the end of Chapter 42 that the destruction is necessary, for it removes the pretense of benevolence that imperialism so often attempts to cloak itself with:

"I placed four of my boys there as a guard — inside, and out of sight. Nobody was to be hurt — while outside; but any attempt to enter — well, we said just let anybody try it! Then I went out into the hills and uncovered and cut the secret wires which connected your bedroom with the wires that go to the dynamite deposits under all our vast factories, mills, workshops, magazines, etc., and about midnight I and my boys turned out and connected that wire with the cave, and nobody but you and I suspects where the other end of it goes to. We laid it under ground, of course, and it was all finished in a couple of hours or so. We sha'n't have to leave our fortress now when we want to blow up our civilization."

Conclusion: Laughing and Thinking

But Twain, of course, sees through this. A Connecticut Yankee — like "Jumping Frog" and so much else that Twain created — is a story about an imperializing republic. This fact no doubt made many of his readers uncomfortable, but their desire to read a text that could make them laugh without also making them think must not be held above Twain's desire to have them do both. Certainly Twain makes us laugh. But he also tried to make us think as he cried out in anger against racism, against war, against imperialism. We do him a disservice if we do not now weep through our laughter.

Works Cited

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