[In this essay, presented in 1980 as part of a series of lectures titled "Nineteenth-Century Industry and Culture in Connecticut," Sloane discusses Mark Twain's favorable impression of American industrialism as seen in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which he calls "Twain's most ambitious attempt to make a comprehensive dramatization of the issues surrounding democracy and industrial progress."]

Mark Twain, in 1871, wryly observed of a "medieval" tournament in Brooklyn, N.Y., that it was absurd to introduce the sentimentalized brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of the medieval joust into the broad-awake city of New York and the rolling mills and factories of the Northeast.² Mark Twain was not alone among Northeastern humorists in his progressive viewpoint, for lesser writers like Max Adeler, B. P. Shillaber, and John Phoenix had also pointedly remarked on the social advances which characterized "modern" America.³ These writers, and others like William Cox in the 1830's and Will Carleton in the 1870's, and Mark Twain particularly as an adopted son and Connecticut Yankee, fancied that principles of American life were uniquely embodied in the material advances of the machine age beyond those benighted cultures which were held back by monarchical absolutism, religious superstition, and technical ignorance. Twain's assumption was that modern man was a natural ally of mechanical progress, helping populate a world of democratic principles, professional responsibility, and humane dealings. When he saw the opposite in corporate dealings, as in the corruption depicted in The Gilded Age, he resolved the contradictions through dramatic action and humor. Whether or not Twain's solutions really fit the problems he defines is a moot point, as the resolution of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court suggests, and his practice as a novelist raises some ethical questions that remain pertinent to American society today.

As early as the 1830's, American writers were showing an awareness of the implications of technology for their own lives. William Cox, in "Steam" as early as 1833, took a conventional tack in decrying the loss of peace and pastoral calm to railroads and steam-driven automatons.⁴ Cox describes a world of steam power in which rapid transit much like subways whisks people along so rapidly that they suffocate from lack of oxygen. "Vegetable nature," in his Romantic pastoral view, is bisected by "iron gangways," "monstrous machines," and even dancing, singing, love-making, marriage, and resurrection are all "done in a hurry . . . upon the high-pressure principle." The narrator is roused to fury by the inhumanity of the crowd of passersby who ignore a workman fallen from a scaffold and weltering in his own blood; on closer inspection, the workman is "only a steam man," working on the "locomotive" principle and easily repaired. When a steam-man replaces the "rosy-cheeked chambermaid" and Hamlet is played by steam, the narrator escapes from his dream vision by waking up. Cox is not dealing with technology itself as much as he is projecting his own anxiety about a failure to manage its changes. Writing expressionistically, he finds in machines a metaphor for a world which dominates individuals, even while seeming to serve mankind; John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1938), among a host of other works in the 1920's and 1930's, prove Cox's themes to be continuing ones.

Cox's position is an interpretation of technology, and it was by no means clear to American industrial pioneers that industry and technology were incompatible with the Athenian idealism of Federal New England. At Lowell and Andover, Massachusetts, lyceums were provided, and the moral growth and protection of the Yankee mill girls was carefully attended to.⁵ Eli Whitney's development of the interchangeability system was consistent with the egalitarian ideal of farmers and artisans sharing the capability of making workable objects through machine tooling. Even the buildings he created show Federal designs and local building materials testifying to his aesthetic order in conjunction with manufacturing objectives. As time passed, in fact, many American writers saw American mechanical progress in favorable terms.

Will Carleton and Mark Twain are two writers who saw American industrialism and American technology in patriotic and humanistic terms. The Midwestern poet Will Carleton was one of the most beloved of the dialect poets of the 1870's, famed throughout the country for his defense of familial virtues and loyalty in "Over the Hill to the Poorhouse" and "Betsy and I are Out," published in Harper's Monthly and in his Farm Ballads (1873). Carleton found himself in lyrical abandon on spying a McCormick reaper in the wheat fields of Great Britain. Although his poem is laced with Romantic images of pastoral life such as abound in Wordsworth, his declaration is clearly in favor of the patriotic supremacy of American mechanical progress:

The clang of the Yankee reaper,
On Salibury Plain!
A music sweeter—deeper—
Than many a nobler strain.

Across that British prairie
I tramped one summer day;
The breeze was free and merry—
White lamb clouds were at play;

With fleecy wealth was teeming
The shepherd's paddock fold;
And ripened grain stood gleaming
Like lakes of melted gold; . . .

And never the sea's wide reaches
Seemed half the fathoms o'er,
Or the West-land's shining beaches
So far away before.

When, richer, sweeter, deeper
Than a distant music strain,
Came the clang of the Yankee reaper
On Salisbury Plain!

As when the heart is weeping
'Neath slowly crushing hours,
The fragrance soft comes creeping
Of memory-hallowed flowers;

As when, with sudden gleaming,
Above some foreign dome,
Against the sky goes streaming
The flag of our nation-home; . . . 

Carleton's poem identifies the machine with a complex of patriotic and natural feelings. The personal and ideological identification is emotional even more than it is philosophical or pragmatic. Nor is Carleton alone among American humorous writers. Whereas Dickens, in Hard Times (1854), saw English spinning jennies as melancholy elephants, Benjamin Taylor, in The World on Wheels (1873) finds that New York's advances in the application of the wheel embody "pretty much everything in the Nineteenth Century but the Christian Religion and the Declaration of Independence. Having thought about it a minute more, I am inclined to except the exceptions, and say they translate the one and transport the other."⁷ Considering these views, it is not surprising that Twain's Connecticut Yankee would declare that "The first thing you want in a new country, is a patent office."⁸

For Mark Twain, industrialism is the enemy of vice, ignorance, and poverty. The American vandal of The Innocents Abroad (1869) is an outright exponent of technological progress as an alternative to the forces of reaction. In the Azores, the traveling reporter Mark Twain protests, "There is not a wheelbarrow in the land—they carry everything on their heads. . . . There is not a modern plow in the islands, or a threshing-machine. All attempts to introduce them have failed. The good Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God shield him from all blasphemous desire to know more than his father did before him."⁹ Twain's profound rejection of Catholic reaction and technological ignorance is close to Will Carleton's enthusiasm for the Yankee reaper. Twain appears more pragmatic, but in other respects, the sentiments are almost identical.

In burlesque, later in The Innocents Abroad, Twain reversed his viewpoint, pretending to be a Roman traveling in America and writing home to Catholic Italy. Reporting beyond his "modern Roman sloth, modern Roman superstition, and modern Roman boundlessness of ignorance," the narrator describes fire engines, fashions, the rich and the poor—"a senator, no matter how ignorant an ass he is" and rich men are invited "to drink complicated beverages; but if he be poor and in debt, they require him to do that which they term to 'settle.'" More significantly, however, common people read books and newspapers printed by "a great machine," and, finally:

In America the people are absolutely wiser and know much more than their grandfathers did. They do not plow with a sharpened stick, nor yet with a three-cornered block of wood. . . . Those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors. They plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it cuts into the earth full five inches. And this is not all. They cut their grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day. If I dared, I would say that sometimes they use a blasphemous plow that works by fire and vapor and tears up an acre of ground in a single hour.¹⁰

Morse, Jenner, Howe, Fulton, and Daguerre are among those praised by Twain, a representative mix of mechanical and humane inventiveness. In fact, a lengthy catalog of material goods and political rights expands considerably on the items cited above, overtly linking knowledge, political beliefs, and economic progress. Twain's own investments in the ill-fated Paige typesetting machine were consistent with all of these attitudes.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in 1889, is Twain's most ambitious attempt to make a comprehensive dramatization of the issues surrounding democracy and industrial progress. The two most prominent symbols in the novel are the Colt revolver and the Gatling gun, products of the nineteenth-century industrial age having great destructive potential. The Yankee, Hank Morgan, is the symbolic American entrepreneur-industrialist, an amalgam of Andrew Carnegie and P. T. Barnum. Like Frederic Tudor, the early nineteenth-century American who not only recognized the commercial potential of New England's ice harvesting but then went on to develop the technology and even the markets for his million-dollar enterprise over twenty-five years, the Connecticut Yankee is the "go getter," the representative of the "go ahead" spirit of the universal Yankee nation.¹¹ Like other representatives of the "go getter" spirit in the American West, however, occasions arise when the immensity of his own designs overwhelms conventions of law and morality, demonstrating a complex issue which Twain admits in the plot of the novel but does not discuss.

From Hank Morgan's introduction and his initial decision to bust Brer Merlin's stock flat at the Round Table, the Yankee is a symbol of irreverent inventiveness, from his mistaking Camelot for Bridgeport and his labelling of Raphael as "a bird" to his announcement that he would bring to the serfs of feudal England a "New Deal," the origin of Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous phrase. Repeatedly, the Yankee asserts his national identity in relation to his mechanical ability, claiming "I am an American . . . a Yankee of the Yankees—and practical. . . . I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything; guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery . . . if there wasn't any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one." Hank Morgan thus becomes the personal embodiment of American industry in the nineteenth century.¹²

From the opening pages of A Connecticut Yankee, Twain built ambiguities into his plot, superficially symbolized by the coat of mail with a bullet hole, presumed to be from Cromwellian times but really made by the Yankee. The Yankee notes in Arthurian England the absence of modern conveniences—bells, speaking tubes, gas and even candle light, books, pens, paper, glass ("It is a little thing—glass is—until it is absent, then it becomes a big thing"), and sugar, tea, tobacco: "I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did—invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them busy. Well, that was in my line." His laudable industrial ambition complements an equally strong intention to educate the English peasantry up to revolution grade, even though he realizes that goody-goody talk cannot replace the rule that successful revolutions must begin in blood. It seems that Hank's sense of medieval people as animals and his hostility to the political machines of church and state represents a source of irreconcilable conflict with his inventiveness.

As a true industrial entrepreneur, Hank establishes a "Man-Factory" (passim) in which he can make the materials of an American-style industrial democracy complete with stock boards and baseball teams. There the principle could be established that "A man is a man, at bottom. . . . bound out to some useful trade, universal suffrage instituted, and the whole government placed in the hands of the men and women of the nation, there to remain." Unfortunately, as Henry Nash Smith has shrewdly pointed out, the Yankee's financial and industrial empire is virtually without a system in the novel; money has no relation to power; Hank Morgan represents a spirit of democratic horse-play as much as he represents a reasoned form of technology or industrial capitalism.¹³ Consequently, progress takes an uncomfortable turn as the conflicts broaden between the Connecticut Yankee and the Catholic Church and feudal knights led by Merlin. Originally, Hank had defended himself against a knight with a dynamite bomb, and later in the "Valley of Holiness" he reintroduces bathing to the monks by opening up a well with a dynamite torpedo like those used to reopen oil wells in America; but by the time Hank must make his last stand against Arthurian chivalry, his "civilization factories" and delegations of knights must be exploded in acts of desperate self-defense.

Almost from the moment when Yankee industrialism is at its highest point, it is threatened by its own success. Hank Morgan's pride in his cultural achievements expands even on Will Carleton's sentimentalism:

Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the type-writer, the sewing machine, and all the thousand willing and handy servants of steam and electricity were working their way into favor. We had a steamboat or two in the Thames, we had steam war-ships, and the beginnings of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready to send out an expedition to discover America.

However, with success comes awareness on the part of the Church, which attacks Hank's power with an Interdict against England, and the forces of feudalism are mobilized. Hank retreats to a cave with fifty-four boys and prepares to defend himself with electric fences and Gatling guns. Hank had previously killed a knight with his Colt revolver, accounting for the hole in the chain-mail beginning the story. In the final chapter, electrocution—supposed to be a humane way of killing—and the Gatling gun—supposed to be a weapon to end wars because of its horrible efficiency—become his primary tools:¹⁴

So I touched the button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.

Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty near filled with the living, . . . while even that slight fragment of time was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks! There was a groan you could hear! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. . . .

"Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!"

The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, then they broke. . . . Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

The technical magician and democratic champion has become a tremendous destroyer. At least one modern critic has commented that Hank has substituted the politics of the Western gunman with his "High Noon" confrontations to prove he is the better man.¹⁵

Any attempt to interpret American industrialism as a cultural phenomenon needs to take into consideration a variety of disparate elements. Biographies of men such as Eli Whitney are studded with ambiguities like those captured in Twain's Hank Morgan. So Whitney's cotton gin, designed to save labor, is credited with reinforcing the slave labor system in the South. Nor are all the surprises on the negative side, as when atomic power yields medical cures. For Mark Twain, as with several of the other humorists referred to, technical progress and American political ideology seemed to be combined in ways which guaranteed humane uses of technology. It may well be that they were not sufficiently wary of the openness of technology as a system to any directive use.¹⁶ In relating Twain to nineteenth-century industry, we find that his tendency to see conflicts in terms of dramatic confrontation brought about a sort of warfare which Hank Morgan himself had been at pains throughout the novel to reject. A modern reader might well note the ambiguities in Twain's approach to industrialism, for Mark Twain's rejection of the violence which the plot demands seems to call for a careful and thoughtful control of mechanical progress in order that it really serve the ends for which it is contrived.

² Mark Twain, "The 'Tournament' in A.D. 1870," Contributions to "The Galaxy," 1868-1871 by Mark Twain, ed., Bruce R. McElderry (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1961), pp. 59-60: "It is hard to tell which is the most startling, the idea of that highest achievement of human genius and intelligence, the telegraph, prating away about the practical concerns of the world's daily life in the heart and home of ancient indolence, ignorance, and savagery, or the idea of that happiest expression of the brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of our ancestors, the 'tournament,' coming out of its grave to flaunt its tinsel trumpery . . . in the high noon of the nineteenth century, and under the patronage of a great broad-awake city and an advanced civilization."

³ Max Adeler [Charles Heber Clark] treated the modern civilization/feudalism contrast explicitly in The Fortunate Island (1881), which anticipates Twain's A Connecticut Yankee; see Edward M. Foster, "A Connecticut Yankee Anticipated: Max Adeler's Fortunate Island," Ball State University Forum, 9 (1968), 73-6. John Phoenix was the pen-name of George H. Derby, author of Phoenixiana (1855) and The Squibob Papers (1859).

⁴ William Cox, "Steam," Crayon Sketches (New York: Conner & Cooke, 1833). The version referred to here is in The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor, ed., William E. Burton (New York: Appleton, 1875 [1855]), pp. 91-3.

⁵ Daniel Boorstin, The Americans/The National Experience (New York; Vintage Books, 1965), pp. 28-35, relates mill life to the "uniformity" or "Whitney" system revolutionizing New England. The sorry outcome of this early progressivism in the lumber mills of Everett, Washington, is chronicled in Norman H. Clark's Mill Town (Seattle: U. of Washington Press, 1970).

⁶ Will Carleton, "The Clang of the Yankee Reaper," Farm Ballads (New York: Harper & Bros., 1873), pp. 101-2, verses 4-6, 13 are omitted.

⁷ Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), passim. Benjamin F. Taylor, The World on Wheels (Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co., 1874), p. 13.

⁸ Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1963 [1889]), p. 109.

⁹ Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Harper & Bros., 1911), p. 40.

¹⁰Ibid, pp. 274-80.

¹¹ See Boorstin, The Americans/The National Experience, pp. 10-16. The "go getter" spirit is discussed in relation to the Johnson County War between law-abiding sheep herders and "outlaw" cattle ranchers backed by lawmen, in Daniel Boorstin's The Americans/The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), pp. 3-87. The "go ahead" spirit is a more common term in comic journals of the 1850s and 1860s such as Yankee Notions.

¹² For a fuller treatment of A Connecticut Yankee as literary comedy see David E. E. Sloane, Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1979), pp. 146-67.

¹³ Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in "A Connecticut Yankee" (New Brunswick: Rutgers U. Press, 1964), pp. 90-104.

¹⁴ I am indebted to Professor Louis J. Budd of Duke Univ. for bringing my attention to these points.

¹⁵ Chadwick Hansen in a paper to the national convention of the Modern Language Association (1973) titled "The Politics of the Gunman: A Connecticut Yankee."

¹⁶ Richard Rubenstein, in The Cunning of History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), has applied this point to the extermination camps of World War II in a way which should impress interested readers as horrifyingly logical; readers are recommended to this outstanding study.