On the Hatred of Hypocrites

This chapter argues that political hypocrisy—a so-called “minor” vice that often provokes outsized anger—was scrutinized and repurposed in key late-nineteenth-century texts dealing with Reconstruction and Gilded Age politics. It focuses on Doctor Huguet (1891) by Ignatius Donnelly, founder of the American People’s Party. Doctor Huguet depicts a white Southern reformer who suppresses his feelings of solidarity with African Americans in order to gain elected office. In an act of divine retribution, Huguet is turned black for what the text calls his “hypocritical” betrayal. Like many populists, Donnelly hoped economic interests might offer a rational route to overcome sectional passions. Yet in the novel, his distrust of political ambition, bargaining, and strategizing (collectively diagnosed as “hypocrisy”) threatens to fuel a full-on retreat from politics. The chapter’s final section looks to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) to help theorize the hypocrisy that Donnelly’s novel anxiously dramatizes.