A Populist in King Arthur’s Court

Abstract:Connecticut Yankee stands as one of Twain’s most overtly political novels. Critics have read its protagonist, Hank Morgan, as anything from a progressive reformer to an authoritarian oppressor. This article attempts to explain some of Hank’s contradictions by reading him as a populist in two intersecting ways. First, he serves as a figure for the workingman that was valorized by the late nineteenth-century People’s Party. Second, his rhetoric suggests the lowercase-p populism that splits the political sphere into an insurgent form of “the people” and its elite “other.” Critics of populism argue that this structure is necessarily anti-democratic, and contemporary commentators often use populism as little more than a dirty word; however, this article argues that Connecticut Yankee offers further support to the claim that, at the very least, populism is an element of democracy and, at its best, can disrupt the political status quo in ways that help assert popular sovereignty.