Morphology of Manifest Destiny: The Justified Violence of John O'Sullivan, Hank Morgan, and George W. Bush

The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology.

-George W. Bush

It has been noted that Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court "portrays [two] supposed utopias-the idyllic Camelot and the modern industrialized vision of the Yankee-as undesireable, unpleasant, and indeed truly dystopian" (Shanley and Stillman 274). The novel is, in fact, a narrative account of the violence that ensues when two absolutist world views come into conflict. The two absolute worlds in the book-represented by Camelot, on the one hand, and by Hank Morgan, on the other-form the basis for Twain's critique of self-assured sociopolitical visions in general and of the apparently inevitable violence perpetrated in the interest of that which is "natural" and that which is "good." The tension between the Catholic monarchy of Camelot and Hank Morgan's Protestant, New England progressivism adds an interesting dimension to the Manichean structure identifiable in Twain's fiction. Notably, both sides of the dialectic are essentially the same. Although the medieval nobility's appeal to absolute authority is founded on a Divine Right, while Hank Morgan's appeal to authority is founded on the right of scientific superiority (itself a divine absolution of sorts), both appeals are justified on the basis of naturalizing the dominion of the appellant. The final result, at any rate, is that the justified powers (in Hank's case, in spite of his appeals to natural causes and democratic sentiment) arrogate to themselves the authority to enact unthinkable violence on those "others" relegated to inferiority. As David Sewell has insightfully commented, "[D]emocratic Boss and aristocratic King [come to be] allied against peasants" (148). In the contest of monological utopian visions, it is the people, those pawns in the conflict between authoritarianisms, who ultimately lose.

As a literary work that examines the reflective ideologies of Hank Morgan and his medieval foil, the feudal court of King Arthur (which is, in reality, a mirror of Hank's own imperialistic attitudes), A Connecticut Yankee is also a screen in which today's reader may see reflected the many ideological conflicts in twentieth-century global politics. Most notably, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union represented a similar polemic, in which two seemingly irreconcilable political systems came into conflict. Indeed, during the decades of the Cold War, the catastrophic violence enacted in Twain's "Battle of the Sand Belt" was a real possibility and, at times, was made to seem inevitable by governments intent upon vilifying their foil on the opposite side of the globe. Moreover, today's "war on terrorism"-as an extension of Hank Morgan's absolute self-assurance, whose arrogation of authority is founded on the idea of the natural superiority of democracy and capitalism-comes at the leading edge of this typology. In the present context, there also exists a dialectic confrontation: The one jihad is based on the absolutism of Islamic fundamentalism, while the other is based on the absolutism of a Protestant fundamentalism that consummates itself in the mask of technological and democratic superiority. Both sides, fundamentally, appeal to a divinely ordained and naturally justified right.

My goal in examining this discourse is to trace the continuity between Hank Morgan's narrative, with its anti-imperial imperialism and ideas of technical and moral superiority, and the American government's narrative for today's war on terror. I want to (re)think the strategies of justification deployed today and narrated in the United States National Security Strategy of 2002, otherwise known as the Bush Doctrine, as the inheritance of a tradition of Manifest Destiny that is also narrated in Twain's novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the process, I will trace the origins of the fixed idea of Manifest Destiny to its Puritan roots, examine its morphology through the nineteenth century, where it finds itself treated in Twain's fiction and essays, and finally, arrive at a fuller understanding of the legacy that informs...