Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy

194
TOM SAWYER: HERO OF MIDDLE AMERICA
Harry V. Jaffa
In the last chapter of Tom Sawyer Becky tells her father, in strict
confidence, how Tom had taken her whipping in school: ". .
. the Judge
was visibly moved; and when she pleaded grace for the mighty lie which
Tom had told in order to shift that whipping from her shoulders to his
own, the Judge said with a fine outburst that it was a noble, a generous,
a magnanimous lie a lie that was worthy to hold up its head and march
down through history breast to breast with George Washington's lauded
Truth about the hatchet."
Tom Sawyer, master of the noble lie, is the master figure of American
literature, the character in whom, more than in any other, Americans
fancy themselves to be reflected and idealized. Not Captain Ahab, pursu
ing the great white whale, or Walter Mitty at the bridge of the destroyer,
but Tom Sawyer playing hooky comes closest to our aspirations for glory.
To be described as having
a "Tom Sawyer
grin"
is an accolade of im
measurable value to any rising politician. In recent years the man to whom
this epithet was most frequently applied was the late President, General
of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is a curious revelation of the
American soul that the reflection of his Kansas childhood in his boyish
smile and wave of the arms conveyed more of the reassurance the repubhc
sought from his leadership than any
specific achievement of his later life.
We are a democratic people, and democracies love equality
else, as Alexis de Tocqueville so forcefully pointed out so long
above aU
ago. We
tend to equalize the distinctions based upon wealth and birth, but we
tend also to equalize those based upon age. Where else is it considered
an achievement not to be able to tell the mother from the daughter or
the grandmother from the granddaughter? It is nature's way of providing
immortality
that a father should find in his son signs of his own qualities
and characteristics. But it is part of democracy's quest for immortality
to seek signs of its childhood in its elders. The ancients celebrated the
strength that comes with maturity and the wisdom that comes with age. But
we moderns turn instead to the cleverness and charm if not the in
nocence of the young. In part this follows from our belief in science
and progress. "When I contemplate the immense advantages in science
and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my
life,"
wrote Jefferson in 1818, "I look forward with confidence to equal
advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will conse
quently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were,
witches."
and they than the burners of As a nation we seem early to have