Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy

Tom Sawyer: Hero of Middle America 195
been committed to a depreciation of ancestral wisdom and to an elevation
of the young that reverses the order of nature. Tom Sawyer had no father.
Aunt Polly tells us that he is her dead sister's son; but no allusion of any
kind is ever made to his paternity. Even Huck Finn had a father, albeit
the town drunk. Tom is the new boy, if not the new man, par excellence.
"Tom Sawyer's Gang,"
whose formation is the culminating event, or
conclusion, of the novel, is in fact the United States, whose founding or re
within the framework of the plot. The
founding is described symbolically
democratization of the republic requires a juvenile hero to replace the
father figure of Washington. We know of course that the "lauded Truth
about the hatchet"
was Parson Weems's invention, just as we know that
Judge Thatcher is utterly deceived as to the generosity of Tom's lie. But
to send Tom first to the National
Judge Thatcher's declared intention,
Military Academy and then to the best law school in the country indicates
that even he comprehends somehow that Tom's destiny is that of a
guardian of the democratic republic. What Judge Thatcher fails to realize
is that Tom's education is already complete, that in the new order, of
which Tom is a new prince, the boy is father of the man,
are ruled by the young.
and the old
In the third chapter we find that the small fry of St. Petersburg meet
regularly in battle under the rival generalship of Tom and Joe Harper,
a bosom friend. The two commanders do not, we are told, condescend
to fight in person. Rather do thev sit upon an eminence and conduct
operations through aides-de-camp. We are not vouchsafed details of the
conflict, although we may surmise it is carried on by well-defined rules,
by which the advantages of the respective sides are evaluated. We are told
that Tom's army won a great victory after a lone and hard battle, after
which "the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next
disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the necessary battle
appointed."
All Tom's virtues, we learn, are in a manner arts of war, arts of force and
fraud, in which the latter component is predominant. Tom may be said,
like the grandfather of Odysseus, to surpass everyone in thievery and
perjury. Yet his deceptions are of the grand, not of the petty variety. And
they turn out, in the end, to be in the service of the law and justice and
piety against which he appears to rebel. Tom's unregenerate individualism,
or protestantism, which is the book's never failing source of humor, strikes
a deeply
sympathetic chord within the sanctuary of the conventions he
appears to ridicule. In one of his moments of supreme glory, produced by
a most profane deception, he makes the congregation of the little village
sing the doxology with a passion and intensity they had not known. In
the opening chapter the author tells us that Tom "was not the Model Boy
of the village. He knew the model boy very well though and loathed
him."
In the end, however, Tom is the Model Boy. Tom, we may say,
captures the town by his generalship.
Tom's military skills are displayed in the opening episode,
when he is