In 1920, Carl Van Doren—biographer, historian, critic and uncle of an infamous nephew who cheated on a TV quiz show—introduced a new term for a sub-genre of American fiction which had already been around for several decades by that point, but was really starting to make inroads into the consciousness of reading America at the time. The term was “revolt from the village” and it describes a series of literary works which encompass—among a great many others—such notable and popular titles as Spoon River Anthology, Main Street and Winesburg, Ohio.
What these and the other novels, dramas, poems and short stories all share in common is a corrosive critique of the longstanding idea that small towns were superior to big cities—by which is meant populated by a collective higher moral standing, a more cohesive sense of communal brotherhood and hospitality and an innate desire among all to engage in acts of goodwill founded upon incorruptible integrity —simply by virtue of being small towns. This was an idea which was accepted almost as irrefutable fact throughout the 19th century in part because American writers helped to foster the concept and did little to poke holes into its obviously mythological structure. It is a myth that still holds fast among Americans even today.
By 1920, things had changed substantially and it was no longer considered bad form to intimate that those living in rural areas in less densely populated geographic centers freed from the temptation of theater, cinemas, night life—and speakeasies after 1920—were not necessarily born with a more durable moral fiber already intact. The “revolt from the village” stories revealed a darker side to small town life and a reasonable argument can be made that “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” was instrumental in unleashing the dogs of war. Most assuredly it is not sheer coincidence that a great many—most, in fact—of these stories which flipped the myth of wholesome goodness over to show the bugs and filthy lying beneath had themselves grown up in small towns. After all, if a New Yorker writes a story about a stranger showing up and revealing how corruptible and already-corrupted the residents of Hadleyburg are, that’s something entirely different from it being written by one of their own.
Twain was never really a big-city kind of guy despite the fact that he could arrive in any metropolis on either side of the Atlantic and make himself seem right at home. The fact that he’d already written a sort of idealistic view of the kind of stories about small town life that were precisely the kinds of stories which the “revolt from the village” were directed toward exposing certainly lessened the impact as well. Would his tale of the stranger showing up in Hadleyburg have been so easily accepted by American readers if they had not already come to love Tom Sawyer?
Unlike most others who made contributions to the “revolt from the village” genre, Twain was able to have it both ways. He enjoyed success building up the idealistic view of small-town life (though Tom’s story does contain a fair level of ironic commentary which bites at that idealism) and then was able to match it by tearing it pieces when he created Hadleyburg. The true legacy of “The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg” as it relates to the deconstruction of the mythic purity of small town life in America is that it attacked the populations of such towns not on general terms of being less honest and upright than they seemed, but specifically on the grounds that those populations pursued a materialism which made them not just corrupt as their big city brethren, but with the additional negative aspect of using that material means to pursue duller ends.
