ABSTRACT
Veblen at Cedro and Mark Twain have been linked in my own mind as men whose irony at once expressed and concealed a raging bitterness against all in the Gilded Age that was shoddy, effete, or pretentious. Indeed, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court takes a view as rosy as Veblen's towards the machine process, and manifests as little nostalgia for the peasant and handicraft era. Both the Connecticut Yankee and The Theory of the Leisure Class have only ridicule for archaism, mystery and priestcraft: both are the books of freethinkers who keep hoping the better man, the matter-of-fact man with slide-rule, will win in the end. Bernard DeVoto writes that "The nineteenth century, which 'turns automata into men', is vindicated and the Utopia of Mark's imagination is seen to be an affecting blend of Hannibal's small farms and the Colt's Arms culture of Hartford".
