It’s from a rhyme that was probably originally a riddle about an egg—the title of this week’s BP, I mean. We all know this famous little rhyme. It goes like this:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

My first thought regarding the group of people referred to in the title All The King’s Men was that they are the people with whom Willie Stark surrounds himself, who promote his candidacy in various political races—i.e., those who do his dirty work. At the end of the film (spoiler alert!) when Adam shoots Willie, these cronies can do nothing but sit helplessly next to Willie as he bleeds out. They cannot put Willie “together again.”

Willie Stark, aspiring small-town politician at the beginning of the film.

Yet as you probably noticed, equating Willie’s posse with the king’s men in the film’s title seemingly makes Willie out to be the king, not Humpty Dumpty, who needs “putting together.” Let’s think about that a second. At the beginning of the film, Willie is a small-town political hopeful. He sees a problem—the abuse of the common people—and he stands up to government corruption in order to give normal people like himself hope that if they all come together they can rid themselves of the stranglehold of the town’s mafia-esque, exclusive government. Willie’s courage and the growing enthusiasm he ignites in the common folk bring him to the attention of political players who need a patsy candidate to split their opponent’s vote and ensure their victory. They light on Willie as their choice for political sucker. Clearly, in the first half of the film, Willie is not the king. He is a pawn. Once Willie has gained political power, though, he does seem to hold all the authority—although, there are references to other groups that Willie has made deals with in order to achieve the political clout he wields. Those groups cannot be said to be without power. The thing is, if Willie is the king (spoiler alert!), why does he die at the end of the film? “Humpty Dumpty” does not seem to indicate any harm to the king at all. In fact, the king himself never actually enters the rhyme. He is a distant figure directing his horses and his men to fix poor Humpty.

Jack Burden, Willie Stark, and Sugar Boy during the height of Willie’s power.

So, what if Willie is Humpty Dumpty? He has a fall—he is nearly impeached and later shot. No one can save him—again, Willie’s loyal aides can only sit by while he dies. Here’s an interesting question. If Humpty Dumpty is so in danger of an accident like a fall, why does he sit on the wall in the first place? What is the temptation of parking himself on such a ledge? What benefit does it offer him? Can it have something to do with power? Prestige? Fatigue? This is probably a question we cannot answer.

But assuming Willie Stark is the metaphorical equivalent of Humpty Dumpty leaves us with a dilemma: Who’s the king? In 1957, James Ruoff wrote an essay entitled “Humpty Dumpty and All the King’s Men: A Note on Robert Penn Warren’s Teleology.” In this essay (which is definitely worth tracking down!), Ruoff addresses many of the questions we are discussing in this post, concluding that Willie must be Humpty, God must be the king, and all the rest of us are the “king’s men.” It’s a fascinating essay, but there is a problem with this analysis of All the King’s Men: If God is the only one who has enough power to be the king, how come He doesn’t enable his men to put poor Humpty back together again?

For Me Then…

In trying to come up with a satisfactory way of connecting each of the characters in All the King’s Men to the figures in the rhyme from which the film takes its name, I keep getting stuck on the phrase about the horses. “All the king’s horses…Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” Does that seem odd to anyone else? How would horses put anything back together? Their physiology doesn’t really seem to allow for this type of motor skill. Could the horses and men be in themselves a metaphor for something else?

What I’m thinking is perhaps a stretch, but here goes. What if the king’s horses represent military might, the physical power of government? What if the king’s men stood for a more intellectual power, that of debate and persuasion—in other words, politics? With that interpretation, we could let Willie Stark remain Humpty Dumpty. The king becomes an unnamed-but-realized power over all—perhaps the government itself. And the king’s men are those who play the political game of wheeling and dealing in order to get more votes than the other guys. Those intriguing horses don’t really play a role in the film character-wise, but let’s go a bit further.

The rhyme specifies that Humpty Dumpty experiences a “great fall,” not just a little slide onto the ground, but a self-shattering, irreversible catastrophe. We know Willie experiences something like this at the end of the film, but really all the film’s characters fall in some way (spoiler alert!). Jack betrays his friend the Judge. Anne cheats on Jack and has an affair with Willie. Tom’s drunkenness leads to his negligent homicide of his girlfriend. Sadie’s jealousy of Anne and liaison with Willie lead to her paranoia and further political corruption. Adam’s hatred of Willie leads him to murder and to his subsequent death. And in the end, all are helpless. Neither the physical, military might of the government (“the king’s horses”) nor the wiles and guiles of political pundits (“the king’s men”) can repair the moral and mortal deficiencies that lead to Willie’s demise.

The lack of emotion on Willie’s face at this moment in the film is indicative of his moral descent.

Taking it closer to home, this film presents us with a pretty hard-hitting glimpse of government and those who play its game. One can appear to have all the physical might of a nation and all its ingenuity completely in hand, and then—boom—out of nowhere, one’s moment of secure repose becomes one of panic and desperation. Our little nursery rhyme doesn’t relate if Humpty is pushed off the wall or experiences an accident, but what is clear is that he ultimately lacks the power to save himself. I think that quite often in our country, those with the power think they can deliver themselves from any predicament they may have gotten into through either their strength or their cleverness, but what they forget is that they are Humpty Dumpty, not the king. Like Willie Stark, their power will not save them because it is a sham. Government receives its authority from “the consent of the governed,” wrote the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. Government, therefore, is a team effort, not the weapon of one bad egg.