Coit Tower and the History of Its Murals

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Coit Tower, one of the great landmarks of the city of San Francisco. Coit Tower is a frequent tourist attraction that offers a breathtaking view of San Francisco and the Bay. Within its walls are a series of murals created by 26 different artists during the 1930s. These murals depict many of the struggles that working class people were going through during that time. It came at a time when the San Francisco art scene began to develope its distinctive personality, one that reflected the multicultural diversity of the city by the bay.

Coit Tower was built in 1933 on top of Telegraph Hill at the behest of Lillie Hitchcock Coit, one of the more colorful figures in San Francisco history. Lillie Coit was a cigar smoking, trouser-wearing woman who often disguised herself as a man so that she could frequent the males-only gambling establishments in Long Beach to gamble. She developed a special relationship with the firefighters of the city after being rescued from a fire at the age of eight. She became an honorary firefighter as an adult and had a special affinity for Knickerbocker Engine Company Number 5. A myth grew that Coit Tower was designed to resemble a fire hose nozzle, thought architects Arthur Brown, Jr. and Henry Howard always denied it.

The San Francisco art scene was going through a transformation as the 1920s turned into the 1960s.  Before the 1930s, the San Francisco art scene was still under the effects of the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, a fair the made up 76 blocks of 35 murals of monumental size.  These paintings were done in a decorative classical art style, similar to the artwork of Maxfield Parish.  Frank Brangwyn typified the style of art at this time (http://www.bpib.com/illustrat/brangwyn.htm), as his stylized historical murals of California history dominated the murals of the fair.  Patrons of San Francisco art could be found in the Bohemian Club, an exclusive men’s club that saw itself as a meeing place for artists and the wealthy.   The city thus had a history of mural art.  As San Francisco entered the 1930s, both the city and the artists became more radicalized as the economic difficulties of the Great Depression began to affect its citizens.

Diego Rivera was the major influence on the muralists of San Francisco when he made three extended visits to create murals for the city.  Timothy W. Drescher wrote in his book San Francisco Murals:  Community Creates Its Muse 1914-1994:

“Diego Rivera significantly influenced San Francisco muralists.  The New Deal artists watched him paint in person, and sometimes worked as his assistants.  Subsequent muralists learned about his murals and those of other Mexican masters by visitng the walls themselves or through reproductions in books.  Technical and stylistic aspects were thus passed on to later generations.  Above all, the Tres Grandes demonstrated that public art and political commitment were bound together.”

Rivera painted three murals in San Francisco:  Allegory of California in the Pacific Stock Exchange;  Making a Fresco in the Art Institute of San Francisco;  and Pan American Unity painted on Treasure Island for the 1939-1940 World’s Fair.  As the Coit Tower muralists worked on their own murals, they could look at Rivera’s art only a few blocks away.

Bernard Zackheim conceived of the mural program, with funding and supervision from the city power broker Herbert Fleishhacker and the new director of the de Young Museum Walter Heil.  Zackheim was an immigrant leftist artist and he wanted the murals to reflect the current conditions in San Francisco.  Anthony W. Lee, in his book Painting on the Left:  Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals, quotes Zackheim as saying, “We should deal with an overall idea on the economy… not so much historical as actual, what is happening right now in the United States.  I suggested that and it was adopted.  We were each given a certain subject…. And each one had his own side of a wall in which to do it.”   During the time that the Coit Tower murals were being conceived, a large strike of waterfront workers, longshoremen, teamsters, seamen, and municipal workers was taking place, and it was one of the biggest strikes of the Depression.  From May 31 to July 31, the strike affected commercial activity all over the city.  This strike affected all of the painters of the Coit Tower murals, and those artists who were Communist Party members felt it necessary to include some sign of the strike in their murals.

The painters on the second of the floor of Coit Tower were not Communist Party members and their murals tended to be of leisure scenes, like Edith Hamlin’s Hunting in California, Edward Terada’s Sports, and Jane Berlandina’s Home Life.  The art of Otis Oldfield, Moya del Pino, and Rinaldo Cuneo were in the interior lobby.

 

The more politically charged murals included Bernard Zackheim’s Library, which had newspapers that had headlines of the destruction of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center murals in 1934.   Ray Boynton’s Animal Force and Machine Force has a celestial set of eyes surrounding a doorway.  Ralph Stackpole’s Industries of California shows the machinery of industry and the workers as cogs of that machine.  Clifford Wight had several images of workers, like Steelworker and Surveyor, and he was the only artist to have a painting obliterated from Coit Tower.  Critic Julius Cravens describes the lost artwork:

“Over the central window (Wight) stretched a bride, at the center of which is a circle containing the Blue Eagle of the NRA (National Recovery Act).  Over the right hand window he stretched a segment of chain;  in the circle in this case appears the legend, ‘In God We Trust’- symbolizing the American dollar, or I presume, Capitalism.  over the left hand window he placed a section of woven cable and a cirlce framing a hammer, a sickle, and the legend ‘United Workers of the World,’ in short Communism.  It would seem that he considered those three issues to be important in the American scene today.”

  

Victor Arnautoff’s City Life is the most prominent mural in Coit Tower and it is my favorite mural.  It shows a crowd scene in downtown San Francisco.  In the forefront a man is getting held up by some hooligans, while in the background is a car accident.  A postman is picking up the mail.  Pedestrians are rushing about, a mixture of rich society people, sailors, longshoremen, and blue collar workers.  In a newspaper stand, a vendor is hawking leftist newspapers like the Masses and the Daily Worker.  It is a Leftist view of San Francisco of the 1930s.

 

In 1994 I did my first mural for a library in San Jose, California.  I visited Coit Tower and spent the day looking at the murals and it really inspired my own mural design.   I hope anyone who visits San Francisco takes some time to visit Coit Tower and look at the murals (http://www.inetours.com/Pages/SFNbrhds/Coit_Tower.html).    And I wish Coit Tower a happy 75th anniversary.

Groupthink and the Importance of Thinking For Yourself

It’s always difficult for an individual to go against a group of people. We all want to get along and be liked by people, so we often keep quiet about opinions when we’re with a group of friends or family members who may not agree. I learned the hard way that keeping quiet about one’s opinions and allowing other people to think for me does long term harm to myself. I’ve been very interested in learning about the dynamics of groupthink, the tendency of a group to limit independent thinking and questioning in the quest for consensus and group cohesiveness. The dangers of groupthink are numerous, from Nazi Germany in the 1930s, China during the Cultural Revolution or in the McCarthy era in America in the 1950s.   While it is good to find a community where one can find love and acceptance, it’s also important to be able to speak for oneself and to be able to think independently.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink) gives this definition of groupthink:

Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas. Individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness, as are the advantages of reasonable balance in choice and thought that might normally be obtained by making decisions as a group.  During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish, or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group. Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions, where individual doubts are set aside, for fear of upsetting the group’s balance. 

During my life, I’ve encountered many situations where I’ve been reluctant to express my feelings because of worries of being different from a group.  It could be with a group of friends, with family members, with coworkers.  Over time, though, I’ve learned to express my own opinions with close friends and family because I feel safe to disagree with them and I’m willing to listen to their disagreements with me.  The situations where I haven’t felt safe to voice my own opinion are in a church or political group where the members are very loud and insistent about being right.   Churches are often vulnerable to groupthink and one of the most extreme examples of this are in cults.  I looked in internet sites for signs of cults and found these signs that cults exhibit.  Among these signs are these:

The group is preoccupied with bringing in new members.

Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished.

The leadership dictates sometimes in great detail how members should think, act, and feel (for example: members must get permission from leaders to date, change jobs, get married; leaders may prescribe what types of clothes to wear, where to live, how to discipline children, and so forth).

The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s), and members (for example: the leader is considered the Messiah or an avatar; the group and/or the leader has a special mission to save humanity).

The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which causes conflict with the wider society.

The leadership induces guilt feelings in members in order to control them.

Members’ subservience to the group causes them to cut ties with family and friends, and to give up personal goals and activities that were of interest before joining the group.

Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group.

Members are encouraged or required to live and/or socialize only with other group members.

Emotional Leverage/Love Bombing – Instant friendship, extreme helpfulness, generosity and acceptance…Group recruiters “lovingly” will not take “no” for an answer-invitations impossible to refuse without feeling guilty and/or ungrateful. “Love”, “generosity”, “encouragement” are used to lower defenses and create an ever increasing sense of obligation, debt and guilt.

Exploit Personal Crisis – They use an existing crisis as a means of getting you to participate. They exploit vulnerability arising from:  Broken relationships;  Death in the family;  Loss of job;  Move to new location;  Loneliness/depression;  Guilt/shame;  Stress/fear

Crisis Creation – They employ tactics designed to create or deepen confusion, fear, guilt or doubt. i.e. “you aren’t serving God the way He intended.” Questions areas of faith never before examined or explored and attack other faiths specifically.

Motive Questioning- When sound evidence against the group is presented, members are taught to question the motivation of the presenter. The verifiable (sound documentation) is ignored because of doubts over the unverifiable (presenter’s motives). See Opposer Warnings (#2 above).
Information Control – Group controls what convert may read or hear. They discourage (forbid) contact with ex-members or anything critical of the group. Ex-members become feared and avoidance of them becomes a “survival issue.”

Coercion – Disobedience, including even minor disagreement with group doctrine, may result in expulsion and shunning.

To be fair, I can say that I’ve never been in a church that would be considered a cult.  But I’ve seen people within a former church use similar tactics as cults to get members to conform. I’ve see a group of people isolate an individual to make them more vulnerable to pressure to conform to their views. I’ve witnessed individuals get ostracized and have their reputations brought low when they’ve left the group and tried to talk about their experiences. After witnessing these things, I grew afraid of expressing any difference of opinion and it cast a pall on others as well.   I guess that’s one of the disadvantages when any group of likeminded people get together:  the group runs the danger of becoming insular as they try to be with people they feel comfortable with and weed out people they differ from.

Eventually I left that situation, and I grew to appreciate the importance of thinking for one’s self. I’ve always been free about my opinions only with those I felt safe with, and I want to learn to have the courage to express my opinions to a hostile group or individual. In these past few years I got hooked movies and read books about lone heroes who stood up to a mob and independent thinkers. Sometimes I’d picture myself like Mr. Smith in the Frank Capra movie fighting a lone battle against corruption, or Oskar Schindler outsmarting the Nazis to save innocent Jewish lives. In the real world, I doubt if I’d have that much courage, but I could always dream.  My favorite movie character is Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, a lawyer who went against the disapproval of his neighbors to represent an African American who is accused of rape. 

Reading about these lone heroes made me appreciate the value of dissent. One of my favorite books is by Cass Sunstein titled Why Societies Need Dissent. In it, he gives a good explanation on why dissent is good for society. He wrote:

To a remarkable degree, human beings are influenced by what others do. In selecting restaurants, enemies, doctors, grocery stores, leaders, books, computers, mories, heroes, political opinions, and much more, we often follow other people. Conformity of this kind is not stupid or senseless. For one thing, the decisions of other people convey information about what really should be done. If most people like Shakespeare, admire Abraham Lincoln, and avoid cigarettes, it makes sense to pay attention to them. For another thing, most of us want the good opinion of others. Those who reject widely held opinions and exhibit strange tastes might well find themselves less popular. Their careers might be threatened; they might even be ostracized. Ostracism isn’t pleasant. In many parts of the world, the punishment for noncomformity is death.
For all these reasons, it is often reasonable to conform. The problem is that conformity can lead individuals and societies in unfortunate and even catastrophic directions. The most serious danger is that by following others we fail to dislcose what we actually know and believe. Our silence deprives society of important information. As we shall see, like-minded people often go to unjustified extremes. Those who dissent, and who reject the pressures imposed by others, perform valuable social functions, frequently at their own expense. This is true for dissenters within corporate boardrooms, churches, sports teams, student organizations, faculties, and investment clubs. It is also true for dissenters in the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It is true during times of both war and peace.

James Surowiecki makes a similar point in his book Wisdom of Crowds.  He argues that it’s important for each individual in a group to be able to speak of his or her own experiences and opinions freely, because it adds to the pool of information that the group can draw upon before making a collective decision.  Surowiecki wrote:

Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise. An intelligent group, especially when confronted with cognition problems, does not ask its members to modify their positions in order to let the group reach a decision everyone can be happy with. Instead, it figures out how to use mechanisms- like market prices, or intelligent voting systems- to aggregate and produce collective judgments that represent not what any one person in the group thinks but rather, in some sense, what they all think. Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.

I’ve tried to look in the history of Christianity and the Bible for specific examples of independent thinking and of dissent.  The Biblical passages tend to focus on obedience to God, but many of the prophets and holy people in the Bible have had to dissent from their community and its values in order to obey God.  From the prophets like Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah in the Old Testament to Jesus and the Apostles in the New Testament, they all seem to follow this tradition of railing against the social injustices of their society and advocating more compassion and generosity to the marginalized members of society and a strengthening of their personal relationship with God.  It seems like Jesus, John the Baptist, St. Paul and other early Christians spent a lot of time in jail or facing fierce resistance from authority figures like the Romans or the chief priests.  Though St. Paul always advocates a Christian community in his writings, in my eyes he doesn’t have much fear of taking lone stands for what he believes even if it causes disruption within the community. 

As Christian history unfolded, many Christian heroes like St. Francis or Martin Luther have taken a lonely road where they went against their society.  My favorite Christian hero in these past couple of years has been Dorothy Day, the Catholic activist of the early 20th century and founder of the Catholic Worker.  A socialist early in her life, Day converted to Catholicism in the 1920s when she found the same radical sympathy for the poor in the Bible and the Papal encyclicals that she saw in socialism.   This radical Christian vision led Dorothy Day to take several unpopular positions:  she took a pacifist stand during World War II at a time when nationalistic feelings in the U.S. were high;  she wrote articles in sympathy with American communists during the McCarthy era and when the Catholic hierarchy were stridently anticommunist;  she marched against the Vietnam War and support Cesar Chavez and striking farmworkers at a time when such positions were unpopular.   She kept alive the Progressive Christian tradition during the 1940s and 1950s until it flowered again during the 1960s. 

I’m still learning to think for myself.  I try nowadays to avoid situations where a group of people can bully me or pressure me to try to conform to their ideas.  Whenever I try to form an opinion about something, I try to read as many different books and ask different people their opinions, to expose myself to a wide variety of viewpoints.  And I’m trying to learn to value my own opinions and gut feelings and to gird myself if some of those opinions go against a group.  I leave this post with a quote from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her essay on the need for women’s independence.  Though she’s writing about women, I think it applies to all people and their need to think and live independently.

The isolation of every human soul and the necessity of self-dependence must give each individual the right to choose his own surroundings. The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation… It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman.

Graphic Satire and the Masses Magazine

One of the great sources of liberal and left wing thought has always been the leftist magazine and newspaper.   I’ve learned a lot about left wing thought and the social problems that are hidden from the general media from periodicals like the Nation, the Progressive, the Catholic Worker, Z Magazine, Mother Jones, and the Progressive Populist, magazines that are available in many libraries.    One of the common things I found in all these magazines is the rich array of great satiric artists that grace its pages.   This linking of great satiric art and strong leftist writing first occurred in the Masses (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/ARTmasses.htm), a magazine that circulated in the early twentieth century.

The Masses was founded in 1911 by Piet Vlag, a Dutch immigrant, and financed by Rufus Weeks, a wealthy lifen insurance executive, and Amos Pinchot, a lawyer who supported progressive causes.  Piet Vlag wanted a magazine that promoted the interests of working people and consumer cooperatives in particular.  The magazine struggled in its early months with boring articles and a lack of readers, until Max Eastman became the editor of the magazine in December 1912. 

Max Eastman, who would later be called the most famous radical in America, had at that time been a founder of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage and was a lecturer of social causes.  When Eastman took over the magazine, he changed the tone of the periodical from being a right wing socialism to a left wing socialism.  The Masses discussed the issues that were important to the Progressive and Radical movements of its time:  the debate between direct versus political action, the merits of anarchism versus socialism, the efforts of the Industrial Workers of the World (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Workers_of_the_World) to organize the unemployed, the link between capitalism and militarism, Margaret Sanger’s fight for women’s access to birth control, and revolutionary activity in Mexico, China and the Philippines.    Coupled with this strong revolutionary streak was an irreverence at any sort of dogma and a willingness to challenge the mores of mainstream society.  It became a badge of honor for the radicals and intellectuals of the time to be published in the Masses and the many of the most prominent writers, artists, poets, and political theorists contributed:  Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Djuna Barnes, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Louis Untermeyer, Babette Dodge, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Carl Sandburg, Mabel Dodge, Bertrand Russell, John Reed, and Pablo Picasso.  Ross Wetzsteon wrote in his book Republic of Dreams:  Greenwich Village the American Bohemia, 1910-1960:

“Though The Masses’ circulation hovered between fifteen thousand and forty thousand…. it had an impact far beyond mere numbers.  It was the first major American expression of the link between the radical intelligentsia and the revolutionary labor movement that would continue, in often confused configurations, for several decades, and it immediately became a decisive force, along with Mabel Dodge’s salon, in bringing to the rebels a sense of political, intellectual, artistic community.  ‘Them Asses’ they might be called- often by themselves- but, as Irving Howe has written, ‘For a brief time… The Masses became the rallying center- as something also a combination of circus, nursery, and boxing ring- for almost anything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture.’”

Along with a stable of great writers was a staff of great graphic artists.  Steven Heller wrote in his book Man Bites Man:  Two Decades of Satiric Art: 

“During this time the most insightful graphic satires were coming from the artists of The Masses, a socialist magazine edited by Max Eastman, devoted to art and politics.  A myriad of contributors including the ‘ash-can school’ painters George Bellows, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Adolf Dehn, Maurice Becker and Boardman Robinson created cartoons in the tradition of Daumier.  Cartoonists Art Young (who was arrested three times for ‘seditious’ cartooning), R.K. Chamberlain, and Robert Minor (whose ‘The Perfect Soldier’ is a masterpiece of protest art) were also regular staffers.”

These artists contributed to one of the best designe magazines of the time.  John Sloan designed the magazine to have bold headlines, wide margins and large drawings.   Artists like Stuart Davis, Maurice Becker and John Sloan created wonderful artwork for the covers of the Masses, among the most famous a cover by Stuart Davis of two hags with a caption underneath saying “Gee Mag.  Think of Us Bein’ on a Magazine Cover” .    Ross Wetzsteon noted that John Sloan would contribute his best ideas and artwork to the Masses before sending it to anyone else.

Robert Minor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Minor) was one of the great cartoonists that worked on the Masses.  Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1884, Minor was one of the first cartoonists to use grease crayon on paper.  He was the highest paid cartoonist in the U.S., working for the New York World, until he made anti-war cartoons in protest of World War I.  His cartoons for the Masses continued his anti-war message and his most famous cartoon was a picture of a muscular headless soldier called “At Last! A Perfect Soldier” (http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/visual_arts/satire/minor/minor2.htm).  Eventually Minor was jailed for his cartoons, but he was released in 1918 after the war was over.   You could look at more of Minor’s cartoons at http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/visual_arts/satire/minor/index.htm.

Art Young (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Young) was another great cartoonist that contributed to the Masses.  Young was born in 1866 and started out as a Republican, but he started listening to the lectures of British labor leader Keir Hardie and reading the work of muckrakers like Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair.  By 1906 Young had become a socialist and his work afterwards reflected socialist concerns, like racial and sexual discrimination and the injustices of the capitalist system.  One of his most famous cartoons for the Masses is a 1917 drawing of a capitalist, a politician, a minister and an editor dancing for war for the devil (http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/visual_arts/satire/young/young13.htm) that got him prosecuted by the Wilson administration.  Noah Berlatshy wrote an informative article in the January 2006 issue of The Comics Journal on Art Young’s art career.  You could look at more of Young’s work at http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/visual_arts/satire/young/index.htm.

The art of the Masses was more than just window dressing for the articles of the magazines.  The graphic art was an integral part of the Masses because it encapsulated the issues that the left was trying to solve in understandable terms.  They pointed to one of the great functions of art, to challenge assumptions and make the viewers to see things in new ways.  Ross Wetzsteon wrote a great summary of the importance of these artists contributions.  I end this with his quote:

“…The Masses staff nevertheless succeeded in bringing the political implications of art and the aesthetic implications of politics into public discourse after a century in which they were considered entirely separate activities.  For some Villagers defining the self, creative self-expression, Enjoying the Revolution, may have been part of a purely personal revolt, but in acknowledging the capacity of art to alter consciousness and in insisting on the personal dimensions of politics, it also revealed the compatibility of individual aspirations and socialist programs.  They formed an entirely new character type in the American intellectual gallery, the bohemian/artist/radical, equally committed to all three vocations.”

The Fight for Interracial Marriage

As California voters decide on the fate of Proposition 8, a ballot measure to ban gay marriage, it is well to consider the fory-first anniversary of a Supreme Court ruling that also had a profound effect on the institution of marriage in the United States.  In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case Loving Versus Virginia that the state of Virginia’s laws against interracial marriage (known as the Racial Integrity Act) were unconstitutional and went against the Fourteenth Amendments’ principle of equality.  At the time 17 states enforced laws prohibiting marriage between whites and nonwhites.    This ruling overturned a long history of a horrible injustice that was inflicted on African Americans, Filipinos, Native Americans and Asians for simply trying to marry a loved one who was of a different race.  Much of this information is from the wikipedia post  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation.

The banning of interracial marriage is known as the miscegenation laws.  The first miscegenation laws were enacted in 1664 was a law in Maryland that banned the marriage of whites with black (and mulatto) slaves and indentured servants.  Virginia in 1691 enlarged the scope of the ban to include free whites and blacks and it was soon followed in other colonies.    In 1776, seven out of the thirteen colonies had laws outlawing interracial marriages. 

Some effort was made to combat miscegenation laws.  In 1780, Pennsylvania overturned miscegenation laws as part of a larger effort to gradually abolish slavery within the state.  After the Civil War, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina and Alabama temporarily legalized interracial marriage for some years during the Reconstruction period.  After conservative white Democrats took political power again after Union troops left the South, they reestablished  miscegenation laws and Jim Crow laws to segregate blacks from whites. 

Many reasons were used to justify miscegenation laws.  Some took a racist reading of the Bible, using the passages of Phinehas in Exodus and the Curse of Ham in the book of Genesis as biblical justification for the banning of interracial marriage.  In an internet post (http://hnn.us/articles/4708.html), Peggy Pascoe, an Associate Professor and Beekman Chair of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon, found four reason often given to support a ban on interracial marriage:  first, judges claimed that marriage belonged under the control of the states rather than the federal government;  second, they began to define and label all interracial relationships (even longstanding, deeply committed ones) as illicit sex rather than marriage;  third, they insisted that interracial marriage was contrary to God’s will;  fourth, they declared that interracial marriage was somehow “unnatural.”   In the 1883 Supreme Court case Pace versus Alabama, the Court ruled that the Alabama miscegenation laws did not violate the fourteenth amendment because both parties suffered under interracial marriages and interracial sex.

African Americans were a primary target of the miscegenation laws.   In the great Ken Burns documentary Unforgivable Blackness on Jack Johnson, the African American heavyweight boxing champion of the early twentieth century, Burns chronicles the outrage of white Americans when Johnson had marriages to white women, first to Etta Duryea and then to Lucille Cameron.  As a direct result of Johnson’s marriages, Representative Seaborn Roddenberry introduced an amendment in 1912 to the U.S. Constitution to prohibit interracial marriages.    Native Americans and Asian immigrants also were subject to miscegenation laws.  These laws not only restricted white and nonwhite marriages;  it also outlawed marriages of couples of different nonwhite races.  So African Americans weren’t allowed to marry Native Americans or Asians, and visa versa.  It was all part of an ideology of racial purity that was accepted by a majority of white Americans.

Filipino immigrants faced special harassment in California during the 1920s and 1930s.  In Carlos Bulosan’s book America Is In the Heart, it chronicles a period betwen 1907 to 1926 when 150,000 Filipinos immigrated to the United States to find employment, with a majority of the group landing in Hawaii and California.  The Filipinos in California were mostly young unmarried men with little education and few skills, and they hoped to stay for a little while in America, make money, then return home to the Philippines.  Filipinos of this time faced harassment from white Americans because they were not as averse as other minorities to date and marry white women.  Ronald Takai’s history of Asian Americans, Strangers From A Different Shore,  documents organizations like Native Sons of the Golden West, the Commonwealth Club and prominent figures like former president of the University of California Dr. David P. Barrows testifying before Congress of the threat of Filipino men mixing with white women.  In Watsonville, California, in 1930, four hundred white men attacked a Filipino dance hall where Filipino men danced with white women and many Filipinos were beaten and one was shot to death.  In 1930 a white man testified before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, “The Filipinos are… a social menace as they will not leave our white girls alone and frequently intermarry…”  As a result of all this white pressure, thirteen states prohibited marriages between whites and Filipinos.

In 1963, Richard and Mildred Loving, an African American and white interracial couple, decided to challenge the miscegenation laws of Virginia and this eventually lead to a Supreme Court ruling that overturned the ban on interracial marriages in the United States.   The Lovings married in Washington D.C. to avoid Virginia’s miscegenation laws, but when they returned to their home state, they were arrested in their bedroom for living together as an interracial couple.  The judge suspended the case as long as the Lovings left Virginia for 25 years.   They eventually took their case to the Supreme Court and in 1967, the Court unanimously decided that miscegenation laws was against the Fourteenth Amendments’ goals of equality.

I am a Filipino American.  My wife is white.  Fifty years ago, I would’ve been sentenced for up to ten years in prison for  marrying Lisa.   A 1958 Gallup poll showed that 96 percent of white Americans dissapproved of interracial marriage.  Now one fifteenth of all American marriages are interracial marriages.  The change in attitudes towards interracial marriage makes me confident of the capacity of average Americans to grow and become more tolerant. 

In my ears, the past arguments against interracial marriage are no different from today’s arguments against gay marriage.  People argued that interracial marriage would harm the institution of marriage, that interracial marriage was contrary to God’s will, that interracial marriage would cause a decline in public morality.  In the 40 years since Loving versus Virginia and interracial marriage has become more common, the institution of marriage has survived intact, churches now accept interracial weddings without controversy, and no one questions the effect of interracial couples on public morality.   I have confidence that the course of gay marriages will follow the same course that interracial marriages blazed in the recent past.

If you’re a Californian and you read this post, please vote no on Proposition 8.

California’s Proposition 8

In the thirtieth anniversary of the assasination of gay San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, a proposition is now being considered that would ban gay marriages in the state of California. This proposition, Proposition 8, would create a state constitutional amendment to take away the rights of gays and lesbians to get married in California and would overturn a ruling by the California State Supreme Court to allow such marriages to take place. Many of the more conservative Christian believers from the Catholic, Mormon, and Evangelical churches are spearheading a strong organized drive to get Proposition 8 passed, while the more liberal Christian and Jewish groups have been less organized in their efforts to defeat Proposition 8.  Matthai Kuruvila wrote an informative article in the October 15, 2008 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle about the fight between liberal and conservative Christians over Proposition 8 and the issue of gay marriage.

Many of the conservative Christians who oppose gay marriage do so because of the way they read the Bible.  They believe that 3 passages (Genesis 19:4-6, Leviticus 20:13, and Romans 1:27) condemn homosexuality and they view the Bible as the inerrant word that came from God.  In ads across the state, conservative Christians argue that homosexual marriages is a threat to the institution of marriage and would undermine the traditional nuclear family.  They push the idea that children would be indoctrinated about gay marriage without their parents consent.  The Church of Latter Day Saints have made a concerted effort to persuade its members to fight for Proposition 8 and Mormons account for 40 percent of the donors supporting the ballot measure.  The Knights of Columbus, a conservative Catholic organization, and Focus on the Family, a conservative Evangelical organization, are also heavily contributing to the passage of Prop 8.

Kuruvila notes that liberal groups representing Christians, Jews and others have been far less organized in their efforts to defeat the measure.   St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco has been marshalling opposition against Proposition 8, mainly through individuals working at phone banks.  St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco, which chose lesbian priests to lead it two decades ago and gave up its membershilp in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, have had fragmented efforts to make a liberal opposition.  In a Roman Catholic Church in Fresno, a priest went out of the closet and decried Proposition 8 in the pulpit in early October, causing controversy in his parish.  The Reverand Geoffrey Farrow said, “How is marriage protected by intimidating gay and lesbian people into loveless and lonely lives?  I am morally compelled to vote no on Proposition 8….   I know these words of truth will cost me dearly.  But to withhold them… I would become an accomplice to a moral evil that strips gay and lesbian people not only of their civil rights, but of their human dignity as well.”

I personally am opposed to Proposition 8.  My wife and I both have close gay and lesbian friends, and we know two lesbian couples who have married and have had no harm to the people around them.  Since conservative Christians are targeting their fellow churchgoers to support Proposition 8, it would do well for liberal Christians to do the same. In my time at an evangelical church, I found two types of people who were against homosexuality: one group thought homosexuality was a sin and hated gays and lesbians; and the other group thought homosexuality was a sin but had close family members or friends who were gay and lesbian and sincerely struggled with loving their gay friends and family while holding on to their belief. Trying to talk to the first group is a waste of time, but I think it’s possible to talk to the second group. The people in the second group do not see gays and lesbians as two dimensional stereotypes: they are their brothers, sisters, relatives, close friends. Though it may be futile to try to convince them that homosexuality is not a sin, I think it’s possible to convince them that even if they believe homosexuality is a sin, homophobia is an even worse sin. Homophobia is like racism and sexism in that they have the effect of dehumanizing and marginalizing a group of people, making them vulnerable to a whole range of cruel treatment. Jesus went out of his way to reach out to marginalized people, to make people see the humanity in prostitutes, demon possessed people, taxcollectors and outcasts. Here is the full context of a passage in Romans that is often used to justify the idea that homosexuality is a sin:

“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, Godhaters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious towar parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die- yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.
Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

The whole point of the first part of Paul’s letter to the Romans is that everyone falls short of the righteousness of God, whether it be the pious Jew or the licentious Gentile. Paul seems to be saying that we all have our faults, we’re all guilty of some sin. In today’s terms, it doesn’t matter if a person is a devoted churchgoer or a gay or lesbian; we’re no better or no worse than anyone else in God’s eyes. We’re all just people.

Most of the people who advocate Proposition 8 are probably nice people, conscientious citizens, and loving family people. But I’m against them on this issue because this particular idea does harm to a specific group of people. I believe that the argument used by African Americans and women in their fight for equal rights applies also to the gay community: if a certain group of people are denied certain rights due to prejudice or unjust reasons, then it has bad effects all of us as a community.

Walt Kelly and Pogo

I recently read that Berkeley Breathed is retiring his wonderful character, Opus, after almost 30 years of creating wonderful gentle satire of American culture and politics. Opus is part of a long tradition in comic strips of sharp political satire. From Al Capp and his comic strip Li’l Abner, to Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury, to Aaron McGruder’s Boondocks, a few comic strips in each generation have taken on the politicians, celebrities, and wall street financiers that dominate the nation’s news. One of the first cartoonists to tackle political subjects in his work was Walt Kelly in his comic strip Pogo. It has the reputation of being one of the best comic strips to ever grace the news page.

Walt Kelly was born on August 25, 1913 in Philadelphia. He drew his first cartoons while he was in high school for the local Bridgeport Post. In 1936 Kelly moved to California and began work in Walt Disney studios, where he worked on the films Pinocchio, Fantasia, The Reluctant Dragon, and Dumbo. He left Disney studios during a bitter strike and moved to New York to work in the comic book industry. It was in a comic book in 1942 that Walt Kelly first introduced the world to his famous character, Pogo the Possum.

Pogo was a sweet possum with a southern accent who lived in the Okefenokee Swamp. He was the sane center in a growing cast of eccentric characters. It included Howland Owl; Churchy Le Femme the turtle; Beauregard Bugleboy the hound dog; and Porkypine the porcupine. They first appeared in the newspaper PM, an experimental left-wing newspaper in the 1940s that also included the political cartoons of Dr. Seuss and Crocket Johnson’s intellectual comic strip Barnaby (Johnson later authored the Harold and the Purple Crayon books). When the Post-Hall Syndicate picked up Pogo, it became a popular national comic, appearing in more than 500 newspapers.

Pogo became the most controversial comic strip of its day because Kelly was not afraid of injecting politics into his strip and tackling some of the most contentious issues of the nation. At the height of Joseph McCarthy’s popularity during the Red Scare of the early 1950s, Kelly created the McCarthy spoof Simple J. Malarkey, a mean bobcat who harassed the characters in Okefenokee Swamp. In 1962, Kelly depicted Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev as a boorish pig and Cuban dictator Fidel Castro as a goat, which caused a Japanese newspaper to drop the strip. Among the other figures that were spoofed by Walt Kelly were Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Spiro Agnew and J. Edgar Hoover.

Pogo had a great influence upon many future political cartoonists. Jules Feiffer, the political cartoonist of the Village Voice, said in an interview on the August 1988 issue of the Comics Journal:

“Kelly was just like a bolt of lightning to my perceptions. Beginning with his political cartoons in the New York Star, before I was even aware of Pogo. And then Pogo began in the Star and it really knocked me out. He also made me aware of the dangers of being brilliant six days a week with a Sunday page…”

I discovered Pogo while reading the book America’s Great Comic Strip Artists by Richard Marshall. The strips that I read are wonderfully clever and hilarious. Except for a few anthologies, however, I haven’t really had much of a chance to read more than a small sampling of this brilliant comic strip. I hope that eventually a publisher will take the time to publish a large collection of Pogo, to expose a new generation to the wit and wisdom of Walt Kelly’s legendary comic strip. It is the foundation from which Bloom County, Doonesbury, Boondocks and future political comic strips can build upon.

Why Crossleft Has Been Important To Me

It’s been a year now that I’ve been in Crossleft, a Progressive Christian site.  Why have I stayed?  For the most part it’s because Crossleft dovetails my two prevailing interests:  an interest in liberal and progressive politics and an interest in a more progressive Christianity.    I’ve learned a lot from reading the bloggers in this site.  A few years ago I was in a painful church conflict that really shook my faith in God and Christianity.  A small part of me though, still wants to believe in God and Jesus, so I’ve embarked in these past few years to try to figure out what parts of this Christian faith do I still believe.  During this time, I found Crossleft.  I’ve always felt that Crossleft has been like a Godsend to me. 

 

In order to better understand why, a little of my history is in order.

 

I grew up Catholic.  The first time that I ever felt close to God was in Jr. High School.  I was taking CCD classes for Confirmation, and it made me very fervent to be closer to God.  I read all I could about the Jesus and the saints and the church.  I found out about Pope John XXIII and Vatican II and grew to love that vision of church.  My mom had a book about St. Francis, and it became one of my favorite books.  When I prayed, I really felt like I was talking to God and I prayed every night for my friends and family.  Every month I’d go to confession.  I remember once when I my family had for one night a statue of the Virgin Mary that was traveling from household to household for us to pray the rosary.  I never found out what was special about that statue, but I remember how special my prayers felt when I did the rosary that night.

 

That fervent belief lasted for several years, until college.  I have no explanation as to why my faith faded at that time.  I had my disagreements with John Paul II, but I knew many Catholics who disagreed with the Pope and still remained faithful churchgoers.  After I left, I encountered the priest in the church I went to.  He looked at me and apologized for not knowing me;  he had so many people in his congregation, he didn’t know who I was.  And I had to admit, in the years that I had gone to the church, I had not gotten to know anyone other than the people who I went to school with.

 

For a brief period I stopped going to any kind of church.  Then the evangelicals found me.  A college friend invited me to her church, the San Jose Chinese Alliance Church.   Gradually I began to make friends and stayed because of those friendships.  When I told them that I was a liberal Democrat, they told me that it didn’t matter whether a person is liberal or conservative, so long as that person was in a personal relationship with God.  In my first few years I did feel like I had a relationship with God.  These evangelicals were sincere about their faith, and they deeply cared about following the Bible and doing the right thing.  Their fervor rubbed off on me, and I joined Bible Study groups and learned about Romans, Ephesians, Mark, and Genesis.  A group of us followed the pastor when he moved to Los Altos to found a new church, Grace Community Convenant Church.   And the first few years in that church were wonderful too.

 

There was a flip side however.  Though I was initially told that a person’s political affiliation didn’t matter, it turned out not to be quite true.  While the members had a diversity of political views, a majority were fairly conservative and they made it clear that they didn’t like liberals.  At first I was fairly open about my opinions, but gradually I learned to keep quiet.   I witnessed times where a group of people would gang up on an individual and use peer pressure to get that person to conform.  These incidents bothered me, but I was too afraid to go against the group.   And then I got into some conflicts.  The things that I observed happening to others started happening to me.  The gossip, the talking behind the back, the loss of friendships.  Church became like a bad high school experience.   I kept getting into these frustrating Abbott and Costello type conversations.  As a typical example, here is an example of a conversation that happened when they found out I was dating Lisa:

 

X:  You shouldn’t be going out with Lisa!

ME:  Why not?  I like her.

X:  No you don’t.  You’ll be unequally yolked.

ME:  I don’t care if I’m unequally yolked. 

X:  Yes you do.  Why don’t you ask this girl out instead?

ME:  I have asked her out.  She’s always busy.

X:  Don’t worry about it.  Just keep asking her out.

ME:  Why?  I like Lisa, not her.

X:  You don’t like Lisa.   Just listen to what I said.

ME:  So you don’t want me to go out with someone whom I like and who is willing to go out with me?  And Instead ask out someone I don’t like and is too busy at work to go out?

X:  Don’t think about it.  We know what’s the best for you.

 

After a while I just stopped listening.  I stayed for two more years in that church, but a place that I was once fond of became a place I felt miserable at.   It really disillusioned me, and I still struggle with feelings of bitterness.  From this experience, I learned that it’s better to think for myself and be wrong sometimes than to have a group of people do my thinking for me.

 

For a long time, I stayed away from church.  After a while I started missing going to a church.  I believed in God before went to Grace.  Why should I let this experience take that away?  So I decided to do something that I had always wanted to do… visit churches of different denominations.  I visited a Quaker meeting, a Greek Orthodox church, a Lutheran church.  For several months I stayed at a Unitarian Universalist church and really enjoyed their company. 

 

I eventually wound up in an Episcopalian Church, where I’ve been attending for about a year now.  I really like their idea of via media, this sort of combination of the Catholic service and Protestant theology.  It’s a chance for a fresh start.  They’re an older congregation and they’ve been very nice to me.   I haven’t made any close friends yet, but I’ve been making an effort to invite people to dinner and get to know them better.

 

Right now I am not this Christian of deep faith.  I no longer really pray apart from when I’m in church.  I struggle with feelings of anger and forgiveness.   When I first started posting on Crossleft, someone asked me if I believe in the Apostles Creed, and I had to admit I wasn’t sure anymore.  The only thing that makes me a Christian is that I still believe Jesus is the Son of God.  I have  no logical reason for this.  It’s just something that I hold on to.

 

I read Crossleft because I see in these people a group of fervent and sincere Christians whose progressive politics is an outgrowth of their fervent relationship with God.  Crossleft is this diverse group of Christians who’ve had their own struggles with God and church, yet still believe and have charted their own course with God and Jesus.  It’s a place where I feel safe to say my own opinions and disagree and have respectful debates, and that’s important to me.    I admire the Crossleft bloggers for standing up to the Religious Right and for calling them out on their inconsistencies, although I also worry for them;  I’ve learned that when people are challenged, they often retaliate and they often do not fight fair.  I’m grateful that Crossleft has allowed this nominal Christian to  blog at their site and to allow me the room to find my own voice.

 

One of my favorite books is Strength For The Journey, by Diana Butler Bass.  Bass went through struggles at various churches before finding her own voice, and she wrote a paragraph that I empathize with.  I end this post with that paragraph.

 

“I do not know how or where I learned it, but I had learned not to say what I really thought or truly believed or most desired….  The way of safety is to say what others want you to say, to repeat words of those who hold power.  And if you do that well enough you might gain a modicum of control over your own life.  By age thirty, after a decade of higher education, I knew everyone’s words but my own.  Holy Family had given me a place to use my hands and, very tentatively, hear the words forming within.  When I left, I had only just begun to realize that I might have a voice of my own.” 

Frank Capra and the Populist Film

One of the hallmarks of Christmas since I was a child has been watching It’s A Wonderful Life.  It’s a great film, one that makes me appreciative of my friends and family.  The director of It’s A Wonderful Life is Frank Capra, one of the finest directors of the 1930s and 1940s.  One of the things that I love about the Capra films is the love that Capra has for the average American and it’s extolling of the values of American community.   The characters are fun, energetic and humble, and they have supportive and loving family and friends.    The optimism and sentimentality in these films though are balanced by a willingness to look at the harsher aspects of American life.   Frank Capra’s films offer us a look at how Americans viewed themselves in the Roosevelt era, and they influence how we would like America to be today.

My favorite movies of Frank Capra were those made in the mid 1930s to mid 1940s.  Films like Lady For A Day, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, It’s A Wonderful Life.  I was lucky to catch a festival that the Stanford Theater had in the 1990s on Frank Capra and managed to watch several of his movies for the first time.  One of the most appealing things that I found when I first watched these films was the affection that Capra lavished on the ordinary working people of his movies.  The taxi drivers, waiters, bellhops, maids, policemen, gas station attendents, and drug store owners didn’t just blur in the background;  they were funny, kind, generous, and humble, the kind of people I’d like to meet.  The heroes were usually of humble origins.  Mr. Smith (from Mr. Smith Goes To Washington) was a boy ranger leader,  Peter Warne (from It Happened One Night) was a down on his luck reporter, John Doe (from Meet John Doe) was a has-been baseball player and itinerant hobo.    Capra’s heroines appeal to me because they are capable and intelligent, more than equal to the heroes of the movies.    Most of the women are more wise to the world than the heroes were, and these women often had to provide the street smarts to help their men fight against corruption.   Clarissa Saunders, in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, helps Jefferson Smith with the Senatorial rules necessary to filibuster a corrupt bill.   Babe Bennett, in Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, teaches Longfellow Deeds of the pitfalls of New York City high society.  Both the heroes and the heroines are funny and decent at heart, and they enjoy the company of every day people. 

In these films, community is very important.   In most of his movies, the hero and heroine are beloved members of a loving community or small town.  George Baily, of course, is the center of his town as the savings-and-loan officer who was responsible for many of the townspeople being able to afford their homes.  Longfellow Deeds, of Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, is sent off to the city by the entire small town as they serenade him goodby.  These friends and family not only offer love and support to the Jefferson Smiths and George Bailys, they also root their heroes in the small town values that gird them from the temptations of a materialistic and corrupt world.   I read somewhere that American culture was still struggling between the virtues of a small town farming society and an urban city society, and this seems to be depicted in the values that are in conflict in Capra’s films. 

I read a lot about how Capra’s movies are overly optimistic and sentimental, but the Capra movies that I’ve watched are not shy about showing the dark side of American culture.   These movies were made during a time when many Americans were under severe economic distress, and there were worries overseas about the growing threats to democracy from Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union.    The Capra films wasn’t afraid of showing the effects of the Great Depression on their characters.  In the middle of Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, the comedy and high spirits of the first part of the movie is stopped cold when a hungry vagrant confronts Mr. Deeds and asks how he could spend his wealth frivolously while people around him starve.   In It Happened One Night, the frivolity of a sing-a-long on a bus trip is interruppted when a woman faints and her son explains that the woman had been looking for a job and hadn’t had anything to eat.   Both American Madness and It’s A Wonderful Life depict a bank run, as the ordinarily happy and decent people turn into a desperate mob afraid of seeing their life savings disappear.   Meet John Doe has a seen where a group of townspeople tell John Doe of the ways that the economy has affected them, of a man who snuck in the middle of the night to sell his furniture to get needed money, or of the man who went through trash cans because he was too proud to take help. 

Capra’s most political films, in my eyes, are Mr. Deeds Goes To Town, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and Meet John Doe.    Mr. Deeds Goes Town deals with the divide between the rich high society elite of New York City and the struggling poor and unemployed.  Mr. Smith Goes To Washington deals with political corruption and the struggle that all politicians face between political pragmatism and politican idealism.  Meet John Doe touches upon the dangers when corporate heads control newspapers and how dangerously easy it is to manipulate a population through the media (a lesson that is fresh to America after Bush’s campaign to invade Iraq).   A common theme in all these films is how a community can be transformed into  a hostile mob through the manipulation of the press.   Although Capra loves the American community, he realizes that groups are not always benign.  In such circumstances, his films believe justice is best served by individuals who take courageous stands.  This is in keeping with Martin Luther King’s observation in Letter From a Birmingham Jail that groups tend to be immoral than individuals.

When I observed the sympathy that these films had for the common American, I always assumed that Frank Capra was a New Deal liberal.   It surprised me to find out that Capra was actually a Republican who disliked Roosevelt and the New Deal.  I always found his films to be unabashed liberal films, but as Donald Willis wrote in a critical study of Capra’s films:  “Depending on one’s political point of view and on what Capra film or films or parts of Capra films one is talking about, Frank Capra is an advocate of Communism, fascism, marxism, populism, conservatism, McCarthyism, New Dealism, anti-Hooverism, jingoism, socialism, capitalism, middle-of-the-road-ism, democracy or individualism.”    I guess my initial response to Capra’s films shows my own bias as a liberal Democrat and the failure to realize that many Republicans like Capra do have compassion for working Americans and the poor.

Though Frank Capra is a Republican, I believe that his films do have a liberal and left wing influence.  His films are not just his views alone, but the amalgamation of his views and those of his screenwriters.  His close friend and frequent screenwriter, Robert Riskin, was a New Deal Democrat.   Sidney Buchman was a member of the Communist Party at the time he wrote Mr. Smith Goes To Washington.  Capra was able to collaborate with people of diverse opinions because of his open mindedness and his respect for divergent views.  Joseph McBride wrote in his book, Frank Capra:  The Catastrophe of Success,

“The auteur theory… did not recognize the degree to which a filmmaker such as Capra could be influenced by conflicting points of view and incorporate them into his work, nor the degree to which a filmmaker might be expressing his times as much as he was expressing himself.  And though there was much controversy in the 1970s about how much credit Robert Riskin deserved for Capra’s success, not even Riskin’s supporters ever pointed out that the crux of the problem ws that Capra and Riskin did not have identical sociopolitical views, or that their films could have been a volatile fusion between two conflicting viewpoints rather than a smooth and unified expression of one man’s ideas.  Nor was there any cognizance of the degree to which Capra in the 1930s acted as a relatively passive sounding board for the political views of his diverse brain trust, which included the far-right Myles Connolly, the Roosevelt liberal Jo Swerling, and the left-liberal writer and associate producer Joseph Sistrom….  Capra in the prime of his career liked to surround himself with colleagues who were not yes men, and his ability to listen to and absorb such a range of viewpoints ‘made him an interesting guy’, contributing to the complexity of his films. ”

Though the America of the 1930s and 1940s seem so far away now, the movies of Frank Capra can help remind us that we have more in common with that time than we think.  It was a time of economic hardship, when Wall Street was in shambles and banks were foreclosing, people were losing their homes, and danger seemed to growing overseas.  As the financial crisis have hit Wall Street and the banking system in these past 2 weeks,  as our economy slows down and people go out of work, as our security becomes threatened by terrorists and new world powers, it becomes easier for us to sympathize with the America of the 1930s and 1940s.  And as those Americans did, we could look to Frank Capra to encourage us, to remind us of our American values, and to support us for the struggle ahead.