Frank Capra and the American Ideal

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about It’s A Wonderful Life and it got me thinking about Frank Capra. Capra is one of my favorite filmmakers. His films are full of energy and fun, with appealing characters and good humor. When I watch these films, I feel proud of being an American. This was one of the intentions of Frank Capra. Capra made his best films during the Great Depression, during a time of great suffering for many Americans. He wanted his films to show empathy for these common Americans, and he wanted to give these Americans a sense of pride in themselves and their community. Capra and his screenwriters collaborated in films that explored the American Dream at a time when the American Dream had collapsed for many Americans. His movies became a social commentary on those economic and political forces that threatened our American ideals and told his audience to hold together as a community and to help each other.

When I first watched Frank Capra’s films, I assumed that he was a New Deal liberal because of the sympathy that his films had for the average American and for its criticism of financial institutions and the wealthy elite. According to Joseph McBride in his book Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Capra was actually a Republican who opposed the New Deal. Capra though, was an open minded filmmaker who was able to collaborate with people who had very different political views than he did, and he was open to being influenced by their views. Robert Riskin, a frequent screenwriter of Capra’s films and one of Capra’s closest friends, was a New Deal Democrat. Sidney Buchman, the screenwriter of “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” was an American Communist. His close circle of collaborators also included right wing Myles Connolly, New Deal liberal Jo Swerling, and liberal writer and producer Joseph Sistrom. Thus Capra’s films are an amalgam of both liberal and conservative views.

Joseph McBride wrote in his book, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

“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.”

Two things helped make Capra’s collaborations with his more liberal colleagues possible. One of the things was that the Republican Party of the 1930s was very different than the Republican Party of today. Capra was a Republican at a time when the Republican Party was still close to a progressive Republican tradition that was embodied by Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Robert LaFollette. This progressive Republican tradition had fought for the regulation of corporations, fought for the rights of African Americans, and lobbied for a greater democratic process in the elections of public officials. President Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal expanded the government’s regulatory powers over privative industry through such acts as the Elkins Act of 1903 and the Hepburn Act of 1906 to control rates on railroads, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to regulate the food industry, and the Antiquities Act of 1906 which gave the government the power to restrict the use of government owned land. Progressive Republicans like Albert Baird Cummins and Robert La Follette fought for direct primaries to give more power to the people, fought for stringent railroad regulation, and fought for higher taxes on corporations. The progressive Republicans of the early twentieth century wanted to restrict the power of the corporations over the political and economic landscape through the government’s regulatory powers. This progressive Republican tradition clashed with the more conservative business-friendly part of the Republican Party and would eventually recede and lose out to the business interests, but it still had some sway among some Republicans during the 1930s. As late as 1924, progressive Republican Robert La Follette ran as a third party candidate for the U.S. presidency and garnered 17% of the vote.

Another thing that made collaboration between Capra and his more left wing colleagues possible was the efforts by left-leaning artists in the 1930s to bring out the radical implications of the American democratic traditions. Left wing artists like Aaron Copland, Thomas Hart Benton, Zora Neale Hurston and Ben Shahn were exploring the early American folk traditions and the myths and ideas of our early Founding Fathers as inspiration for a radical politics that was based on the average everyday people. Many leftists of the 1930s were deeply critical of the capitalist system, but they did not equate the American ideas with the faults of the capitalist system. The Left wanted to fight economic injustice, fight the segregation and lynchings of the South, fight for right of collective bargaining for workers, fight for the poor and downtrodden. In fighting these causes, liberals and radicals saw themselves as fighting for America to live up to its highest values. This attempt by leftists of the 1930s to bridge the gap between America’s ideals and its reality is captured by an excerpt from Langston Hughes’ poem Let America Be America Again

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again

Frank Capra thus shared with his more liberal collaborators a great love of American traditions and ideals. Both saw these cherished American democratic ideals under assault by an economic calamity that had led to 25% of the country unemployed, industrial production down 47 percent below normal, homeless people setting up Hoovervilles, and farmers losing their farms to foreclosure. It was a time of labor strife, riots, and demagoguery from the likes of Huey Long and Catholic priest Charles Coughlin. In this time of uncertainty, Frank Capra and his writers wanted to explore the viability of our American ideals in the context of the Depression.

In Capra’s more political films, the hero often has to go through a period of disillusionment as his small town idealism clash with the reality of greed and corruption of the world. In “Mr. Deeds Goes To Town”, Longfellow Deeds inherits 20 million dollars and finds himself fending off greedy opportunists after his money. He eventually finds himself on trial for mental incompetence in an attempt by a greedy lawyer to wrest the fortune from Deeds after Longfellow Deeds decided to give his fortune away to the poor. In “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, Jefferson Smith is appointed as a temporary replacement for a Senate seat and finds out that his colleague Senator Joseph Paine, who Smith idolized as a political hero, has been corrupted by a political boss and is attempting to pass a bill full of graft through the Senate. In “Meet John Doe”, a drifter named John Willoughby is hired to pose as an idealistic hero named John Doe, and comes to believe in the ideas that he is preaching to the people, until he finds out that he is being used by a powerful businessman to garner support for the businessman’s run for the White House. In each case, the hero initially finds that his naive idealism is no match for the financial and political power of big business (in “Meet John Doe”), a corrupt political machine (in “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”), and greedy lawyers and a snotty wealthy class (in “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”).

This period of disillusionment is followed by a period of reflection, then maturation, as the hero gets his second wind and gains resolve to fight for his American ideals against some very steep odds. The hero no longer has a naive view of the world, but sees the corruption and venality of the powers that be as something that needs to be fought against. In “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” and “Meet John Doe”, Jefferson Smith and John Willoughby see that country does not live up to its high ideals. But they still fight for those ideals, because they’ve met enough decent people to know that those ideals are worth fighting for. Jefferson Smith and John Wllloughby have much in common with the leftist activists who were also fighting to bridge the gap between America’s high ideals and the American reality.

Frank Capra’s films have a great empathy for the poor and the average everyday person. Capra’s films have a deep egalitarian vision, where the average everyday person is highlighted and a deep feeling of community leads to acts of altruism for those in need. In the movie “Mr. Deeds Goes To Town”, Longfellow Deeds meets a destitute farmer, who chides Deeds for using his wealth for frivolous pursuits while the poor around him starve. Deeds realizes the truth of the farmer’s words, and decides to use his fortune to buy farm plots for homeless families. In “It’s A Wonderful Life”, George Baily works in the Bailey Building and Loan Association that lends money to poor working people so that they could move out of slums and get a better standard of life. In “Meet John Doe”, a group of townspeople meet John Willoughby and tell him how his speeches made them get to know their neighbors better and to help those neighbors who were destitute get fed and find work.

Capra frequently compares the everyday citizens of America with the rich and the powerful. The everyday citizens always comes out looking better. In “You Can’t Take It With You”, Grandpa Vanderhof criticizes rich businessman Anthony Kirby for looking down on the poor. George Baily chides banker Potter for thinking more about profits than he does of the working people who are victims of his profitmaking. Longfellow Deeds finds the company of his servants and of ordinary people a lot more fun than the company of the rich socialites of the New York elite. When Capra criticizes the powerful, it is because their power and wealth separates them from ordinary people and the poor, and they lose empathy for the suffering of others.

In this sense, Frank Capra shares a similar sensibility as Charles Dickens. Both are making moral criticisms of the society around them. Though Capra doesn’t have as sharp a critique of the capitalist system as Dickens’s works like “Hard Times” or “Oliver Twist”, Capra does show in many of his films the economic struggles that people in the depression go through. In his films, Capra shows people who suffer through prolong unemployment, foreclosures on their homes, hunger, isolation. Both Capra and Dickens attack the values of excessive power and wealth, how it makes the powerful greedy and callous to the suffering of their fellow neighbors.

In the year 2012, we are going through some of the same struggles that Frank Capra’s audiences experienced during the 1930s. An economic meltdown, people losing their homes through foreclosure, millions enduring long term unemployment, a rise in hunger and homelessness. Nowadays, because of the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran Contra hearings, the Iraq War, and the current deadlock in Congress, we’re a bit more skeptical now about American ideals and the goodness of American intentions. But I still think Frank Capra’s films have something to give to us. Morris Dickstein wrote in his book Dancing In The Dark: A Cultural History Of The Great Depression

I have stressed Capra’s darker side partly to show his complexity, the kind of complication we can easily miss in this kind of popular filmmaking, but also because Capra was long portrayed- not the least by himself- as a cockeyed optimist, a purveyor of marketable fantasies. If this were true, his work would not have reached people the way it still does, nor would it have connected so well with the climate of insecurity and foreboding of the Depression years. His work is both a catharsis of pain and fear and an evangel of hope. His faith in human nature is linked to an immigrant’s belief in self-improvement. But Capra’s work was also simple in a way that was right to be simple. As Robert Warshow wrote about Chaplin, “the impact of his art… is helped rather than hindered by a certain simplicity in his conception of political and social problems.” The same point can be made about Dickens. Capra’s populist simplicity showed up in the way he personalized social problems into Boy Scouts and bosses, heroes and villiains. But the same approach enabled him to transform America into a vivid personal myth of archetypal simplicity, affecting humor, and elemental emotional power. Like Chaplin, like Dickens, Capra remained in touch with something raw and vulnerable in himself and his audience, a memory of humiliation, struggle, and inner resolution. The coming of the Depression gave it a more than personal meaning, and helped turn it into a not always comforting social vision.

Grandpa Martin Vanderhof (Lionel Barrymore) tells Mr. Kirby (Edward Arnold) what really matters in two scenes from Capra’s “You Can’t Take It With You”

A group of average Americans tell John Doe (Gary Cooper) how he’s inspired them, from a scene in Capra’s “Meet John Doe”

Jefferson Smith talks of the meaning of liberty in scenes from Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”

Tom Dickson tells the banking board that they must help the average Joes in a scene from Capra’s “American Madness”

George Baily argues for the right of working people to live in decent homes in a scene from Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life”

“It’s A Wonderful Life” And Occupy Wall Street

Christmas is not Christmas for me until I watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” at least once during the holiday season. “It’s A Wonderful Life” is one of the great heartwarming films that film director Frank Capra made during the 1930s and 1940s. This film, as is most of Frank Capra’s films, is a paen to the spirit of altruism and community that Capra felt was at the heart of the American spirit. Capra though is not blind to the dark side of this American vision, as he also shows the cost of this altruistic philosophy on the main character of “It’s A Wonderful Life”, George Baily, on his unfulfilled personal dreams and the burdens and personal sacrifices of serving the community and fighting for the greater good. “It’s A Wonderful Life” was made in 1946, when the United States went through a decade and a half period of economic depression and a world war. This period of economic suffering and world conflict has special relevance to the Occupy Wall Street movement, as these protests also reflect the worries of a country going through economic uncertainty at home and hostile forces abroad. “It’s A Wonderful Life” is the last of Frank Capra’s meditations on the American myth, and it has lessons that are relevant to the Occupy Wall Street movement today.

Frank Capra made his best films in the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when the American artists and writers were deeply influenced by the Depression and the suffering of the poor and the homeless. At this time, the art and literary explored the lives of the average American, and began drawing inspiration from the myths, folk tales and folk music of the popular American culture. Painters like Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Norman Rockwell and William Gropper began depicting the diversity of American lives, of the farmers, laborers, miners, soda jerks, the taxi cab drivers, the burlesque dancers. Regionalist artist Grant Wood made gentle satires of the American fables, while writers like Zora Neal Hurston began to document the folklore of the South. Poets and writers like Langston Hughes, John Steinbeck and Muriel Rukeyser created poems and fiction that decried the economic hardship of African Americans, migrant farmers, and the working class. Aaron Copland and George Gershwin incorporated folk music and jazz into their compositions to create a more American sound, while folk troubadours like Woody Guthrie described the plight of the working class in lyrics.

It is this context that Frank Capra began to explore the myth of the American common man in his films. Morris Dickstein wrote in his book Dancing In The Dark: A Cultural History Of The Great Depression:

Despite Capra’s Jeffersonian suspicion of the city, the small town is already an anachronism in these films, an idea; it’s where the hero comes from; its values are now embodied in his character, not in any fixed sense of place. This is how Capra brings together the two sides of Hollywood, the mythic and the quotidian, the stellar and the banal. He translated the small town- the idea of an unspoiled America- from a static tintype into flesh and blood, into Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart. No greatness attaches to these figures; they are not Odysseus, not Prince Hamlet, nor were they meant to be. Capra’s heroes are not exceptional men, but only heightened versions of ordinary good men; they may stumble into heroism, but their myth is the 1930s myth of the common man. During a period of social crisis, this populist myth, though politically vague and ambiguous, carried nevertheless a strong political charge. It had a long history in American social criticism and popular protest.

When I first watched Frank Capra’s films, I always assumed that Capra was a New Deal liberal. In fact, though, Capra was a conservative Republican who disliked the New Deal. The Republican Party in the 1930s, though, was different from the Republican Party of today, as it was still influenced by a progressive Republican tradition embodied by Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Robert LaFollette that had fought for the civil rights of African Americans, had fought for the regulation of corporations and the breakup of monopolies, and worked to protect the environment. Capra was an open minded artist who collaborated with and was influenced by people of many different opinions. His close friend and frequent screenwriter, Robert Riskin, was a New Deal Democrat. Sidney Buchman, the screenwriter of “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington”, was an American communist. The official screenwriters of “It’s A Wonderful Life” were Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and Frank Capra, based on a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern. Jo Swerling, Michael Wilson, Dalton Trumbo and Dorothy Parker did uncredited work in polishing up the script, with both Trumbo and Parker having leftist political views. Joseph McBride wrote in his book, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success about Capra’s respect for divergent views:

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 was 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.

“It’s A Wonderful Life” and the best of Capra’s films had both liberal and conservative views. Taken together, the most overriding vision in Capra’s films is a populist view of the world. It’s the world that sees the value of community, where everyone knows their neighbor and helps each in times of need. It is a political vision born of personal relationships, where an empathy for the poor comes from knowing a friend or a family member who is poor. George Baily’s sense of civic responsibility is born out of his friendships with everyone in his town. In this world, financial institutions are good only when they help give average people economic mobility to get out of poverty and improve their lot in life. In Capra’s eyes, financial institutions can do good only when they are connected to the communities whom they are supposed to serve. Capra believes this connectednes to the community prevents financial institutions from the greed and predatory practices that comes from institutions that focus only on creating the greatest profit. In “It’s A Wonderful Life”, Capra contrasts the Bailey Building and Loan Association, which gives loans to the working poor people so they can escape the slums of their town, and the greedy avarice of Mr. Potter’s bank. Morris Dickstein wrote in his book Dancing In The Dark: A Cultural History Of The Great Depression:

Frank Capra was not one of the newly radicalized artist from the 1920s who discovered “the people” because they were now in fashion. He was no tortured intellectual out of Exeter and Harvard like James Agee, more like a Russion populist than an American one, a true Narodnik in love with the salt of the earth. Capra’s feeling for ordinary life is deep and intuitive, whatever his attempts to mythicize it. But gradually, under the influence of the Depression, his fables shifted toward a genuine if vague populist politics. Besides the nostalgic idea of a golden age and the belief in conspiracy, one key notion that sets the populist vision off from Marxism is, in Hofstadter’s words,

“…the idea of a natural harmony of interests among the productive classes. To the Populist mind there was no fundamental conflict between the farmer and the worker, between the toiling people and the small businessman… Predatory behavior existed only because it was initiated and underwritten by a small parasitic minority in the highest places in power… The problems that faced the Populists assumed a delusive simplicity: the victory over injustce, the solution for all social ills, was concentrated in a crusade against a single, relatively small but immensely strong interest, the money power”

The Occupy Wall Street movement seems to share this common vision with “It’s A Wonderful Life”. With its protest of the vast economic inequalities of the 99 percent of American society and the growing concentration of wealth in the 1 percent of the rich, the Occupy movement shares with Frank Capra a deep distrust of the concentration of power and money in a small group or institution. Both assume that concentrating power and wealth into a few hands ultimately leads to corruption and the alienation from community. The encampments in Wall Street, Oakland and across America seem to be attempts to create a community, and the assemblies of the Occupy movement, with it’s attempts at radical democracty and decisionmaking by consensus, show a value in respecting all individual’s voices.

The respect that the Occupy movement has for individuals keeping their individuality within the group is something that is also valued in Capra’s films. In “It’s A Wonderful Life”, “You Can’t Take It With You” and his other films, Capra celebrates the quirky individuals in the community and believes that the differences of each individual are valuable to the community. In Capra’s eyes, an individual doesn’t have to subsume their personalities into some collective groupthink. In fact, though Capra extols the community and the common man, he is also cognizant of the dangers of mob rule. In this, Capra shares a lot with the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers wanted a government that ruled by consent of the governed. But they also created a Constitution with a bill of rights to protect individual and minority rights from a tyranny of the majority.

“It’s A Wonderful Life” is one of my favorite films. Though I don’t agree with everything that the movie extols (I don’t think a person has to sacrifice all of his or her dreams to also serve their community and fight the common good), I do think that the spirit of altruism and community that “It’s A Wonderful Life” represents is a good vision that America should strive for. I share a lot of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s sentiments about economic inequality and keeping financial institutions accountable. Like George Baily, I hope financial institutions focus on ways they can help people in danger of foreclosure, that they help immigrant families climb the ladder to a better life, that they get involved in their community and realize that in the long run, financial institutions are good only when they help give everyone in the community a better way of life, and not when help a small group of people gain as much profit as possible. Here is a quote from a Nicholas D. Kristof article for the October 1, 2011 New York Times:

I don’t share the antimarket sentiments of many of the protesters. Banks are invaluable institutions that, when functioning properly, move capital to its best use and raise living standards. But it’s also true that soaring leverage not only nurtured soaring bank profits in good years, but also soaring risks for the public in bad years.

In effect, the banks socialized risk and privatized profits. Securitizing mortgages, for example, made many bankers wealthy while ultimately leaving governments indebted and citizens homeless.

We’ve seen that inadequately regulated, too-big-to-fail banks can undermine the public interest rather than serve it — and in the last few years, banks got away with murder. It’s infuriating to see bankers who were rescued by taxpayers now moan about regulations intended to prevent the next bail-out. And it’s important that protesters spotlight rising inequality: does it feel right to anyone that the top 1 percent of Americans now possess a greater collective net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent?

…Much of the sloganeering at “Occupy Wall Street” is pretty silly — but so is the self-righteous sloganeering of Wall Street itself. And if a ragtag band of youthful protesters can help bring a dose of accountability and equity to our financial system, more power to them.