The Lincoln Plawg

Wednesday, October 23, 2002 06:10 p.m.

American Innocence and Mr Smith Goes To Washington

It's a theme of Americans and anti-Americans down the years: naivety, simplicity, innocence, lack of refinement and sophistication. Americans have used it as something of a rallying cry - plain, honest Yankees bamboozled and cheated by devious, sophisticated Europeans; Europeans as self-satisfied self-congratulation that wealth, power and comfort were not everything - Americans were uncouth hillbillies blundering in their ignorance, incapable of appreciating subtlety if it bit them in the behind.

And, in the current US President, both sides have decided they have a more than apt example to turn to their purposes (Sunday's Christopher Hitchens' piece that I discussed on Monday is a case in point).

It's highly improbably that either side actually believes the caricature; it's for the consumption of outsiders - Administration types want to show that it's a regular guy in charge of the egg-heads; and his opponents have in mind Jethro Clampett with his finger on the nucular button.

Running parallel with the Daniel Boone notion of American statesmanship is that other strangely persistent idea, American Innocence. On the face of it, it is impossible to have the most tenuous grasp of American history without having in one's mind vastly more material than is necessary to disprove any such notion.

The subjugation of the Indian nations was, no doubt, perfectly necessary to the development of the US; it was not secured by kid-glove methods - the role of that father of the Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson, was notably unfettered by pettifogging legal and constitutional limitations.
The Civil War: enough said; followed, in the Reconstruction Era and beyond, by greed (rhymes with Tweed), fraud and corruption of an extent and a brazenness to demote the present-day Enrons to petty-cash embezzlers in comparison.
The hundreds of US military interventions - starting at least as early as the 1846 Mexican War, and no doubt earlier still - were similarly motivated, though effected by guns rather than pens.
Overstepping World War 1 (which Uncle Sam had the good sense to stay out of for most of its duration), the war in the Pacific, 1942-45, must rank as amongst the most savage warfare ever waged by such large numbers. Notoriously, no quarter was given on either side. The well-known US ape posters (matched by similar treatments of their foe by the Japanese) describe pretty much the feelings of the combatants.

Where was the innocence in that lot?

(As you see, it's not hard for those on this side of the pond to get a trifle aerated on the subject.)

But, like the cowboy diplomatist, American Innocence is, of course, a work of pure fiction. Don't do as I do, do as I say is its motto.

A confidence-trick perpetrated by the cognoscenti on that supreme American object of pity, the sucker? I don't think so. It seems to me that it's all part of the trick of believing contrary things at the same time. No one - no reasonably sane and educated American, at least - is fooled.

In the same vein as Mr Shake-down, the American tends to be just too much man for just one idea. He contains multitudes.

Thus - signally - the racial double-standard that was for so long written into the laws and constitutions of the US and at least some of the several states. Gunnar Myrdal, in the essential work on the race question in America, termed it The American Dilemma: 'all men are created equal', says the founding document of the nation - but, Northerner or Southerner alike - had no need to say - even consciously to think - the practical addition: 'except the Negroes'. Because, by admitting the exception, the Americans would sully the purity - innocence, again! - of that iconic text; which would have been a loss for no countervailing gain, since the scourge of Jim Crow would not thereby have been a whit abated.

Naturally, I'm not suggesting hypocrisy is confined to the New World! But there is, I hypothesise, a particular character to the American variety. In Continental Europe, for example, the fragility of political institutions has led to much less striving to demonstrate or preserve their legitimacy.

So, for example, the French were French long before they acquired their first written constitution, at around the same time as the US Constitution came into force: and, whereas the US has managed for all that time with just the one (or, at a stretch, three), the French list is around 20 and counting! They have learnt not to get too attached to them.

Before the US Constitution came into force, there was (or were) no United States - not a nation-state by that name, at all events. On the other hand, European constitutions (including the unwritten UK one) are not, for the most part, 'constitutive' of the states to which they belong. (In the case of Johnny-Come-Latelys like Italy and Germany, the existence of a people preceded national identity, let alone particular constitutional forms.)

In the UK, in contrast, however long-lived and organic the constitution, we almost take pride in its essentially shambolic nature! Few will have seen the text of Magna Carta or the 1689 Bill of Rights, and fewer still probably bemoan their ignorance. If it's by no means guaranteed that There'll always be an England, it won't be constitutional construction that kills it off.

Since constitutions and laws tend (in form, at least) to be pristine, and politics is usually grubby, to hold constitutions and laws as icons, rather than political tools, almost by definition invites the comparison between lofty aim and sordid reality. The example of the 14th Amendment springs to mind: a good deed in the incredibly naughty world of Radical Reconstruction, which, in the decades prior to the court-packing row of 1937, was turned from its original purpose of buttressing Negro rights to protecting corporations from the iniquities of minimum wage and child labour laws!

Probably the supreme dissection of this neck of the American woods in popular culture is the 1939 Frank Capra movie Mr Smith Goes To Washington. And - quite appropriately given its subject - it is a masterful piece of artistic misdirection.

Read the movie guides and reviews, and you'd think this is a sumptuously gift-wrapped cob of sugar-coated Capracorn, dedicated to the proposition that honesty is the best policy, and the dopes will inherit the Earth, Truth, Justice and the American Way shining out in each of its 170,000 odd frames.

Horse-radish!

The clue is in the credits. Capra had junked Robert Riskin - who had gone soft and preachy after his Oscar clean-up It Happened One Night - and brought in Sidney Buchman, whose singular characteristic was that he was a Communist (a genuine CPUSA member, it appears, rather than fellow-traveller - and subsequently a HUAC victim).

This was still the period when the Third International decreed cooperation with other left-wing groups in Popular Fronts - it was just before Uncle Joe had a change of heart, fashion-wise, and declared that brown was the new red. In France, Communists took part in a coalition government; in the US, they helped mightily (relative to their numbers) in setting up industrial unionism and the CIO, an FDR re-election powerhouse in the non-machine Northern states.

What more natural than that a Communist should analyse the workings of the American political system for the benefit of the masses (in a popular, Hollywood way, rather than a tedious, agitprop, Federal Theater Project way).

The result - whatever Capra (or Columbia) thought - was a cynical study of cynicism, where nothing is what it seems on the surface to be.

The true villain of the piece is not the John Goodman-sized 'machine boss' Jim Taylor or the smooth sell-out Senator Joe Paine: it's the Boy Ranger himself, the very personification of American Innocence, than whom no clover-leaf is greener.

Misdirection, again. To judge from his script, what Buchman is really worried about is the American Dictator.

FDR's supreme service to his country - like Winston Churchill's to his - came at the start of his time at the top: managing the banking defaults staved off a pre-revolutionary situation. In precipitately descending order of potential dictator material, Huey Long, Father Coughlin and Gerald L K Smith had all missed their moment. But, with a war coming, who knew whether another chance would come along for the right man?

And what stripe of man would that be? Communism, Fascism and the like were out. The structure of American society was stony ground for that kind of ideology (the extreme tardiness of unskilled worker unionisation, and lack of national success for any socialist movement is testimony to that). The only ism that would serve would be Americanism. Served up by a plain man. Huey Long minus the brash manner, corruption and Southernness (Southerners - except the house-trained variety, like Woodrow Wilson - weren't available for the Presidency at that stage).

Perhaps someone from out West, where the wind leans against the tall grass, who spends his time with boys (in the good way!) and recites (though signally fails to understand a word of) the works of the founders of the nation.

Despite (or perhaps because of) James Stewart's best endeavours, Jefferson Smith comes over as a pitiful specimen, a backwoodsman like the Gary Cooper character in Mr Deeds Goes to Town, but lacking all the native cunning that makes the Cooper guy interesting, at least for the first third of the movie.

Eric Cartman has a more profound grasp of the Federal institutions of the US than Smith; he can't even keep hold of his hat; and he's made a fool of the Biblically-correct three times - by a girl, no less!

There's no doubt where the cojones are located in the movie: the Jean Arthur character [1] embodies the double-standard, a true multitudinarian. Straight off the bat, she figures him for a dope, and decides to have some fun, setting the local hacks on him in his hotel room; she then develops tender feelings for him (if she were a guy, they'd call it horniness), but still sets him up for a fall by failing to tip him off about the crooked dam being planned for just where his Boy's Camp is to be; and, under the watchful gaze of the greatest US President (back at the Lincoln Memorial) [2], spins him the sleaziest line imaginable (short, perhaps, of a conditional offer of sexual services): that, by undertaking a filibuster that was bound to fail [3], he would be emulating the hero of whom he understands nothing - that eminently practical politician who, for his country's sake, daily defiled himself with the political dregs of the capital, and still came up smelling of roses.

This woman is the antipode of any ideal of American womanhood, Northern or Southern: she is a rat-fink, and utterly hypocritical on the subject [4].

The glorious Dmitri Tiomkin score underlines her essential two-facedness during the 'bill-drafting' scene, when Smith/Stewart gets all throbbing-voiced about freedom of speech; the strings, doing variations on American folk-songs, go into a rather Richard Strauss-like chord progression; and suddenly, as the cheesiest close-up of Arthur (think Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation) almost jump-cuts its way onto the screen, without warning, we hear - Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair [5]! What better way to draw attention to the fact that the Arthur character is as much play-acting as Arthur is than to refer to the actress by name?

When it comes to details, the movie is no less rewarding - decrypting the names, references and images is good fun, and the number to be decrypted suggests that Buchman was having as much fun inserting them.

(The tourist bus montage, around 20 minutes into the movie [6], is a goldmine: for instance, the Liberty Bell is seen ringing, though notoriously it was cracked (during Chief Justice Marshall's funeral, from memory); and the post-Long national insurgency had been represented in the 1936 Presidential contest, to disappearingly small effect, by one William 'Liberty Bell' Lemke!

There is a further riff based on the Lincoln Memorial and the concert organised there in 1939 for Marian Anderson when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to have her sing at Constitution Hall. The movie was premiered at - you guessed it!)

The Vice-President (in real life, the Texan John Nance 'Cactus Jack' Garner) was played by a stalwart of cowboy movies, Harry Carey. According to David McCullough (his Truman biography), Garner had a yen to wear morning coats (or cutaways). And, in the movie, what do we see but - a morning coat. Not on Carey, but on the stooge Governor - whose nickname (Happy) was shared by Kentucky Governor (and later Baseball Commissioner) A B Chandler, a key figure in FDR's abortive 1938 primary purge.

And so it goes on.

The references, I suspect, are mostly meant as fun for insiders. But their presence alerts the viewer to the political substance beneath the feel-good shmaltz.

In the final act, we see a glimpse of what Buchman is suggesting: the puppet cuts the strings. Despite the girl's entreaties, Smith, utterly exhausted, nevertheless carries on: he likes this game. His natural ignorance has been barely tampered with; he's working with his own emotions, working on those of his audience (in the movie-houses and, by extension, amongst the people - the Senators would be supremely unimpressed).

That, Buchman is saying, is what (albeit shooshed up for the paying public) an American Dictator would look and sound like. In most circumstances, washed up. But, if that tide in the affairs of men were to come along - that almost came in 1933, and might come again with another war - who knows, but that he might not catch it at the flood, and soon be Surfing USA......

Of course, he's not saying he approves of the machines; or of Franklin Roosevelt, truly the capo di tutti capi when it came to machine politics. Or the strange ways of the Senate, with its (then) two-thirds rule for cloture (why on earth isn't that closure?) and disproportionate sway of the Jim Crow states.

He's just saying that it's preferable to the alternative. A sentiment very much in the pragmatic spirit of the Popular Front idea.

In reality, of course, a guy like Jefferson Smith would never get anywhere near the Senate, let alone that filibuster. And, even if he got close, the fact that most members of Congress and the President were intimately involved with political corruption of one sort or another would be a powerful incentive to see that he disappeared. (To the funny farm, perhaps, as in Mr Deeds.)

But Buchman must have feared that there were politicians, with the drawbacks neither of Huey Long nor of Jefferson Smith, who might seek to use a similar technique to appeal over the heads of the pols to the voters, probably using the Father Coughlin's medium of radio.

The fact that in 1939 it was widely thought that FDR would observe the unwritten rule, and not seek a third term, obviously had added further confusion on top of that created by the oncoming war. As Taylor suggests to Paine

At the convention, anything might happen.

Did the audiences of 1939 believe that the machines were a cancer in the political system that could be cut out by the application of some good, old American innocence? I doubt it.

Did they realise that the machines were not a cancer at all, but an essential part of the contemporary political structure, cunningly exploited by Roosevelt to achieve successive re-elections? That, I'm not so sure about. After all, it's commonly thought nowadays that a good proportion weren't aware till his final months that the man was a cripple.

The dividing lines between innocence, ignorance and not wanting to know tend, in practice, to be tricky to draw.

Pointedly, during the Civics 101 lesson she gives him on passing a bill through Congress, the Arthur character refers to the impracticality of taking
....a Bill nobody even heard about and discuss it among ninety-six men.
Thus, she highlights by omission the intriguing character of Hattie Caraway, Senator from Arkansas in 1939, the first woman to be elected to the US Senate, and (I believe) an erstwhile associate of Huey Long.
Coiffed in a Robin Hood Hat, no less!
He goes for a day, which, I believe, is about the individual record in real life.
She whines on endlessly about the Senator's daughter using her femininity to lure him away from his legislative duties, without the slightest recognition of her own, much more treacherous, conduct towards him!
The character's name is Clarissa, by the way. Jeannie recurs in the score when Clarissa is spinning her yarn at the Memorial. Appearance of the tune not a coincidence!
An incredible piece of propaganda from Slavko Vorkapich and composer Tiomkin - taken straight (which, in context, it was clearly not meant to be), perhaps worthy of comparison with Leni Riefensthal's Olympia and Triumph of the Will. Even as an intended piece of phony patriotic chatter, it can still bring a tear to the eye of the non-American.