On Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
There is no other city in the United States quite like Washington, D.C. Having frequently visited Manhattan as a child, I remember going to my nation’s capital for the first time and being shocked by how clean everything was. The laconic drawl of the National Mall conveys an easy authority, a total control that rises out of the earth like gentle hills. The White House emerges from behind trees like a cabin in the woods, and the Lincoln Memorial is solid as those terra-cotta buttes that tower from the Arizona desert.
It is an awe-inspiring place. It is also the current residence of a man named Donald Trump, leader of the free world. But more on that later.
As I recently rewatched the 1939 political drama Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I was struck by how vividly director Frank Capra captured the sensation of that city. In a major sequence, newly-appointed Senator Jefferson Smith (James Stewart) arrives outside the Capitol and promptly abandons his duties to tour the various monuments. The former leader of a youth group who’s never left his hometown, Smith is stirred by the city’s physical grandeur and comes away from the Mall with a patriotic gleam in his eye.
Upon starting his new job, however, Smith is dismayed to discover that the Senate is filled with corrupt opportunists. The minute he threatens to take action against their shady goings-on, they launch a smear campaign to discredit him. Desperate, he takes to the floor of the Senate and begins a twenty-four hour filibuster extolling the fragile virtues of Democracy. When that fails to alter public opinion (all media outlets are controlled by a ruthless monopolizer who falsifies Smith’s speech as it comes from the Capitol), Smith is only redeemed when the troubled Senator Paine (Claude Rains) erupts in a frenzied confession, admitting his guilt and praising Jefferson Smith as the only man suited for his position.
At at time when the United States was beset with Hoovervilles and breadlines, Frank Capra made films about common men who found themselves elevated to places of extraordinary influence. In It Happened One Night (1934), a newspaperman pursues a runaway socialite for a scoop and ends up marrying her. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (‘36) is the story of an aw-shucks country bumpkin who inherits a vast fortune and implements it to aid struggling farmers (and in so doing derails the greedy interests of several businessmen). And You Can’t Take it With You (‘38) is about a wealthy man who is won over by the philosophical-political teachings of an eccentric, humble family.
These movies were enormously popular during their initial releases and Capra won the Best Director Oscar three times in five years. Each of them appealed to a Hollywood-produced working class ideal: that of an individual who affronts a complacent, corrupt establishment for the sake of good-old-fashioned decency. But Mr. Smith reached a new pinnacle of grandiosity; in presenting a local hero who advances to one of his country’s highest offices, Capra offered a fantasy wherein the Everyman could tell off Mr. Bigshot in person and put the whole crooked system in its place. Make America great again, he pleads, and don’t anyone interrupt me while I’m here reminding you.
Eight years ago, I read a critique of Capra by the British film critic David Thomson who — in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf, 2010) — calls out the righteous political tenor of Capra’s films by pointing to their one-sided obstinacy:
The most odious aspects of these films is the way they bowdlerize politics by suggesting that the tide of corruption can be turned by one hero… [who admonishes] indolent or cynical government assemblies with a soulful list of clichés that Capra persuades himself is libertarian poetry, rather than a call for unadventurous conformity. (p 149)
Individualism — the notion that a person can strike out alone and make their own way in the world — has long been a popular American creed. The gutsy martyrdom of Capra’s protagonists is expressive of that creed, yet their simultaneous disregard for nuance (governmental or otherwise) reveals an inclination towards the reactionary. One can detect fascistic impulses in the nationalistic pageantry of Mr. Smith — and, indeed, in his personal life, Frank Capra was an antisemite and an admirer of Benito Mussolini.
Contrasting his adroitness as a filmmaker, and beneath the appealing warmth of his protagonists, Capra consistently employed crass populism as the ideological fulcrum of his stories. The purportedly enlightened family in You Can’t Take it With You are in fact uninformed, reckless dropouts who refuse to pay income tax. Longfellow Deeds is an equally heedless outsider whose ignorance is essential to his charm. (As one character puts it, “that guy’s either the dumbest, the stupidest or the most imbecilic idiot in the world or else he’s the grandest thing alive.”) And Jefferson Smith is a totally unqualified state representative who fails to grasp the dynamic of compromise that facilitates democratic government. His tirade in the Senate is not heroic but foolish (he fills time by reading aloud The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution), grossly selfish (think of the taxpayers’ dollars he’s wasting) and antithetical to the principles he claims to be defending.
All of this should be enough to repudiate much of Capra’s filmography, but what makes his movies so hard to desecrate is their aesthetic attractiveness. Working at a time when many American directors still seemed stupefied by the phenomenon of actors talking onscreen, Capra staged dialogue with energetic focus. He was imaginative with his camera angles. He knew how to edit, streaming scenes together through montage and iconography. In Thomson’s words, Capra films “move like hunting dogs” — and indeed, like hounds, they overtake the viewer before one has time to think.
We are currently living with a President who has risen to power on the strength of a voting public that takes his word before it thinks, a public that takes his bullheaded incoherence as evidence of down-to-earth credibility. “America first!” — a sentiment that might have tripped from the ranting lips of Jefferson Smith while he was busy blocking up the engines of democracy. Donald Trump is a charismatic idiot, and as much as some Americans were bewildered by his election to the Presidency two years ago, it is important to understand that we have been cheering on men of his boldness and ignorance for decades.
With Senator Smith, Mr. Deeds, John “Doe” Willoughby of Meet John Doe (1941) and, yes, even George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (‘46), Frank Capra established the everyman hero who has become essential to many Americans’ idea of themselves. “Democracy in America is a noble hope that needs to be guarded against corruption,” David Thomson writes, “but compromise is the essential American way — without it we would risk dictatorship.” Mr. Smith Goes to Washington stands as an imperative demonstration of the thinking that can lead millions of people to endorse ranting over deliberation, the filibuster over the compromise. Who could have guessed eighty years ago that Capra’s far-fetched daydream was actually a safe bet? Knowing what we do now, he could have taken Mr. Smith all the way to the White House.
