How We Got To Where We Are: 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'

What can an old movie show us about contemporary politics? A surprising amount, actually.

In a moment, I'm going to write a bit about the trench warfare of contemporary American politics. It's pretty much an unavoidable topic these days, and it's one that I, like a lot of other people, carry a good deal of anxiety about. To be dead honest, I think the odds of American democracy surviving in a recognizable form much past the end of this decade are distressingly low.

But when I write about politics here, I'm not going to try very hard to prove to you that one side or another is right, or one position or another is the right one to take. It's not that I don't have politics – and those of you who've been reading this site for any length of time probably haven't had to squint too much to understand where those politics lie – it's just that I don't have much interest in convincing you of them.

What I am interested in is convincing you of the value of watching an old movie like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Put simply, I think that value lies in the fact that it reveals – more clearly than almost anything else in our world – some of the deepest strucutures of American life. The things that run way down below politics. The myths, and stories, and beliefs that have seeped into virtually everyone living in this country, whether they're aware of it or not, and whether they like it or not.

I'm talking here, of course, about what we think of as "culture." Sure. Got it. But, ah…what the hell is culture? I mean, we're always talking about it, but what is it, really?

Maybe the best way to think about a culture is by comparing it to those fascinating (soon to be extinct) half-living and half-dead structures of the ocean: coral reefs. What do I mean? Well, think about how and why we believe what we believe. Each generation that has come before us has lived its life and thought its ideas – "The little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave," in the words of Ernest Hemingway – and then has died out. But it has not disappeared.

Instead, these generations have left behind the tiny structures of the things they've thought and said and done, and it's on these that the next generation has built, like living coral on top of the massive carapace created by the old dead coral that has come before. All the way, up and up, to our generation at the very top.

So if you want to really understand America, one of the best ways to do it is to take a core sample of the reef we're occupying, as it were; if you do, what you'll often see is how directly the shape of things back then reveals the shape of things now.

The basic story of Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington – released, vitally, in 1939, at the precipice of World War II – goes as follows.

In an unnamed western state, a U.S. Senator has just died. He was corrupt, and a part of a political machine run by a man named Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold). In fact, virtually all the big-name politicians in the state are corrupt, including the other senator, Joe Paine (Claude Rains), and the governor, Hubert Hopper (Guy Kibbee), who gets to name the replacement for the deceased senator. But they're not only corrupt – they've set up a shady development deal that's dependent on a bill pending in the Senate.

So Hopper needs to appoint a stooge who won't do anything to mess up the bill. He settles on a man named Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart), the leader of a local boys' group, kind of like the Boy Scouts. Smith is naïve, an absolute believer in the noble verities of the American experiment in democracy, and has a pure heart. Uh-oh.

In Washington, Smith finds himself in the company of a plucky buy cynical secretary (Jean Arthur) and a doubly cynical newspaperman (Thomas Mitchell) who at first think his patriotism is ridiculous but are then won over by his earnestness. The action of the film comes to a head when Smith introduces a bill on the Senate floor which would secure federal funding for a camp to educate boys on the virtues of outdoor life and American democracy.

However, this proposed camp happens to be located on the piece of land that Taylor's political machine has targeted for its graft. Immediately, Taylor and his machine spring into action. Acting through Senator Paine – who was a dear friend of Smith's father – they forge documents indicating that it is Smith himself who is corrupt. A Senate committee is convinced by the fake evidence, and it's clear that Smith's career and reputation are to be annihilated.

But in the final act – in what is probably the most famous scene about politics in American cinema history – Smith filibusters the bill that would clinch the Taylor machine's graft, using the Senate rule that allows anyone to hold the floor for as long as they want, provided that they keep talking and never sit down. His gamble is the underdog's, and his hope is the idealist's: if he just speaks eloquently enough and for long enough, he will remind the senators of the great shining dream of democracy and convince the people of his own state to support him. Unfortunately for Smith, the Taylor machine is too strong: they control all the newspapers in his state, and even beat up the boys from Smith's boys' club when they print fliers to get the word out about what's happening.

Fortunately for Smith, however, Senator Paine has a smidgen of conscience. At the end, with Smith exhausted to the point of collapse and facing inevitable defeat, Paine can't take his own hypocrisy anymore. He rushes onto the senate floor to declare that Smith has been right the entire time. The truth triumphs, as do Smith and democracy itself.

If you read a lot of what passes for criticism on the internet these days, or a lot of what passes for political commentary, you'll be familiar with the kind of treatments a film like this one is often subjected to.

So, for example, a critic from the left might focus on the extraordinary sequence that occurs when Smith arrives in Washington, which is as naked a piece of propaganda as has ever appeared in an American film. It's a montage that shows Smith touring the national landmarks – the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington monument, and the rest – while the score cycles through takes on everything from "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "America the Beautiful" to the National Anthem. Smith gets teary-eyed, and director Capra uses every trick in the book, including rippling American flags, shots emphasizing the nobility of the so-called Founding Fathers, and even a black man taking off his hat and staring reverently up at the statue of Abe Lincoln, to light up a feeling of patriotism in his viewers. (One important piece of context here is, of course, the war already sweeping Europe – the film was released in October of '39 – and the question of American participation in it.)

This sequence is as good a summary as any of the film's sense of reverence towards American institutions, and criticisms of all of it from the left are not hard to imagine. It centers (in the parlance) the action on a white man, and reduces the past political accomplishments of the nation to the actions of white men, thereby rendering invisible the contributions of other races, not to mention women. More directly, in a moment when Jim Crow was still raging unabated, and people of color were at best not equal before the law and at worst living under a reign of violent terror, it has the temerity to suggest that we and they should all be as misty-eyed as Jefferson Smith about how noble and decent our country is.

One could go on, from the movie's condescending stance towards women – in the character played by Arthur, who is congratulated for all she's done to rise to the position of secretary – to the deeper idea that the American state itself, which in the '50s will be overthrowing democratically-elected governments in Africa at its whim, in the '60s and '70s will be causing the death of some two million peoples in Vietnam, and in the '80s will begin a long, naked, radical shift towards transferring power and money away from the lower and middle classes and towards the wealthiest members of our society, is here whitewashed into something we should, once again, all get misty-eyed about.

I described contemporary American politics above as a kind of trench warfare, and I think it is; if you've engaged with it at all in the past several decades, you will be familiar with these kinds of arguments.

But here's something interesting: I don't think that many commentators on the right would be entirely comfortable with the vision of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington either.

Why might this movie annoy a critic from the right? For starters, it presents a radically secular notion of our country. There is absolutely no sense that America is playing some part in some sort of divine plan, or that traditional religious morality is the foundation of our nation. Instead, it clings to what used to be called a "secular humanist" understanding of the moral basis of our lives and politics.

Beyond this, the film takes a rather dim view of the business class, which is here presented as fat guys smoking cigars and manipulating the government to enrich themselves, and is opposed by two sorts of people that liberals love to adulate. The first is the mainstream media, which is portrayed as a body devoted to discovering truth and battling a business tycoon who also happens to have gone into media ownership, when we all know that the mainstream media hates the truth and spends its time trying to tear down anyone in this country who has worked hard and earned their wealth.

The second sort of person the film adulates is Jefferson Smith himself, a young idealistic fellow who isn't interested in entrepreneurship but just wants to help people. Basically, Smith is a social worker who gets dragged unwillingly into politics. In its portrayal of him, and in its tone and implications more generally, the film engages in that classic liberal vision that has plagued Hollywood since its earliest years and has helped form the naked reverence for everyone from John Fitzgerald Kennedy to Barack Hussein Obama.

It's a vision in which the powerful old people have become corrupted by their allegiance to wealth and their own status, and what's needed is a renewal brought about by a coalition of the young and the different. Nor is there any room here for the notion that political and economic success are indicators of higher human qualities, or that the poor and the dispossessed can't be trusted to do their proper duty as citizens. A right-wing fever dream, this is not.

Stepping back from all of this, what one sees in looking at Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, is how easily it can be used – like everything else in our culture, it seems – to make little tactical warheads to be dropped on the heads of the enemy. And perhaps this is the way it should be used. I don't know. I noted at the beginning that I hold a great deal of trepidation about the future of our democracy, and maybe the best way to do my part to avert what I believe is coming is to unsheathe the saber (I've somehow gone from the nuclear age to the cavalry one in my military metaphors, but whatever) and get to hacking away.

But I love film, and there's a small part of me that still believes – very naively I'm certain – that art offers a wisdom powerful enough to dull at least some of the worst excesses of politics.

I wrote at the beginning about how culture is like a coral reef, and that we can learn a great deal about it by taking a core sample, and here's what I mean. When you really start to think about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, I think, what you begin to see is not so much that it supports one or the other side in our contemporary politics, but that it it exposes the roots of the terrible tragedy of those politics.

Put simply, these roots lie in the fact that, as in any civil war, both sides are animated in many ways by the same set of myths about the world. They come, in other words, from the same culture. They believe in the same things, but draw radically different conclusions about what those beliefs entail.

In America, a fundamental part of the national mythos revolves around the idea of a noble crusade against the forces of oppression and darkness. Whether it's Barack Obama's adoption of the idea that "the arc of history bends towards justice" or Ronald Reagan's vision of "a new day in America," one of the deepest stories that we tell about ourselves is that we are members of a virtuous, optimistic army fighting against dismal and distressing powers. We're all underdogs in our own minds, like Rocky running up the steps or George Washington holed up at Valley Forge, facing off against a super-powerful foe who will be defeated because of our sturdy hearts and steadfast refusal to compromise our principals. Perhaps this goes back to the notion of throwing off the tyranny of King George all those centuries ago, or perhaps to more complicated things, but it's in our blood.

And at the same time, this is paired with a deep sense of righteousness that has a distinctly religious aura to it, a sense that our moral code is the moral code. There is an almost fantastic self-reverence in Americans, the specific tone of which is possible, perhaps, only in a nation whose founding myth is about the creation of an entire system out of nothing but ideas, a place in which, according to this myth, there was nothing until we just sat down and thought of a politics and a culture, invented it ourselves, threw away all those stupid ideas about kings and queens and the impossibilities posed by decaying old forms of governance and, like we were pulling Athena from our own skulls, simply invented ourselves.

This creates a kind of paradox, and it's the paradox that lies at the heart of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and at the heart of American culture. The system is corrupt, the standing order is one of injustice, and so it must be defeated. And yet the individual who comes along to do just that is animated not by something exterior, but by the true values of that system.

So for the leftist, American history is an object lesson in the abuses of the powerful, and their resistance to allowing the dispossessed any say in their own self-determination. And yet what more classic leftist hero – in terms of narrative structure – is there than Jefferson Smith, who confronts the corruption that's destroying the hopes and dreams of the ordinary people, and defeats that corruption because of the pure, humanistic virtues of his moral vision, which is communitarian in nature and founded on the ability of every single person to see justice if it's just laid out before them clearly enough?

And for the rightist, American history itself is the venerated object that is under attack from the forces of moral decadency, social idiocy, foreign influence, and anti-patriotism. And what better film to show kids than Capra's, which demonstrates so clearly that not just our strength but our true nature lies in those unassailable truths laid down by those great men so long ago? Those values are continually under attack by forces that would corrupt them, and the film shows how tightly we must cling to them, oh fellow freedom fighters, if we are to survive.

None of which is to say that the things dividing us are neither real nor meaningful; they are, in contrast, all too real and all too meaningful. But it is to say there is a terrible irony here, and it's the exact irony that makes civil wars so horrific. They are fought not by people who believe different things, but by people who believe the same things, and yet see no space for the other in that vision.

This is our culture. And a clear view of that culture becomes possible in part when you start to understand that old movies are not (or not all) dusty old relics that have somehow been made irrelevant by our glittering new baubles. They are often about us in exactly the same degree as are new movies, once you allow for the translation of a few decades.

Enjoy this piece? Please consider sharing it with anyone you know who's interested in culture, movies, or ideas. If you'd like to read more of my work, my book on William Klein's cult classic superhero film Mr. Freedom is now available from Liverpool University Press, and my novels The Committers and The Subterranean Man are available here.