It's Still a Wonderful Life

Something clicked.

When “Meet John Doe” ran on cable during this year’s Wall Street meltdown, it no longer felt like a quaint, period piece. Frank Capra’s populist films about little guys standing up to media magnates, corrupt politicians and greedy capitalists struck a nerve with audiences fighting their way out of the Depression. They have new relevance in the age of Goldman Sachs, Bernard Madoff and the unitary executive.

Capra always seemed a sentimental relic of a simpler time. But watching Wall Street collapse of its own folly, half a million jobs lost in November, and a White House positioning to escape accountability for wrongdoing, Capra’s popularity with Depression-era audiences finally hit home.

Alongside the virtues of Everyman, Capra put on display the predatory side of capitalism: Edward Arnold played a newspaper tycoon plotting to lead a fascist political movement, and the wealthy puppet master behind a legendary senator; Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore), the richest man in Bedford Falls, played Monopoly with real houses and real lives.

The New York Times made a similar connection last week [1]:

For Wall Street, much of this decade represented a new Gilded Age. Salaries were merely play money — a pittance compared to bonuses. Bonus season became an annual celebration of the riches to be had in the markets. That was especially so in the New York area, where nearly $1 out of every $4 that companies paid employees last year went to someone in the financial industry. Bankers celebrated with five-figure dinners, vied to outspend each other at charity auctions and spent their newfound fortunes on new homes, cars and art.

As in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s day, the lure of easy money blinded America to the shell game behind those fast fortunes. Last week Paul Krugman observed [2]:

Think of the way almost everyone important missed the warning signs of an impending crisis. How was that possible? How, for example, could Alan Greenspan have declared, just a few years ago, that “the financial system as a whole has become more resilient” — thanks to derivatives, no less? The answer, I believe, is that there’s an innate tendency on the part of even the elite to idolize men who are making a lot of money, and assume that they know what they’re doing.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it,” Upton Sinclair said [3]. Did Bernard Madoff understand? Or like so many others, was he too bedazzled by the money to bother?

In a few Capra films, the Madoffs (Lays, Kozlowskis, Ebbers, etc.) come to recognize their venality, as arms manufacturer Anthony P. Kirby does in “You Can’t Take It with You.” Perhaps more widespread than before, that venality afflicts the country still. In the debate over aid to the Big 3 automakers, opponents argued vigorously – even angrily [4] – that government assistance that might save millions of jobs would violate free market principles.

It is characteristic of Gilded Ages that economic principles override all others.

Kevin Drum reacted [5] to such attitudes after a 2007 Los Angeles Times op-ed suggested health care benefits for local cafeteria workers would come at the expense of food for school children:

I would happily pay for universal healthcare just so I never had to read an op-ed like this again. It's not that Williamson doesn't have a point, it's just that this beggar-thy-neighbor attitude is enough to make me retch, and I see it all the time. I don't get dental coverage, so why should grocery workers? My copay went up last year, so why shouldn't everyone else's? I don't pay for healthcare for my housecleaners, so why should I pay it for school cafeteria workers? Our wretched private healthcare system has turned us into a nation of spiteful and small-minded misanthropes.

Or the seasonally appropriate, Scrooges. Small-mindedness is what Capra’s films were always a tonic for. The holidays are a time we celebrate the possibility of redemption from it, when the little guys can hope for better tomorrows.

This year’s election was right out of Frank Capra. An army of Obama volunteers fanned out like Boy Rangers, knocking on doors, making calls and registering voters. At 11 p.m. EST on Election Night, when networks called the race for Obama, little guys all around the world began cheering and chanting, “Yes, we did!”

Capra himself couldn’t have done it better.