Season's Greetings: Frank Capra was a what?

Happy Holidays everyone. If you are like me you probably spent at least a little time watching holiday movies this past week. After rushing around trying to travel, buy gifts, wrap them, exchange them, eat too much, and so on we all need a break right? So what would be more natural than watching little Ralphie pursue his Christmas dream of a Red Rider BB gun, or Scott Calvin transition into being Santa Claus, or the Peanuts gang, the Grinch, and Rudolph to try and unwind a little? Or the timeless Frank Capra classic It's A Wonderful Life. Then, if you are a certain gloomy sea monster you might follow some Facebook comment sections about something or other and come across a conservative troll making one of the most counter-intuitive claims you've ever heard; that Frank Capra was a conservative Republican who hated FDR and the usual litany of supposed conservative bugaboos.

I wish I had book-marked or screen-shotted the thread because it was a fascinating demonstration of reality control. I mean the right-wing fantasy about the New Deal actually worsening the Great Depression is a fairly well known talking point. The co-opting and re-imagining of American leaders as actually encompassing contemporary right-wing values is fairly commonplace. While portraying great Hollywood actors and directors as actually rebels against the liberal and even communist film industry is also not unknown, the attempt by movement conservatives to claim Frank Capra as one of their own was not one of those. I became intrigued and started researching this idea. On its face, the idea that 'Capraesque' could be inverted in the same way that National Socialism became socialism or Liberalism remade into Liberal Fascism was rather preposterous. People knew that Capra's films were about the little guy standing up to the greed of powerful and uncaring men in a way that is instinctively understandable where the finer tenets of Nazism or Fascism is not.

Normally, when I come across a misattributed or fictional quotation mauled into supporting gun fanaticism or free market fundamentalism I can simply go to google and start to piece together where it came from. If you come across a meme claiming that George Washington or James Madison was all for a heavily-armed and totally unregulated paranoid populace ready and willing to overthrow the government they created, then chances are you can find a few hundred cut and paste jobs repeating the lie ad nauseum with a quick google search. The informal, shadowy Ministry of Truth out there in cyberspace that is constantly trying to rewrite history to conform with the GOP party line is rarely so subtle that it cannot be spotted with a little diligence. However, the Capra as conservative Republican may be a new attempt. Or this could be a failed attempt merely making a zombified appearance for the many viewings of It's A Wonderful Life during the holiday season. After all, I only read of the one troll on one comment thread making the assertion, perhaps it was simply a weak attempt to derail the conversation. Though he was pretty adamant about the veracity of his claim and felt that it proved that only his side (you know, the ones always talking about "second amendment solutions" and that poor people scamming bankers to get houses they could not afford because government political correctness forced banks to securitize mortgages and crash the economy, then wailing like banshees about bailing out the losers) could be compassionate. If this goofball meme gets legs they will be calling Mr. Potter a liberal next.

I started by looking up Capra on Wikipedia. Now, there is a reason why the internet encyclopedia is not a suitable source for schoolwork, anyone can go on it and edit entries. Most of the time this is a good thing, the idea of many minds contributing to the commonwealth of knowledge is a very democratic concept. However, when a group of committed activists sets their sights on hijacking the discourse by editing a Wikipedia entry with misinformation or outright lies it can do real damage. Therefore Wikipedia is a good place to start research, to acquire some background information and especially to follow the citations and bibliography on a subject, but not reliable for serious citation. I remember once looking up the artist formerly known as Prince when he performed during the halftime show of the Superbowl one year and marveling at the dogged determination of racists to edit and re-edit the entry in real time. Anytime there are ideologues whose agenda is more important than facts in a controversy you can bet that they will try to be the Ministry of Truth and mess with things.

This is what I found under "political beliefs" for Frank Capra's Wikipedia page:

Capra’s political beliefs coalesced in his films, which promoted and celebrated the spirit of American individualism. A conservative Republican, Capra railed against Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his tenure as governor of New York State, and opposed his presidency during the years of the Depression. Capra stood against government intervention during the national economic crisis.^[58]

The footnote reads "Wilson 2013, p. 266." This is the only citation for that book, that you then have to scroll down through the bibliography section to find that it refers to: 

• Wilson, Victoria. A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013, ISBN 978-0-6848-3168-8.

I have so far been unable to read the actual page asserting that Capra, a lifelong resident of California after emigrating from Italy, was concerned with the governor of New York or what followed for the nation. Opposing government intervention seems out of character for a man who, as the Wikipedia entry also states,

Within four days after the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Capra quit his successful directing career in Hollywood and received a commission as a major in the United States Army. He also gave up his presidency of the Screen Directors Guild. Being 44 years of age, he was not asked to enlist, but, notes Friedman, "Capra had an intense desire to prove his patriotism to his adopted land.

The director of a series of government morale-boosting films called "Why We Fight" who volunteered for the military seems a poor candidate for hating government. Nevertheless, I kept digging. Though it seems unlikely that a biography of an actress who appeared in some of Capra's films would be strong enough source material to justify the unqualified statement that he was a conservative Republican. Especially when it is only cited once, and only for one page. It is possible that Capra may have said something about a New Deal program or a policy of Roosevelt's administration while governor of New York, but one utterance does not endorse that kind of certainty. This kind of thing seems like an important bombshell revelation, considering the continued relevance of It's A Wonderful Life and other populist films. The charge of political identity never made it into any reviews of Wilson's book that I looked at. This seems to be a pretty thin reed, even if Capra's politics were not manufactured from whole cloth by some overzealous partisan and inserted into Wikipedia in an act of ideological espionage.

Next I found a conference on Capra held by AHA through the Journal for MultiMedia History featuring three eminent historians who presented on Frank Capra's populism. Very interesting, but no official judgement that the director was indeed a populist of the knuckle-dragging Donald Trump type. Though professional historians are not usually going to fix a label like that to a subject. This series of talks from Robert Brent Toplin, Lawrence Levine, and Dan T. Carter is much more interested in the nuance of Capra's values and how that relates to the American experience than dropping him wholesale into an ideological slot as the anonymous editor of Wikipedia did. Moving on I became a little frustrated, the original troll presented the idea that Capra was just as angry and deluded as a typical tea partier as though it was plain as day. Clearly Frank Capra's ideology and political affiliation was more nuanced and less apparent than checking off some box.

Keeping in mind that this is just an cursory examination of online sources, not an exhaustive academic research project. It sounds like this subject will take a lot more work but I will end with one book that asserts Capra's secret identity is as "...the man who seemed to put the spirit of the New Deal on the screen was, in reality, a closet reactionary and a dogged Roosevelt hater."

This is "Joseph McBride's masterly, comprehensive and frequently surprising biography, 'Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,'" as reviewer Barry Gewen put it in the New York Times. The tone of this review just drips of conspiracy theories, Capra's whole life was a lie and he was actually ashamed of everything he did in public. And never told anyone. It was up to this author to discern and distill Capra's big secret. Now, it seems Joseph McBride is a rather accomplished scholar and a fellow Wisconsinite but the first paragraph of his own biography on his own website states:

McBride was a volunteer worker in Kennedy’s 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign and spent thirty-one years researching and writing [Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (2013)], which is structured as a memoir of his personal journey in understanding the case.

I'm not going to judge McBride based on this statement but it does indicate that he is no stranger to conspiracy theories. How influential being steeped in JFK lore for over thirty years is on an unrelated subject cannot be stated with any certainty. It would, however, explain how McBride came to the conclusion that Capra was a closet reactionary when no one else, as far as I can tell, has agreed with this assertion. Instead of a million cut and paste dittos from right-wing blogs and forums, there is this lonely book out there from over twenty years ago

This project will require more investigation but it can be said that Frank Capra as conservative Republican is not a self-evident assertion that Internet trolls can lob around with confidence. The GOP has not yet been able to co-opt Capra or his films to their sick fantasy. Nor can they toss it out there to support some other talking point of the day the way trolls like to dismiss Democratic support for minority issues because once upon a time southern conservative Democratic senators voted against the Civil Rights Act. And trolls like the one who prompted my investigation will not be able to invoke Capra's name in support of bank deregulation or the supposed war on Christmas. At least, not this year.

Trump; Why Worry?

The left of center blogosphere still seems to lack consensus on the oft-bankrupt scion of undeserved wealth and failed businessman Donald Trump's ideology. Is he a fascist, is he merely an opportunistic right wing demagogue? Or maybe a carnival barker, basking in the adoring glow of rabid and delusional ghouls to further sell his "brand"? There is even an hypothesis that Trump is actually a plant by the Clintons to finally push the whole frothing mass of extremists over the cliff and win the presidency for Hillary.

There are two problems with any of these theories. First is that the extremist right wing never goes away, the paranoid style can be pushed back to the fringe for a while but never locked away in a padded room as it should be. Trump's supporters have waited for a man on horseback to appear for a long time now and they will not be satisfied by a run of the mill corporate "conservative" again for a long time. The bar for crazy will have to be raised each cycle until the inevitable day one finally wins. 

Which brings us to the second point. Since Watergate, Democrats only win the presidency after a Republican wrecks things so badly that no amount of money or propaganda can keep a Republican in office. A Democrat has not succeeded another Democrat since LBJ's landslide over Goldwater in 1964. Ideologically, Reagan broke the New Deal consensus and replaced it with sunny, optimistic extremism that embraced naked class warfare on working people, hammered a wedge between government and the populace, and continued Nixon's "Southern Strategy." Since then the metaphorical 50 yard line of American politics shifted far to the right. The Democratic Party became the conservatives and the Republicans became reactionaries.

If our traditions as we think of them today grew out of the changes in American society that were in turn a response to the Great Depression and World War II, then the defenders of those New Deal changes are the actual conservatives in American politics. And the Democratic Party's platform, such as it is, is dedicated to preserving that legacy. Including but not limited to; a minimum wage, progressive taxation of wealth and income, the right of workers to organize and collectively bargain, social insurance, and so on. It was a system that worked fairly well at home and abroad, not perfectly of course, no human system is ever perfect. But it was something to build upon.

Instead, since the 1980 election, the Republican Party has been dedicated to dismantling the system piece by piece, and return the nation to the 1920s. A time that bears more than a superficial resemblance to today. Immigration was very high, interrupted by the Great War of course, and suspicion of immigrants was equally high. From worries about assimilation, to huge numbers and high birth rates squeezing out political power and privilege from the native-born Americans, to theft of jobs and driving down wages, to outright danger from disease and crime. The Great War also brought a new fear, that of mixed loyalties and whether immigrants would attack or sabotage the United States on behalf of their home countries.

The U.S. also participated in wrecking a country through armed force and demonizing its people to the point of renaming sauerkraut "liberty cabbage." Historical comparisons are always difficult, but the extremists that crawled out of the collapse of authoritarian regimes in Germany and the Middle East also bore a mutated resemblance to darker aspects of society. No, ISIS or Daesh or whatever it is called is not like the Nazis but the fear it generates in the paranoid parts of American society is real and clouds rational judgment. The simple fact that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a foreign-born terrorist cannot seem to penetrate the irrational, paranoid mindset of those people supporting Trump. It could happen, therefore the only answer to keep America safe is to bomb and invade any area that could possibly, theoretically, threaten Americans.

It does not matter that this approach has been tried, repeatedly, throughout American history beginning with Bacon's Rebellion to drive out the Native Americans, to Andrew Jackson's war to occupy Florida, right on through to Bush's Iraq occupation. Expansion means security and vice versa, the only acceptable defense against any possible threat is to attack immediately. The paranoid style will accept nothing less, and the demagogues jockeying for the GOP nomination will always deliver.

The emergence of Trump as the completely uninhibited Id of the paranoid style is already a disaster for America. What does it matter if he checks off enough boxes on some arbitrary chart for fascism? Putting aside the fact that fascism is chameleonic and will adapt itself to the society it infects, what Trump is selling and what the Republican base is demanding is the abandonment of all American principles for the right leaders. The rule of law, checks and balances, division of power, and the fear or at least suspicion of concentrated power are all destined for the dustbin of history. The very idea of a republic where leaders are not above the law, where disputes are settled through elections and debate instead of violence. All of these and more are what the extremists enabling Trump are in reality demanding. But only for "one of them," obviously President Obama is an illegitimate usurper and so shall be evermore any non-fascist occupying a government office at any level.

These are not the attitudes of a "loyal opposition" or any political force in a republic, and why, whether, fascist or authoritarian or some other non-democratic ideology, it must be stopped. Trump, and any and all political figures after him, cannot continue down this path. His irresponsible rhetoric only drives and empowers the undemocratic and un-American segments of the population who operate only on fear and hate. This is why we should be worried.