Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American

by Matthews, Chris

  . . . I have a high regard for Mr. Capra . . . but his fine work makes the indictment of our government all the more damning to foreign audiences. . . . I feel that to show this film in foreign countries will do inestimable harm to American prestige all over the world. I regret exceedingly that I find it necessary to say these things. . . . The fact remains, however, that pictures from the United States are the greatest influence on foreign public opinion of the American mode of life. The times are precarious, the future is dark at best. We must be more careful.

  Sincerely yours,

  Joseph P. Kennedy

  The good news is that moviegoers, starting with the critics, loved Mr. Smith as much as the Washington crowd had hated it.

  “The bewildered young Senator Smith symbolizes those figures who arise occasionally to challenge the dragons,” said The Kansas City Journal. “Those they would dethrone brand them as radicals and eccentrics and seek to discredit their motives.” Variety called it “the most vital and stirring drama of contemporary American life yet told on film.” Hedda Hopper called it as great as the Gettysburg Address.

  “The high privilege of being an American citizen finds its best and most effective expression in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” said the Cincinnati Post. The Los Angeles Times outdid them all: “It says all the things about America that have been crying out to be said again—and says them beautifully.”

  The reason for the movie’s popularity—then and today—is that it strikes something in the American heart. Just as we take pride in our self-made roots and being a place where someone can become who or what they want, we have an equally grand notion of ourselves as constant rebels. Who wouldn’t want to be that person with the guts to stand alone against the corruption and cynicism of the powers-that-be? Who wouldn’t be thrilled to be Jeff Smith standing up for all that’s good in democracy against those who would undermine it for the special interests?

  What gives Capra’s film its hold on the American people is the truth it screams. Corruption is able to take hold because of its appeal to human greed and easy ambition—always abundant resources in Washington, D.C. It offers not only enticements but also rationalizations. Political bosses like the one in Mr. Smith figure that every ambitious young politician has a price. It’s simply a question of figuring out what that price is.

  “Anything that’s important to the state is mighty important to me,” Boss Taylor declares as he tries seducing the young senator. “Now if I felt that you had the welfare of the state at heart like I do, I’d say you were a man to watch. Now what would you like? Business? If you like business, you can pick any job in the state and go right to the top. Or politics? If you like being a senator, there’s no reason why you can’t come back to that Senate and stay there as long as you want.”

  Young Jeff Smith gets the kinder, greater case for corruption from the man he most respects. Listen, as his hero Senator Joe Paine coaches him on the long-ago deal he himself once had to cut:

  It’s a brutal world, Jeff, and you’ve no place in it. You’ll only get hurt. Now take my advice. Forget Taylor and what he said. Forget you ever heard of the Willet Creek Dam. I know it’s tough to run head-on into facts but, well as I said, this is a man’s world, Jeff, and you’ve got to check your ideals outside the door, like you do your rubbers. Thirty years ago, I had your ideals. I was you. I had to make the same decision you were asked to make today. And I made it. I compromised—yes! So that all those years I could sit in that Senate and serve the people in a thousand honest ways.

  You’ve got to face facts, Jeff. I’ve served our state well, haven’t I? We have the lowest unemployment and the highest federal grants. But, well, I’ve had to compromise. I’ve had to play ball. You can’t count on people voting. Half the time they don’t vote anyway. That’s how states and empires have been built since time began. Don’t you understand? Well, Jeff, you can take my word for it. That’s how things are. Now I’ve told you all this because, well, I’ve grown very fond of you. About like a son, in fact. And I don’t want to see you get hurt.

  This is vintage political seduction: there’s a bank of enticements placed before the newcomer. There’s the stick as well as the carrot. Play the game and you get ahead; go your own way and you get hurt. Then comes the kicker: your friends are in on the deal; if you blow it you’ll hurt them. Besides, the only way to get things done, good things, is to go along with the sleazy stuff.

  Remote from the corridors of political power, unlikely to ever walk in his shoes, audiences grasped instantly what Jeff Smith was up against. They recognized the guts it would take for an ordinary man to stand up to an entrenched system, especially on the floor of the United States Senate surrounded by a cynical room of political insiders, watched over by an equally cynical gaggle up in the press gallery.

  All Jeff Smith has going for him is the principles he brought with him from the outside world—in other words, from the country itself.

  “You think I’m licked. You all think I’m licked,” the exhausted young idealist says as Senator Paine confronts him with cartloads of phony, politically generated letters denouncing him. “Well, I’m not licked, and I’m gonna stay right here and fight this lost cause even if this room gets filled with lies, and the Taylors and all their armies come marching into this place. Somebody’ll listen to me.”

  Those words speak with the enduring voice and soul of America standing up for what it believes in the face of those who would corrupt it. It is the voice, not just of Jefferson Smith but also of young Tom Jefferson and the other passionate men who created this country.

  The notion of the constant rebel, like that of being self-made, was born with the country itself. In January 1776, a young English immigrant, Thomas Paine, wrote a pamphlet titled Common Sense. It sold 500,000 copies in a country that had barely two million people.

  It made a basic argument: America was a revolutionary-minded country, and its independence was inevitable. It was time to stop the endless effort to accommodate the British and do what had to be done, which was to declare America a separate country.

  Six months later, the Continental Congress did just that.

  “Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil . . . in its worst state an intolerable one,” Paine famously proclaimed in Common Sense. And the revolutionary spirit of the country did not die after the Revolution had ended. Tom Paine repeated his sentiments in 1791 with The Rights of Man. “Man did not enter into society to become worse than he was before, not to have fewer rights than he had before but to have those rights better secured.”

  That same year, Thomas Jefferson won approval of the Bill of Rights. These rights included, but were specifically not limited to—freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly; the right to bear arms; the right not to have troops quartered in your house; the right not to be searched without a warrant; the right not to have to testify against yourself; the right to a speedy trial and to be tried by a jury; the right not to be cruelly or unusually punished.

  There also were included rightful prohibitions on what government could do to the individual citizen. They were constitutional guarantees, not to governmental benefits but to freedom from governmental power. They were attempts to stymie the emergence of a new political elite that might seize the privileged positions of power so recently held by the British.

  The Bill of Rights was the enduring testament to the fact that, in this newly created nation, government power would be suspected and resisted. That goes for any force that would try to subdue the rights and freedoms of the individual American.

  Here the bottom line is rock solid: we favor the individual person against the government.

  For better or worse, this is the vintage American view of government. It may be necessary to have a government, but we don’t trust it.

  We don’t want to trust it. We want those in power to worry about us.

  In a letter he wrote to James Madison in 1787, Thomas Jefferson said, “Unsuccessful rebellion
s, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of the government.”

  Andrew Jackson

  Though he was the seventh president, Andrew Jackson was the first to take up the cause of the little man against the interests of entrenched political and economic power. The majority of Americans of that era saw Jackson, elected president in 1828, as their champion. He was a rough man of the frontier, armed with the grit to fight both Indians and the Eastern banks with equal gusto. To those living in Tennessee, in what was then considered the American West, he was a hero.

  Born in 1767, he started his public life as a messenger in the Revolutionary War. After studying law, he moved to Nashville, then still part of North Carolina. He built a successful law practice, became a land speculator, and, at twenty-nine, became the first congressman from the new state of Tennessee.

  After later service as a U.S. senator, he was named commander of the state militia. He won the nickname “Old Hickory” during the War of 1812 for ensuring that his entire army of 2,500 men returned home safely from an aborted 1813 mission to New Orleans—thereby disobeying an order to disband the unit in Mississippi.

  Jackson added to his reputation in 1815 by returning to New Orleans and this time successfully engaging the British forces. In this, the last action of the War of 1812, he lured the British into attacking his position. They did so at the cost of 2,000 casualties. The American losses were six dead, ten wounded.

  Reelected as a U.S. senator from Tennessee in 1823, Jackson ran unsuccessfully for president in 1824. He ran again four years later, this time successfully defeating John Quincy Adams. Once in office, Jackson’s biggest target would be the Second Bank of the United States, which he viewed as elitist and undemocratic. After vetoing the Bank Bill in 1832, he ordered his Secretary of the Treasury to withdraw all government money from the institution. When the Cabinet member refused, Jackson fired him.

  “The Bank War,” writes the historian Arthur Schlesinger, “triumphantly established Jackson in the confidence of the people. Their faith in him had survived ordeals and won vindication: thereafter, when faced by a choice between Jackson and a cherished policy, the voters would choose Jackson.”

  Jackson was a true democratic hero. As a man of the people, elected to challenge the corrupt marriage of money and politics, he set the standard. “Jackson was widely acclaimed as the symbol of what the new American thought himself to be—a self-made man, son of the frontier, endowed with virtue and God-given strength because of his closeness to nature, and possessed of indomitable will and moral courage,” according to Joseph J. Tregle, Jr., a Jackson scholar at Louisiana State University.

  Populism

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the frontier resentment toward the East that had driven Jackson’s career gave rise to the American populist movement. The platform of the People’s Party called for a progressive income tax and the direct election of U.S. senators—both of which became law within a generation—restrictions on land speculation, and government ownership of railroads and telegraph companies.

  The Populists elected a number of candidates to Congress in 1894. Two years later, the Democratic nominee for president, William Jennings Bryan, had taken for his own many of the Populist causes. Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, delivered at the Democratic National Convention, endures as an eloquent example of American populist principles. Invoking Old Hickory himself, Bryan berated the wealthy elite and lionized laborers and farmers. “What we need is an Andrew Jackson to stand, as Jackson stood, against the encroachments of organized wealth.”

  “Upon which side will the Democratic party fight?” Bryan challenged the convention delegates:

  Upon the side of “the idle holders of idle capital” or upon the side of “the struggling masses?” You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country. Our ancestors, when but three millions in number had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation; shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy millions, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers?

  If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

  While never gaining majority support, the Populist agenda met the Jeffersonian prescription of “a little rebellion now and then.” Its criticism of the pro-business Republican establishment in the late nineteenth century would become the “medicine” of reform in the early twentieth.

  In 1928, Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana. He became a U.S. senator in 1930. He was a hero to the “little man,” a critic of banks and big corporate interests. He called himself “The Kingfish” after a character on the popular “Amos and Andy” radio show. “I’m a small fish here in Washington,” he said, “but I’m the Kingfish to the folks down in Louisiana.”

  The Kingfish pushed a national economic program called “Share the Wealth.” It was remarkably simple: every family would be guaranteed $5,000; everyone over age sixty would get an old-age pension; every fortune would be limited to $50 million, inheritances to $5 million, and annual incomes to $1 million.

  In order to promote his program, Long relied on grass-roots “Share the Wealth” clubs. The organizations sported the slogan, “Every Man a King, But No One Wears a Crown,” a phrase Long borrowed from one of William Jennings Bryan’s speeches. A political showman, Long angered his Senate colleagues with his frequent use of the filibuster. But the Senate floor gave Long a platform to push his “Share the Wealth” scheme and to rail against the rich.

  Long was famous for his down-home brand of oratory. “How many men ever went to a barbecue and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for 9/10ths of the people to eat?” he asked. “The only way to be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub that he ain’t got no business with!”

  Dismissing Long as a demagogue is too easy. He won the hick vote by pretending to be one of them. He knew how to tap a legitimate vein of deep American resentment. We suspect political and economic power even in good times. When the jobless rate starts to climb, as it did so frighteningly in the thirties, that suspicion, now turned to rage, shows up at the ballot box.

  But for most Americans the goal is not to take from the rich and give to the poor. It’s to stop the elite from cheating the average citizen of what is rightly his. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls this our fear of “rot at the top.” It is “about the malevolence of powerful elites, be they wealthy aristocrats, rapacious business leaders, or imperious government officials.”

  Such fist-shaking at “Washington” and “Wall Street” is as American as dumping that tea in Boston Harbor.

  “The struggle is only occasionally and incidentally a matter of money or class. There are no workers pitted against capitalists at the heart of this American story,” Reich writes. “It is, rather, a tale of corruption, decadence, and irresponsibility among the powerful, of conspiracy against the broader public.” As the headlines of 2002 prove, such corruption is still alive in the boardrooms of our largest corporations. Insider trading and dishonest accounting fatten the wallets of CEOs and hurt the little guy, the honest inves
tor.

  Resentment toward the powerful runs back, as we have seen, to the days of the Revolution. Abuse of power by the English monarchy prompted our Founding Fathers to adopt a government of checks and balances, grounded in the Enlightenment principle of government through consent. American history has also been characterized by efforts to limit big business, through antitrust laws and labor unions, and to decentralize government, through civil service and electoral reforms.

  Despite the anti-“Washington” rhetoric that seems these days to fire every successful presidential campaign, Americans are not blindly against government. Not by any means. We like Social Security because we contribute to it as individuals—we earn our right to those checks after retirement. It’s a program custom-made for the American temperament: it doesn’t come from the government, it comes from our work and our lifetime of paychecks. It’s not welfare because it only goes to people who work and contribute to it.

  Government is also good when it comes to our aid in times of crisis. It is not good when it interferes in our daily, often ornery, joy of being Americans.

  In a nearly religious way, Americans subscribe to the belief expressed by England’s Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  We are rebels by nature. That word “freedom” is not just in our founding documents; it’s in our souls.

  We are the most freedom-loving people in the world. We’d rather have guns than live under a government powerful enough to collect them all. We regularly say no to a national health system fearing it means a regime of long lines for strange doctors. Even people with grave concerns about abortion would rather see women individually decide the matter than live under a government repressive enough to deny them the freedom to decide.