Corn: Both Canned & Capra

A Personal Reflection Inspired by Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)

Still of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) via The Hollywood Reporter

We have been cursed to watch history be made every day in the last decade since that gaudy ass golden escalator slowly trundled the Wizard of Loss in the direction the world economy would tumble under his divine stupidity not once but twice in less than two seasons’ releases of Stranger Things. BUT for the first time in a long time, we bore witness to history being made that brought me to tears of unbridled hope and, dare I say, pride to be an American.

The esteemed gentleman Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey held the Senate floor in a marathon speech of officially 25 hours and 4 minutes this week, beating all previously held records for speech length in the Senate including the longest filibuster record held by segregationist coward Strom Thurmond. Senator Booker’s speech was easily the most powerful and beautiful American political moment I have ever witnessed in my lifetime.

Obviously, Booker’s courageous action meant I had to re-watch Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) in which Junior Senator Jefferson Smith (Jimmy Stewart) filibusters a Senate session for nearly 24 hours, standing against powerful oligarchic media figures who are trying to frame him as corrupt when he tries to bring their crimes to light. Mr. Smith is one of my favorite films full stop, and returning to it now in April 2025 was profoundly moving.

It was so moving, in fact, that I have decided we’re going to make April a month of Capra-corn, and I’ll tell you why: being an American in the fullest sense of the word is corny as hell, it’s embarrassing and cringey, and I never fully appreciated why until this week when Cory Booker, a man whom I disagree with on multiple issues, stood on the Senate floor and brought me to the most beautiful tears I’ve cried for my country in years. So, we’re going to start this two-part review with a personal reflection on patriotism and Frank Capra, and then in a few days, I’ll post my Formalist review of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington as the Review Roulette wheel dictates.

A Personal Aside on Patriotism

I was 7 on 9/11. A little second grader in southeast Pennsylvania who only vaguely understood there had been an attack because my teacher was crying as she tried to get her daughter on the phone at her office in Manhattan. I was then swept up in some of the most overwhelming displays of nationalism that if we witnessed them in the public schools of other countries, we would brand them with words like “authoritarian”, “thought police”, and “state propagandists”. I cried every time I heard the song “Proud to Be an American” like the good little patriot I was, that familiar lump in my throat proving the Pavlovian response was working as my heart raced beneath my hand. I was supporting the troops with every letter I wrote in my childish handwriting telling them that I heard it was hot wherever they were and that I hoped they could come home for Christmas. I didn’t really know where they were or what they were doing or why they were there but by God did I support it with every canned food drive I brought home a flier for, pushing out of mind the question of how my one can of corn helped us win a war I didn’t really know we were in.

It wasn’t until college that I realized I had been lied to about certain things in our collective past, like that the Americans weren’t the only ones at D-Day (and that there were 14,000 Canadian troops landing that day – that really blew my young star-spangled mind). I was a proper social conservative then, not aware enough to be politically conservative in any meaningful way, though I did register Republican at 18 because I was told I was a fan of John McCain (whom, for the record, I have since learned more about and decided I am in fact a fan of for reasons we will discuss below). As I learned I had been lied to, and as personal relationships forced me to confront whether I truly did hold the socially conservative ideas I professed, cracks began to form in my worldview, and I was largely just confused.

Then I moved abroad in 2016 two months before the election and a lot of things changed very rapidly for me. I talked to people from different countries about which I had very skewed perspectives from my regular diet of aggressively pro-American propaganda that I know now was built on lies and exaggerations. I learned that I had to unlearn a hell of a lot of things, and I became obsessed with rejecting my Americanness. I was revolted by my programming, pushed back against the responses that had become second nature like singing the Preamble or dissing the French. I rebelled against images of the Statue of Liberty presiding over a place that deigns to call any huddled masses yearning to breathe free “illegal”. That Pavlovian lump in my throat turned my stomach when I learned that that disingenuous man would also proudly stand up next to you to defend Canada, ‘cause there ain’t no doubt Lee Greenwood loves money.

I was disgusted that I had fallen prey to what I saw as one of the oldest tricks in the book: laziness of identity. I ate up that pride over something I had no hand in at all; the coincidental place of my birth shouldn’t dictate my worth in the world or the values I hold or the feelings I feel about any of it. How dare the American flag gaslight me into believing in anything let alone the opposite values I had seen displayed by so many of my fellow Americans and leaders?

Then I started studying American history for real for my PhD and things started sliding into place. I studied interpretations of American iconography on screen and Hollywood’s presentation of how to be an American. I studied Frank Capra and his populist cinema, and I wrote about the importance of symbolism and tradition in building national identity: familiar touchstones imbued with meaning we give, and how we can manipulate that meaning, twist the traditions, develop new definitions of what it means to be an American that will then have political reverberations once the Hollywood seed grows into a regional perspective.

And in all of it, I was forced to confront the Americanness I so rejected.

And this week, I realized that Frank Capra, a man I’ve thought more about than my husband, still has some lessons to teach me. So, for the next four reviews leading up to Capra’s birthday, we’re going to dive into films from nearly a century ago that are just as relevant now. And we’re going to talk about how Capra-corn being labelled as such was severely detrimental to our American way.

America is a victim of hubris, thinking we are too cool to have to talk about values, too stable to have to do anything more than vote every two or four years, too powerful to have to defend democracy in our own democratic institutions. It’s corny to hear the words of the Gettysburg Address as a call to action, it’s lame to be moved by Lazarus’s poem on Liberty Island, it’s traitorous to my own righteous leftist anger to find John McCain’s no-vote against repealing Obamacare to be as beautifully American as I do, but, man, I really do. Capra is corny and I now understand that he genuinely did embrace the Capra-corn term in the 70s when it was thrown on him derogatorily in the media. He knew it was pejorative, but he owned it with the energy of “yea, it is lame to love America for dorky historical reasons, but guess what? Mr. Smith is a god damn hero”, and I respect the hell out of it. It moves me.

And I am moved by Americans exercising their First Amendment right to protest. The Hands Off protests today and Tesla Takedown protests for weeks have brought that familiar lump to my throat not because it’s a Pavlovian response to a song played a million times in my youth, but because it is so moving to see people who have a vision of a better nation and who are actively trying to bring that vision to life. All of my earlier critiques of the US were valid, and the protests I went to and letters I wrote to representatives were all valid expressions of my citizenship. But, truth be told, I had no real vision beyond stopping the bad things I was seeing that didn’t align with the American values I had heard about. In other words, in rejecting my Americanness, I wasn’t helping my fellow Americans realize a better version of ourselves, I was only begging for the way we were to stop. Because I thought it was corny to admit that I too believe in the promises of a future in which Americans are better to one another, but my refusal to embrace that corniness meant that that future would always remain a distant promise and not a realized present. Mr. Smith doesn’t mind being called corny, and Mr. Smith certainly doesn’t mind fighting to exhaustion to bring about the American promise today.

I have been reflecting on American patriotism in different iterations of myself and my work for a while now, and for a long time I honestly did not know I had to participate. I thought “patriotic” was something you were, not something you did. I thought Pavlovian throat lumps meant job done, patriotism checked off the list, nailed it, I sent a can of corn to the troops, wherever they were. I didn’t know I had to think about it. I didn’t know that being an American was an action, not a default identity box checked and forgotten. Even at protests where I held the bullhorn leading chants in the streets of Dublin, I didn’t know that I had more ideological work to do within myself to understand that love is much more powerful and helpful than hate, and that, ultimately, patriotism is a uniquely intimate form of love.

As we know, these things evolve interminably, so my current stance on what American patriotism is is that you are not patriotic unless you are able to criticize the US out of a place of love; to recognize that the “promises” of America are not inevitable, merely possible. So many have said it far better than I ever could:

Langston Hughes, Let America Be America Again, 1935:

America!
O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Merle Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty, 1946: Whether America will provide an even larger freedom at home, an even stronger hope for the world, depends upon what citizens make of our country – depends not only upon the strength of our devotion to it, but also upon the character of that devotion. In a democracy blind, unthinking love of country must presumably give way more and more to intelligent and understanding patriotism, if that democracy as such is to survive. That being so, an examination of the sources and nature of American patriotism may be more than an academic exercise; and he who reads it thoughtfully may be helped toward more enlightened citizenship.

James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955: I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

We have some lofty goals, dreams, and values in this country and we have never once lived up to all of them and, this is crucial, we likely never will. It is at least impossible to live up to all of them all of the time in this lifetime. We have done too many horrendous things, refused to atone for them, and continue to perpetrate crime after crime against people just trying to live their lives. It is impossible that in one lifetime we would fully and completely live up to every value we proclaim. That’s not to say the US shouldn’t strive to whenever and wherever possible; it’s not a scapegoat to say it’s not possible so we shouldn’t try. It’s a necessary reality to know – that we will not live up to all of our ideals at once – so that we may individually take up causes that are most meaningful to us and make the case for why those ideals should be upheld.

Capra knows this, and so, as you will see over the next few weeks, the actions we see are not complete overhauls of the system or sweeping changes across the country. Instead, Capra presents small actions that accumulate over a lifetime that create ripples of potential change. Mr. Smith is appointed to the Senate to fill a vacant seat mid-term because the Governor of the state is swayed by his children who vouch for his character as the leader of the Boy Rangers. His reputation precedes him, both figuratively and literally as we are not introduced to Mr. Smith for a significant portion of the beginning of his film, the ideal, humble Capra hero. Active patriotism the American way then, for Capra, is about individuals who live their lives with outstanding character in systems that don’t often reward it and who dedicate themselves to the betterment of all Americans so that one day we can live in a country that not only resembles our visions of it but fully embodies our values too. Individuals who send canned corn to the troops because they might be hungry one evening, not because it will win the war.

It's a terrible, rude truth, but the coincidence of the place of my birth is not actually a coincidence at all and is, in fact, a lifelong burdensome duty handed down to me by my ancestors who too believed in the promises of America: a duty to fight for values I have decided for myself are worth fighting for in a land of 300 million other people who are burdened to do the same for themselves. We will never agree 100% on what those values and ideals and morals mean or how to fight for them; we will never agree on exactly what it means to be “American”, or “un-American”, for that matter; we will never agree on precisely how a government of the people, by the people, and for the people should function, but all 300 million of those people and I carry the original sin of American idealism and are cursed to confront it every day in this democracy, if we can keep it.

Capra himself couldn’t have ended this on a cornier reference.

Misters Smith and Booker

So, Senator Booker gave a marathon speech, I had a cry, and Mr. Smith collapsed on the Senate floor …

[to be continued]