Part V of Corn: Helping the Whole Circle
A Textual Approach to American Madness (1932)
American Madness (1932) – Textual
Happy May, my Capracorn cherubs! The sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and the protests are working. What a wonderful world, indeed.
To match our moment and finish up our Caprathon-A-Palooza, this week I watched an earlier, lesser remembered Capra film, American Madness (1932). If you’re familiar with his It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – and if you’re a loyal reader of mine, I would severely hope that you are – American Madness is like a longer stay with the glimpse into the Great Depression in It’s a Wonderful Life. The Review Roulette wheel landed on Textual as our analytical approach, so I thought we could do a little comparative reading between those two films largely between the texts of two speeches given by the populist heroes in each.
American Madness roughly encapsulates a 24-hour period in a bank during the Great Depression. The bank manager, Thomas Dickson (Walter Huston), is our central populist hero and very much embodies the characteristics that would later appear in Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey of It’s a Wonderful Life. Dickson runs his bank on a series of principles and personal judgement, choosing to have faith in his borrowers and depositors once he personally vouches for their character – again, traits he shares with George. Over this 24-hour period, Dickson’s faith in humanity and in himself is restored, his convictions validated, once he and key members of his banking team successfully maneuver a run on the bank that is caused by malicious misinformed rumors.
We’ll deal with the rumors at the end, but I first want to look at the two speeches given by Dickson and George to the bank board members in their respective films centered on specific borrowers they entrusted with the bank’s funds. For Dickson, he exemplifies his economic philosophy with a businessman named Jones, and for George, it’s a taxi driver named Ernie Bishop.
Excerpt from American Madness (1932)
DICKSON
The trouble with this country today is there's too much hoarded cash. Idle money is no good to industry. Where is all the money today? In the banks, vaults, socks, old tin cans, buried in the ground! I tell you, we've got to get the money in circulation before you'll get this country back to prosperity.
CLARK
Who are we going to give it to? Men like Jones? Last week you made him an extra loan of fifty thousand dollars. Do you call that intelligent banking?
SCHULTZ
He can't pay his bills. How do you expect him to pay us?
DICKSON
That's a fair question, Schultz. Now let's see how bad a risk Jones is. What's his history? He's been a successful businessman for thirty-five years. Two years ago, business started falling off. Today Jones needs money, and if he doesn't get it, he goes into bankruptcy and throws nine hundred men out of work. Answer - unemployment. It also means his creditors aren't paid. They're in trouble. They go to banks and are turned down . . . more bankruptcies . . . It's a vicious circle, my friends, and the only place to cure it is right here at the source. Help Jones and you help the whole circle. Now, when Jones comes to me, I ask myself two questions. First - is he honest? Yes. Second - is he as good a businessman as he was before? And the answer is - he's better. He is not only older and wiser, but his present trouble has taught him precaution. In my estimation, gentlemen, Jones is no risk. Neither are the thousands of other Joneses throughout the country.
…
It's they who built this nation up to the richest in the world, and it's up to the banks to give them a break. Disraeli said security is the prosperity of the nation.
AMES
(cutting him off) Why, Disraeli didn't say anything of the kind.
DICKSON
Well, he should have said it. It's as true now as it was then. And let us get the right kind of security. Not stocks and bonds that zig-zag up and down, not collateral on paper, but character!
CLARK
(indignantly) Character, hmmpf! That's your idea?
DICKSON
Not at all. That's Alexander Hamilton's idea - the finest banking mind this country has ever known. Those are his exact words, gentlemen. Character! It's the only thing you can bank on, and it's the only thing that will pull this country out of the doldrums.
Excerpt from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
POTTER
Peter Bailey was not a businessman. That's what killed him. Oh, I don't mean any disrespect to him, God rest his soul. He was a man of high ideals, so-called, but ideals without common sense can ruin this town.
(picking up papers from table) Now, you take this loan here to Ernie Bishop... You know, that fellow that sits around all day on his brains in his taxi. You know... I happen to know the bank turned down this loan, but he comes here and we're building him a house worth five thousand dollars. Why?
George is at the door of the office, holding his coat and papers, ready to leave.
GEORGE
Well, I handled that, Mr. Potter. You have all the papers there. His salary, insurance. I can personally vouch for his character.
POTTER
(sarcastically) A friend of yours?
GEORGE
Yes, sir.
POTTER
You see, if you shoot pool with some employee here, you can come and borrow money. What does that get us? A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Peter Bailey stir them up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas. Now, I say...
George puts down his coat and comes around to the table, incensed by what Potter is saying about his father.
GEORGE
Just a minute, just a minute. Now, hold on, Mr. Potter. You're right when you say my father was no businessman. I know that. Why he ever started this cheap, penny-ante Building and Loan, I'll never know. But neither you nor anybody else can say anything against his character, because his whole life was... Why, in the twenty-five years since he and Uncle Billy started this thing, he never once thought of himself. Isn't that right, Uncle Billy? He didn't save enough money to send Harry to school, let alone me. But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what's wrong with that? Why... Here, you're all businessmen here. Doesn't it make them better citizens? Doesn't it make them better customers? You... you said... What'd you say just a minute ago?... They had to wait and save their money before they even ought to think of a decent home. Wait! Wait for what? Until their children grow up and leave them? Until they're so old and broken-down that they... Do you know how long it takes a working man to save five thousand dollars? Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you're talking about... they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn't think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they're cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you'll ever be!
Dickson and George share this philosophy about keeping money moving in the economy and, even more crucially, in the hands of people who need it. They both have faith in their neighbors and customers and know that hoarding cash during a depression only worsens that depression. Both speeches are concerned with the “businessman” and his role in society. Dickson emphasizes how impactful on the community a successful businessman can be and the knock-on effects of how supporting local businesses can keep the whole town’s economy not only in balance but also thriving. George rebuffs Potter’s condescension of his father and his assertion that his fine principles as a businessman could ruin the town. Ultimately, George understands that his father’s principles are the cornerstone to fostering the Building & Loan into the heart of the town and its economic prosperity.
Both of these speeches also specifically mention “character” as a necessity to running a bank. They prioritize the human and communal aspects of the transactions they conduct rather than seeing borrowers as potential threats to their personal investments as the board members do. Dickson invokes Hamilton while George stands in front of a portrait of his father with a plaque under that reads “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.” These populist cues imbue the respective speeches with a gravitas of history, wisdom from an older generation encouraging the bankers to heed warnings of unchecked, individualistic, fearful capitalism that forgets the point of having organized resources in the first place.
The growth between 1932’s Dickson having faith in his customers and 1946’s George being a central figure in his community who is also a banker is interesting. Dickson’s goal with lending is to support the local economy directly with funds, whereas George’s role is to finance houses with the philosophy that happy, safe, cared for people make better citizens and better customers. They’re similar ideas with different perspective emphases that both boil down to the fundamental truth that helping people is the absolute baseline requirement of a society. “Help Jones and you help the whole circle.” “People were human beings to him.” These aren’t difficult, complicated, overly sophisticated arguments Dickson and George are making; they’re basic concepts most of us understood in kindergarten.
While there is no oligarch fixing the Senate as in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), or an oligarch fixing the Presidency as in Meet John Doe (1941), or lawyers bewildered by a wealthy man’s generosity as in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1934), American Madness speaks to the philosophy behind each of those scenarios as an early warning against the concentration of wealth and hoarding of resources during crisis. And as with each of those other Capracorn classics, it is very powerfully and depressingly resonant today, particularly with its economic philosophy but also with the warning against rumors.
The malicious rumor spreads through a telephone chain and word of mouth with each link of the chain relaying a slightly altered version of the original fact. As misinformation spreads, so does fear, and people react out of ill-informed impulse causing a run on the bank. This mob mentality is dangerous and incredibly prescient of the fear mongering and misinformation of our current moment. The onslaught of social media on our political and social structure has been unprecedented, but I don’t think we could ever say that it was unforeseen. As ever, the 21st century is simply an ill-conceived, over-produced reboot of past horrors about which we ignored the warnings time and time again with the hubristic idea that somehow this century was uniquely immune to the fundamental issues of human nature and American citizenship.
But thankfully we still have Capra, and we still have cinema, and we still have all of these amazing cultural resources to reflect on our present place in history and imagine where we want to be in the future. We can embrace these corny populist films and say, “yea, it is cheesy to be so sentimental about the community, and it’s lame to espouse your values so publicly, and it’s hard to stand against a mob, but it’s all also so damn worth it. It feels so unbelievably good to be kind to other people even if they think I’m a fucking dweeb or weak or weird, but if they do, that’s just a poor reflection of their character, not mine. I may be an odd little duckling, but at least I’m not an asshole.” You know? We can do that, and I think we should, and so did Capra.