I just finished watching It's A Wonderful Life again. I'll bet I've watched that movie thirty times since I first discovered it back in the late 1970's. I came home from work at the radio station very late one night and turned on the TV. The only station still on the air was WAKR in Akron, Ohio, which had recently moved from Channel 49 to Channel 23 and increased power. Their signal now reached the Cleveland area fairly well, even clearly if you had an outside antenna on a rotor. They were showing old black and white movies all night and It's A Wonderful Life happened to be running. It was near the beginning and I started watching it. I had no idea how long it was, but I didn't plan to stay up late to watch the whole thing. I was so captivated by the story, I had to keep watching all the way to the end. The sun was starting to rise before I got to bed!
Watching It's A Wonderful Life this time started me thinking about how much America has changed over the past 100 years. Something happened around 1909 that gradually, progressively, infected our political process and corrupted both political parties. This movie starts out with George Bailey as a young boy in 1919, right in the middle of the Woodrow Wilson administration. When George Bailey would have been born, Teddy Roosevelt was president. He was elected as a Republican, but he became a Progressive before his two terms ended in 1909. He formed a third party called the Bull Moose which formed the very beginnings of a Progressive movement. He was followed by William Howard Taft, a Conservative Republican, who served only one term. The Progressives were struggling to gain control of America, and they set about to do that by infiltrating the Democrat party. In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was elected. He called himself a Democrat, but he was actually a Progressive. He was very different from the Democrats who came before him. He was addicted to power and sought to greatly expand America's central government, and with it, the Ruling Class. This was directly in opposition to the original intent of our country, based on the Constitution, limited central government, States rights, and individual freedom. Prior to the infiltration of Progressives, these ideals were held sacred by both political parties. Things had changed.
Newspaper publisher Warren G Harding took office after Woodrow Wilson's second term. He was a Conservative Republican who campaigned as a supporter of the League Of Nations (now the United Nations). After he got elected, he fought to keep America out of that organization. On his watch, however, many of his friends began taking advantage of the positions of power they'd been given. The result was scandal. Some believed that President Harding was responsible for everything, including actions that took place without his knowledge or consent. Perhaps that's true of any President. President Harding didn't live long enough to find out how these scandals would be resolved. He died of a heart attack two years into his Presidency while visiting San Francisco. His Vice President, Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in on August 2, 1923.
Calvin Coolidge was a Conservative Republican who sought to restore the dignity of the Presidency. During his term, America's economy was booming. It was known as The Roaring Twenties. This period is depicted in the movie as the time when George Bailey and Mary dance the Jitterbug right into the school swimming pool under the gym floor.
George Bailey's father ran the Bailey Building And Loan. Mr. Potter was portrayed as an evil rich man who bought shares of that business and then tried to take it over when George's father died. The Board of Directors voted to keep the Building And Loan operating, provided George stayed on to take his father's place as Executive Secretary of the business. George reluctantly agreed to stay. Based on events in the movie, George gets married to Mary in October 1929, coincidentally on the same day the stock market crash begins what we now call the Great Depression. Mary offers up the money they received from wedding gifts to help George keep the business solvent through the initial crisis. Mr. Potter, meanwhile, bought out the bank for pennies on the dollar. He would have taken over the Building And Loan as well, if it had not been for the charitable gestures of Mary and George, which forced them to give up a honeymoon trip.
Now let's stop here and try to figure out the politics of these characters. George Bailey and his father were Capitalists. They were almost certainly Republicans. But, Mr. Potter was also a Capitalist, and most likely a Republican as well. But there was a difference. Like the Progressives who were struggling at this time to regain political power, Mr. Potter was drunk with power. He sought to rule over people like royalty, or even as a dictator. This leads me to believe that Mr. Potter, the rich guy, was a Progressive at heart, even though he may have called himself a Republican.
Let's compare the moral values of these characters. George Bailey, the Conservative Republican, was obviously a religious man. His family celebrated Christmas and he believed in Heaven and angels, although he was reluctant to think an angel could actually visit him on Earth! He was a family man who loved his kids and cared deeply about his wife, family, and friends. He was very brave, jumping into freezing water TWICE, once to save his little brother, and again to save the angel Clarence, a total stranger at the time. He was a man who truly cared about the poor working folks. He dedicated his life to helping them, not by giving them handouts or government programs, but by helping them grow their own fortunes and raise their own standard of living. He was a charitable man, giving money to his friends who found themselves in desperate situations, and passing up one opportunity after another to stick around and help out his family and his community. In my mind, this is the description of today's Conservative Republicans, even though the Progressives have spent the past 100 years trying to paint them as evil, greedy, rich people.
Mr. Potter, the Progressive Republican, was really the evil rich guy. He could have returned the money Uncle Billy had misplaced, but he didn't do it. Instead, he used that incident to try to steal the Building And Loan business, and send George to prison in the process. He had tried to sucker George into coming to work for him, offering a $20,000 a year salary and a three year contract. At first, George was tempted. That was a lot more money than the $45 a week he'd been drawing from the Building And Loan. It meant an opportunity to finally travel the world, which was his life-long, unfulfilled desire. But George saw through the scam very quickly. Mr. Potter didn't care at all about the working poor. He called them "riff raff" and did everything he could to keep them in poverty and in debt - to him. Would Mr. Potter have jumped into freezing water to save anyone? Hardly.
Today's Progressives are much more like Mr. Potter than George Bailey. Every Conservative can clearly understand that. When George experienced what life would be like if he had never been born, Bedford Falls had been transformed into Pottersville, a city consumed by poverty and immorality where evil, greedy, rich people like Mr. Potter owned and controlled everything and everybody.
Look at any issue today and think about it in the context of Bedford Falls and Pottersville. In which of these towns would they have taught gay history in school? In which of these towns would drug abuse be more likely? Which of these towns would have the largest percentage of people on welfare and other government entitlement programs? Which of these towns would have been more likely to take down a cross from public land?
Don't let the Progressives get away with painting Conservatives as evil and greedy. They're the ones who are drunk with power. They're the ones who think nothing of keeping others down so they can enrich themselves.
It really is a wonderful life. But I can't help wondering what it would have been like if Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had never been born.
