A Shrine to Nativism or to Democracy?

In high school, in the Midwest, I learned about the concept of Manifest Destiny.
This was the idea that White Americans were ordained, by God, to settle the entire continent “from sea to shining sea.”
The concept of Manifest Destiny was tied in with the idea of “American Exceptionalism,” the genocide of indigenous people, and the rejection of Native American rights.
Since Mount Rushmore was imagined by its’ sculptor (Gutzon Borghum) as about the expansion of America, one way to think about it is as a shrine to Manifest Destiny.

Originally, Red Cloud was going to be immortalized on another North Dakota mountain.

Instead, Mount Rushmore was built by sculptor Gutzon Borghum.

Borghum was a proponent of nativism who believed in strict controls on immigration.

Honoring U.S. presidents was NOT the original concept for building a giant monument in North Dakota.
Moreover, the four presidents weren’t selected based on their thoughts on Democracy.
According to an article “75 Surprising Facts About Mount Rushmore” (by Dylan Mancy), the original idea was to sculpt images of “Oglala Lakota leader Red Cloud, explorers Lewis and Clark, and Buffalo Bill Cody.”
This concept would have made it a monument to both Native Americans, and to U.S. expansion—an exceedingly contrary proposal indeed!
However, it would have been more in harmony with what the Lakota (also known as the Teton Sioux) called Mount Rushmore.
The Lakota called Rushmore the “Six Grandfathers.”

As far as I can tell, the main person who selected the four presidents for Mount Rushmore was the sculptor, Gutzon Borghum.
His idea was to pay homage to presidents who had contributed greatly to the “founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the country.”
George Washington represented the founding.
Thomas Jefferson represented expansion—through the Louisiana Purchase.
Teddy Roosevelt represented preservation and economic growth.
Finally, Abraham Lincoln represented unification.

In Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism, Paula Marantz Cohen, discusses how the chase in 1959’s North by Northwest (starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint) “dramatizes the puny but heroic efforts of individuals to stand up against institutional pressures.”

It’s interesting that President James K. Polk is not immortalized on Mount Rushmore, especially since Polk was the president most closely allied with U.S. expansion.
However, Teddy Roosevelt was associated with the West as a naturalist, hunter, and conservationist; helped build the Panama Canal; as well as a close personal friend of the sculptor.

Another interesting fact (that I learned in “75 Surprising Facts About Mount Rushmore”) was that Mount Rushmore was named after Mr. Charles E. Rushmore—an obscure New York lawyer who surveyed gold claims in North Dakota, in 1885.
(His guides incorrectly assumed that the mountain had no name.)
How odd to name such a large mountain after such a minor official!

Sculptor Gutzon Borgham,* the creator of Mount Rushmore, was born in 1867, in the Idaho Territory.
His father immigrated from Denmark and his mother was the child of Danish immigrants.
According to Wikipedia, Borgham was a child of Morman polygamy.
At one time, his father (Jen) was married to both Borgham’s mother (Christina), and to her sister Ida.
(However, Jen Borgham eventually divorced Gutzon’s mother, stayed with Ida, and left the Morman Church.)

In 2004’s Team America: World Police, the counter-terrorism force (Team America) used Mount Rushmore as a home base.

After attending preparatory schools in Kansas and Nebraska, Borgham moved to New York City where he sculpted religious figures for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
By age 40, one of his sculptures was accepted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he was on his way to success and fame.
Over the years, Borgham became more and more fascinated with themes of American patriotism and heroic nationalism.

Now we come to the subjects of nationalism and nativism.
Nativism is a belief system in which “non-natives” are threatening, and only the “true natives” in a country are considered acceptable citizens.
This idea might seem an odd concept in a “melting pot” land in which everyone is an immigrant or descended from immigrants—except, of course, Native Americans.
However, somehow many White Northern European Protestants have come to assume that only they are “true Americans,” and everyone else is an unfit interloper.

Imagining only people of Northern European heritage, as “real” Americans doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Between 3.8 to 7 million Native Americans lived in North America before the arrival of Columbus.
The ancestors of Black Americans were kidnapped, and forcibly kept here as slaves, beginning in 1640.
Their labor made millions for their captors.
Immigrants have toiled on U.S. soil from all over the world.

Chinese men built the railroads.
The ancestors of people of Hispanic descent (like Eva Longoria) raised cattle, and grew crops, on the Northern side of the Rio Grande long before the U.S. was a country.
Yet, somehow indigenous peoples, Black people, Southern European people, Jews, and Catholics are considered “non-natives?”
How does that work?

Front page of the Treasure Chest comic book story “The Shrine of Democracy.”

Instead of portraying Mount Rushmore as a shrine to nativism, this story portrayed the monument as a shrine to Democracy.

Today, Mount Rushmore is known as a monument to a system of government and to great presidents.
On June 14, 2023, a Naturalization ceremony was held in which more than 200 citizens from over 60 countries were welcomed.
The Mount Rushmore site has links for 21 associated Native American tribal nations, and proclaims that the Federal Government consults and coordinates with those tribal nations.
One wonders how Gutzon Borghum would have reacted to this turn around.

* Twelve years before Borgum worked on Mount Rushmore, he created mock-ups for Stone Mountain in Georgia. A 38-minute documentary Monument: the Untold Story of Stone Mountain (by the Atlantic History Museum), covers Borghum being fired from that project, as well as Stone Mountain’s history with the KKK. (You can watch the complete video HERE.)

 

Who’s Drinking the Flavor-Aid?

Jim Jones [Powers Boothe] in 1980’s Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones.

This historical event is where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated. Actually, Jones gave his flock generic Flavor-Aid.

Several years ago, when I worked for a very large company, the company was going through yet another “reorg.”
I remember a meeting in which a Senior Vice President faced over 100 members of her division.
She enumerated the many adjustments we were about to go through, and (making it clear that she disagreed with the changes), commented that we all had to “drink the Kool-Aid.”*
In other words, we all had to pretend that the reorganization was a fine idea, and “go along,” without complaint.

Superman (George Reeves) in Adventures of Superman, which aired 1952-58.
The voiceover ended with the tagline “Truth, justice, and the American way.”
(In 2021, DC Comics updated the Superman tagline to “Truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.”)

In trying to figure out this period of political polarization, I’ve decided that we’ve been drinking different flavors of Kool-Aid.
I had been drinking the fantasy that Democrats and Republicans were basically similar, we were all in a melting pot, and most citizens believed in my family’s interpretation of the slogan associated with Superman: “Truth, justice, and the American way.”
When Donald Trump was elected President via the Electoral College—while losing the popular vote—I finally realized that I’d been drinking some serious Kool-Aid.

I had completely missed that some people had been traumatized by having President Obama as President for eight years, couldn’t conceive of a woman as their President, and/or cared deeply for a candidate who I perceived as a conman.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Trump (because I had a bad opinion of him after living in New York City in the 1980’s and 1990’s).
However, many Americans had listened to him, and had responded powerfully to his message.

Scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with Peasant 2 (Michael Palin) screaming “Help, help. I’m being repressed,” as he’s being strangled by King Arthur (Graham Chapman).

Some Trump supporters think that they are being supplanted by people of color and immigrants.
They also tend to interpret the “American way of life” in a way I had never considered.
In this world view: White men should be in power, “outgroups” (like LGBT and “non-white” people) should accept a lower status, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant societal values should be placed on a pedestal.
(It’s true some Catholics, Hispanics and Southern Italians are allied with MAGA, but their own cultures are thereby repressed.)

Furthermore, most Trump supporters are extremely cynical about Government.
They think it’s obvious that elections are stolen, the Federal government is corrupt, and politicians steal.
When I hear MAGA people being interviewed, it seems that their only real goal is to elect politicians who will cut taxes, and stop the tide of “outgroups taking over society.”

In the book The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Lies, by Aja Raden, Raden quotes a 2002 study by Colleen Seifert, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who specializes in complex human cognition.
According to Seifert: “when people are presented with evidence that the information they’ve been exposed to over and over is factually untrue, the attempts to refute it further entrench their belief.”
[Emphasis mine.]
Once someone is convinced of something, and it feels “like truth” to them, convincing them otherwise is close to impossible.

The U.S. seems stuck in a place in which about 60% (?) acknowledge that an unfit criminal held the nation’s highest office for four years, and another 40% (?) seem to believe that he did a good job and it would be fine if he were President again.
Making the situation worse, only half (or less) of U.S. citizens can be persuaded to vote, and it’s unclear which side the non-voters are on.

Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) in The First Lady—the 2022 TV series.

In 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), then First Lady of the U.S., wrote an essay entitled “The Moral Basis of Democracy,” saying:

We are in truth the melting pot of the earth. Our solidarity and unity can never be a geographical unity or a racial unity. It must be a unity growing out of a common idea and a devotion to that idea.

It seems that few of us are devoted to the ideal of Democracy. She goes on to say:

Moreover, no one can honestly claim that either the Indians or the Negroes of this country are free. [Roosevelt used the accepted terminology of the times.] . . . Few members of the older generation have even attempted to make themselves the kind of people who are truly worthy of the power which is vested in the individual in a Democracy. We must fulfill our duties as citizens, see that our nation is truly represented by its government, see that the government is responsive to the will and desires of the people. . . We must maintain a standard of living which makes it possible for the people really to want justice for all, rather than harbor a secret hope for privileges because they cannot hope for justice.

Do Americans still hope for Justice?
About a year before she wrote this essay, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote another essay called “Keepers of Democracy,” which appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter, 1939).
She says:

There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which stems from fear. . . when we allow one group of people to look down upon another, then we may for a short time bring hardship on some particular group of people, but the real hardship and the real wrong is done to democracy and to our nation as a whole. We are then breeding people who cannot live under a democratic form of government but must be controlled by force.

Have we bred people who cannot live under Democracy?
How many voters no longer hope for justice?
Is the simple difference between the two sides that some are willing to endure an authoritarian government (as long as they are accepted into the group that is “on top”), while others want to live equally with others and make the bargains necessary to live in a Democracy?

*In case anyone is too young to know where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated, it comes from the story of Jim Jones—a cult leader who died in 1978, with around 900 followers (at least 200 of them children). According to Wikipedia, Jones asked his group to ingest grape-flavored Flavor-Aid (misidentified as Kool-Aid) plus cyanide, as an act of “revolutionary suicide.”

Will This Be OUR Crisis?

From left to right: Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey), Hari Seldon (Jared Harris), and Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) in AppleTV’s Foundation.

The second season of Foundation is airing on AppleTV, and episode seven arrives on August 25th.
Based on the book series by Isaac Asimov, Foundation is about a mathematician named Hari Seldon, who becomes the first psychohistorian.
He predicts that the Empire is approaching its’ decline and fall.
However, between his time, and the far future, there will be several crises (or tipping points), during which the coming period of disorder may be shortened with his assistance.

The cover of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, published as an abridged version (in 1951) as The 1,000 Year Plan. Seldon hoped that his Foundation would shorten the period of chaos between the first Galactic Empire, and the second Galactic Empire, to around 1,000 years—mitigated from a probable 30,000 years of disorder.

Seldon sets out to establish a society, a “Foundation,” to cope with these crises, and save human civilization from barbarism

The U.S. has had its’ own “tipping points.
The first was the country’s birth.
In 1776, many colonial citizens were too conservative to rebel.
Thousands of Loyalist families fled to Britain, or Canada, leaving their wealth behind.
Perhaps, if all white men over the age of 16 had voted “Yay” or “Nay,” the colonies wouldn’t have separated.
According to Wealth and Democracy, by Kevin Phillips: “Only supporters of Independence were allowed to vote [for the Declaration of Independence], Tories being barred, and with prewar property requirements also set aside.”

The Founders needed “the rabble” to set up a new country.
However, many of the Founding Fathers could only imagine a hierarchy of Anglo-Saxons being in control.

Another “tipping point” occurred in 1861 when eleven Southern states declared themselves a separate country.
However, the real crisis had begun years before the South seceded, with a general lack of respect toward the Federal Government that grew with each inadequate presidency.

Abraham Lincoln (Satan) carrying away the Goddess of Liberty published in Southern Punch on November 14, 1863. Southern newspapers vilified Lincoln before and during the war.

Southern newspapers convinced their citizenry that if Abraham Lincoln were elected, he’d arm slave revolts, give their daughters to Black men, and make the South destitute.
It had become illegal to even discuss abolition publicly in most Southern states, and over twenty Northern abolitionists were lynched.
(The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, by Larry Tagg.)
The U.S. was forced to choose between a weak central government (and the enslavement of almost four million Black people), and remaining the united country that the Founding Fathers had dreamed of.

British DVD cover of C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America.

In 2004’s C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America—a satirical “documentary” in which the South won the Civil War, written and directed by Kevin Wilmott—Wilmott shows the C.S.A. becoming an Empire, and taking over sections of Central and South America in order to keep the slave system going.
Those scenes seemed hyperbolic until I learned the story of William Walker.
Walker was a young Southern doctor who in 1856 traveled to Central America and made himself the President of Nicaragua, (thus creating a slave country south of the border).
U.S. President Pierce actually recognized Dr. Walker’s government as legitimate!
Walker’s regime lasted less than a year.
A few years later, he tried for power once more (this time in Honduras), was captured by the Brits, found guilty in a court, and executed by firing squad.

The 1930’s were another tipping point, when the Great Depression resulted in Democracies ending all over the world, and international trade breaking down.
(The fact that this was a reactionary period, wasn’t covered well in my high school history book.
If Franklin Delano Roosevelt—the President from 1933 until his death in 1945—hadn’t used his power judiciously, or if the U.S. hadn’t become united by World War II, perhaps we wouldn’t live in a Democracy today.

Trump shaves Vince McMahon’s head in 2007’s WrestleMania23. Who thinks Trump would have let McMahon shave his head if he had lost the bet?

Yet another tipping point occurred in 2020, when publicity-seeker Donald Trump—less a populist than a Hero of Hierarchy—lost his opportunity to serve a second term.
This continuing crisis is more like the 1930’s tipping point, then the ones in either 1776 or 1861.
Although a few U.S. representatives propose that the U.S. split up into red and blue states, that wouldn’t work today.
(Too many states are purple.)
Just as 1930’s isolationists flirted with Fascism, Trump created MAGA by convincing Americans that he had the ability to wall them off from “out groups,” as well as put a halt to societal change.

A comic book in 1950 explained why our votes are vital.

To read the complete comic go HERE.

Close presidential races have occurred before.
However, those elections weren’t “tipping points.”
Four presidents were assassinated—in 1865, 1881, 1901, and 1963—but those tragedies didn’t create chaos.
Most folks viewed the two parties as too similar to really care who won.
In too many elections less than half of Americans vote.

No one state, or group of states, got everything they desired in the U.S. Constitution (written in 1787), but that was the point.
People got together and bargained, and the majority opinion won.
The Constitution, and Bill of Rights, were written to work hand in hand with a Democratic society, and Democracies work best if people are free to do whatever, as long as doing so doesn’t harm others.
As the saying (attributed to multiple people) goes: “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins.”

The framers erred in hoping that slavery would gradually fade away.
They also made a mistake in creating the Three-fifths Compromise,* enticing Southern states to sign the Constitution by trading this compromise for a bit more power.
(This strange agreement “baked” the concept of slavery into the Constitution.)
Eventually, wealthy Southerners conflated their own freedom with the freedom to be “on top” of the societal heap, and to own other people. 

Picture of Washington and Lincoln (the saviors of unity) by Currier & Ives.

One way of thinking about each U.S. crisis is that they centered around reactionary cycles and hierarchy.
However, as Lincoln (the disciple of Washington) expressed it in his Gettysburg Address, the U.S. needs a Federal Government that is: “Of the people, by the people, for the people.”
There’s simply no room for hierarchy in that phrase.
In the crises of 1861, 1933, and 2020, large segments of American society feared that their ways of life were being threatened.
They became resentful of other Americans, and valued “Anglo-Saxon order,” and wealth, over the Democratic system.
Hierarchy, and not caring about the general good, is a very bad fit with Democracy.
We are now at a crisis point.

* The Three-fifths Compromise was an agreement—in the U.S. Constitution—that included slaves in the state populations, but in a very peculiar manner. It specified that each slave would be counted as 3/5th of a human being. The resulting totals were used to calculate the number of seats in the House of Representatives, the number of electoral college votes, and how much states would pay in taxes. Although slaves couldn’t vote, slave-holding states ended up with more state representatives, and more electoral college votes, than they truly deserved.

Teetering on the Edge of Fascism?

Poster from Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston, as President Hammond.

There’s a lot about U.S. history that I didn’t learn in school.
For example, I learned this year that Republicans took the presidency from a Democrat before 2000.
(The “election” was in 1877, a backroom deal—in which 20 electoral votes were conceded to Rutherford B. Hayes, to end Reconstruction—which made Hayes the 19th President by a single vote!)
In addition, I wasn’t aware that, during the 1930’s, America teetered on the edge of giving up on Democracy. 

Evidence for a “lack of confidence” in Democracy can be found in the 1933 film, Gabriel Over the White House—directed by Gregory La Cava, and financed by William Randolph Hearst.
(Hearst was a newspaper publisher and politician; his life was one of the inspirations for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.)
“Gabriel” is the story of a political hack who’s elected President.
Early in his presidency, he nearly dies after speeding.
After the car crash, he changes from a figurehead, to an activist intent on saving the country.
According to IMDb, the film was released with two different endings—an American version and a little-seen European version.
(I’ve only seen the American version. According to sources on IMDb, the European ending is similar to that of the original novel. See below.)

When President Hammond (Walter Huston) is elected, he’s a caricature of a glad-handing politician.
He jokes about not fulfilling election promises.
His knowledge of geography is nil, so he asks his attractive young secretary (with whom he’s having an affair) where Siam is.
He’d rather crawl around on The Oval Office floor—with his four-year-old nephew—than pay attention to an army of the unemployed marching on Washington.
After Hammond awakens from his coma, however, he refuses Cabinet pleas to “defend the Capitol.”
Instead, he supplies food to the homeless men, and promises them jobs.
Dramatic lighting (and the sound of faint trumpets) reveal that this is a new President, guided not by his party’s needs, but by the Angel Gabriel.

The film script was based on a science fiction fantasy entitled Rinehard, by British author Thomas F. Tweed.
In the novel, American President Rinehard, changes, after a car accident, from a fan of “detective and wild west” tales, to a reader of political and economic tomes.
He dissolves Congress, fires his cronies in the Cabinet, declares martial law, creates his own militia, sets up agents in all state governments, increases the size of the Supreme Court (to 15), and replaces the Constitution—all to eliminate “red tape,” and create a functioning government.
At first, the White House staff is hesitant to follow (thinking he’s become insane), but one by one they conclude that it’s “a divine madness, the kind of madness that this crumbling world needs.”

Cover of Gabriel Over the White House, as published in Britain by Fantasy Books. Kemsley House, London. This is the version I read, but it was first published in Britain as Rinehard.

Cover of Gabriel Over the White House, as published in America by Farrar & Rinehart. Thomas F. Tweed’s name is not mentioned in the printed American version.

Oddly, the 1933 film credits list the Gabriel Over the White House author as “Anonymous.” Did Hollywood want to keep it hushed up that the author of “A Sensational Novel of the Presidency” was British? The story is told in first person by Hartley Beekman, Secretary to the President.

Tweed (1891-1940) was a British WWI Lieutenant-Colonel, and a political advisor to David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister.
According to Wikipedia, some characters in the novel are based on real people that both Tweed and Lloyd George knew.
Rinehard is set in the near future, and is about the world being given the government it “needs”—an efficient, benevolent dictatorship, where evildoers are punished.
(The secondary plot is a tale of Rinehard battling vicious Italian gangsters.)
Tweed later wrote another book known alternately as Blind Mouths or Destiny’s Man—which again involved a dictatorship and a healer.

It’s easy to figure out that Tweed was a Brit who never “crossed the pond.”
His novel is filled with British terms (“queue” instead of “line,” and “hire-purchase” instead of “buying on time”) plus awkward attempts at American slang.
(His gangsters seem based on British penny dreadfuls.)
A group of Chicago gangsters—"talking rapidly in Italian,” and described as “fat, swarthy, and soft-voiced”—are comically named Wolf Miller, Jose Borelli, “Spike” Jameson, and “Roddy” Greenblatt.
They commit a robbery with one thief costumed as Pierrot.*
(It’s strange that Tweed imagined that an Italian-American gangster would dress as an Italian clown; this “flourish” must have come from reading penny dreadfuls.)

The book was written in the 30’s, so it’s riddled with casual anti-Semitism, anti-Black, anti-immigrant and anti-Feminist sentiments.
A Chicago newspaper (Chicago Searchlight) is called a “filthy tabloid loved by Negroes, Jews and Italians.”
The President’s mistress/secretary (Pendie Malloy) is described as having a “faint strain of Jewish blood” because of her “acquisitive nose” and “full red lips.”
(“Acquisitive” is not my typo; that’s what Tweed wrote!)

The only sections that deal honestly with human emotions occur late in the novel, when an assassination attempt causes a head injury, and Rinehard returns to his former self.
Four years have passed since the car crash, but the befuddled Rinehard thinks it’s just days later.
He’s horrified to discover all the undemocratic measures he’s taken during his presidency, and wants none of it.
He asks that the White House staff set up the “television apparatus,” so that he may apologize to the nation.
However, his aides have become too invested in his legacy.
They refuse his request, causing a heart attack.
Rather than give Rinehard the medicine he needs, a staffer allows him to die.
The President’s legacy is left intact. 

President Hammond (Walter Huston) and Pendola Malloy (Karen Morley). In the novel, the secretary’s name is “Pendie Malloy” (short for “Independence”), but in the movie her name is Pendola Molloy.

In the novel, the only indication that Rinehart is possessed by an Angel is found on page 64.
Pendie Malloy tells the narrator (Hartley Beekmann) that: “Sometimes when Rinehard is dictating, he seems to be at a loss at a certain point. . .He lifts his head and bends it sideways, for all the world as if he were listening to something or someone.”
Malloy speculates to Beekmann that “God has become a little merciful,” and has “sent Gabriel to do for Rinehard what He did for Daniel,” lead The Prophet in the right direction.

Tweed’s 1933 novel presents an America in which “people had lost all hope and faith and belief in their institutions,” and have “a deep distrust of politics.”
Above all, they need a “Leader.”
After President Reinhard begins to present his “Rinehart bedtime stories” on television, the populace dutifully lines up behind him.
There’s no need to gag the press, or to interfere in the free expression of public opinion.
(Indeed, a science fiction-fantasy! Rinehart’s “bedtime stories” preceded FDR’s fireside chats.) 

Crime boss Nick Diamond in center (C. Henry Gordon) faces the President’s top aide, Hartley Beekman (Franchot Tone), on right. In the movie (and book), the President’s top aide heads a Federal Police unit that punishes criminals, not by imprisoning them, but with courts martial and firing squads.

The Hollywood film is somewhat different from the Tweed novel.
The film is set in the present (1933), rather than the late 1940’s.
The President’s relationship with his young secretary is obviously amorous in the film (but not so clear in the novel).
The film gangsters are slightly more realistic, and more “upscale.”
Several characters from the novel are combined in the film script, to simplify the plot.
The ending for the film is different too, with President Hammond dying after he’s signed a World Peace covenant.
However, the gist of the story is there.
Both the film, and the novel, are based on imagining whether America (and Britain too?) might be better off, if democracy was suspended and a “benevolent” dictator took power. 

In Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1939 article “Keepers of Democracy” (in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter), she describes a world in which the people of the U.S. had allowed themselves “to be fed on propaganda which has created a fear complex. . . People have reached a point where anything which will save them from Communism is a godsend, and if Fascism or Nazism promises more security than our own Democracy, we may even turn to them.”
(Sadly, this description of propaganda-believers sounds very similar to what’s occurring in 2023.)

President Hammond (Walter Houston) addresses the “army of the unemployed” under a statue of George Washington and offers them jobs as the “army of construction.”

In Gabriel in the White House, President Hammond becomes a dictator, but he’s also a protective figure, who gives people a sense of security.
In the film, he walks—unescorted and Jesus-like—to address the “army of the unemployed.”
He bravely confronts the evil crime boss Nick Diamond in The Oval Office.
He’s aware of his role as a servant of God and Country, and becomes remote from human affections.
In 1933, President Hammond was the only type of benevolent dictator that Hollywood (and Hearst?) could imagine as a substitute for Democracy. 

*”Pierrot” and “Harlequin” are both commedia dell’arte characters. In her youth, Dorothy L. Sayers did admit to enjoying trashy over-the-top “penny dreadfuls.” Their influence can be felt in Sayer’s 1933 Lord Peter Whimsey mystery, Murder Must Advertise. In that story, Lord Peter disguises himself in a Harlequin costume, while infiltrating a cocaine party, to solve a murder. 

Retribution of the Dollar-Hunters

Writers and journalists have traveled from “across the pond,” stayed for a while, examined American society, and published their viewpoints since the 1700’s.
They discussed topics like American individualism, and the large number of churches.
However, one attribute stood out—how fixated Americans were on making money, and the lives of the very rich.

French historian Alexis de Tocqueville (who visited America in 1831) was concerned that there would be “permanent inequality of conditions and inequality” because of American pursuit of self-interest and American disinterest in the general good.
He also discussed how quick Americans were to act in an excessively subservient manner to people they perceived as wealthy.

Book cover of Dickens & the Workhouse by Ruth Richardson, published by Oxford Press in 2012.

Novelist Charles Dickens asserted that Americans had a relentless focus on materialism—especially in relation to slavery, the prison system, and treatment of the mentally ill.
English economist John Stuart Smith described (in 1860) how American men were devoted to “dollar-hunting,” and American women were devoted to “breeding dollar-hunters.” 

Founder Thomas Jefferson, had a “complicated” history with money.
He assumed authority of the Monticello plantation (inherited from his father), at the age of 21, and was a wealthy man since birth.
As a young man, he advocated for abolition.
However, when he neared the age of fifty, he realized that Monticello earned 4% a year through the births of black slave children alone, and that these babies were his most lucrative “investment.”
He walked an intellectual tightrope on the issue of slavery for the rest of his days—fearing punishment from God, but unwilling to face bankruptcy.
(The book Master of the Mountain, by Harry Wiencek, tells the story of Jefferson’s financial decisions, in relationship to his views on morality.)

Religion played a part in American viewpoints about wealth.
The early Puritan and Calvinist settlers (ignoring the story of Job in the Bible) viewed material prosperity as a sign of God’s love.
During the Gilded Age (1877-1900), young boys read the rags-to-riches novels of Horatio Alger—a man raised in a Calvinist household who graduated from Harvard Divinity School.
Minister Norman Vincent Peale expressed his belief that one could “live successfully by picturing oneself succeeding,” both on his pulpit, and in his book The Power of Positive Thinking.
Several Protestant ministers—among them Joel Osteen and Paula White—continue to preach the “prosperity gospel.” 

Although many Protestant ministers didn’t believe the theories of Darwin, social Darwinism* had a big impact on American men in the late 1800’s.
According to historian Richard Hofstadter “American society saw its’ own image in the tooth-and-claw version of natural selection.”

Andrew W. Mellon (James Cromwell) in 2010-2014’s TV series Boardwalk Empire. In the episode “You’d Be Surprised,” Mellon testifies before Congress.

Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), Secretary of the Treasury under three Presidents—Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—told Presidents that a Depression* would “be good for the country because it would purge marginal farmers and small business people.”
He also advocated for violence against labor unrest.
(After his death, the IRS sought millions from Mellon’s estate for back taxes; his estate finally settled for $668,000.)
Today, Mellon heirs still fund right-wing causes.

Along the way, there was some rebellion against the “love of wealth” ethos.
The ”Share the Wealth” clubs,* of “Kingfish” Huey Long (1893-1935), claimed to have seven million members in the early 1930’s.
In FDR’s first inaugural address he said: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.”

American films illustrated our concerns.
In 1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a guardian angel teaches George Bailey (James Stewart) the value of love, and his own life, over materialistic goals. 

Cousin Eustace (Charles Williams), Cousin Tilly (Mary Treen), Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), and George Bailey (James Stewart) gaze at a basket of money in It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s a Wonderful Life deals with many money issues.
Young George Bailey assumes that his future wife, Mary (Donna Reed) must prefer his high school rival Sam Wainwright, because Wainwright is so wealthy.
Banker Henry Potter (Lionel Barrymore) owns most of Bedford Falls.
Yet, Potter is so avaricious that he steals the $8,000 that Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) loses, and then connives to send both Bailey and Uncle Billy to prison, because of the loss.
The alternative universe Bedford Falls—Pottersville, in which Bailey was never born—is a sleazy place of poverty, crime, and run-down businesses.
(Bedford Falls has been picked clean by Henry Potter. Uncle Billy has been committed to an asylum, and their bank is a brothel.)

At the end of the film, Bailey’s navy veteran brother, Harry, makes a toast: “To my big brother George, the richest man in town.”
George’s “wealth” is the love and admiration of the people of Bedford Falls, not the money in his bank account.

The Scarecrow (Patrick McGoohan) puts a gun to the head of a British soldier in Disney’s The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. The film and TV series were based on stories of the British smuggling gangs who brought in brandy and tobacco to avoid taxes, and novels by Russell Thorndike about a pirate turned vicar (Dr. Syn) who steals to give to the poor.

European popular culture tended to have a more egalitarian bent, and viewed wealth with suspicion.
English folklore told of Robin Hood, who robbed from the rich and gave to the poor.
Dashing highwaymen, like Dick Turpin, were sung about in ballads and immortalized in plays.
French authors created Arsene Lupin (a gentleman thief)—and the much more ruthless Fantomas—criminals who successfully eluded the police.
The German legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin explains how the Piper—when cheated of his full fee (for luring away thousands of rats)—revenges himself on the town of Hamelin, by stealing away its’ children.

Americans favored some famous thieves—Jesse James, Billy the Kid, and Bonnie and Clyde, to name a few—but these were real people who Americans read about in newspapers and dime novels.
We also heard stories about industrious workers like Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and John Henry.
When I researched Paul Bunyan, however, I discovered that the Bunyan stories were rooted in the lumber fields of Canada.
There weren’t any folk tales about John Henry; his battle against a steam drill originated in an 1870 song.
Johnny Appleseed was a real person—horticulturist Jonathan Chapman (1775-1845).
It turns out that Chapman was a missionary of the Swedenborgian Church, as well as a planter of apple trees.
According to Collier’s Encyclopedia, “a good deal of what has been presented to the American public as folklore, we now know never existed in the oral tradition.”

We might assume that love of money, and admiration for the rich, goes hand in hand with the famous “Protestant Work Ethnic,” but that isn’t the case.
It’s true that (according to Pew Research Center), Americans work longer hours per week than Europeans, and take shorter vacations.
It’s also true that millions of Americans have two, or three, jobs.
(It’s been this way since the 1990’s.)
However, people don’t have multiple jobs because they want to work more.
Most are doing so because of medical debts, because hourly wages are so low, or in order to feed and house their children.
According to an article in The Guardian (September of 2022, Michael Sainato), nearly 5% of U.S. workers hold two or more job positions.
However, many experts call that a serious underestimate.

In Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, she theorizes that because real wages have stagnated for workers since the 1970’s—without the safety nets afforded in other Western countries—we’re experiencing what political scientists (like Diana Mutz) call “dominant group status threat.”
A percentage of Americans feel that the “outgroups” (Blacks, Asians, immigrants) are doing “too well,” and therefore their own status is being threatened.
These deep fears are one source of MAGA support.

The Bizarro World of the Superman comics (art by Wayne Boring) is a crazy mirror image of the real world in which “bad” means “good” and coal is used for money.

To simplify, we’re living in a bizarro world where half of us believe that Democracy is only possible if we all have equal access to good health, education, and opportunity; while others just want to join the “top” caste, and are fearful of societal change.
Each believes the other is living in “Bizarro World.”

*Further information on these ideas is found in Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips, published in 2002, by a division of Random House.