Yesterday was Pearl Harbor Day, and as part of a Frank Capra marathon Turner Classic Movies was showing several of the Why We Fight films. As some of you know, the War Department asked Capra to make the Why We Fight series as a crash course for new recruits during World War II. It was figured new inductees didn't have the detailed knowledge behind why the United States was at war, so Why We Fight was meant to inform and motivate.
I've often talked about the Why We Fight films in some of my classes, but I'd never really sat down to watch any of them, so I watched War Comes to America. I have to confess, I wasn't prepared for how powerful they were. Capra's style of filmmaking -- the triumph of the decent, honest, upstanding little guy against all odds -- is well-known, and applied to the story of good vs. evil on a global scale, it's powerful.
Capra's films are often derided as "Capra-corn" because they have this quaint, almost naive faith in decency and in things working out in the end. Life, of course, is seldom like that. (I've found my own life is far from Capra-esque. It's more like something Preston Sturges would have made.) All that said, I can still get choked up by a good piece of Capra's work, and that's what worked on me as I watched last night. Capra's idealized retelling of American history really got to me, and there's a reason.
I was a bookish kid who spent so much of my childhood reading biographies of historical figures. To me, history was full of great heroes. The libraries of my schools had these 200-page biographies of great Americans, written for schoolchildren, and I'd constantly have one of those checked out. They were the stories of great leaders who rose from ordinary childhoods. I could sympathize with the stories I read. Henry Ford, the endless tinkerer whose father called his first automobile a fool contraption. Young, weak, asthmatic Theodore Roosevelt being bullied by older and stronger kids, only to grow up and become President. I read these books, and they were the stories of people who seemed no more special than I was, going on to do great things, fighting great battles and make history.
I almost envisioned history as this sort of Camelot, full of these great figures who rose from simple beginnings and overcame the obstacles of life to become noble warriors who fought great battles. As I grew older, I graduated from the junior biographies to books like Walter Lord's Day of Infamy and A Night to Remember, narrative history as a series of vignettes, and was captivated by those almost innocent images, almost straight from a Johnny Horton song.
Of course, I grew older and wiser, and I found things out. Every great historical figure has a dark side. I held American presidents high on a pedestal, only to learn as I grew older just what goes into attaining and maintaining office, and to learn that every President and every public figure had lesser qualities. There's the line attributed to Pappy Boyington: "Show me a hero, and I'll show you a bum." Having grown from an enthusiast to a trained historian, I know exactly what he's talking about.
Still, I see certain things in history, or from history, and I choke up a little. I can watch Howard Hawks' Sergeant York, for instance, and though in some ways it's a very corny movie, oh, how it drills right to that part of my heart: the day is saved by a quiet hero who does the right thing when the moment comes to act, because it's the right thing to do. It's the same chill that went up my spine when I visited Queenie a few months back: The cynical, grown-up me knows all the dirty political stuff that likely took place on board (and about her planned role as spy aircraft), but the more innocent part of me absolutely reveres that aircraft because I read stories of her in books when I was younger, and I know about all the history she made, and it absolutely humbled me to be aboard.
The cynical, grown-up me knows the stories are a little corny. But the seven-year-old me, nose in a book, doesn't need it explained to her.
