Populism

THE MYTH OF POPULISM

To discuss populism as myth usually means attending to its retrogressive "Agrarian Myth" elements. From the internationalist perspective of classical Marxism, populism is simply the agrarian myth in action—in venues as disparate as Russia, India, and Latin America—and is inherently reactionary for naturalizing "peasantness" as definitive of a "national" or "ethnic" essence. The American derivation of this small-p populism typically sees the Populist Party as a single episode of a much larger political saga pitting Hamiltonian finance capitalists against Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. Nature, in this picture, is pastoral, Edenic, so that rural hardship is chiefly attributed to conspiratorial elites—bankers, rail-road executives, intellectuals—and the urban political machines they control. An obviously influential instance of this agrarian resentment is D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), where the specter of an alien political regime disempowering a native rural aristocracy leads to the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.

Two literary movements or genres are often invoked in charting the populist conflict between rural and urban interests: the "cracker-box" philosopher-humorist tradition stretching from Seba Smith (1792–1868) through Mark Twain (1835–1910) to Will Rogers (1879–1935), and the middle-brow and middle class, mostly magazine fiction of the 1920s and 1930s (Clarence Budington Kelland, Damon Runyon, Rose Wilder Lane, Joel Chandler Harris, Irvin S. Cobb). Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town combines both strains, in that Gary Cooper's Longfellow Deeds is a common-sense Yankee sage who writes greeting card verse and derives from a story by Kelland.

Scholarship since the 1990s on Will Rogers and Capra alike gives reasons for doubting the strict equation of film populism and political reaction, though Capra's Lost Horizon (1937) has been seen as epitomizing the agrarian desire to eschew the modern "rat race" in favor of an orientalist "Shangri-La"-cum-"chicken ranch." Indeed, some writers have linked the geography of Capra's "Valley of the Blue Moon" Himalayan utopia to Leni Riefenstahl's proto-fascist "Mountain" films (for example, The Blue Light [1932]), as exhibiting the more atavistic strain of the Agrarian Myth. And there is a long list of more natively "American" films in which a near-link of populism and fascism is suggested, including Capra's Meet John Doe and All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949).