Frank Capra’s America and Ours

Too good not to digest, even though we must put up with references to The Tyrant. :)

John Marini, a professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is a graduate of San Jose State University and earned his Ph.D. in government at the Claremont Graduate School. He has also taught at Agnes Scott College, Ohio University, and the University of Dallas. He is on the board of directors of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy and a member of the Nevada Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Dr. Marini is the author or co-author of several books, including The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science; The Politics of Budget Control: Congress, the Presidency, and the Growth of the Administrative State; and The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration.
 

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The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on March 3, 2015, during a conference on the films of Frank Capra sponsored by the College’s Center for Constructive Alternatives.

Filmmaker Frank Capra was not an American by birth or blood. Consequently he did not understand America, as many Americans do today, in terms of personal categories of identity such as race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality. He understood America in terms of its political principles—the moral principles of America that can be shared by all who understand them and are willing to live up to them. This was Abraham Lincoln’s understanding as well. In a speech in Chicago in 1858, Lincoln noted that many citizens of that time did not share the blood of the “old men” of America’s Founding generation. But, he continued,

. . . when they look through the old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principles in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Frank Capra was born in Sicily in 1897 and came to America in 1903.

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