September 30, 2006
Willie Stark and the Crowd Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST Last evening I saw All The King’s Men, the new film adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel by the same title, roughly modeled on the life of Huey P. Long, the Louisiana governor and U.S. Senator who was gunned down in the State House 71 years ago this month. Allen Barra wrote a fine review of the film for American Heritage.com, and I find myself largely in agreement with him. While some of the individual performances are brilliant—particularly Sean Penn’s chilling portrayal of Willie Stark, the demagogue-populist governor who, like Huey Long, is cut down in the prime of his electoral career—I thought the film didn’t quite cohere. But I’m no film critic. Warren’s book, which was published in 1946, and its first film adaptation, which was released in 1949, dwelt on the dangers of populist upheaval. Importantly, this was an age when many leading public intellectuals came to manifest a deep distrust of mass politics. Writers and scholars like Daniel Bell, David Riesman, William White, and Richard Hofstadter came out of a liberal intellectual tradition of the 1930s that celebrated the common man and the triumph of popular democracy. These were the days of industrial unions, The Grapes of Wrath, demonstrations for the Scottsboro Boys, rent strikes, and the like. By the late 1940s, however, many of these same public intellectuals moved into the Cold War camp. Alarmed by the rise of fascism and Soviet totalitarianism, when they saw large crowds of people demonstrating in the streets, they no longer saw working-class heroes. They saw Nuremberg, and it frightened them. This helps explain why Hofstadter’s famous 1955 book, The Age of Reform, portrayed 1890s populists and early-twentieth-century progressives as narrow-minded bigots with a tremendous capacity for hate and conspiratorial fantasy. Though much of this interpretation no longer holds up, the book remains an important artifact of mid-century intellectual distrust of mass political action. All the King’s Men was written and produced in this same tradition. Though the original film focused more intently on Willie Stark’s demagogic talents than on the credulity of his constituents, every good demagogue surely needs a believing crowd. In the wake of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, a new generation of intellectuals rediscovered an affinity for mass politics. These same intellectuals dominate the academy, and the editorial room, today. I wonder, then, how much resonance All the King’s Men continues to have. We have learned not to be as skeptical of crowds as Robert Penn Warren was, even if we remain deeply distrustful of rabble-rousing politicians who make great promises that we know, in our heart of hearts, can’t be delivered.
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