'Dastards, liars, traitors, knaves, Americans all!'

Probably to distract me from the tumult now shaking the very roots of our democracy, Ann the other evening suggested I watch Turner Classic Movies' airing of director William Dieterle's "The Devil and Daniel Webster," a 1941 film that in several respects improves on American writer Stephen Vincent Benet's compelling tale of five years earlier, and not just because of Walter Huston's wonderfully devilish portrayal of Mr. Scratch and Bernard Herrmann's mesmerizing score, alternately mischievous and macabre when not mining strains of Americana. This recycling of the Old World Faustian bargain is distinctly American: Struggling New England farmer Jabez Stone bargains away his soul not for enlightenment, not for sensual pleasures, but for prosperity and, as the film's original title puts it, "All That Money Can Buy." What's more, the Benet tale, whether in magazine, film or even as a terrific one-act 1939 "folk opera" (by American composer Douglas Moore), offers a powerful allegory that resonates a bit too uncomfortably in our own times: Indeed, when confronted with astonishing and repeated instances of the corruption, cruelty and constitutional transgressions of the past four years, to degrees not seen in a previous presidential administration, too many of us shuffle our feet, nod in half-hearted acknowledgement while looking at the earth, then plead in a burst of justification for it all, "Well, sure ... but we sure as hell don't want to do anything to upset this economy!" At the risk of mixing metaphors, too many of us have accepted our 30 pieces of silver if not sold our souls.

One of the improvements of the Dieterle-Benet collaboration involves the climactic scene in which American statesman and orator Daniel Webster — whose once-famous 1830 Second Reply to Hayne was drilled into generations of American students to ensure they fully grasped the importance of the Union — offers to defend Stone from the devil's claiming his soul as duly contracted. When Mr. Scratch notes the difficulty of mounting an ordinary trial to decide the matter, Webster declares: "Be it the quick or the dead, so it be an American judge and an American jury." Scratch replies with zest: "The quick or the dead, you have said it!" He then conjures a jury of the damned including pirates, murderers and traitors, most obscure, some even non-existent. The exception: General Benedict Arnold, who rises from the depths of hell to join the jurors assembling in Jabez Stone's New Hampshire barn, still hiding his face in everlasting shame. For whatever reason, Benet in his 1936 short story blundered here, leaving Arnold off the jury; General Arnold's inclusion on the Dieterle set gives Webster a familiar American scoundrel to play off — first by objecting to Arnold's presence on the jury as a traitor, then in his subsequent appeal on behalf of his fellow American: "You, Benedict Arnold, I speak to you first because you are better known than the rest of your colleagues here. What a different song yours could have been — friend of Washington and Lafayette, a soldier. General Arnold, you fought so gallantly for the American cause till — let me see, what was the date? 1779, that date burned in your heart. The lure of gold made you betray that cause."

No other scene in Dieterle’s film, even that in which a temptress from hell dances a penny-pinching miser to his death, rivals that where Webster goes to bat for Stone before this jury of the damned — "dastards, liars, traitors, knaves," the devil readily acknowledges, but “Americans all.” Yet as one today contemplates the jury, including such intriguing villains as British loyalist Walter Butler (in command of the raiding party credited for the Cherry Valley Massacre of 1778), turncoat Simon Girty, pirate Edward Teach and, of course, General Arnold (who actually betrayed the American cause in 1780, not 1779), one wonders how such an American jury of the damned might be properly replenished in times to come. Who among us now might one day be ripe to fill in for General Arnold and Walter Butler upon jury summons? Surely retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, the ex-national security advisor recently pardoned by President Trump after lying about ties to foreign adversaries and now pressing President Trump to declare martial law, suspend the Constitution and order new presidential elections under military oversight. Surely former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, whose claims of electoral malfeasance are so insane she was dumped from the president's legal team after touting such conspiracy theories as the long-dead Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez conspiring to help Joe Biden win the 2020 presidential election — and Powell’s lately retweeting a call to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, suspend the Electoral College (which so many Trump disciples swore by after the 2016 election) and set up military tribunals to pursue election fraud. Surely Trump campaign attorney Joe diGenova, who last week said Christopher Krebs, the honest Trump-appointed election security chief who defended the integrity of the 2020 elections, should be killed, "taken out at dawn and shot."

Diehard Trump apologists will certainly object to this admittedly idle pursuit of "seat-the-jury-of-the-damned," Scratch-style, as vindictive and hateful and irrelevant. Fair enough. The problem is many of them have zealously played this destructive political parlor game for years now, before, during and after the supposedly stolen presidential election of 2020. Consider Republican state Sen. Brian Birdwell, a supposed “war hero” and self-envisioned patriot representing Waco and the surrounding area, standing up in a local church on Oct. 25 to suggest those allied against President Trump in the election do not love their country. Consider rabble-rousing Republican Party of Texas chairman Allen West — whose campaign for the job last spring condemned mask mandates as tyranny, deadly pandemic notwithstanding — claiming in this very same church that "[w]hat the left is seeking to do in the United States of America is undermine the omnipotence and authority of God." Consider Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert, again at this very same church and on the very same evening, resorting to a familiar refrain and calling on Christian warriors to defeat Democrats at the polls: "We're at the edge of a cliff and we're either going over it and becoming socialist or we can just go back to the crossroads and get on the right track." In her primary election campaign last winter, colossally unprepared Republican Congressional District 17 candidate Renee Swann highlighted this last-cited GOP default stance, as evidenced by one of her many mailers cramming my mailbox (presumably given my long-lapsed Republican credentials): “Socialists want more control over us. They want to take our health care away. They want to take our energy choices away. They want to take our Second Amendment rights away. I’m Renee Swann and I want to make socialists GO AWAY.” Considering their vicious maligning of their “enemies” as godless socialists and commies bent on destroying the country and undermining god-given freedoms, it seems only right that right-wing demagogues contend with devastating claims and damning characterizations, including the most damning of all, one well earned by certain Republicans in recent days and weeks: traitor.

The stormy period since Election Day 2020 does raise increasingly legitimate questions about traitors and fifth columnists and turncoats as so many Republicans beginning with the president and his chief attorney Rudy “Truth isn’t truth” Giuliani argue and conspire to invalidate the votes of millions of Americans, all to leave President Trump victorious rather than vanquished. Some now concur in the treasonous call for military-run elections, scrapping the constitutionally mandated Electoral College and pressing violence on all who defy President Trump. Some even speak warmly of a Trump dynasty. (I marveled the other day at a Trump-supporting friend’s efforts to referee a wild dispute erupting on his Facebook page in which a lifelong Republican condemned Trump’s corruption of the GOP and the “integrity of democracy,” only for another to literally and repeatedly sermonize to her: "What will you do when you realize that Father God appointed and anointed POTUS Donald J. Trump? What shall you say, scoffer?") All of which begs the logical question: When do such anti-democratic, un-American shenanigans slip into genuine sedition? When do such self-styled “patriots” become out-and-out traitors? Would your congressman or senators fit the mold? How to judge, for instance, five-term Republican Congressman Bill Flores, an amiable retired oil and gas executive who represents Waco and the surrounding Central Texas area, portrays a mannered and measured public servant during Waco Tribune-Herald editorial board meetings, yet joined 38 other House Republicans in signing a Dec. 1 letter to Attorney General William Barr complaining of election fraud and voting irregularities — the very day Barr told The Associated Press that neither his DOJ prosecutors nor the FBI can find any evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the presidential election outcome? Yet we see no details of the anomalies, improbabilities and accusations Flores and other House Republicans claim any more than we've seen them in the many spurious lawsuits filed by Trump's lawyers, suits repeatedly rebuffed and even ridiculed by outraged Republican and Democratic judges, some even Trump appointees, before and after these 39 House Republicans dispatched their letter. Is this effort traitorous or merely complicit in undemocratic undertakings? Or is this simply a political maneuver to pacify an enraged president more than willing to publicly disparage and vilify all who dare cross him? Probably the latter, hardly excusable given their oaths of office (probably sworn on fire-retardant Bibles) but demonstrating little more than cowardice or timidity when the nation more than ever calls for sobriety, courage and backbone. And how to judge Flores' Republican successor, carpetbagging career politician Pete Sessions, who lately has used social media to advance all sorts of conspiracy theories suggesting a stolen presidential election — hardly prudent given Sessions' 2018 role in an alleged quid pro quo scheme in which foreign money of suspicious origin was routed to the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action and Sessions' re-election campaign as part of a high-pressure scheme to engineer removal of Marie Yovanovitch, beleaguered U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. A 22-year congressman who relocated to his native Central Texas after his 2018 defeat in Dallas, Sessions has maintained in my interviews with him that he was an unwitting pawn in this Trump-Ukraine skullduggery involving a couple of Giuliani stooges — certainly possible, though Sessions' efforts advocating for Yovanovitch's removal and his poor judgment as a veteran lawmaker accepting foreign loot in the first place don't exactly bolster his insistence of innocence (and, to be clear, Sessions has not been charged in the investigation). Just for the uninformed, there's a ban on U.S. political campaigns accepting foreign cash for reasons Congressman-elect Sessions might ask General Arnold about next time he sees him.

Evidence strongly suggests German-born William Dieterle enjoyed overseeing RKO's production of "The Devil and Daniel Webster," possibly because he was already steeped in Goethe's "Faust," having acted in an ambitious silent film version of the classic from Germany's famed UFA studio in 1926. No doubt the opportunity to recycle the saga through American sensibilities and in American settings excited him in 1941, particularly after fleeing economic and political upheaval in Germany. (Dieterle was such a big believer in Bernard Herrmann's marvelous score for "The Devil and Daniel Webster," for instance, that he suggested the entire score deserved a full hearing separate and apart from the film — rare praise from a filmmaker and something that my friends, conductor William Stromberg and film composer John Morgan, hope to one day record if sufficient financing falls into place.) While the film offers an allegory for its times amidst the Great Depression at home and tyranny on the march abroad, it also pricks and provokes and prompts certain parallels with 21st century America and the bargains we the people have more recently made.

At present two major theories explain why so many Republican officials have allowed themselves to become swept up in Trump's all-out assault on democratic values and constitutional protocols, to the extent of contributing to his scheme to overturn election results that, by all federal and state court accounts, should have sent Trump packing for departure and flight: Either Republicans truly fear defying him and being savagely condemned by presidential tweet, backed up by threats physical and political from his unquestioning supporters or else too many Republicans have devolved to the point that, yes, power is worth throwing everything else over the side for, including the U.S. Constitution and the will of the people come election time.

During a Waco Tribune-Herald editorial board meetings over opinion page positions, our ebullient, blunt, cut-to-the-chase publisher Jim Wilson remarked that, whatever else, President Trump's xenophobic, profane rhetoric and rants had opened a veritable Pandora's box within each of us, freeing impulses and resentments and hostilities one might have long kept hidden if only because of societal expectations or, if one prefers, political correctness. All such restraints are gone now, Jim contended: If you're a racist at heart, those impulses are now free for you to air and to vent, however these may shock and repel some friends or reassure and enable others similarly inclined. And if you're a Republican who believes the ends justify the means, however horrible the means might be, however morally and ethically impossible they might once have been in polite and civilized society, whomever they might strike, wound and disable, then Donald J. Trump has been a searing catalyst, unleashing whatever Machiavellian motives have lurked deep in your soul. For many Republicans, Trump has arguably reawakened beliefs deeper than the constitutional values that some tea party types once ran around claiming and championing. It’s clearly no longer convenient to claim and champion such values. Trib Editor Steve Boggs, a steadfast conservative in principle and Oklahoma-reared independent with whom I greatly enjoyed serving in Waco till my retirement, captured the situation perfectly in a 2017 column noting how the constant moving of political goal posts by Republicans makes it harder to settle on rules and principles and standards. My own conclusion: Such increasingly frequent and bewildering shifts ultimately reveal a faction that in the final analysis no longer stands for anything. If proof of this point is needed, consider the 2020 political platform of the Republican National Convention: There isn’t one except for pledged fealty to this president.

All of which, given the folkloric allegory at hand, raises a final set of questions: Who among us, to quote dour Judge Hathorne in "The Devil and Daniel Webster," is already "lost and gone," perhaps one day liable for duty on a jury of the damned under the conditions Benet and Dieterle prescribe? Who among us is Jabez Stone, finally realizing, almost too late, that certain bargains come at a terrifying cost, to the point they may cost not only us but cherished progeny? And do any Daniel Websters, at least as idealized by Benet during another dark period of American history, still walk among us today, ready to demonstrate political courage in the face of treasonous calls for violence, military oversight and sedition, up to and including invalidating the will of the people?

One must acknowledge here that Webster, who in real life condemned slavery as “a great moral, social and political evil,” was himself condemned by abolitionists and others for his support of the Compromise of 1850 with its controversial Fugitive Slave Act requiring return of escaped slaves. Repugnant though this legislation was, Webster likely realized preventing the spread of slavery or one day even abolishing it would be a higher hill to climb if the nation went to pieces, a dilemma Abraham Lincoln faced a decade later. Interestingly, it was Lincoln’s 1860 election on a policy of preventing the spread of slavery into the territories and the subsequent refusal by Southern states to honor and accept the election results that prompted many states to secede, igniting a war that ultimately left hundreds of thousands dead, freed the slaves, preserved the union and left historians to endlessly debate whether Southerners such as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee qualify as traitors for breaking their oaths and taking up arms against their country. One lesson emanating from the disputed election of 1860 that seemed beyond debate, at least for historians and constitutional scholars: If individual states are indeed permitted to ignore election outcomes and splinter into disunion and disarray, then mighty constitutional protections and the promise of the Declaration of Independence mean nothing. Even now, the only thing worse than candidates branding one another socialists and fascists and heathen and traitors is a refusal to acknowledge election results. And if politicians and jurists and party leaders and members of the Fourth Estate chronicling these matters normalize such refusals as acceptable in a democracy and shelve their responsibility to stand by the people and the Constitution, they themselves become complicit in undemocratic, unconstitutional activity. The question then becomes to what degree and whether consequences are warranted, even if only exacted by the lowly American voter.

In her column in last Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Reagan speechwriter and longtime conservative commentator Peggy Noonan eloquently posed the same question about political courage. She celebrated Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith and the Maine lawmaker’s principled refusal to kowtow to Republican demagogue Joe McCarthy during the red-baiting era of the 1950s, even though Smith realized defying Sen. McCarthy might cost her politically, even though other Republicans had surrendered their principles and cowered before McCarthy's reckless whims and lust for political dominance. Noonan cited Chase’s 1950 “Declaration of Conscience,” a Senate speech in which she lamented that those “who shout the loudest about Americanism” ironically ignore “some of the basic principles of Americanism.” In concluding, Noonan makes clear how this bit of obscure American history offers the way forward in our own times. “What are we saying? When history hands you a McCarthy — reckless, heedlessly manipulating his followers — be a Margaret Chase Smith,” Noonan wrote. “If your McCarthy is saying a whole national election was rigged, an entire system corrupted, you'd recognize such baseless charges damaged democracy itself. You wouldn't let election officials be smeared. You'd stand against a growing hysteria in the base. You'd likely pay some price. But years later you'd still be admired for who you were when it counted so much."

Despite humiliation by Republican Party officials for her principled stand, Chase survived, thanks to Yankee constituents who put more stock in her than Joe McCarthy and party dictates. Director William Dieterle wasn’t as fortunate. While Republicans couldn’t lash him as a committed communist during the red scare of the 1950s, his being a foreign-born filmmaker with leftist ties got him “graylisted,” compelling him to return to Germany after work dried up in America. As for McCarthy, he has earned his rung in hell. During the scandalous Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, the senator made the mistake of personally crossing Joseph Welch, the unflappable, articulate attorney tapped to defend the Army of charges that communists had infiltrated their ranks. When McCarthy foolishly sought to malign one of Welch’s assistants, Welch pulled the grenade pin during the televised congressional hearings that McCarthy otherwise so craved, sealing his finish. In remarks as applicable now as then, Welch dispatched McCarthy with this: “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”