It's a Wonderful Life Is the Most Conservative Film Hollywood Ever Made

The Federal Bureau of Investigation once looked at a Christmas movie about a small-town savings and loan and concluded it might be Communist propaganda. Hold that thought, because it is the funniest sentence in the history of American film criticism, and it is also true.

In 1947, in its files on Communist influence in motion pictures, the FBI flagged Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life as a picture with a possible agenda. The suspicion, as the file laid it out, was that the film discredited bankers by casting its banker as a Scrooge-type, and that this was a familiar device for stirring up class resentment. So the nation's premier investigative agency, with all the threats of the early Cold War on its desk, spent some of its attention on a movie in which the climax is a town passing a hat to save a family from ruin.

Folks, I have watched this film more times than I can count, and I can tell you it is about as Red as a Vermont barn. It may be the most conservative picture Hollywood ever made. Let me make the case.

The film, briefly

It's a Wonderful Life was released in December 1946, directed by Frank Capra for his independent company Liberty Films, and adapted from a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern called "The Greatest Gift." James Stewart plays George Bailey, a young man in the fictional town of Bedford Falls who dreams of leaving and seeing the world, and who never quite gets out. Donna Reed plays Mary, the woman he marries. Lionel Barrymore plays Henry F. Potter, the richest man in town. Henry Travers plays Clarence, an angel trying to earn his wings.

The story turns on the Bailey Building and Loan, a small institution George inherits from his father, Peter Bailey, who dies partway through the film. A building and loan was a real kind of American institution: a mutual organization where neighbors pooled their savings and lent to one another so working families could buy homes. The Bailey Building and Loan makes it possible for people to leave Potter's rental housing and own their own homes. Potter, who owns most of the town, wants to close it down or swallow it. On Christmas Eve a pile of cash goes missing, George faces ruin and a scandal, and he contemplates ending his life. Clarence shows him what Bedford Falls would be like had he never been born. The town, in that world, is a place called Pottersville, and it is hard and cheap and run for the profit of one man.

The film earned five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and did not win any of the major prizes. It was not the hit it is now. Its first run did not earn back its cost, a disappointment that left some in Hollywood thinking Capra had lost his touch. For years it was a minor entry in Capra's career.

How the film came back

Here is a piece of the story that nobody could have scripted. In the 1970s the film's copyright reportedly lapsed because of a failure to renew it, which meant television stations could show it without paying for the rights. And show it they did, year after year at Christmas, until the movie that had flopped at the box office became the movie a nation could not do without in December. A lapse in paperwork gave the country a tradition. Say what you like about the free market of ideas, it saved this one.

The film thrived because audiences found something in it that no studio could have marketed. They did not need to be told that the story was about the worth of an ordinary life. They saw it on their own screens, surrounded by their own families, and they recognized it.

What the film actually values

Let me argue this the way a conservative should argue it, with premises.

One: the film's moral center is the family, and the family is treated as the unit that matters most. George's whole life is a series of sacrifices for the people near him. He gives up college so his younger brother Harry can go. He spends his honeymoon money to keep the Building and Loan open during a run on the bank. He stays in his town and raises children in a drafty old house. The film does not pretend this is easy, and it does not pretend he is never tempted to resent it. But it concludes, clearly, that a life spent on others is a wonderful life.

Two: the film is a hymn to thrift and to local, voluntary institutions. The Building and Loan works because ordinary people put in small amounts and trust their neighbors to repay. It is an institution of savings, not of handouts, and of mutual obligation, not of dependence. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, wrote in the 1830s that Americans, of every age and condition, constantly form associations, and he saw those associations as the secret of the country's self-government. Bedford Falls is Tocqueville's America on a Christmas card. When the government is not the answer to every problem, neighbors become the answer, and the film shows how powerful that can be.

Three: the film takes faith seriously. It opens with prayers. The people of Bedford Falls pray for George, and the film's opening is, if you think about it, an audience of the divine hearing petitions. An angel is sent. The film's central question, whether a man's life has mattered, is answered by someone who has been looking down on it from a perspective larger than the man's. That is a religious view of human dignity: every person's life has weight, and no one is a statistic.

Four: the film respects duty over self-expression. George wants adventure. He would be an explorer, an engineer, a builder of skyscrapers and bridges. A modern script would likely have him go. Capra's film lets him feel the pull and then asks whether the person who stays and keeps his word is a lesser man. The answer is no. The most important work of his life is the work of the man who shows up.

Five: the villain. Henry Potter is not a cartoon capitalist, and I think this is the most overlooked point in the film. Potter is a landlord and banker, yes, but what makes him the villain is not that he is rich. It is that he wants to own everything, to be the only institution in town, to turn independent homeowners back into dependent renters, and to absorb the one competing institution that works for ordinary people. Potter's sin is monopoly, power concentrated in one man's hands. He does not just want to profit; he wants to rule. And he has contempt for the people of Bedford Falls, whom he calls a rabble. A conservative would call that the vice of concentrated power, and would recognize that it can wear a banker's suit or a bureaucrat's.

This is the key to the FBI memo, by the way. The report's authors saw a rich man as the villain and assumed class warfare. What they missed is that the film's hero is also a businessman. George Bailey runs a financial institution. He is a banker, and the film loves him for it, because he uses his bank to help people own their homes. The movie has no quarrel with finance. Its quarrel is with the man who uses it to crush his neighbors.

The steelman

The best objection runs like this. It's a Wonderful Life is, on a fair reading, a film with a skeptical view of big business and a warm view of community, and those themes are also found on the left. Its hero is a man who runs a not-for-profit-style cooperative lender. Its villain is the richest man in town. Plenty of progressives love this film for what they take to be an anti-capitalist message, and the 1947 memo was only the least charming version of the same reading. A film that celebrates solidarity, shared sacrifice and the little guy against the corporation belongs to everyone.

That is a fair argument, and it deserves a straight answer, not a sneer. Anyone is entitled to love the picture.

The answer

There are four things to say.

First, the left's reading depends on treating Potter as a stand-in for capitalism. But the film is full of capitalists who are admirable. George is one. So are the small businessmen of the town. The film does not oppose profit, property or ownership; it celebrates a town where ordinary people can own their homes. That is the most conservative aspiration there is, and it is the exact thing Potter wants to take away.

Second, the solution in the film is never the government. When the money goes missing, nobody calls a federal agency. The solution comes from the town itself: neighbors, friends and family who put their own dollars in a basket. The film trusts private charity, mutual aid and community over distant institutions. If the Bedford Falls story had been written as a plea for a program, George would have been rescued by a caseworker. He is rescued by the people whose lives he touched.

Third, the film treats virtue as a personal, not a systemic, achievement. Its measure of a good life is character: honesty, courage, steadiness, and the willingness to keep a promise when it costs you. You do not need a theory of society to see that those are the values conservatism has always defended.

Fourth, consider what happens in Pottersville. It is not a place where a few villains have taken control; it is a place where the institutions that bound people together have vanished. The family is scattered, the neighbors are strangers, the main street is a strip of bars and pawn shops. A conservative would describe that as what happens when civil society collapses. Which is precisely what the film is warning about.

The Founding connection

The Founders valued the kind of society this film describes. Washington's Farewell Address praised religion and morality as the pillars of public happiness. The American republic rested on the assumption that ordinary citizens, in their families and churches and local associations, would form the character and the habits that self-government requires. The film's insight is that those small bonds matter more to a free country than any single grand scheme. The Constitution created a government of limited powers precisely because the Framers expected most of life, including the care of neighbors in need, to be handled outside Washington.

The film also makes a point the Founders would have recognized about power. Federalist No. 51 says that ambition must be made to counteract ambition. Potter is ambition without counteraction. He is a man whom no one in town can stop, until the town finds a way. That is the concern behind separation of powers, written as a movie.

Why it still matters

Every December the film reminds us of something our culture has trouble saying plainly: that an ordinary life lived well is a great life. Not a famous life, not a rich one, not one with a platform. A life of keeping your word, supporting your family, helping a neighbor and staying at your post.

That message is more countercultural than it was in 1946. A culture that tells young people to chase influence and to measure a life by reach can find, in the story of George Bailey, an alternative worth considering. The film does not tell him to give up his dreams for nothing. It tells him, in the end, that what he built was bigger than the dreams.

If you want more on how popular culture treats the values this film celebrates, read From Father Knows Best to the Bumbling Sitcom Dad, What TV Taught About Fathers, Movies That Love America Still Sell Tickets, and Hollywood Keeps Forgetting, The Hollywood Blacklist Was Wrong, and Conservatives Should Say So Plainly and Country Music Still Sings About Work, Faith and Flag, and It Is No Accident. And for the quiet virtue the film honors, see Dirty Jobs and Honest Work, Why Pop Culture Rarely Celebrates the Trades.

One last jab at the memo, because it deserves one. If a film in which a community saves a family from foreclosure by passing a basket was a Moscow plot, then Moscow was playing a very long game and missed the part where the villain gets no comeuppance but a nation chooses to love the hero. The best propaganda lasts a season. This has lasted three generations of Christmases.

The case in brief

1. It's a Wonderful Life (December 1946) celebrates family duty, thrift, faith and local institutions, which are the core of the conservative view of a good life.
2. Its villain, Henry Potter, is not wealth but concentrated power: a man who wants to own everything and absorb the one institution that serves his neighbors.
3. The rescue comes from the community, not from a government program, which is the conservative answer to need.
4. The 1947 FBI memo that read the film as a Communist device mistook an attack on monopoly for an attack on capitalism, and the film's hero is, in fact, a banker.
5. The film's message, that an ordinary life lived well is a great life, is a message a free republic needs to keep telling.

What you can do: this Christmas, watch it with your family, then ask each person to name one neighbor or local institution they would help to keep going, and do it.