Ketanji Brown Jackson Is Wrong about It’s a Wonderful Life

I t’s Christmas Eve, which means that, somewhere, someone is probably watching Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (and an angel is getting its wings). The 1946 film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a small-town man whose story I summarized in a piece earlier this year:

In a moment of desperation after a life of seemingly thwarted dreams, [Bailey] wishes he’d never been born. Divine intervention, in the form of his guardian angel, Clarence (Henry Travers), shows him how important he has been to those around him — the very people who later help him out of his financial troubles.

It’s a Wonderful Life took a circuitous journey to its current renown. As I noted in a different piece in 2020 (yes, I’m a fan), the film was “somewhat ignored by audiences and misunderstood by critics in its initial release,” but “the passage of time and many TV airings have given this film the iconic status it deserved from its first screening.” Nowadays, it is virtually — and rightly — inescapable during the Christmas season, with its message about the fundamental value of life and the importance of family and community, as well as many of the other elements of its story, having thoroughly penetrated popular culture.

Unfortunately, because we live in a time that can be allergic to the kind of earnest, unironic morals that It’s a Wonderful Life imparts, Capra’s film has its detractors. University of Notre Dame political-science professor Patrick Deneen, for example, has lambasted Bailey as a progenitor of the suburban hellscape that America allegedly became after the end of World War II. Bailey, you see, had the audacity to finance — through Bailey Building & Loan, his family business — the creation of a new subdivision that compromised the humble stature of Bedford Falls, the fictional upstate-New York hamlet in which the events of the film take place. This is ludicrous, of course; Bailey is a credit to his community, whose members he helps repeatedly and who help him in return. Equally ludicrous is the notion that the Bailey-less, alternate-reality version of the town depicted in the film “gets kind of a bad rap,” as the Bulwark’s Sonny Bunch has argued. Pottersville, the creation of miserly town tycoon and Bailey nemesis Henry F. Potter, is an anomic, hedonistic dystopia, plagued by low levels of social trust and lorded over by the tyrannical Potter himself. And while our own Andrew Stuttaford may be correct that Potter has considerable business acumen, Potter deserves nothing but condemnation for stealing money from the Baileys, an act that vindicates George’s assessment of him as a fundamentally selfish, “warped, frustrated old man.”

Earlier this month, Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Deneen, Bunch, and others in the ignominious group of It’s a Wonderful Life haters. During oral arguments in the case 303 Creative v. Elensis, which concerns whether a website designer who opposes same-sex marriage must be legally compelled to create a site for a same-sex wedding, Justice Jackson brought up Capra’s classic as part of a strange hypothetical:

What I’m asking you is, [say] I have a public business, I’m a photographer. My belief is that — you know, I’m doing It’s a Wonderful Life scenes. That’s what I’m offering, okay? I want to do video depictions of It’s a Wonderful Life. And I — knowing that movie very well, I want to be authentic, and so only white children and families can be customers for that particular product. Everybody else can — I’ll give to everybody else, I’ll sell them anything they want, just not the It’s a Wonderful Life depictions.

I’m expressing something, right? For your purposes, that’s speech. What about — what’s the other step? It’s speech, and I can say anti-discrimination laws can’t make me sell the It’s a Wonderful Life package to non-white individuals. . . .

Everybody can come, but I have certain products that I’ll only sell to non — to — to white individuals because the speech that I’m trying to depict is the authentic depiction of that scene as I understand it and that I want to put out there in the world, and it has my signature on the bottom of it, so people are seeing my photos and I want my photos of It’s a Wonderful Life to be as authentic as possible, meaning no people of color.

Putting the legal issues aside, Justice Jackson is simply wrong about It’s a Wonderful Life. If she means to imply that there are no “people of color” in the film, she should watch it again, paying particular attention to the closing scene. She should also note that the Baileys count as something like a family member Annie, a black woman in their employ who gets some of the film’s funniest lines. Capra’s own assessments of the character and of actress Lillian Randolph are instructive. Noting a letter he had received about Annie, Capra emphasized agreement with its conclusion that Annie was meant to be seen as “a friend and a member of the family, rather than a servant.” Of Randolph, here’s how Capra responded to a letter asking if it was essential that her role be played by a black woman: “Of course it wasn’t. The part called for a good comedian, which Lillian is. She wanted to play the part [and] we wanted to have her.”

These comments speak to Capra’s own expansive and magnanimous view of humanity. “When I see a crowd, I see a collection of free individuals: each a unique person; each a king or a queen; each a story that would fill a book; each an island of human dignity,” he once said. Of his choice of film subjects, he said, “Yes, let others make films about the grand sweeps of history. I’d make mine about the bloke that pushes the broom.”

This message is fully evident in It’s a Wonderful Life, perhaps the most literally pro-life film ever made. Its universality helps to explain why people of all backgrounds find the film accessible and appealing. When I attended the It’s a Wonderful Life Festival in Seneca Falls, N.Y., last year, I encountered people from all walks of life. A guestbook in the town’s visitor center that weekend recorded visitors from Illinois, Florida, New Jersey, South Dakota, Canada, and Wales. These and other people had all taken different paths to the film. It speaks to all of them in highly personal ways. Yet all could relate to the meaning each of them found in it.

In light of all this, one almost feels sorry for the cramped, reductive worldview evidenced by Jackson in her hypothetical, which seeks to deconstruct the universal through a crude racialist lens. Jackson’s misunderstanding of It’s a Wonderful Life reveals once again the superficiality and the insufficiency of this way of looking at the world.

Any accurate understanding of Capra’s Christmas masterpiece would reject out of hand the photoshoot in Jackson’s hypothetical. What most people in the film may or may not look like is the least important part of It’s a Wonderful Life. The legal status of a business like the one Jackson imagines becomes an afterthought when one realizes that there would almost certainly be little to no demand for the service it was offering.

Even Henry Potter could understand that.