Reel History 6: The Devil and Daniel Webster

It's 1840, we're in the midst of Jacksonian Democracy, and America is still seen as a collection of loosely unified States (they say 'the United States are rather than 'the United States is' and so forth). One man rises above to protect the innocent farmer from those who would take what's his- and that man is Daniel Webster.

Note: Some of this piece comes straight-up from a post I wrote last October; bear with me and my self-plagiarism.

It's just after Labour Day as I write this, which means that summer is done and we all just stop pretending we like the beach and let autumn, the greatest season of all, take over. There is nothing I don't like about fall- the cool weather, the leaves, the fact that football becomes bearable to watch just by virtue of the climate. It's great!


There's also this aura of spookiness that pervades everything, not only because of the impending Halloween season. Maybe it's that after the sheer brightness of summer, everything becomes a little more muted- it becomes darker sooner, the foliage starts fading, and you could almost feel ghouls and specters walking down every little path in the crisp evening air. And it's this time of year that I like to enjoy a little favourite of mine, a movie about history's greatest monster: no, not Jimmy Carter, THE DEVIL. The Devil and Daniel Webster, an oft-overlooked 1941 classic, pits one of the greatest orators of the pre-Civil War era, Daniel Webster, in a courtroom against the Devil, for the soul of one Jabez Stone.

In this movie, the Devil, or Mr. Scratch, as he is known in the tale (they dubbed the anthropomorphic Devil 'Old Scratch' in the Faustian tales of New England, tales probably influenced by German settlers to the New World), is hardly scary at all, at least from the audience's point of view (though I wouldn't want to meet him on some dirt road in the middle of the night). The Devil of The Devil and Daniel Webster hardly seems like the Biblical Satan, more like a mischievous imp whose sole purpose is to make deals with local farmers for their souls. And it's not like Jabez Stone was Job- he was angry, reluctant to go to church, and continually consarn'd it around his wife and mother, hardly a model soul.  

The Devil really let himself go

But that makes sense, I suppose: legends like the one this story is based on (the movie is based on a short story of the same name, written in 1931, which is in turn based on a story by Washington Irving written in the real time of Daniel Webster) put really small regions in the center of the universe, so it makes sense that the Devil would have the time to walk around the New Hampshire countryside, waiting for some poor sap to make the decision to sell his soul for riches and a hot Devil-mistress. And [spoilers!] Daniel Webster wins it in the end, another triumph of American ideals over the forces of evil.

The movie is great, in the It's a Wonderful Life vein but with less sap and more spook. There are many creepy scenes, like when the shadow of this pig-nosed demon is tempting Daniel Webster, or the ghoulish courtroom climax full of America's greatest villains straight from the bowels of hell. It also mythologizes a completely different time in American culture, telling a tale of a man who was good at speaking, thus making him worthy of tall tales and the public's adulation. Daniel Webster was one of the 'Great Triumvirate', three American Senators- Webster, a representative of Massachusetts, John C Calhoun of South Carolina, and Henry Clay of Kentucky, and these men are still famous for the way they dominated the Senate with their debating skills.

If you've ever been a college sophomore and read Neil Postman's Amusing Yourself to Death and went into a Huxlean, anti-cold medium state of mind, you'll know Postman extols the virtues of the Stephen Douglas-Abraham Lincoln debates, ones that went on for hours and attracted crowds from all over, and how these debates would never happen on TV, where the soundbite is king. Daniel Webster is firmly in the Lincoln-Douglas tradition (well, of course he was, he died 1852, only six years before those debates began), and pitting him against the Devil highlights just how good an orator he was considered to be- he's the best candidate to have take on the trickiest entity in the universe and it makes sense to have him win. It reflects him accordingly; his ' Second Reply to Hayne' is considered the most eloquent speech ever delivered to Congress, and the whole debate with Robert Hayne of South Carolina just kinda happened, no game plan needed.

Who would be our contemporary Daniel Webster? A politician like Barack Obama or Ron Paul? A lawyer like Johnny Cochrane? A 'newsman' like Keith Olbermann or Bill O'Reilly? Quick, think of a politician or famous lawyer (haha) you support and think about why you like him/her. Is it their speaking skills? Do we value our leaders being able to debate and defend what they believe on their feet, off the cuff, for hours at a time? Debate today belongs to the realm of Christopher Hitchens and William Lane Craig, and they now act as sideshows, when they were once the highest form of political conversation.

Back to Mr. Scratch. In New England, circa one of their Great Awakenings, it's understandable that the Devil was the scariest of all monsters, made all the scarier if you thought you could encounter him on some forest path or in the back of your barn. Like the witches of The Crucible, everyday malevolence was easier to believe in 19th Century, rural America. This story would be something you'd tell your kids to scare them straight, and the movie's strength lies in its capturing the feel of the time period. The setting was a time when unexplained phenomena could be explained convincingly with the epitome of evil. In the book Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts, author Rupert T. Gould recalls an incident in England, 1855, around the same time of The Devil and Daniel Webster, where a long series of hoof-marks were noticed criss-crossing the countryside in freshly laid snow. In a newspaper article, "Richard Owen" recounts:

The superstitious go so far as to believe that they are the marks of Satan himself; and that great excitement has been produced among all classes may be judged from the fact that the subject has been decanted from the pulpit.

These days, even the most religious attribute Satan to far subtler activities, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks the Devil or his demons will take the form of a human to outright trick you out of your soul. But this was the belief of the times- not only among popular, back country folklore, but among the preachers and teachers, the ones who held the most influential opinions.

NEXT WEEK: Leading up to the Civil War, looking at slave culture and how people- both real (Amistad) and fictional (Django Unchained)- fought back.