TWO SIDES OF INNOCENCE

By GARRY WILLS

Early in this century, the humorist Stephen Leacock said the American innocent must prove his folksy virtue by being semi-inarticulate, mouthing things like "Heck, b'gosh, b'gum, yuck, yuck." That is why Jimmy Stewart's hesitating-gulpy delivery was reassuring. His appeal went so deep because it touched America's belief in its own simplicity. When Mark Twain wanted to present himself as a traveling American, he called his tourist book The Innocents Abroad.

America is the New World. What it has to offer the jaded Old World is its fresh eye and unspoiled candor. When Stewart goes to Washington as Mr. Smith, a band of amused journalists ask him what he knows about governmental procedure or the passing of bills. His answer: "I don't pretend to know." And that too is a guarantee of virtue. Mr. Smith's first name is Jefferson, after the man who said that a plowman is wiser than a professor when it comes to essential things.

Stewart's appeal was the polar opposite of Cary Grant's suave cosmopolitanism or Clark Gable's rough self-assurance. Their glamour had an edge of danger to it. Theirs was a knowing wink. Stewart was safe because unknowing. He was the innocent at home.

The frontier myth, in one of its aspects, denied original sin. Sin is not original but cumulative. The origins are pure. Nature is sinless, before an overlay of mounting compromises and concessions induces a weary cynicism. Even Mr. Smith's fallen idol, the worldly Senator Paine (Claude Rains), was unsullied before he breathed in the big-city corruptions of Washington.

In keeping with the age-old idea of America as the New World (we are hoary with youth), Stewart was, in the roles that most gripped the public, a kind of child-man, a Harry Langdon with sex appeal. Even the sexiness brought out a mothering instinct in women. He was their poet, who had to be protected from insensitive brutes.

Nothing could be more American in its innocence than Mr. Smith Goes to Washington--though many called it un-American when it came out. Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune launched a crusade against it. Joseph P. Kennedy, writing to the studio from his diplomatic post at the Court of St. James's, said releasing it abroad would do "inestimable harm to American prestige." Senate majority leader Alben Barkley called it a disgraceful attack on the U.S. Senate. Imagine the furor if any of them had known that a man still active in the Communist Party, Sidney Buchman, had written the screenplay for Mr. Smith.

The movie's only problem is that it is too American, too comfortably nested in our native illusions. The glorification of the amateur and contempt for the professional are as old as Jefferson and as new as the push for term limits. Jefferson Smith, with his army of Boy Rangers, must be Ross Perot's favorite daydream. Militiamen and others who suspect the government and all "elites" of conspiracy or collusion will find confirmation of their views here. A whole race of phonies can be undone by one "genuine" American. "And a little child shall lead them..."

As Graham Greene often argued, innocence is like all other illusions, pleasant but dangerous. Children are not innocent. No one is innocent. Thinking that one is defies reality. Pyle, in Greene's The Quiet American, says innocents should wear little bells, like lepers, to warn others they are coming. He had in mind the Americans who thought we could succeed in Vietnam where the French, despite many years of knowledge about Indochinese culture, language and religion, had failed. That knowledge was Old World knowledge, compromising and corrupt. Like Jefferson Smith, we "did not pretend to know." But we brought clean hands. We were not like other nations. We free, we do not colonize. We give, we do not take. We are the original sinless. But the clean hands were those of Lieut. William Calley.

It is hard to imagine Stewart's innocence as dangerous. The magic moments I treasure most are when his throaty hesitations are melted in a murmur of tenderness--the defensive and rigid store clerk of The Shop Around the Corner confessing his love for Margaret Sullavan, the small-time banker whispering "Mary" over and over while Donna Reed is on the telephone with another man.

But there were other sides to the Stewart performances. He is most often thought of as the sentimental avatar of "Capracorn," though he made only three pictures with Frank Capra. He made only four films with Hitchcock. But he made eight with Anthony Mann, more than with any other director, and five of those were westerns with a cynical edge that anticipated the "dark" westerns of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. These appeared in the 1950s, when American innocence was challenged and betrayed by a worldwide conspiracy, by a treason of the knowing and elite, when even Stewart had to show a retaliating bitterness.

In these movies, Stewart's charm is of no avail. He is put-upon and victimized. In The Man from Laramie, his brother is killed, his wagon burned, his mules slaughtered. He is lassoed and dragged through a campfire. His right hand is held down while a sadist shoots a bullet through it. His aw-shucks tentativeness turns to high-pitched sputterings. His thin frame is shaken with the outsize energies of hysteria.

For all his tenderness, there was a hint of the violent in Stewart's innocence. His first reaction to ridicule as Mr. Smith is to hunt reporters down and punch them out--until Jean Arthur's hardbought worldly wisdom is put at his service. The innocent is not good with words, so fists must serve--as Stewart shows when he tries to taunt the glib C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) into fighting him in The Philadelphia Story. Even saintly George Bailey terrorizes his own children before rushing out to do violence to himself.

Mann channeled these earlier minor eruptions into great cleansing explosions. In The Naked Spur, Stewart is a bounty hunter who is shot, rolled down a rocky cliff, betrayed by partners, tortured by fever into screaming delirium. He uses the spur of the title to dig handholds up a sheer cliff, then embeds it in the face of his prisoner (Robert Ryan). Some fans of Stewart the gentle child-man do not like to see him become a snarling avenger. But that is what happens when the sense of one's own virtue is affronted. American innocence fairly begs to be violated. Then it kills.

Garry Wills is the author of John Wayne's America.