25 hours? Before Cory Booker, there was ‘Mr. Smith’

When New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker finally said “I yield the floor” on Tuesday night at the end of the longest Senate speech on record, he had spoken for just over 25 hours.

That almost perfectly matches the time Jimmy Stewart’s title character is supposed to have spoken in Frank Capra’s 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Booker’s speech ended with him quoting his former mentor, the late Rep. John Lewis, about getting into “good trouble,” and the Senate chamber erupting in cheers.

Stewart’s ends with him quoting his mentor, fictional Sen. Joseph Payne, but ends less happily — his voice ragged, hair unkempt, eyes bleary, as he collapses to the floor in a dead faint.

Stewart, as new senator Jefferson Smith, has been arguing for nothing less than decency and the American way — arguing against “a man who controls a political machine, and controls everything else worth controlling in my state. A man even powerful enough to control congressmen.”

Asked by one of those congressmen to yield the podium, he shouts, “I will not yield.”

And he doesn’t. He keeps speaking until he can barely give voice to sentiments that were time-honored then, and that remain so today.

“There’s no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies, or compromise with human liberties,” he croaks. “Great principles don’t get lost once they come to light. They’re right here. You just have to see them again.”

The Senate wasn’t seeing them. Wasn’t listening, really. And in the film, the public didn’t even get a chance to listen because the corrupt politicians had the press in their pocket, so newspapers wouldn’t report on Mr. Smith, or if they did, they distorted what he was saying.

And still he kept going.

“I guess this is just another lost cause,” he says to his onetime mentor, Sen. Payne. Then he turns to the other senators. “All you people don’t know about lost causes,” he laments. “Mr. Payne does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for. And he fought for them once, for the only reason any man ever fights for them. Because of just one plain simple rule: Love Thy Neighbor.”

I remember learning in my seventh grade civics class about how Congress worked, but I didn’t really understand the concept of a filibuster until I saw Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

The movie played on TV when I was a kid, and it was clear to me, even then, that filmmaker Capra had made his title character both principled, and naïve. The film’s Mr. Smith is right about corruption, but by the time the bad guy’s confessing, Smith’s passed out on the Senate floor. And the film ends, not with glory for its title idealist, but with chaos, and the president of the Senate smiling smugly to himself.

Capra was no fool. He knew one man standing up against the system is just one man. The system will survive.

But the standing up — that is what audiences took to heart.

Jennifer Vanasco edited the audio and digital stories. Vincent Acovino mixed the audio.