You, the People (MGM, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Sunday, March 31) my husband Charles and I had watched an intriguing 20-minute short on Turner Classic Movies called You, the People, a 1940 “Crime Does Not Pay” series entry, directed by Roy Rowland from a script by Douglas Foster, in which an actor, Robert Elliott, introduces the film by representing himself as an attorney general from a (not specified, and probably fictitious) Midwestern state. (For some reason screenwriter Foster named this character “Edward Gibbon,” after the famous author who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) He announces that the crime it’s going to deal with is election fraud, and specifically the attempt by political machine boss Bailey (C. Henry Gordon) and his stooge, Mayor James Wheelock (Paul Everett), to stay in power against the challenge of a reform candidate, Frank Y. Carter (John Hamilton). I suspect the writer had Tom Prendergast’s legendarily corrupt machine in Kansas City, Missouri in mind. Among Bailey’s tactics are extorting campaign contributions from city employees as well as small businesspeople by threatening them if they don’t comply (telling city workers who don’t contribute they’ll be fired and making the familiar “protection racket” threats against the business owners); forging fake ballots with votes for Wheelock already pre-cast; starting rumors that Carter is himself as corrupt and machine-controlled as Wheelock to drive down turnout overall; and, when all else fails, literally setting fire to the ballots and the warehouse containing them so they can’t be checked for authenticity and inspected for the minute details of difference between the phony ballots and the real ones.

You, the People suffers, like so many other films of its time, from the fact that classic Hollywood knew only one way to depict urban evil: the corrupt political bosses in this short act the same ways the gangsters had acted in 1930’s movies, the Nazi Fifth Columnists would in the 1940’s, and the equally malevolent (if not more so) Communists in the early-1950’s films that enjoyed a brief vogue as Hollywood tried to suck up to the House Un-American Activities Committee by making them. But seen today it’s a chilling reminder of how relatively easy it was – and still is – to rig elections. It’s also a timely depiction of how often both sides in an American election claim “Fraud!” whenever they lose. Donald Trump and his minions made up an elaborate set of phony claims after Joe Biden beat him in 2020; that Trump actually won in a landslide, which he didn’t. Trump’s masses rallied to his call to “Stop the Steal!” and staged a riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to stop Biden from being formally elected as President by any means necessary, including violence. The Biden administration slowly and reluctantly tried to prosecute at least some of the rioters; Trump gave them all a blanket pardon when he regained the Presidency, creating a cadre of people who’d already shown a willingness to commit political violence on his behalf and many of whom went on social media to boast about their willingness to do it again. This is one reason why there’s been so little resistance to Trump’s agenda among Republican officeholders; either they’re on board with Trump’s anti-democratic “MAGA” agenda or they’re in fear for their own or their families’ lives if they stand up to him. And it’s not just the Republicans who try to sow distrust in the outcomes of elections that go against them; in both 2004 and 2024 – the only Presidential elections since 1988 in which Republicans have won pluralities of the popular vote – Democrats have tried to explain away their losses with the same kinds of statistical B.S. Republicans used in 2020.