JAMES STEWART: TWO SIDES OF INNOCENCE

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..."