We Need Spencer Tracy

On the Absence of Moral Authority

“That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you,”

—the last words of Renee Nicole Good

This has been a rough week. I’m packing up 50 years of books and memories, and watching the news…and thinking how different this America is from the one in which I grew up. I came to consciousness in the late 1950’s and my sensibility was formed on the center left. Clarence Darrow, the lawyer who defended trade unionists and mentally ill murderers and who heroically dismantled William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, was my hero. I read and was moved by Howard Fast’s novels of social justice, and John Steinbeck’s, too. I was stirred toward rebellion by rock and folk music, and movie stars like Marlon Brando, who uttered the line of the decade in the movie, The Wild One. He led a motorcycle gang. An authority figure asks him, what are you rebelling against?

“What you got?” Brando replies.

Reality was black and white back then, at least in the movies. The serious social dramas—as opposed to the musicals and comedies—were black and white, which was really a palette of grays. As often as not, the movies that moved my soul were produced or directed by Stanley Kramer—The Wild One, On the Beach (about nuclear war), The Defiant Ones (starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as prisoners shackled to each other and on the run)—or Elia Kazan and Richard Brooks. Elmer Gantry—directed by Brooks—was in color and spectacular, starring Burt Lancaster as the classic American religious con man.

These films, as well as others like On the Waterfront and West Side Story had a similar subtext, as we emerged from the McCarthy period: truth and justice were the American way; equality, especially racial equality, was the American way. Bullying was not. We could all get along here.

At the top of this pyramid of decency was the actor Spencer Tracy. He played Clarence Darrow in Inherit the Wind, which I rewatched (for the umpteenth time) last year. And he played the lead American jurist in Judgment at Nuremberg, which I rewatched this past week. Tracy was not your conventional movie star. He wasn’t Cary Grant handsome. He was crusty, wrinkled—you could see he’d lived it hard—and only came into his full power in old age, white-haired, shuffling, with a gravelly voice and a deep moral presence.

I suppose that if Tracy had been cast for a role in this past week’s events, he would have played Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a flawed and all too human character. Walz, who allowed massive welfare fraud to take place on his watch, has, in other circumstances, cosplayed Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life. But he was calm and decency personified after the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE officer in Minneapolis on Monday.

There were characters in the Minnesota drama, however, who would have been entirely unfamiliar to me back in the black-and-white days. They were the technicolor villains of the Trump Administration, who cast judgment and aspersions against Renee Good—she was a domestic terrorist who rammed her car into the ICE officer—before the actual facts became known. They told lies, baldly, with the most evil intent. The most basic fact: Good did not run over Ross; at worst, she brushed past him trying (foolishly) to escape in a panic. We have never seen a character like the collagen cowgirl Kristi Noem, with her flagrant hats and lip gloss, a true post-modern American horror (Stanley Kubrick might have imagined her). One could see a hard-edged bad guy like Richard Widmark playing the try-too-hard conspiracist J.D. Vance, blaming it all on the media. I don’t know who could play endlessly invidious Donald Trump, the greatest liar in American history. We have never seen anything like him before.

The killing in Minneapolis is a complicated story. Renee Good and her more militant spouse, Rebecca, shouldn’t have been where they were. Once stopped, they shouldn’t have tried to get away. They were, in fact, useful idiots—exactly where the Trump Administration wanted them, harassing the ICE thugs. There is also no way a properly managed police agency would allow an officer, Jonathan Ross, badly wounded in a similar traumatic confrontation six months ago, to be allowed back on the street with a gun so soon. (Ross had been dragged 100 yards by a car driven by an illegal immigrant criminal; the worst wounds were no doubt psychological.) You could feel his panic now, facing a similar situation. Similar, but very different. He fired at Renee Good three times after she said sweetly, ““That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” Her last words. This was, at once, a tragedy that never should have happened…and an inevitable—perhaps even desired—result of Trump Administration policies.

Good and the ICE officer Ross are bit players in a terrible national scandal. The scandal is the Trump’s ongoing desire to aggrandize his power by provoking a Reichstag Fire situation—a phony conflagration that would implicate the Left and provide an excuse for a national crackdown (as Hitler did four weeks after he came to power). I am not saying Trump is Hitler; I am not saying he will overturn our democracy, although he tried in 2020. But his is an endless quest for power—and, as we’ve seen in actions like Venezuela, he doesn’t have a long-term event horizon; he plays it by ear and by gut. We can speculate why Trump has been so intent on this path, so intent on implicating a pathetically weak and foolish left, so eager to assume authoritarian powers…but even that speculation plays into his hands. He has outplayed his opponents and the media, mostly by being more brazen than any other politician in American history. He can still be stopped, but the only forces that can bloc him most credibly now are his own: decent Republicans—some of whom look and pretend to act like Spencer Tracy—who stand up and say, that’s enough! We didn’t sign on for this. Their numbers are increasing in Congress, but a massive Epstein Files level rebellion is needed now.

Several other thoughts come to mind. There are many different Americas, but two stand out here. There is a gypsy America, and Renee Good was part of it—drifting from town to town, from identity to identity, married to two men and then a woman, experimenting with life, trying to find a comfortable place—this is an identity as old and as essential to the American character as Daniel Boone. The other America is stolid, rock-ribbed; it plants roots, settles on the land. It becomes encased in a rather strict notion of propriety. It demands order. It used to be your family doctor, your kids’ teachers, the mailman; it is on the wane now, which has caused great fear and apprehension in the middle class, exacerbated by the gypsy-celebrating nature of popular culture.

There is osmosis between the two. Gypsies settle down, eventually; solid citizens let their freak flags fly—the lure of the road is eternal in America. And so is the friction between these two camps. It is the job of leadership to understand that both are integral to who we are, that American brilliance comes from gypsy Steve Jobs’ garage and the stolid Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop. Donald Trump does not understand or even care about this. Far worse, he slices and dices it, inflames it, for his own advantage.

Spencer Tracy had purchase in both gypsy and stolid America. He played the plain-spoken idealist, our favorite image of ourselves. At the end of Inherit the Wind, he walks out of the courtroom with both The Bible and The Origin of Species under his arm. More to the point is his final soliloquy in Judgment at Nuremberg—a legendary bit of film-making, done in one take—in which he sentences the Nazi Judges, who claimed they were just following orders, to life in prison.

There is a coda. The most distinguished judge is—of course—Burt Lancaster, a reluctant supporter of the regime, appalled by Hitler. He tells Spencer Tracey that he had no idea the Nazis were slaughtering millions, he would never have been part of it. Tracy, who was great at avuncular, is the opposite now. He is rock-hard righteous: The moment you sentenced the first person to death whom you knew was innocent, you were guilty.

Innocent people are being rounded up in the streets of America now. One was killed last week. Too many of our fellow citizens are okay with this. But they don’t even have the “Good” Nazis’ excuse: they know it’s happening. They see it on tv every night. Their tolerance for this brutality is making our country, palpably, a place it never was before. It is becoming the sort of country that people used to flee……to come to America.