The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941)
In pitting the celebrated nineteenth-century politician against the devil himself, this film reimagines the economic and legal transformations of that era through the prism of the New Deal.
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This post is part of the ‘Rewound’ series of analyses of objects or episodes from cultural and political history.
Content warning: Slavery; Ethnic cleansing of indigenous Americans; Violence against children.
Spoiler alert: This analysis of the film The Devil and Daniel Webster and its themes reveals plot details for the purpose of enhancing that analysis.
The Devil and Daniel Webster commences in the small New Hampshire town of Cross Corners in 1840. Jabez Stone (James Craig) is a simple and plain-speaking young farmer, who lives with his adoring wife Mary (Anne Shirley) and God-fearing widow mother (Jane Darwell). He and several other local farmers are badly in debt to moneylender Miser Stevens (John Qualen). They put their hope in the (real-life nineteenth-century politician) Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold), a champion of the poor farmers’ cause, and a longstanding friend of Mary’s family. Jabez is also approached by the other farmers about joining them in forming a grange, a fraternal organisation to protect themselves against exploitation.
However, a series of misfortunes prompts Jabez to declare his willingness to sell his soul to the devil for financial gain. Immediately, Mr Scratch (Walter Huston) appears and introduces himself to Jabez, explaining that he can promise him seven years of good fortune in exchange for his soul. Jabez signs the contract, and Scratch burns the date ‘7 April 1847’, when he will come to collect his debt, into a nearby tree. He reveals to Jabez that there is a hoard of gold coins, formerly belonging to Hessian soldiers, buried beneath his barn.
Jabez initially puts his newfound riches to good cause, paying off his debt to Stevens, and acquiring new equipment for his own farm, and grain for his farmer friends. When Webster comes to Cross Corners, himself dogged by Scratch’s efforts to tempt and mislead him, Jabez gives a rousing speech on his behalf. Mary later becomes pregnant, and Jabez, mindful of his looming fate, seeks to cut down the tree. Scratch appears and warns him against breaching his contract. He sends a storm which ruins the land of all the other farmers except Jabez, who offers to employ his now destitute friends to help harvest his own crops, on what turn out to be extremely poor terms.
Mary gives birth to a boy, whom they name Daniel, after Webster, who is also to be the child’s godfather. However, Scratch sends his beautiful minion Belle (Simone Simon) to serve as maid to the family, and Jabez becomes besotted with her, driving a wedge between Mary and himself. Belle spoils young Daniel (Lindy Wade), who becomes spiteful and cruel, including to his own mother. Jabez, meanwhile, is ever more consumed by greed and conspicuous display of his wealth, building a huge mansion for himself, while Mary and Ma Stone remain estranged from him in the old farmhouse. In desperation, Mary visits Daniel Webster and persuades him to investigate the situation.
Jabez holds a ball at his mansion, but none of his old friends and associates come, except for Miser Stevens, who subsequently dies after dancing with Belle; it turns out he too was in hock to Scratch, who has come for his soul. Scratch offers Jabez a deal: he will let him keep his soul, in exchange for that of his son. Instead Jabez, remorseful and ashamed of his conduct, turns to Webster for his help. Webster argues that, as an American, Jabez is entitled to a fair trial. Scratch accedes to this request, but subsequently summons a jury of men notorious for treachery and other gross misdeeds, including the pirate William Kidd, and Benedict Arnold, who had defected to fight for the British during the War. Presiding over the trial is Justice John Hathorne (H. B. Warner), who had been an infamous magistrate during the Salem witch trials of the 1690s.
The case seems hopeless, but Webster gives a stirring defence of Jabez, appealing to the jurors to remember how they too had been tempted by the devil into the betrayal of their country and the sacrifice of their freedom. The jury decides in Jabez’s favour, the foreman tearing up the contract, and Webster ejects Scratch, who warns the Senator that he will never make President. When morning comes, Jabez’s mansion has mysteriously burned down, and he, his family, Webster, and the other farmers with whom he is now also reconciled, sit down to breakfast. The film finishes with Scratch, flicking through his book of potential clients, before pointing mischievously at the viewer.
The Stones, farming, and New England
The Stone family epitomise a vision of an authentic America rooted in antebellum New England, an historical version of the nation as white pioneers, in an era of westward expansion, but untainted by association with slavery. Jabez is focused above all on sustaining his farm as a living entity. He baulks at the prospect of having to present Miser Stevens with a bag of seed as a means of payment, explaining to his wife ‘To me, seed isn’t a thing to pay debts with. It’s alive, more alive than anything.’ He is concerned with social as well as agricultural reproduction, desiring of a male heir whom the farm might be passed down to as it was to him.
This type of agrarian masculinity is complemented by the almost angel-like Mary: always good natured, utterly selfless, refusing to judge Jabez even as his character changes for the worse. Ma Stone, meanwhile, functions as the family’s conscience, but also grounds her religiosity in fiercely local terms. ‘I never did care much for Job, even if he is scripture,’ she tells Mary. ‘Took on too much. Of course I don’t want to malign the man, but he always sounded to me like he come from Massachusetts.’ The family name itself suggests plainness and durability. Jabez’s forename, meanwhile, recalls a figure from The Books of Chronicles:
And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, Oh that thou wouldest bless me indeed, and enlarge my coast, and that thine hand might be with me, and that thou wouldest keep me from evil, that it may not grieve me! And God granted him that which he requested.1
The Stones stand in for a broader republican social and political vision: a preindustrial nation of individual, independent farming families, tilling the modest plot of land that providence has granted them with. The morality of this way of life is deliberately contrasted with the usury practiced by Stevens, which would render autonomous American men as perennial debtors, but also with Jabez’s later pursuit of accumulation and accompanying reduction of other farmers into wage earners. Held up as an alternative to these forms of domination is the neighbourly, egalitarian model of the grange, whereby the risks arising from economic change are shouldered collectively.
The devil, wealth, and contract law
The world the Stones inhabit, however, is one that is rapidly changing, where the growth of commerce destabilises traditional social, economic, and legal relations. During the Antebellum period, the practice of contract law increasingly shifted away from notions of fairness in agreements towards an emphasis on the liberty of individuals to enter into contracts on terms they agreed and their responsibility to honour those terms. This was accepted as necessary to promote economic progress, even if it reinforced and widened inequalities between contracting parties.2
Jabez does not enter into the contractual agreement with Mr Scratch on an equitable basis; it is an agreement with a malign and powerful figure driven by desperation, and yet it is binding. It is diabolical, being a device intended to bring about man’s ruination through temptation; to use the promise of relief from suffering to inflict more suffering in the long run; to compel him to sacrifice that which he has that is of immeasurable material value in exchange for that which he does not have but the worth of which can be quantified. And Jabez’s contract with the devil, and Miser Stevens’s too, are what lead them to set the terms of subsequent contracts that likewise coerce men to cede that which is alive or inalienable – their crop or livestock, their freedom to labour on their own lands rather than another man’s – in return for money.
The gold that Mr Scratch presents to Jabez belonged to the Hessians, the German auxiliaries who served on the British side in the Revolutionary War, and were popularly detested on the American side as barbaric mercenaries. The foreignness and rootlessness of sources of temptation is also encapsulated by Belle, who stands for woman’s capacity to destroy men through their lust just as Mary stands for their capacity to save them through love. At one point, she sits with Jabez and his friends as they gamble on a Sunday morning (while Ma Stone and Mary are at Church); when one of the players asks her if she is French, she laughingly replies ‘I’m not anything’.3
Later, however, when Daniel Webster appeals to Mr Scratch that ‘Mr Stone is an American citizen, and an American citizen cannot be forced into the service of a foreign prince’, Scratch insists on his own legitimate claim to Americanness:
When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on the deck. Am I not still spoken of in every church in New England? [Chuckles] It’s true, the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I’m neither. Tell the truth, Mr Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in the country than yours.
The speech nods at the original sins baked into American nationhood, and how they have now been visited upon Jabez Stone: swindled out of that which was his like the indigenous Americans; treated as the property of another like enslaved Africans. Yet while it references these evils, it presents them as all the more salient for being inflicted upon a white New England small farmer, that which epitomises the ideal, republican America.
Daniel Webster and American history
Webster seeks to break poor farmers from their shackles by advocating for special protections in a forthcoming bankruptcy bill. We hear Jabez Stone and other farmers reading out the words of his speech with admiring wonder:
The insolvent farmers cannot even come to the seat of their Government to present their cases to Congress – so great is their fear that some creditor will arrest them in some intervening state. We talk much and talk warmly of political liberty, but who can enjoy political liberty if he is deprived permanently of personal liberty? To those unfortunate individuals doomed to the everlasting bondage of debt, what is it that we have free institutions of Government? And if the final vote shall leave thousands of our fellow citizens and their families in hopeless distress, can we – members of the Government – go to our beds with a clear conscience, can we, without self-reproach, supplicate the Almighty mercy to forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors?
As the farmers note, Webster is himself a New Hampshire-born farmer. He is also a lawyer as well as a lawmaker. This combination is a significant one: as a politician, he is a representative of the perceived authentic historical America, and he is an advocate for them – both collectively in Congress, and individually when he represents Jabez in his trial. He is also a father-figure, to Jabez and Mary, but also to his young godson and namesake, who undergoes a change in behaviour after being spanked by Webster for being cruel to animals – an act, it is implied, Jabez himself had been too distracted to administer. Mr Scratch seeks likewise to lure him from the path of righteousness, trying to dissuade him from making his speech with the prophetic warning that he will never make President if he does – but to no avail.
In its claiming of Webster as an historical and mythological figure, The Devil and Daniel Webster reinterprets American politico-legal history from a New Deal-era perspective. That is, it pits him against the changing economic order of the mid-nineteenth century, a lack of legal opposition to which was justified as being in line with the intentions of the country’s founders, as part of the wider development of the developing doctrine of legal classicism.4 Webster stands in the film for the recognition of the limits to economic liberty and importance of state intervention for preserving the rights and freedoms of individuals.
Later in the film, explaining to young Daniel why he does not hurry his horses more, Webster says:
They are good old friends of mine. I call ‘em Constitution and Bill of Rights, the most dependable pair for long journeys. I’ve got one called Missouri Compromise, too, and then there’s a Supreme Court – fine, dignified horse, though you do have to push him now and then.5
The references paint Webster as a unifier with an organic vision of the American political settlement, but also typify the way progressives of the 1930s and 1940s drew upon the constitutional order to legitimise a quite radical change in approach to government.6 He is above all a patriot, with a holistic and historical view of the nation, who speaks glowingly of westward expansion and normatively of settler colonialism – at one point he says of Jabez and himself, ‘If two New Hampshire men aren’t a match for the devil, we’d better give this country back to the Indians’ – as well as disparagingly of parochialism and secessionism.
Jabez’s trial and national redemption
Mr Scratch’s remarks about the inherent Americanness of himself and the evils he represents are a powerful rejoinder to Webster’s optimistic patriotism, enhanced by Walter Huston’s mischievously charismatic performance.7 When Webster demands Jabez have a trial with an American jury, Mr Scratch obliges; as he says of them, ‘Dastard, liar, traitor, knave – Americans all.’ In what is clearly a sham proceedings, rigged against the defendant, whom he is not even permitted to cross-examine, Webster must appeal directly to the conscience, experience, and empathy of the twelve wretched jurors. He begins by recognising their very Americanness:
Oh, what a heritage you were born to share! Gentlemen of the jury, I envy you! For you were there at the birth of a mighty Union. It was given to you to hear those first cries of pain – and to behold the shining babe that was born of blood and tears.
He says that Jabez, like them, had rebelled against his fate, found himself at a crossroads and taken a wrong turn, but had realised his mistake and ought to have an opportunity to right it. He speaks of the loss of their souls to the devil as the loss of their freedom, which was born of the struggle to settle America and build a nation there – ‘we have planted freedom here in this earth like wheat’. He urges them to take Jabez’s side against their shared oppressor.
Let Jabez Stone keep his soul – this soul which doesn’t belong to him alone, which belongs to his son, his family, his country. Gentlemen of the jury – don’t let this country go to the devil! Free Jabez Stone! God save the United States and the men who have made her free!
This is the vision of America with which Webster wins the case, in which individual liberty is both related to and subsumed by the freedom and welfare of the collective, in which the economic bonds of contract are cast aside for the spiritual bonds of a national community. It is rendered tangible in the antebellum New England town romanticised in the film, and in the grange that Jabez belatedly agrees to join, a precursor for the America and the New Deal of a century later.
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1 Chronicles 4:10 (King James Version).
William Wiecek, The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886–1937 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 47–48.
Simone Simon, who played the role of Belle, was indeed French.
See Harry N. Scheiber, ‘Original Intent, History, and Doctrine: The Constitution and Economic Liberty’, American Economic Review, Vol. 78, No. 2 (1988), pp. 140–144.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Missouri to join the Union as a slave state alongside Maine joining as a free state, while otherwise prohibiting the expansion of slavery north of the 36°30’ parallel, averting a civil war for the time being. The reference to the Supreme Court needing to be occasionally pushed is likely a nod to the way it had only belatedly acquiesced to the New Deal agenda amid heavy political pressure.
John W. Wertheimer, ‘‘Switch in Time’ beyond the Nine: Historical Memory and the Constitutional Revolution of the 1930s’, Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 53 (2010), pp. 3–34.
Huston earned a ‘Best Actor’ award nomination at the 1942 Oscars for the role.