Halloween Reflections: The Devil and Daniel Webster & Modern America

 

It is the spooky season again! I love this time of year, not because I am a fan of horror - I am not! - but because I've always considered Halloween to be the antechamber to the Big Holidays, i.e., Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's; it is a time that stirs my increasingly languid blood. 

Despite not being a fan of the horror genre, I do use this time of year to watch a select few scary movies. This year, I revisited a classic of American cinema, The Devil and Daniel Webster (aka All That Money Can Buy.  Yuck, I know. Who came up with that slop of a title?). 

I first encountered the film in elementary school. Like many educational films of the era, it was wheeled into the classroom on a television cart carrying a massive box of a standard-definition television that probably weighed two tons (I can still see the beads of sweat on my teacher's brow as she wheeled it into position!), and shown to students who probably paid more attention to lunch than to the moral lessons unfolding on the screen. Yet someone, somewhere, thought this tale of temptation, character, and citizenship important enough to present to children. Looking back nearly fifty years later, I think they made the right call.

The Devil and Daniel Webster (henceforth, I will use the only acceptable title) is a movie about a hardscrabble farmer who makes a Faustian deal with the devil to save his farm.  Indeed, The Devil and Daniel Webster is just that: an Americanized retelling of the classic moral tale made famous by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, as well as elements of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. Directed by William Dieterle, the tale focuses on one Jabez Stone, a New Hampshirian farmer who has had nothing but a string of bad fortune, one that threatens to have him lose his beloved farm.  In steps Mr. Scratch, an affable if foreboding figure who offers Stone a contract where - and stop me if you've heard this one before - in exchange for his soul, Stone would enjoy seven years of wealth. A desperate Stone, despite fleeting misgivings, agrees and signs the contract.  Ultimately, he gets precisely what he bargained for - years of unprecedented wealth but, much to his surprise, not happiness. While the money flows, he loses everything else, from his friends to his happy marriage. 

It is only then that he realizes what a fool he was, and he turns to the titular Daniel Webster. While often forgotten these days (more on that later), Webster was a famed lawyer and senator from New Hampshire renowned for his remarkable debating skills. Webster, both out of friendship and his own lifelong battle with Scratch's temptations,  agrees to argue the case of what I suspected would have been called Stone v. Satan in a desperate gamble to invalidate the contract and save Stone's soul.  I won't spoil the ending here, albeit I suspect most people know how it concludes from the countless versions and parodies of this classic tale told over the seventy-nine years(!) since this movie was made.  

William Dieterle's movie is not just a masterpiece of storytelling; it is also a damn fine example of what cinema can be.  Adapted from a tale by Stephen Vincent Benét, Dieterle's production is a stylish example of cinematic surrealism. Utilizing lush painterly backdrops that emphasize both the fantastic and the spooky, The Devil and Daniel Webster reminded me of yet another example of classic surrealist storybook cinema, The Night of the Hunter (sadly, more people are familiar with the "good" and "evil" tattooed knuckles of Robert Mitchum than the movie itself). Dieterle would use those gorgeous backdrops with the low-key, noirish lighting of Joseph August to sell the fable with an immersive style. And, needless to say, the acting was top-notch, with Edward Arnold's sympathetically stupid Stone and Walter Huston's strangely (yet suitably!) enticing Scratch, as well as Jane Darwell's earthily pragmatic anti-Scratch, Ma Stone, forming a cast that sizzles with frictional world views. Simply put, The Devil and Daniel Webster is a masterstroke of both cinema and moral storytelling.

When the movie ended, the teacher did the expected discussion of the movie's themes, which left me bored and doodling on my lunchbox because...duh! Who didn't know that bargaining with the Father of Lies would always blow up in your face? It all seemed painfully obvious to my eleven-year-old brain. Can I go to lunch now?

Despite my boredom at the time, the movie persisted in my memory over the decades. I suspect it was because my fresh young brain, one not yet pickled by years of martinis, recognized that something important had just unfolded before it. A vital moral lesson had been brought to life through cinema, and some part of me understood it was worth remembering.

👹👹👹👹👹

Recently, I've been thinking a great deal about that movie and its timeless warning that no one can profit from an agreement forged by both Hades' heat and the hammerblows of Mephistopheles' mallet. As I wrote when I discussed another movie for our times, Pascal Laugier's Martyrs, the scales have fallen from my eyes, and I am horrified by what I see in the world around me. Whatever naivete I somehow managed to cling to well into middle age has finally yielded to a sobering truth: People of all classes are knowingly making deals with the devil all the time in the modern world. And, in each case, they think they will get what they want, only to learn, as Stone did, that only fools negotiate with the devil.

Take Benjamin Netanyahu, for example. Facing serious corruption charges and fighting for his political life, he manipulated America's own morally compromised leader, Donald Trump, into joining his desperate war against Iran in a bid to cement Israel as the undisputed hegemon of the region, as well as delaying his possible prosecution. (The irony that Iran has long referred to America and Israel as the greater and lesser Satans should not be overlooked in the context of this essay for obvious reasons!) Yet much like Jabez Stone, the bargain did not unfold as promised. While Netanyahu got his war, instead of collapsing, Iran absorbed body blow after body blow and emerged from a two-on-one fight bloodied but unbroken. While no one can know what lies ahead until Minerva's owl finally takes flight, many geo-strategists now speculate that Iran's survival may ultimately prove a strategic victory in itself. By enduring attacks from two far stronger powers, Tehran can plausibly claim not only resilience but resistance. Netanyahu sought regional dominance. Instead, he may have strengthened the very rival he hoped to break. Like Stone before him, he received precisely what he bargained for, only to discover that the price may prove far greater than anticipated.

The pattern doesn't stop with Israel. One could say the exact same for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. MBS—famously dubbed "Bone Saw" for his role in the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—likewise believed he could leverage a deal with the Trump administration to establish Saudi Arabia as the unrivaled leader of the Islamic world by also waging war with Iran and its Houthi proxies. Instead, he learned the age-old lesson: Ol’ Scratch always wins. The reality of his bargain manifested in Iranian and Houthi drones and missiles thrashing Saudi oil infrastructure and choking off critical transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Where is the regional supremacy? Gone. And the cost? Quite possibly the long-term stability of the Kingdom itself.

👹👹👹👹👹

Some might argue that ever since Machiavelli published The Prince and dedicated it to the devil (Niccolò wasn't even attempting to hide his willingness to enter into an infernal contract!), geopolitics has been a series of endless Faustian bargains.  But what about domestic politics? Specifically, what about the American people who will be voting again in less than a week? Has America, a land that once proclaimed that it was Winthrop's "shining city on a hill," succumbed to the temptations of Abaddon? 

The answer is an obvious "yes," and it is not even a recent occurrence. There is a remarkable scene in The Devil and Daniel Webster where Webster questions whether Satan's contract has any legal standing in America because, as Webster argues, the devil is a foreigner, thereby making the infernal trial invalid. After all, Stone, as a United States citizen, can only be tried in an American court of law and not in a foreign court. 

Scratch makes a startlingly blunt counterargument:

Foreign? Who calls me a foreigner?... 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? 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.

It is a chilling moment of candor for a film made in a time when such hard truths were not often well received by an audience more accustomed to performative flag-waving. 

Reflecting on that revelation that the devil might be more American than apple pie, my mind flashed back to Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024. Seeing 49% of the voting public hand the keys of the free world back to a man convicted of thirty-four felonies in relation to his extramarital affair with a porn star was a stark reminder of how willingly millions strike a deal with Scratch. From civil liability for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll to the theft and reckless handling of classified secrets, and the botched handling of a global pandemic, his record of corruption and incompetence was plain for all to see. Even after he attempted to steal an election by endeavoring to overthrow the US government with the January 6th insurrection, something that left over one hundred and forty law enforcement officers injured (and would later see Trump pardon those very insurrectionists!), America shrugged—exchanging its moral baseline for a hollow promise of prosperity and power.

Ironically, unlike Stone—who, if nothing else, did get his seven years of power from Scratch—the American public received nothing in return for their signatures except staggering oligarchic corruption, skyrocketing energy prices, soaring grocery bills, deeper national debt, and a foreign war spinning out of control. The reason is simple: while Trump might posture like an orange devil, he doesn't actually wield infernal power. He is merely a flim-flam artist, wearing a dime-store Halloween devil costume, promising the world but unable to deliver a thing. It didn't matter, and he won the election. The only open question is whether he won because he was cosplaying as Scratch or despite it? 

"We are on our way to hell," one disaffected Trump voter recently observed of the nation's dismal trajectory.  An interesting choice of words, that.  They are also entirely accurate. It is worth recalling that back in February, Pam Bondi, then Attorney General for Trump, engaged in a hostile exchange on Capitol Hill. When asked why she refused to seek justice for the victims of the demonic Jeffrey Epstein, her fiery response was that America shouldn't dwell on the infamous Epstein files while Wall Street was booming. Audible gasps filled the gallery. Bondi had made it transparent who the administration really worked for, shocking many in attendance. Personally, I was puzzled by their reaction—after all, that was the exact bargain the American people had ratified with their vote.

👹👹👹👹👹

One of my favorite trip-hop tracks is Massive Attack's Paradise Circus, largely because its refrain captures a profound truth about human nature:

Oh well, the devil makes us sin

But we like it when we're spinning

Whether applied to nation-states or individuals, Scratch’s contract is constantly peddled to those desperate enough to sign away everything for pennies on the dollar. It is playing out on the global stage, on the national stage, and in our personal lives. And it always succeeds for the exact same reason: signing away our principles for immediate relief feels so damn good in the moment. But just like drinking a quart of gin might sound like a fantastic idea at 1:00 AM, the morning reality is something quite different. The hangover is inevitable—and devastating. Yet we convince ourselves that the reckoning is a distant buzzkill, something for tomorrow to worry about. For now, we simply raise our goblets and toast the bargain.

Of course, these are also the themes of The Devil and Daniel Webster.  Ironically, even the titular character wasn't immune to the lures of Iblis. Despite his vocal opposition to slavery, Webster ultimately ruined his legacy by yielding to the slave-holding South—even supporting the Fugitive Slave Act, which empowered slaver agents to abduct African Americans based on unproven suspicion. (If this mirrors the way contemporary ICE agents detain suspected illegal immigrants without regard for actual citizenship status, it is not a coincidence—merely Scratch operating under a new name.) Webster's defense was that preserving the Union outweighed opposing slavery on every front. That was his contract with the devil, and it yielded the expected result. Webster, once heralded as a future president, never reached the White House, leaving behind a reputation forever tainted by appeasement. The devil won in the end. Again.

It is a sad accounting of how easily mankind—born "to fly upward," as Dante put it—so easily falls at "a little wind." We are eager co-conspirators in our own destruction, happy to sell our most precious possessions at a cut-rate for a mere song and dance and empty promises of a better tomorrow. We can smell the sulfur in the air; we can feel the cold malevolence radiating from the contract, yet we greedily grab that pen and sign our names in blood.

I realize now that when my elementary school teacher showed our class The Devil and Daniel Webster, it acted like an inoculation against demonic infection. Not perfectly, mind you—to quote The Pet Shop Boys: "At school they taught me how to be, so pure in thought and word and deed... they didn't quite succeed"—but sufficiently to keep me from making the kind of deal with the devil that 75 million Americans struck in 2024.

Perhaps it is time to roll that AV cart with the box television into every American living room one more time, for a forced viewing of a movie that might just save the nation's political soul.

👹👹👹👹👹