What if Mr Potter never lived?

What if Mr. Potter had never lived?

In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey is rescued from suicide by the angel Clarence and given the opportunity to see how his humble town, Bedford Falls, and all of the people he loved would be different had he never been born. George is a generous, decent, albeit frustrated man, trapped by circumstances and conscience in a place much smaller than his ambitions.

The impacts he had on people’s lives seem small to him until Clarence walks him back through a George Bailey-less town now known as “Potterville.” Then he sees his brother Harry’s grave, dead at age 8 because George wasn’t there to rescue him from drowning (and presumably, none of the other kids would have been able to do it); thus Harry’s World War II battle heroics never happened, and a ship full of troops went down that otherwise, in George’s world, would have lived. Mr. Gower poisons the child with diphtheria and ends up an alcoholic wreck; George’s beloved Mary becomes a fearful old maid; his children are never born; Mr. Potter takes over the town and his mean spirit pervades its erstwhile benign, if dull, social fabric.

So that’s what happens if a good guy disappears. What if it happens to a bad guy? The answer may not be as obvious as you might think.

George’s family, The Baileys, acts primarily as Mr. Potter’s foil in Bedford Falls – a shield of goodness, protecting the weak and less fortunate from Potter’s greedy spite. Without Potter, though, the Bailey’s are just another decent, hard-working family, running a marginally-profitable savings and loan that by all accounts is poorly run from a business perspective. It succeeds because people turned away by Potter’s bank have nowhere else to go. If Potter’s gone, the bank takes on more of those loans, and the S&L probably fails for lack of customers. George’s father and uncle probably fold up shop and get jobs – perhaps at the very same bank Potter is no longer around to run. Uncle Billy’s mid-day nips aren’t tolerated at the more stuffed-shirt bank – this is Prohibition after all – and he becomes unemployable, a drag on the Bailey family for years.

With no savings and loan to save, George can take his trip to Europe, go to college, build his skyscrapers and bridges, and most important, leave Bedford Falls. He’s not there at Harry’s graduation dance to meet Mary again; she ends up an old maid anyway. While some of the immigrant families get home loans at the kinder and gentler bank, many do not; even with the two Bailey brothers there, the bank is still more frugal than the S&L. Bailey Park, the subdivision of modest, affordable homes for working people, is never built. Because George is gone, he never talks Sam Wainwright into building his new plastics factory in Bedford Falls; the town’s economy stagnates; families move away; the town shrivels to a shell of its former self, as did so many small towns in the Depression. George isn’t there to run the recycling effort during the war; Potter isn’t there to run the draft board; the war effort is diminished by the loss of both men’s contributions.

This isn’t to say that no good comes of Potter’s disappearance; far from it. The town is a friendlier place, more generous, less fearful. Perhaps George becomes a fabulous, visionary architect, rivaling I. M. Pei and Frank Lloyd Wright. Any number of good things can be imagined. That part is easy, and trivial. The interesting point is in realizing what good occurs because of Mr. Potter’s presence, or rather, because of the dynamic between Potter and George Bailey, and what bad occurs when that dynamic is removed along with Bedford Falls’ scrooge-like patriarch. Counter-intuitively, Bedford Falls may be worse off without him.

Unsavory motives and actions often undo the good work of some and crush the spirit of others, but they also add energy. They give impetus to the equal and opposite reaction of altruism and noble actions otherwise untapped or unregistered. Sadly, sometimes the only thing that spurs good people to action often is the challenge of combating evil.

Sometimes we wish that certain bad things never happened, or certain evil people never lived. Perhaps it is good to keep in mind on those occasions the old proverb:  Be careful what you wish for.