The Godfather Tragedy and the Way the World Works

By Wayne Allensworth

Human beings live in webs of relationships — relationships that overlap but are prioritized by most people in most places, in most times, by proximity. These priorities are the basis of moral teachings which, when codified and extended to all members of a polity in law, become institutionalized, at least in theory. But the oldest rules of all, the ones we know without needing explanation, never quite go away. Americans might have had their identity so eroded and debased that they are unable to see these truths so clearly. But on some level, the pull of our closest ties, to kin, to home, are still extant unconsciously. I’ve been fascinated by The Godfather saga ever since I saw the original movie when it was released in 1972. As I grew older and a bit wiser, I realized how much it had to tell us. This article attempts to describe the revelation that is The Godfather in some depth. I doubt that I could ever include every pertinent moment or nuance, but I think those who are ready to see, will see. If you haven’t seen the Godfather films, please do before reading. Readers can refresh their memories regarding the plots of the three films and their casts here, here, and here. Regarding modernization, identity, and nationalism, see my book The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia.

Naïve Moderns

When I worked as an intelligence analyst, I frequently recommended that new employees watch The Godfather because the movie showed us the way the world works. I was surprised somewhat by the naivete of young people who had, after all, been raised in a very cynical and unrestrained society. Yet they still believed what they had been taught in high school civics classes and college political theory courses. After recommending the movie, I left it at that unless someone showed some real interest — and then I unpeeled the layers of the onion of wisdom that the movie revealed. For The Godfather and its sequels — which are one work of art — is a story about the Sicilian Mafia on the surface. At its core, it is a revelatory tale about humanity, relationships, morality, modernity, and the way power relationships play out, not only in the world of organized crime, but also in the world at large.

One scene in particular cuts to the core of how states use power, a grossly hypertrophied manifestation of the operations of ancient human hierarchies. Michael Corleone has returned from his Sicilian exile. He hid in the Sicilian town of Corleone after killing a New York police captain and the gangster who had ordered a hit on his father, Vito Corleone, the Cosa Nostra “Godfather.”  He approaches his WASP girlfriend, Kay Adams, to rekindle their relationship. During their conversation, Michael, who had avoided getting involved in the “family business,” informs Kay that he is now working for his father. Kay is taken aback, and Michael explains to her that his father is a powerful man with responsibilities. with people to look after. He is like a senator or president. Kay admonishes Michael. She tells him that he is naïve. Senators and presidents don’t have people killed. Michael wisely — and correctly — tells her “Who is being naïve, Kay?”

Peeling Back the Layers of The Godfather

Like all works of sublime art, The Godfather — Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece saga of an “American” family —  has many levels at which it can be appreciated. The godfather is Vito Corleone and his son, the man who wished to avoid the Corleone crime family’s “business.” The films play out as the tragedy of Michael Corleone.  

The surface layer is that of organized crime. It’s a gangster movie. The “family” organization at its center is an actual family, the Corleones, its capos as well as its “soldiers,” the men who do the day-to-day footwork for the family. It has its own special forces operator in the person of Lucca Brasi, the enforcer who is called in for the family’s most important dirty work. Don Vito, the head of the crime organization and patriarch of his biological family, is “a man of respect,” a man who was, shall we say, an entrepreneur in the “business.” His “startup” operation involved his two trusted partners in crime, Peter Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio. Together they built an organization that became an exemplar for other crime families. Clemenza and Tessio are the capos who direct the soldiers. The Don’s lawyer and counselor, his trusted adopted son Tom Hagen, advises him on business. The Don occasionally has to play hard ball in his business dealings, making those reluctant to accept his authority “an offer they can’t refuse.”

The “family” in its extended form is an underground privately-owned company that is also political, in that it acts through unofficial representatives in public institutions, the legislature, the courts, the mass media, and the police. It makes political “contributions” to support its network of chosen representatives. And the Don, as a political leader of sorts, has a constituency — the Sicilian community of people who petition him for his aid and pledge fealty to him in exchange for his protection. His advisors and trusted lieutenants, including biological family members, are his “cabinet.” Interestingly in The Godfather Part II, the doomed mobster Frankie Pentangeli tells Tom Hagen that in the old days, the Cosa Nostra was modeled on the Roman Empire, with its imperial center, its affiliates, and its own “legions.”  

The second layer in the story involves the Don’s constituency. The relationships between the Don, his family members, and his constituency enlighten the audience on matters of trust, loyalty, and human social organization. The Cosa Nostra, or “Mafia,” of The Godfather is a Sicilian, ethnically-based organization. It has counterparts worldwide, but its structure and norms are specific to it. Such clan-based entities are as old as humanity. Humans are by nature tribal or clannish, and function best in face-to-face communities in which people know one another and a certain amount of mutual trust, as well as obligation, is absolutely necessary. Immediate family members form trust networks, with a broader number of extended family members figuring in concentric circles of duty and obligation. Fellow villagers and intermarried families add layers to the small world of the clan and tribe. Pre-Christian societies — and some that became nominally Christian — extended common moral strictures only as far as their own family, clan, or tribe. These were societies in which honor codes ideally governed behavior, but sometimes led to tit-for-tat vendettas that eroded a community. Like all virtues, honor, depending on how one interprets honorable behavior, removed from the context of other virtues can become the code of the feud. Such was the moral code of Don Corleone. And, for that matter, of the Hatfields and McCoys.

The third layer is linked to modernization and cultural homogenization. In premodern societies, as noted above, extended families were at the heart of social organization. As societies modernized, becoming more complex and broader, especially with industrialization, political arrangements — from feudal arrangements based on personal loyalties and obligations, to citizenship based on legal status determined by law, courts, and bureaucracy — favored and forced homogenization. Bureaucracies and industrialized economies depended on standardization in language, social habits, and loyalty to, or at least acceptance of, centralized states. Modernization discouraged, regulated, or even outlawed, “inefficient” peculiarities of locally based family, village, and small-scale political structures and customs or “inefficient” family farms or craftsmen.

Nationalism as a political and economic form was a critical step in modernization. Nationalism, whether authoritarian or democratic, extended equality of membership in society to all citizens. In theory, all were subject to law. Nationalism worked in establishing a broader identity only insofar as the wider population that was homogenized into a central baseline — say, the Parisian center in France — shared enough commonalities with the dominant center to be assimilated, whether by force or by cultural homogenization. Many nationalist projects encountered roadblocks from populations who differed considerably from the center baseline — the Basques in Spain, for example. Race, religion, ethnicity, language, and shared history all figured in the process of forging new identities. Nevertheless, new national identities took shape. Technologies like the printing press, the telegraph, and railroads extended the center’s reach and culturally homogenized the population. Standing armies and police forces replaced local militias. In theory, the state had a monopoly on the use of force, law acted to enforce contracts, and bureaucracy regulated society.

Traditional Customs — Honor And Loyalty — Operate Parallel To The Rule Of Law 

Against the wishes of his family, Michael enlists as a Marine to fight in WWII. They ask Michael, “Why do you fight for strangers?” The Don attempts to acquire a draft deferment for Michael, the most promising of his sons, but Michael doesn’t want it. Michael says that he wants to fight for his country, which is puzzling to his clannish relatives. Michael wishes to transcend the pre-modern clan identity of his family. He wants to become a modern American.

In contrast, Vito Corleone came to America during the mass wave of immigration that was eventually halted in the 1920s, a wave of immigration that brought people from Eastern and Southern Europe and transformed America. Colonial stock “Heritage Americans,” who had provided the Western European and essentially Anglo-Saxon baseline of American identity, would soon find their majority challenged. The new culture that took shape in the 20th Century was not Barbara Allen and blue grass, much less the gentry culture of the Lees or George Washington. It was a new, urban, mass culture. It was MGM, Cole Porter, Frank Sinatra and automobile culture. The “Melting Pot” would use Hollywood, “Madison Avenue,” and then radio and TV to homogenize a mass society that was stretching the ability of the base to absorb “new Americans.” By the 1960s, the American nation state had gone as far as it could in that direction and the process of “melting” the new Americans was not nearly as smooth or complete as immigration enthusiasts want us to believe. And that’s why we have The Godfather today hailed as an “American” cinema classic. It is an American saga in that it reflects the transformation of a once more homogenous culture, but the story is not “American” in its roots.

America once enjoyed high levels of “social capital.” Hers was a high-trust society, a disposition to others that is essential, especially in a mass democracy, in order to maintain stability. But that social disposition is very fragile. The Godfather saga, portrayed most vividly in The Godfather Part II, is also a coming-to-America story, an immigrant story. And it is also the story of the deracination of America and the dissolution of the family. It is a story about trust and loyalty and betrayal. Young Vito finds himself in Little Italy in a New York City whose knickerbocker past has been subsumed by the immigrant wave. The Italian speakers group together. They maintain their own rituals, customs, and ways of thinking that will take decades to weaken via modernity’s levers of homogenization. These people are familiar with one another, but it is a low trust environment. The extent of their real trust and sense of obligation does not extend very far. They came from societies that, unlike the Anglo-Saxon institutionalized “rule of law” society of America, followed other, older “laws.” The institutions they dealt with were corrupt. They did not trust people from “out” groups or the police or courts. They came from a traditionalist society where customs and personal ties regulate their web of relations. They were first members of a family, a clan, inhabitants of a village who worshiped in a parish, not Protestant individualists.

Allow me to digress a bit and point to two instances that demonstrate that, as well as the means by which an unofficial authority establishes itself in a place where modern institutions exist parallel to the old ways.

First, in the famous wedding sequence of The Godfather, according to custom, the Don hears the petitions and accepts the gifts of his constituency. An undertaker, appropriately named Amerigo Bonasera, tells a sad tale for the Don and makes a request. His daughter was beaten and raped by thugs, and the American courts, which Bonasera hoped would do justice, have released them. The thugs mocked him, shaming a father who is a member of an honor culture. Bonasera tells Don Corleone that he wanted to be an American — to trust in American law. But the savages have gone free. Will the Don, in exchange for Bonasera’s lifelong fealty, give him justice? The Don admonishes the undertaker. He has never sought the Don’s friendship or pledged his loyalty. Bonasera wanted to assimilate to American norms, which have failed him. And now he wishes to return to the fold. Bonasera kisses the ring and calls the Don “Godfather,” a very sacred honorific that is not only holy in the Catholic Church but also signifies the authority of the patriarch. And the Don utters another of the film’s many famous lines of dialogue: “Someday, and that day may never come, I will require a service of you.” The day does come when the Don’s hotheaded son Sonny is killed in the gang war that is main conflict of the first film. 

Second, in The Godfather Part II, we learn that Vito Corleone will not bow to the power of the local gangster in his Little Italy neighborhood, the thuggish Black Hand extortionist Don Fanucci. Instead of bending to Fanucci, Vito kills him. In doing so, he establishes himself as “man of respect,” and the people in his neighborhood, in gratitude and seeking his protection, begin the petitioning ritual that we saw in the original film. He is made godfather to their children, cementing personal ties of duty and obligation, and developing a certain amount of trust in his web of connections. Vito and his lieutenants Clemenza and Tessio move up in the crime world and form a Cosa Nostra “family.” The Don has “made his bones,” establishing his status by killing a man.

The Call of Blood Ties

In The Godfather, Michael attends the wedding of his sister Connie wearing his Marine uniform, signifying his desire for a different life trajectory outside the parochial confines of his traditional culture and the Cosa Nostra “family.” The uniform is a signifier of his new American identity. His WASP girlfriend Kay notices a certain “scary guy” waiting to see Don Corleone. He is rehearsing his words of gratitude to his Don on the day of his daughter’s wedding. Michael explains that Luca Brasi performs certain tasks for his father — such as threatening to kill people who do not wish to accept the Godfather’s “business” proposals. The sheltered Kay is, of course, shocked. Michael shrugs it off: “That’s my family Kay, not me.”

But Michael is not fated to join the mid-Century American mainstream by marrying a WASP and moving to suburbia. Fate takes a hand when Don Corleone refuses a proposal made by drug runner Virgil Sollozzo, with secret backing from a rival Mafia family, the Tattaglias, to go into the drug business. The Don is the most powerful Mafia chief among the “five families” of New York, and Sollozzo wants his help in securing protection from police and the courts to operate his enterprise. The Don does not like the drug proposal — his police protectors and the judges he controls would not remain under control for long if they knew his business was drugs and not simply controlling unions and gambling. They see drugs as a dirty business, and we get the impression that the old school Don agrees.

The Don is wary of Sollozzo and instructs Luca Brasi to spy on him by telling the Tattalgias that he might be interested in leaving the Corleone family and joining them. But Sollozzo and the Tattalgias murder Brasi, then attempt to gun down the Don, who miraculously survives. The attempt on his father draws Michael in. Michael is his father’s favorite. The Don, too, had hoped Michael might leave the “family” world and become a senator, a judge, a member of the American elite who, like the Don in his way, could pull the strings of society’s institutions. He could be a puppet master of sorts but avoid the pitfalls of mob life. Fearing for the life of his father, Michael guns down Sollozzo and the corrupt police Captain McCloskey. He has crossed the Rubicon and there is no going back. With his father ailing, and following his older brother Sonny’s murder, Michael bypasses his weak and simple brother Fredo in the family pecking order and becomes the Don. Blood ties and family loyalty are stronger than the pull of a civic identity based solely on citizenship. Michael is a Corleone and his father’s son. His tragedy plays out on that basis in the face of the siren calls of modernity and the deep ties that bind him.

Loyalty and “Business”(The “Young Turks” and Modernization)

Michael’s wish for the family to gradually shift its focus to legitimate business and become part of corporate America and Sollozzo’s desire to get into the drug trade are two sides of a single coin. Michael is seeking one path to modernization by becoming a player in the managerial capitalist system. Sollozzo is a “Young Turk” who plays by modern utilitarian rules. The object of business is profit and any barriers — including the Don’s old school methods and honor code — must come down.

Several characters explain ordering an assassination as “just business, nothing personal.” But when Michael uses that phrase to justify murdering Sollozzo and McCloskey it rings false. “Business” in that case is very personal. Michael protects his father and plays by the old rules of vendetta and family honor. He does, however, wish to transition to Solozzo’s more utilitarian way of approaching the “family business.” To protect the family and restore its dominance, he orders the assassinations of the other heads of the five families in the film’s climatic sequence, a sequence that juxtaposes the murders with Michael becoming the godfather of Connie’s son. But when he kills his own brother Fredo in The Godfather Part II he is operating by the old rules. Betrayal, even by a brother, must be punished.

At one point, Michael suspects that one of his capos, either Clemenza or Tessio, will betray him. Both are frustrated by Michael’s approach to the battle among the families, and the man they had pledged their lifelong fealty to, Don Vito, is dead. Tessio betrays Michael, planning his assassination, and Michael orders his murder. Just business? In the “family” world, contract disputes are settled by bargaining or assassination. “Settling out of court” one might say. Disputes in the legitimate business world are settled in the courts, ideally, but as corporations replaced proprietary business, litigation became heavily weighted to the side of the powerful. And in the world of statecraft, warfare and killing are “the continuation of politics by other means.” Some of the killing in The Godfather is very obviously — and I think it was intended as such by Coppola and his collaborator, Mario Puzo, who wrote the novel on which The Godfather is based — an analogy to what political leaders would call “reasons of state.”  Michael wants to maintain the Corleone family’s position in the balance of power among the Cosa Nostra families, so “special operations” and “politics by other means” are necessary. Michael says that the family is a business, and the loyalties of its members are based on that. But the old rules and the new, corporate approach meld together in the films. A new world and a new way of establishing identities, the rules of engagement in society, and the powers of the authorities are taking shape as the old world fades away.

In The Godfather Part II, Frankie Pentangeli, believing that Michael has ordered his assassination, is ready to break the old code of silence, Omerta, and testify against the Corleone family. But on the day he is scheduled to testify before a U.S. Senate committee, his brother arrives from Sicily — brought to the hearing on Michael’s command. The sight of his brother silences Frankie. He is reminded of the old world, old loyalties, and the old code, and he refuses to give testimony against Michael. While in FBI custody, he kills himself, again following the Roman model of disgraced leaders opening their veins, as Frankie himself described to Tom Hagen in his comments on the Mafia modelling itself on the old Romans.

The Tragedy of Michael Corleone (And America)

Frankie Pentangeli’s suicide signifies the old ways winning out just one more time. But they are fading fast. Michael and his biological family are caught up in the homogenization, deracination, and atomization of post-war America.

In The Godfather Part II, we get a glimpse of the deracination process. Connie, Michael’s sister, has had a series of affairs and failed marriages, and is now engaged to a ne’er-do-well Anglo with whom the family is not happy. She has never reconciled with Michael after her first husband Carlo’s assassination, ordered by Michael for his betraying Sonny to the Tattalgias. Connie has lost her modest demeanor, wears flashy clothes and jewelry, and has abandoned her children. Michael is clearly disturbed. We also learn that Kay has had an abortion. Appalled at the nature of the Corleone “business,” she decided to prevent Michael from having a son and heir fit for “family” affairs and tells Michael she will leave him. In The Godfather, Michael had decided to move the family from New York to Tahoe, muscling in on the casino business. His great desire is to legitimize the family’s enterprises, but blood ties and Mafia intrigues keep drawing him back into the world of the Cosa Nostra. He watched impotently as the atomizing forces of modernization — mass culture, consumerism, and individualism — break up his biological family and sweep away the honor culture that his father represented. Michael is powerless to stop it.

In The Godfather Part III, Michael seeks absolution for his sins, especially the assassination of his brother Fredo. Again, he unsuccessfully seeks to legitimize the family business, and his beloved daughter Mary is killed in a botched attempt to assassinate her father. Michael will die unreconciled to his fate, a man who was torn between conflicting loyalties. Blood will tell, and Michael chose his father and that way of life from which he was never able to escape. The trappings of mid-century American life did not change that path for him. Yet his biological family was eroded by those same conflicting forces. The tragedy of Michael Corleone became the tragedy of modern America.

The Godfather And The Way World Works: Russian Clans, American Managers

In the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, I witnessed what happens when institutions fail, when trust and “social capital” are low, and chaos ensues. Informal means of enforcing contracts and protecting businesses and neighborhoods spring up, as the Russians said, like mushrooms after the rain. In the authoritarian USSR the Soviet peoples had long relied on informal networks of trust among close family members, classmates, old army buddies, and the like. These networks established, or leveraged, personal relationships that could be built on a “horizontal” or “vertical” axis of ties. The horizontal ties were the closest ones, with blood relations and old friends. The vertical ties were “just business,” built on shared interests or bribery. In the “wild 90s” and the first decade of the 2000s, these old, face-to-face connections came out from the shadows, out from under the rubble of the Soviet collapse. A certain amount of bribery, corruption, and horse trading greased the wheels of a creaky and incompetent bureaucracy, while the close ties of friends and family provided a core of trust for the networks Russians lived in. These are the ties that all of us use (“It’s not what you know, but who you know”), but in a low trust, bureaucratized and atomized society, these aspects of human social transactions hypertrophy and become the system itself, with the official institutions providing a cover for their operations.

Kremlinology became a game of tracing the “horizontal” and “vertical” lines of elite “clans.” Organized crime provided protection for neighborhoods and businesses where police protection was non-existent because the state had ceased regularly paying its vast number of employees. It was a heyday for corruption. Ethnic Russians preferred to forge feudal-like relationships with gangsters of their own ethnicity, a common thing among the various ethnic groups of the Russian Federation. Groups like the Sicilian Mafia had flourished in similar circumstances. New York mobster John Gotti, despite his crimes, was quite popular in his own, quite safe neighborhood. But what struck me at the time, and disturbed me the most, was that our own greater society was headed in much the same direction as post-Communist Russia, a direction much more common around the world than Americans ever understood.

America had become increasingly “diverse” as a result of mass immigration from vastly different societies, while urbanization and the erosion of traditional norms proceeded at a rapid pace. Mobility and mass media have eroded traditional norms. The old ways of thinking and doing, like Don Corleone’s, were being replaced. “Identity politics” had revived a fractured and ideological tribalism of sorts. It occurred to me that that was not unlike “the family” model of the Corleones, which was much more like the default norm of small-scale societies, the kind of societies in which human beings are meant to live. As our country atomized, the very fragile “rule of law” was being undermined by the loss of a certain healthy degree of homogeneity and a concomitant erosion of social trust. This was a phenomenon Dr. Robert Putnam so ably chronicled, beginning with his seminal book, Bowling Alone. Urbanized societies that grew increasingly “diverse” fractured and social trust, so long the great strength of our country, was going fast. It was always a near thing to stretch public trust, trust in institutions, in law, and in each other ever wider. The country was too big, and “we” were becoming strangers to one another.

I sympathize with Don Corleone and his honor code, and with Michael and the dilemma he faced: struggling with an identity crisis and the overwhelming, perhaps impossible, job of keeping his biological family on course in a world that was not made to sustain them. Utilitarianism (“just business”) was the rule of a bureaucratized society, and corporatism (“My father’s ways of doing things are over,” says Michael) had displaced personal relationships and small-scale, face-to-face relations. The Godfather explains how the world works in reality, rather than in theory. It rips away the façade of legitimacy from bureaucratized Leviathan, and exposes its real aims of power, control, and manipulation. Our managerial elites have more in common with one another than the people they only nominally represent. They have their own “clans.” And their behavior only reinforces Hannah Arendt’s view of “the banality of evil.” They are not even dignified by the menacing gravitas of a Virgil Sollozzo or the manipulative Jewish gangster of The Godfather Part II, Hyman Roth.

Many heritage Americans have swallowed the civic identity myth hook, line, and sinker. Civic identity can only be stretched so far. If the tribalist behavior of a U.S. Representative like Ilhan Omar should tell us anything, it is that in a closely interconnected world with relatively easy travel, the tribal identities of immigrants, especially those from vastly different cultures, are harder to assimilate than ever. The rest of us will have to fall back on older ties, personal relationships and friendships, more than ever to see us through what lies ahead. Leviathan and its empire are declining and will break up. We will have to emerge from the rubble to build something new, something hopefully on a human scale.Michael was correct in what he told Kay: His father was no different than senators and presidents, yet the Don’s crimes fade into insignificance next to the crimes Leviathan and its representatives have committed time and again. Leviathan has unleashed wars that have killed untold millions, destroyed families, and wrecked nations. Cynicism often masquerades as statecraft. “Honor,” in however a grisly form it may have taken in the Don’s world, is a word that has lost its meaning. The Don’s world was one of “thick” cultural ties. Ours have grown so thin as to become the mere products of whatever garbage the mass culture is producing at the moment. Michael’s story is a Shakespearian tragedy, but as our country and culture erode, our crass “culture” can produce no tragedian to tell the tale. We are on our own. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, as we remove the larger outer frame of the modernist doll, we reveal other, smaller, and older “faces.” Each was nested in the other all along. If we are fortunate, we can find ourselves again.

Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of  The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.

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