Power Theme Analysis

In its portrayal of the rise of the Corleone crime Family to power, and its central family’s struggle to maintain that power in the face of various competing factions, both inside and outside the family, The Godfather explores the nature of power. The novel’s exploration of power proceeds at two different levels. First, it examines interpersonal and organizational power, the qualities required in leaders to build and run organizations. Second, it explores the differences between what might be called legitimate and illegitimate power, between the power of the state and of legitimate enterprises and the power of the Mafia.

The novel is full of characters seeking to gain and wield power. But perhaps the clearest way to understand the novel’s take on what is actually required of a person to truly become a leader is to look at the three sons of Don Corleone, and the various ways that they fail and succeed at wielding the power that their father has built. Fredo is the most obvious failure. He is cowardly, as shown when he fails to protect his father during the rival mobster Sollozzo’s attempted hit on Don Corleone. Further, he is pleasure-seeking and uncontrolled, as his constant womanizing implies. And he’s not that smart—he fails to profitably run the Corleone’s hotel in Las Vegas. Sonny, in contrast, seems to have the makings of a leader: he is charismatic, courageous, and physically dominant. When Don Corleone is injured, it is Sonny who becomes acting Don. Yet Sonny’s hot-headedness and sentimentality makes him both reckless and predictable, traits that the rival Barzini Family take advantage of when the lay a trap and then ambush and kill him. It is instead Michael, a war hero who originally wants nothing to do with his family’s crime connections, who ends up as the leader of the Corleone Family. Michael’s war heroism makes clear his physical bravery, but what also becomes clear over the course of the novel is his intelligence, his family loyalty, and his fundamental cold-bloodedness. It is Michael who both comes up with the plan to trick and then kill Sollozzo and the crooked cop McCluskey, and it is Michael who carries out the plan. Michael gives up everything he once wished for to protect and rebuild his family’s power. Michael is also able to develop long-term plans, calm enough to wait for them to come to fruition, and ruthless enough to carry them out when the time is ripe. In virtually any situation in which a character in the book fails to show these traits—whether courage, loyalty, intelligence, or cold-blooded ruthlessness—that character usually ends up either losing power, or dead.

While portraying the personal attributes necessary for leadership, the novel also shows the way that such traits can be used to build power. Vito Corleone’s rise to power in the criminal underworld embodies these methods. As a Sicilian immigrant in New York’s Little Italy, Vito gains power by murdering Fanucci, the Black Hand (a Mafia precursor that extorted money from immigrants). Vito understands that Fanucci relies on “personal brute force” but lacks the connections that are essential to maintaining power. By killing Fanucci, Vito becomes a “man of respect” in the community because people know he will kill to get what he wants. Here, Puzo demonstrates how violent crime is an essential element in building illegitimate power. And yet Vito uses his new reputation not simply to extort and prey upon those in his community. Instead, he uses his power to build connections, to develop a network of power throughout the community. Thus, when the poor widow, Signora Colombo, complains that her landlord has evicted her, Vito intervenes on her behalf by paying off the landlord, who both lets the widow back in after learning of Vito’s reputation and repays Vito in order to stay on his good side. Vito does favors, builds a network, and then cashes in those favors. Of course, he also uses strong-arm tactics to get what he wants, but he does so intelligently, behind fronts. He builds a lucrative, legitimate olive oil business, but does so using illegal means, building a monopoly by threatening both retailers and competitors with violence. Vito also performs favors for others and cultivates favors in return. His model of illegitimate power rests on the exchange of favors and good deeds with the threat of violence just below the surface.

The novel also explores power in a broader sense by showing both the contrasts and similarities between illegitimate and legitimate power. This contrast is shown most sharply when members of the Corleone family come into conflict with leaders of legitimate institutions or industries. The Corleones pejoratively call such people the pezzonovanti, a Sicilian term that means “big shot.” The pezzonovanti include professionals such as lawyers, doctors, professors, politicians, leaders in the church, and others who hold social and political capital that, in turn, gives them power over those of lesser means. Mainstream society considers the pezzonovanti’s power to be legitimate because they derive it from legitimate sources: the state, the law, expertise in a trade, the church.

The pezzonovanti consider their power to be greater than the illegitimate power of any mobster. This belief is evident in the Corleone’s interactions with the powerful film producer Jack Woltz. When Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen tries to strongarm Woltz into making a film starring Johnny Fontane, Woltz not only refuses but mocks Hagen for even trying to force him to do anything. Woltz makes clear the extent of his legitimate power, bragging about his connections to both the President and the FBI. Woltz, however, mistakes “the power he wielded in his world to be more potent than the power of Don Corleone.” Woltz is willing to bend the law, but unlike Corleone, he is not willing to break it. Woltz’s power rests on the assumption that legitimate society deems some actions beyond the pale of decency. When faced with Corleone’s willingness to do things that are truly bloodthirsty—such as to kill Woltz’s prized stallion and place the animal’s severed head into bed next to a sleeping Woltz—Woltz folds. “There couldn’t be any kind of world if people acted that way. It was insane,” Woltz reasons. That Woltz considers Corleone’s action to be “insane” confirms Hagen’s belief that Woltz is not a gangster, and he will therefore refuse to sink to the Don’s level to get what he wants. When Hagen states that Don Corleone is “more powerful in areas far more critical” than Woltz (and, by extension, other pezzonovanti), he means that the Godfather’s power stems from his willingness to flout legitimate society’s moral conventions to get what he wants. This willingness gives the Mafia’s illegitimate power an edge over Woltz’s legitimate power.

However, while embracing illegitimate power makes Mafia members powerful, it also makes them vulnerable to attacks from other members, which, paradoxically, makes the security of legitimate power appealing. At a meeting of New York’s Five Families (the Italian American Mafia groups that control organized crime), Don Corleone explains that the Mafia “refuse[s] to be puppets dancing on a string pulled by the men on high.” The string-pullers are the pezzonovanti “who take it upon themselves to decide what we shall do with our lives.” The pezzonovanti have made illegal the methods by which Corleone earns a living, and he resents them for it. Nonetheless, Corleone arranges this meeting because the rival Tattaglia Family murdered his son, Sonny, and attempted to murder Corleone himself. While the Don claims that “the time is past for guns and killings and massacres,” such violence is integral to the Mafia’s illegitimate power. Wealth and power are the rewards of the Mafia life, but such rewards come with the constant threat of violence. Thus, even as Corleone mocks the pezzonovanti, he wants what they have: wealth, power, and security. Don Corleone even references this desire explicitly: “Perhaps your grandchildren will become the new pezzonovanti,” he tells the bosses.

Don Corleone’s disgust at the pezzonovanti is ironic, considering his hope that his own descendants might one day become pezzonovanti. But it also hides what the novel seems to consider a deeper truth. If Don Corleone believes that his illegitimate power can be converted to legitimate power—a belief that Michael eventually shares—well, perhaps he’s right! And, further, perhaps the current pezzonovanti are themselves the descendants of long-ago illegitimate power that has been converted, over time, to legitimate power. The epigraph at the beginning of The Godfather seems to at least partially endorse this idea: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

However, while Puzo is skilled at getting readers to understand and even sympathize with the gangsters’ point of view, he ultimately does not embrace the Mafia's view of the world. In fact, Puzo offers a stark contrast between Sicily and America. In Sicily, the Mafia “is cancerous to the society it inhabited,” and it so corrupts legitimate institutions that even doctors are incompetent because they get their “degrees” from the local Mafioso. In America, by comparison, corruption is certainly rampant, but the Mafia's rules do not wholly dictate how society functions the way they do in Sicily, because Mafia law has not overtaken American law. Legitimate power is hardly pure and incorruptible in America, but it is the only real bulwark against the Mafia’s cancerous nature. If enough people lose faith in legitimate power and instead turn to the Mafia for justice, then any notions of equality, fairness, and opportunity for all will, shall we say, sleep with the fishes. Puzo includes the long section in Sicily in part to show readers exactly what happens when the Mafia overtakes legitimate society: people will either die, become hopelessly corrupt themselves, or flee that society if they can.