It can happen here Is Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel of political oppression a playbook for Trump? Imagine living in the Great Depression. Overseas, fascism reigns – in the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain – with bad guys with bad intentions in power and flexing their muscles. “Will Fascism come to America?” was the subject JIM of many lectures, LUNDSTROM newspaper editorials and magazine stories during the 1930s. And because we are the land of the free and the home of the brave, we had a response to the growth of fascism around us – It can’t happen here. In 1935, the writer who is arguably the most famous literary product out of Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis, wrote a book and called It Can’t Happen Here. Released in October 1935, It Can’t Happen Here quickly became a national bestseller. And just how divided America was on the question of fascism in 1935, when “populists“ such as Kingfisher Huey Long (who was killed in September 1935) and Father Coughlin held many in their sway, is best displayed by a quote from newspaper magnate and model for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst, who said, “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a “Fascist,’ you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM.” Hmmmm? Sound familiar? The action in Sinclair’s novel follows the rise to power of the portentously named Berzelius Windrip, who once he is elected president institutes a fascist regime of suppression and terror, and whips up the masses to follow the mandates of the American Corporate State. During his campaign, Senator Windrip issues Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men, which should have raised a huge flag to thinking voters. The campaign planks included
BOOKS
government ownership of all banks; complete religious freedom except for the “atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, or any Jew who shall refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, or any person of faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag”; and the quick return of all employed women to their duty-bound roles as homemakers. And so on go the Neanderthal declarations in the lengthy 15-plan platform. Lewis seems to revel in digging his elbows into the character of Senator and then President Windrip, as in this passage, “He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and Dr. Goebbels, who is privily known throughout Germany as ‘Wotan’s Mickey Mouse’.” (Wotan apparently was the Aryan version of Odin.) Our hero is an old-world newspaper man named Doremus Jessup whose wrath for the corrupt government is not raised early enough, perhaps because he and so many others believe it can’t happen here. He is introduced to us as “a competent business man and writer of editorials not without wit and good New England earthiness” yet “was considered the prime eccentric of Fort
64 July 30, 2020 DuluthReader.com
Beulah.” He’s the only guy in town with a beard, which some folks see as “highbrow” and “different,” and even that coded swear word “artistic.” As our hero studies the Windrip candidacy, he’s bewildered by his power over audiences because clearly he is “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic...” Or, “He would whirl his arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts – figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” Eventually Windrip and his minions must send in troops to subdue, intimidate and imprison dissenters, causing Jessup to declare, “Preachers and modernist educators and discontented newspapermen and farm agitators – maybe they’ll worry at first, but they’ll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we all were in the Great War, and they’ll all be convinced that, even if our Buzzy maybe has got a few faults, he’s on the side of the plain people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they’ll rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big Business will just wink and sit tight!).” Yes, doesn’t it all sound too familiar, even though it is an 85-year-old novel? Was Lewis a prophet? Or has Trump used It Can’t Happen Here as his playbook? Instead of the collective modes of reform that become the main strategy of the Windrip Administration, or any administration that believes in a final solution to solve societal ills, Jessup declares, “There is no Solution! There never will be a state of society anything like perfect.” If this helps to put into perspective where Lewis’ mind was at when he wrote this book, shortly after it was published, he wrote a review of Thoreau’s Walden for Newsweek magazine that began with one sentence: “Once upon a time in America there
was a scholar who conducted a oneman revolution and won it.” Like Thoreau, Lewis’ hero Jessup goes to jail – or a concentration camp, really – for his principles when he publishes an editorial condemning the corrupt Windrip Administration. And like Tom Joad of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Jessup goes off into the ether to be there when needed by the oppressed, leaving this message: “Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists. And who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It, something so immediately important that all doubters must be liquidated, tortured, slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition.” So, yes, it can happen here. In fact, it has happened here.
