It can't happen here

A poignant book review written when I was still but a small fry. That's sea monster humor son, get with the program.

Fascism in America: an all-too real work of fiction

            In Sinclair Lewis’ novel It can’t happen here, totalitarianism overthrows our constitutional government in the guise of down home traditional values. Set just before the 1936 election, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, a fictional Southern Democratic Senator with a demagogue’s flair and team of cynical operators behind him, sweeps into power on the promise of redistributing wealth to all the workers of America. Oh, and he has a 15 point platform to subvert Congress and the Supreme Court, throw unemployed people into camps and specific plans for all of the enemies of our country, namely Jewish bankers, communists and African-Americans among other things. This story sends a chilling message to Americans that benign, liberal government is not written in stone and the constitution is just a piece of paper unless good people stand up for what’s right.
          Sinclair Lewis was “the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature”; he wrote novels critical of rural America, the dreariness, materialism and perils of ambition found there. (The Sinclair Lewis Society) “His concern with issues involving women, race, and the powerless in society make his work still vital and pertinent today.” (SLS) His wife was instrumental in this book’s inspiration as she had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and discussed European political developments at that time with her husband, who was at the same time seeing, “the irrational demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the proliferation in America of fanatical political groups” (Tanner 57) “Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer bought the film rights… with Lionel Barrymore cast in the lead role, but early in 1936 the film was abandoned… for fear of international complications and the displeasure of the Republican Party.” (Tanner 58) The objection of the GOP is odd, in my view, since the leader of the resistance is a Republican. In any case, It can’t happen here would have to wait until 1983 to be brought to the small screen as the mini-series “V” in which the fascists are recast as extraterrestrials. (Wikipedia)

            The reader sees events mainly through the eyes of a small town newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, an educated, intelligent man of sixty years who sees through the façade around Buzz. Nestled away in an archetypal small New England town called Fort Beulah, Vermont; Doremus feels that even if the insanity surrounding the Windrip candidacy doesn’t subside, he figures that life will go on. Personally, Doremus is a “small-town bourgeois Intellectual”, “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal”. (68-9) None the less, his editorials often took a position considerably to the left of his readers and when “[h]e got named Bolshevik… his paper lost a hundred and fifty out of its five thousand circulation” (69) Life does go on, but with horrible consequences for Doremus when his gardener, Shad Ledue, becomes the new county commissioner and takes revenge on his former employer for perceived past slights.

          If Doremus is the hero, the villains are played by a remarkable coterie of individuals and organizations committed to wrenching the reins of power into their own hands.  Buzz himself was a powerful orator, after hearing him speak in New York City and being deftly moved by it; Doremus remarked to himself “[b]ut what Mr. Windrip actually had said, [he] could not remember an hour later, when he had come out of the trance.” (140) Bishop Paul Peter Prang was a radio preacher whose “League of Forgotten Men” delivered to the senator votes in order to win, these are characterizations of the late Huey Long and Father Coughlin that Mr. Lewis was so concerned with addressing. (60-1) Muscle was provided by Colonel Dewey Haik and his paramilitary Minute Men, “a nationwide league of Windrip marching-clubs… the shock troops of Freedom!” (129-30) Intellectual power was provided by Lee Sarason and Dr. Hector MacGoblin, who coined the phrases and songs used by the campaign to more or less distract people and persuade them to vote the right way. The new regime’s ideology was called “corpoism” after the United States was renamed “The American Corporate State” with Windrip soon becoming “The Chief” instead of the president. (142, 214)
            The country was reorganized into Provinces, Districts and counties; with the old geographical distinctions being discarded. The unemployed were rounded up into “enormous labor camps” to work on state projects or hired out to the private sector. (216) Political opponents (like Doremus and most of his friends, eventually) were eventually interned in concentration camps for torture and often execution when “caught trying to escape” (422) The corpos preferred method of torture was a combination of flogging with a “steel fishing rod” and forcing the victim to drink caster oil. (423) Eventually Doremus escapes to Canada and joins the resistance, which does invade and take control of a large area of the US. However, the counterrevolution bogs down and the book ends in a stalemate, even though it is clear that corpoism is largely a spent force due to overreach.  By the novel’s finish, much intrigue has occurred at the top leaving Buzz exiled, Sarason assassinated and Col. Haik as the new Chief.
           This book was written in 1935, before Americans fully understood what totalitarianism was and it was subsequently turned into a play for the WPA theatre, perhaps as a reminder to stick with the mostly moderate policies of Franklin Roosevelt. I feel this novel is overshadowed by George Orwell’s 1984, also warning against totalitarianism of the Stalinist formulation, which was published after the full horrors of World War II were revealed. But Lewis predicted quite a few of the horrors of fascism, right down to concentration camp inmates betraying each other to get out. (430) I believe this story, told on the stage and on the page, helped inoculate America against fascism and in that way played a small part in saving the world from fascism during the 1930’s and 40’s. Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, Doremus comments that: “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.” (258)
            The author’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, “was an expert on European fascism” and no doubt a major source of research, however the edition I read contained no acknowledgements. (Tanner 59) The edition also lacked a preface and I was left somewhat unmoored at the beginning of the story, with only a passing knowledge of the content it took a while to orient myself in this world. Mr. Lewis mentions so many real-life individuals mixed with his fictional characters it was sometimes hard to differentiate them, a reader without historical knowledge of the period and the several references to the Civil War era that Doremus draws strength and reflection from. The book paints a lucid picture, with most of the good guys in the story unable to believe what has happened and even less able to protect themselves from the madness; a representative example is Dr. Fowler Greenhill, who attempts to rescue his father-in-law Doremus from jail and give the local corpos a piece of his mind as though freedom of speech and due process of law still existed and is summarily shot on one corpo’s whim. (269-72)
            Although I could hardly put this book down I did find it overly detailed, with too many simultaneous plot-lines going on at once and far too many characters. I can imagine that this chaotic style helped to reinforce the chaotic events described; and the extensive character development certainly helps the political discussions in the book seem less like the author arguing with himself. “In a remarkable burst of creative energy in 1935, [Lewis] wrote It Can’t Happen Here in a matter of weeks, and his publisher rushed it into print.” (Tanner 57) As such, it is a remarkable effort and great public service, relevant to all Americans interesting in preserving the rule of law in our nation. Above that it is valuable to a college course on this time period because it does an excellent job of relating what life was like in the 1920’s and 1930’s; mentioning the technological innovations, political atmosphere and above all translating the rise of  home-grown fascism for people who think that revolution and dictatorship can only happen elsewhere.