Oh Yes it Can: Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here”

The novelist Sinclair Lewis was an awkward and gangly fellow from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and an early and inveterate reader. After getting through Yale, Lewis kicked about writing for newspapers. All that changed spectacularly in 1920, as though Lewis had burst out of nowhere. The story of small town American provincialism, Main Street was a publishing sensation. It is a depiction of claustrophobic tedium imposed by perfunctory mores and circumscribed expectations.

A Pulitzer Prize was bestowed on Lewis’s controversial Arrowsmith, his story of an ethically burdened physician. Lewis told the Pulitzer crowd they could keep their award. Over that most creative decade, Lewis produced other memorable works like Babbit and Elmer Gantry. In 1930 he was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gracious in his Nobel acceptance speech he felt he did not have the creative strength to go forward. He confided to the actress Lillian Gish, “This is fatal. I cannot live up to it.”

Nonetheless Lewis continued to write. In October of 1935 he composed a tale with an eerie resonance and relevance. A cocktail disturbing and satirical and deadly serious: It Can’t Happen Here. A fascist takeover of the United States has been spearheaded by a fulsome, shallow-minded self-absorbed Big Mouth with a capacity to charm and entertain. This book is an affirmation of American democratic values over the authoritarian miasma then vitiating various nations. Hastily written by Lewis, he wanted the American populace to read this book and ponder the nightmarish barbarism of a militarized state.

Contemporaneous America had its own crop of demagogues hungry for power and influence. Lewis’s pages provide a cautionary narrative for these Trumpian times. One eminent critic pronounced that he had written “one of the most important books ever produced in this country.”

As early as 1922 the first American local of the Nazi Party popped up in New York and by 1935 there were 10,000 official members of the German American Bund, an organization that applauded Hitler’s regime. Populist Huey Long of Louisiana — known as “The Kingfish” — had amassed inordinate power for himself as a bombastic back-slappin’ good ole boy. He was also smart, energetic and combative.

Elected Governor of Louisiana and then made Senator, Long’s influence grew — as did his megalomania. His “Share-Our-Wealth” campaign envisioned a program of redistributive economics to promote widespread financial security for the lower classes. He was genuinely sympathetic to the lot of common people. He openly despised plutocrats and the corporate arrogance of Standard Oil. He would have run for president against FDR had he not been assassinated in 1935.

Another outrageous character was a Catholic priest, Father Charles Coughlin. He was the first shock radio personality. His broadcasts were often tirades consisting of populist economic nostrums, venomous antisemitism, and fervid anti-communism. In 1934, he introduced his National Union for Social Justice in opposition to FDR. Coughlin was finally ordered off the air by the Catholic hierarchy that had become increasingly alarmed at his unabashed vitriol and intolerance.

One of the more curious homegrown personages who openly admired Hitler was the occultist William Dudley Pelley. He claimed that the ascension of the Fuhrer to the throne of German leadership was the fulfillment of a prophetic vision to which Pelley himself had been privy. So inspired, he founded the Silver Legion from whence came his version of storm troopers, the Silver Shirts.

His peculiar “Christian” program promulgated draconian economic edicts like the re-enslavement of Black people and disenfranchisement of all Jews. Apparently, his largest following was in the Pacific Northwest where he made it onto the presidential ballot in 1936. He didn’t get elected, and Pelley wound up in the slammer until his release in 1950.

In 1928 Lewis remarried, this time to the intrepid journalist Dorothy Thompson. During her time in Berlin this staunch newswoman interviewed Hitler multiple times and became increasingly critical of the man who would eventually assume dictatorial power. Her blatant dislike for the impetuous fascist got Thompson summarily booted out of Hitler’s domain once he consolidated his reign, the first American journalist to be so expelled.

Thus did Thompson spur her husband’s effort in sounding the tocsin. In his cautionary novel Lewis conjured up Doremus Jessep, the kindly, bearded, 60-year-old editor of the Daily Informer in Vermont’s Beulah Valley. Though some called him a “Bolshevik” on occasion, he was “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental liberal” who dutifully monitored and reported on the goings-on within Fort Beulah and beyond.

It is an election year and presidential candidate Berzilius “Buzz” Windrip is gaining traction on the national stump. A cross between carnival huckster and sly satrap, Windrip’s endearing public performances are guided by Lee Sarason, his grey eminence. Within this unfolding drama are sprinkled numerous references to actual individuals like FDR, Father Coughlin, Earl Browder, and George Seldes. Huey Long is also invoked, clearly an inspiration for the character of Windrip.

Editor Jessup recognizes the broad appeal of the inflated Windrip, who is “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar” who dispenses a surfeit of idiotic ideas. While his “orgasms of oratory” are spellbinding, the logorrhea quickly forgotten once the show is over. Windrip accedes to the Oval Office, and his administration jams a new jackbooted order in place. It is a white supremacist program that persecutes people of color and Jews and greatly dilutes the rights of women.

The Minute Men (Windrip’s paramilitary garrison overseen by Sarason) are “the shock troops of freedom.” Martial law is declared and over 100 congressmen are arrested. There are book burnings. The “management of the poor, particularly of the more surly and dissatisfied poor, was undertaken by the Minute Men.”

Jessep comes to realize the depth of Windrip’s malice and courageously writes a damning editorial. Retribution is swift: He is imprisoned, and his son-in-law is murdered. Other suspicious journalists are rounded up and incarcerated. Jessep who once held fast to the liberal lore of fairness and reasonableness in political and social affairs now grasps what made men like John Brown to do what they did. Jessep does get out of jail. With a nom de guerre and in concert with other brave men and women, he gives himself fully to the campaign to restore democracy.

It Can’t Happen Here sold well. It roused awareness, stimulated discussion and also sparked a number of theatrical productions around the country, some performed in Yiddish and Spanish. In 1936, a troupe of Black thespians in Seattle, the Negro Repertory Company affiliated with the Federal Theater Project, performed the play, setting the dramatic action in Seattle’s Central District.

Indifference, cynicism, and political neutrality are not options when tyrants and demagogues threaten. In his book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder avers: “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.” Sinclair Lewis did and would agree.