Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951)
Author of Babbitt
About the Author
Harry Sinclair Lewis was born on February 7, 1885 in Minnesota. He was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. A lonely child, Lewis immersed himself in reading and diary writing. show more While studying at Yale University and living in writer Upton Sinclair's communal house, he wrote for Yale Literary Magazine and helped to build the Panama Canal. After graduating from Yale in 1908, Lewis began writing fiction, publishing 22 novels by the end of his career. His early works, while often praised by literary critics, did not reach popularity but with Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929), Sinclair Lewis achieved fame as a writer. His style of choice was satire; he explored American small-town life, conformity, hypocrisy, and materialism. Sinclair Lewis was married and divorced twice. As his career wound down, he spent his later life in Europe and died in Rome on January 10, 1951. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Works by Sinclair Lewis
The Man From Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader Selected Essays, 1904-1950 (1953) 39 copies, 1 review
The Three Readers: Clifton Fadiman, Sinclair Lewis, Carl Van Doren (2017) — Editor; Contributor — 8 copies
Sinclair Lewis Premium Collection (Our Mr. Wrenn / The Trail of the Hawk / The Job / The Innocents / Free Air / Main Street / Babbit) (2009) 6 copies
Babbitt / Moths in the Arc Light / The Willow Walk / It Can't Happen Here / The Queen's Letter (1979) 5 copies
Opere 2 copies
Selected Short Stories 2 copies
The American village in a global setting selected papers from an interdisciplinary conference in honour of Sinclair Lewis and Ida K. Compton (2007) 2 copies
Letters from Jack London, Containing an Unpublished Correspondence between London and Sinclair Lewis (1966) 1 copy
Roman 1 copy
FUEGO OTOÑAL 1 copy
Der Gottsucher 1 copy
“Speed” 1 copy
Babbitt / Arrowsmith 1 copy
Dodsworth. Fuego otoñal 1 copy
La trampa humana 1 copy
Lewis Sinclair 1 copy
PS3523.E94 Falkenflug 1 copy
Virga Vay & Allan Cedar 1 copy
Arrowsmith, Volume 2 1 copy
Complete Novels 1 copy
The Watcher Across the Road 1 copy
You Know How Women Are 1 copy
2018 1 copy
[no title] 1 copy
Associated Works
The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (2011) — Contributor — 284 copies, 3 reviews
The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels from the Time of Sherlock Holmes (2009) — Contributor — 198 copies, 6 reviews
Gentlemen, Scholars and Scoundrels: A Treasury of the Best of Harper's Magazine from 1850 to the Present (1972) — Contributor — 62 copies
The lucifer society;: Macabre tales by great modern writers (1972) — Contributor — 52 copies, 1 review
The Good Old Days: A History of American Morals and Manners as Seen Through the Sears, Roebuck Catalogs (1940) — Introduction — 33 copies, 1 review
The Best Short Stories of 1918 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story (1918) — Contributor — 14 copies
Oogst Der Tijden. keur uit de werken van schrijvers en dichters aller volken en eeuwen (1940) — Contributor — 12 copies
Jurgen and the censor. Report of the Emergency committee organized to protest against the suppression of James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1920) — Contributor — 10 copies
Best-in-Books Volume 48: Dodsworth; The Battler; Rain; Bernice Bobs Her Hair; The Great Impersonation; We; The Man Nobody Knows; The Royal Road to Romance; Life of Christ; The… (1961) — Contributor — 5 copies
A reader for writers — Contributor — 2 copies
Dystopia Boxed Set: 18 Dystopian Classics in One Edition — Contributor — 1 copy
Los premios Nobel de literatura. Los padres prodigos / Voces secretas / La senhorita Smith-Tellefsen — Contributor — 1 copy
Nobelpreisträger für Literatur: 1929, 1930 - Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks - Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt (1985) — Contributor — 1 copy
7 Novel Dystopian Collection — Contributor — 1 copy
The Ethnic Image in Modern American Literature, 1900-1950, Volumes 1-2 (1984) — Contributor — 1 copy
Twelve Great Modern Stories, A New Collection — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Lewis, Sinclair
- Legal name
- Lewis, Harry Sinclair
- Other names
- Lewis, Red
Graham, Tom - Birthdate
- 1885-02-07
- Date of death
- 1951-01-10
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Oberlin Academy
Yale University (AB|1908) - Occupations
- novelist
short story writer
playwright
sold fiction plots to novelist Jack London
ghostwriter
editor (show all 12)
reporter
advertising manager
actor
secretary
janitor
columnist - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature ∙ 1935)
National Institute of Arts and Letters (vice president)
Helicon Home Colony, Englewood, New Jersey
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California writers' colony
Transatlantic Tales, New York, New York (assistant editor)
Daily Courier, Waterloo, Iowa (reporter) (show all 14)
Associated Press, San Francisco (staff writer)
Volta Review, Washington, D.C. (staff member)
Frederick A. Stokes (publisher), New York, New York (manuscript reader)
Adventure, New York, New York (assistant editor)
Publisher's Newspaper Syndicate, New York, NY (editor)
George H. Doran (publisher), New York, NY (editorial assistant, advertising manager, and full-time writer)
Newsweek (columnist)
Esquire (columnist) - Awards and honors
- Nobel Prize (Literature ∙ 1930)
First American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature
National Institute of Arts and Letters (vice president)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (1935)
Litt.D., Yale University
U.S. Postal Service stamp - Agent
- Edith Haggard
- Relationships
- Thompson, Dorothy (wife|divorced)
Lewis, Grace Hegger (wife|divorced)
Lewis, J. P. Sinclair (grandson)
Wharton, Edith (friend)
Acheson, Dean (friend)
Shirer, William L. (friend) (show all 8)
Kruif, Paul de (friend)
Jordan, Elizabeth Garver (editor) - Cause of death
- alcoholism
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
- Places of residence
- Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
Helicon Home Colony, Englewood, New Jersey, USA
Carmel, California, USA
Washington, D.C., USA
New York, New York, USA
Rome, Italy (show all 9)
Austen Riggs Center, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, USA
Thorvale Farm, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA
Barnard, Vermont, USA - Place of death
- Rome, Italy
- Burial location
- Greenwood Cemetery, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
- Map Location
- USA
Members
Reviews
Normally, I would agree that a book review should pertain solely to the quality of the book regardless of outside social and cultural conditions impacting readers, even more so if such conditions occurred ninety years after the book was first published. Nevertheless, the unprecedented 2024 electoral events in the United States, events that saw the country abruptly swing toward the Nationalism and Fascism that characterize the presidential administration that came to power, make it virtually show more impossible to review Lewis' book independently of those events. In essence, when it was published, It Can't Happen Here was a cautionary yet fictional warning of the fragility of U.S. representative democracy. Ninety years on, the book is no longer cautionary but is now seen as a prophetic warning or perhaps even more accurately as a roman à clef, a genre in which real people and actual events are overlaid with a fictional facade. This is truly a situation in which current conditions have changed how we interpret a book written nearly a century earlier.
In the 1930s, this book may have caused Sinclair Lewis to be described as a pessimist and doomsayer. In the mid 2020s, it may well cause us to call him prescient and clairvoyant.
Lewis shows himself to be a master of irony, satire, mockery and derision. Early on in a dialogue over the malleability of American public opinion, the character of Doremus Jessup recalls “our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and when someone actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'.” Those references immediately brought to mind the 2003 renaming of french-fried potatoes as “Freedom fries” and of french toast as “Freedom toast” when some North Carolinians and, indeed, the U.S. House of Representatives took umbrage with France for not supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At that point, on page 17, I realized that It Can't Happen Here was going to be addressing contemporary American foolishness.
I very nearly spit out my coffee when, a few pages later, I encountered reference to a growing popular belief that, once Buzz Windrip won the presidential election, everybody in the country would receive $5,000 apiece (in 1935, remember). What made this especially noteworthy is that a friend in a certain part of the U.S. had recounted to me a comment made to her by a member of a certain demographic group that, as soon as the 2024 GOP presidential candidate was elected, everybody was going to receive—you guessed it—five thousand dollars.
Lewis' candidate, Buzz Windrip, isn't going to stop at distributing $5,000 to everyone though, No, he's in favor of the United States “so preparing its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn . . . he might have to take it over and run it properly.” A bit reminiscent, I thought, of a real president who tries to control imports through tariffs and who insanely talks of making additional states out of sovereign countries.
But we haven't seen anything yet. During his campaign, Windrip issues “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men” [or should we just call it “Project 2025”?] The 15th point states, “Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a) that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b) that Congress hall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President . . . any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate . . . any or all acts of the President. . . .” Rather reminds the reader of the mid 2020s, with a U.S. president tearing down part of the White House, ordering murders of boaters on the open seas, invading Iran with no Congressional authorization, ignoring the Constitutional rights of states to regulate their own elections, feeling secure that the right-wing majority of justices on the Supreme Court will not stand in his way, and intimidating any members of his party in Congress who might be thinking wrong thoughts.
To ensure the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for every right-thinking American, Windrip welcomed the support of all the misled youth, who, wanting to be soldiers but not the regimen of the traditional military, flocked to join the voluntary (at first anyway) Minute Men, soon abbreviated to M.M.s. How were they used? Page 160 explains that “To end [the] cowardly flight of the lying counter revolutionaries (many of whom [were] once accepted as reputable preachers and lawyers and doctors and writers and ex-congressmen and ex-army officers. . .) the government quadrupled the guards who were halting suspects at every harbor and at even the minutest trails crossing the border; and in one quick raid, it poured M.M. storm troopers into all airports, private or public, and all aëroplane factories, and thus, they hoped, closed the air lanes to skulking traitors.” Sounds a bit like an actual 21st century president sending armed military troops into civilian cities even against the wishes of state governors and city mayors, doesn't it? And didn't I read something about immigration cops being stationed in civilian airports during this Reign—um, of course I meant to say “Administration”?
Perhaps we shouldn't include descriptions of the concentration camps that the M.M.s eventually came to run. One might be tempted to draw parallels (deserved or not) with U.S. immigration detention centers run in the mid 2020s by ICE.
There are more tabbed pages in the book, but I believe that those from which I've already quoted are quite sufficient to illustrate what has unfortunately become Sinclair Lewis' clairvoyant vision of a nation whose electorate was swayed to elect a Nationalist Fascist to its presidency. I find Lewis to be an immensely effective writer whose barbs and mockeries are adroitly rendered. That his fictional novel has been forced to become the roman à clef that contemporary events have made it suggests that he wrote it for naught, that it failed to be the effective warning he intended. Still, the book remains instructive and is perhaps more persuasive now than it was in the 1930s. Were I teaching a political science course, It Can't Happen Here would be among the other books of required reading. Do not be put off by my reference to textbooks—there is quite a bit of delightful humor here as well: As Lorinda, a sort-of liberal/sort-of revolutionary but not quite an over-educated product of the U.S. public school system remarks, “Why, darling, the only German I know is the phrase that Buck taught me for 'God bless you'--'Verfluchter Schweinehund'.” show less
In the 1930s, this book may have caused Sinclair Lewis to be described as a pessimist and doomsayer. In the mid 2020s, it may well cause us to call him prescient and clairvoyant.
Lewis shows himself to be a master of irony, satire, mockery and derision. Early on in a dialogue over the malleability of American public opinion, the character of Doremus Jessup recalls “our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and when someone actually proposed calling German measles 'Liberty measles'.” Those references immediately brought to mind the 2003 renaming of french-fried potatoes as “Freedom fries” and of french toast as “Freedom toast” when some North Carolinians and, indeed, the U.S. House of Representatives took umbrage with France for not supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At that point, on page 17, I realized that It Can't Happen Here was going to be addressing contemporary American foolishness.
I very nearly spit out my coffee when, a few pages later, I encountered reference to a growing popular belief that, once Buzz Windrip won the presidential election, everybody in the country would receive $5,000 apiece (in 1935, remember). What made this especially noteworthy is that a friend in a certain part of the U.S. had recounted to me a comment made to her by a member of a certain demographic group that, as soon as the 2024 GOP presidential candidate was elected, everybody was going to receive—you guessed it—five thousand dollars.
Lewis' candidate, Buzz Windrip, isn't going to stop at distributing $5,000 to everyone though, No, he's in favor of the United States “so preparing its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn . . . he might have to take it over and run it properly.” A bit reminiscent, I thought, of a real president who tries to control imports through tariffs and who insanely talks of making additional states out of sovereign countries.
But we haven't seen anything yet. During his campaign, Windrip issues “The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men” [or should we just call it “Project 2025”?] The 15th point states, “Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate amendments to the Constitution providing (a) that the President shall have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b) that Congress hall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President . . . any needed legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate . . . any or all acts of the President. . . .” Rather reminds the reader of the mid 2020s, with a U.S. president tearing down part of the White House, ordering murders of boaters on the open seas, invading Iran with no Congressional authorization, ignoring the Constitutional rights of states to regulate their own elections, feeling secure that the right-wing majority of justices on the Supreme Court will not stand in his way, and intimidating any members of his party in Congress who might be thinking wrong thoughts.
To ensure the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for every right-thinking American, Windrip welcomed the support of all the misled youth, who, wanting to be soldiers but not the regimen of the traditional military, flocked to join the voluntary (at first anyway) Minute Men, soon abbreviated to M.M.s. How were they used? Page 160 explains that “To end [the] cowardly flight of the lying counter revolutionaries (many of whom [were] once accepted as reputable preachers and lawyers and doctors and writers and ex-congressmen and ex-army officers. . .) the government quadrupled the guards who were halting suspects at every harbor and at even the minutest trails crossing the border; and in one quick raid, it poured M.M. storm troopers into all airports, private or public, and all aëroplane factories, and thus, they hoped, closed the air lanes to skulking traitors.” Sounds a bit like an actual 21st century president sending armed military troops into civilian cities even against the wishes of state governors and city mayors, doesn't it? And didn't I read something about immigration cops being stationed in civilian airports during this Reign—um, of course I meant to say “Administration”?
Perhaps we shouldn't include descriptions of the concentration camps that the M.M.s eventually came to run. One might be tempted to draw parallels (deserved or not) with U.S. immigration detention centers run in the mid 2020s by ICE.
There are more tabbed pages in the book, but I believe that those from which I've already quoted are quite sufficient to illustrate what has unfortunately become Sinclair Lewis' clairvoyant vision of a nation whose electorate was swayed to elect a Nationalist Fascist to its presidency. I find Lewis to be an immensely effective writer whose barbs and mockeries are adroitly rendered. That his fictional novel has been forced to become the roman à clef that contemporary events have made it suggests that he wrote it for naught, that it failed to be the effective warning he intended. Still, the book remains instructive and is perhaps more persuasive now than it was in the 1930s. Were I teaching a political science course, It Can't Happen Here would be among the other books of required reading. Do not be put off by my reference to textbooks—there is quite a bit of delightful humor here as well: As Lorinda, a sort-of liberal/sort-of revolutionary but not quite an over-educated product of the U.S. public school system remarks, “Why, darling, the only German I know is the phrase that Buck taught me for 'God bless you'--'Verfluchter Schweinehund'.” show less
I enjoyed Babbitt much more than I thought I would. It's not easy at the start, as the reader gets thrown into a rah rah early 20th century American business environment in the fictional city of Zenith. There isn't a whole lot of plot; it's more a novel of characters, including, of course, George Babbitt. He initially appears to be a pumped-up, full of himself aspirant to the 1%. For a large portion of the book he says all the right things at various local community clubs and political show more events about squashing unions and rewarding the go-getters needed to get the country back on its feet after the first world war. He gets a reputation as an orator, and his real estate business prospers. But even as he becomes a leader in Zenith's "boosterism", underneath it all he yearns to slip away with the fairy child of his dreams:
"He was somewhere among unknown people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the paths of a midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting. Her dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond the perilous moors the brave sea glittered."
After a friend's life takes a disastrous turn, Babbitt rebels and for a time searches for the fairy child among women of his acquaintance. He is reminded of his more liberal views when young, and begins to see his own rebellious son differently.
The book was a huge success in its time, and in 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize, the first American to do so. He writes really well, and more than once I thought this was what Updike was trying to do, with less success. Babbitt is a satire of crass American commercialism and superficial optimism, but the book also has a heart. "Babbitt" became a word in our lexicon defined as ""a person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards". To me, that definition is unfair, as Georgie Babbitt wasn't an unthinking conformist. He yearned for escape with the fairy child, but determinedly, with "pep", he tried to make the best of the hand he saw himself dealt. A four star read. show less
"He was somewhere among unknown people who laughed at him. He slipped away, ran down the paths of a midnight garden, and at the gate the fairy child was waiting. Her dear and tranquil hand caressed his cheek. He was gallant and wise and well-beloved; warm ivory were her arms; and beyond the perilous moors the brave sea glittered."
After a friend's life takes a disastrous turn, Babbitt rebels and for a time searches for the fairy child among women of his acquaintance. He is reminded of his more liberal views when young, and begins to see his own rebellious son differently.
The book was a huge success in its time, and in 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize, the first American to do so. He writes really well, and more than once I thought this was what Updike was trying to do, with less success. Babbitt is a satire of crass American commercialism and superficial optimism, but the book also has a heart. "Babbitt" became a word in our lexicon defined as ""a person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards". To me, that definition is unfair, as Georgie Babbitt wasn't an unthinking conformist. He yearned for escape with the fairy child, but determinedly, with "pep", he tried to make the best of the hand he saw himself dealt. A four star read. show less
Where is your breaking point? What is your red line? When is enough enough?
In recent weeks and months of this year 2017, a good many Americans have asked themselves the same question. All humans have their limits, and as we find ourselves pushing up against, it becomes a universal quest for self-definition. What would shake me from my complacency?
Such a question plagues Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. A self-described “indolent Liberal” show more through-and-through, he would rather just continue to publish his small-town newspaper, the Daily Informer of Fort Beulah, Vermont. His natural cynicism serves him well during the political rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the Führer-in-waiting and a thinly-veiled version of Huey Long who manages to displace Franklin Roosevelt from the 1936 Democratic nomination by promising to give $5,000 a year for every household, to put the uppity Negroes and Jews in their place, and to strip Congress and the Supreme Court of their Constitutional powers.
While many of the esteemed burghers of Fort Beulah sign right up for Windrip’s promises, however, Jessup remains apart, keeping company with his few fellow skeptical friends. Among these are Buck Titus – essentially the prototype for Dorothy Thompson’s “Mr. H” – Father Perefixe, the local Catholic priest; and Karl Pascal, noted Communist and Jessup’s frequent verbal sparring partner. They are all together listening to the Democratic convention over the radio when eventually Windrip manages to wrest it away from Roosevelt.
Needless to say, he goes on to win the election, ushering in the "American Corporate State," with financiers and big business occupying the prime seats at the table, and Windrip's Ernst Röhm-like consigliere/Secretary of State Lee Sarason pulling many of the strings behind the scenes. As the Sturmabteilung equivalent “Minute Men” (or “MMs”) begin restructuring the country, enforcing Windrip’s rule, arresting members of Congress, and establishing concentration camps, the insidious nature of the new Corpo regime comes into clear focus.
But like today’s debate over whether Donald Trump is a mere symptom of the larger system, or if he’s an aberration in an otherwise-functioning polity, so too do the inhabitants of Doremus Jessup’s Fort Beulah argue about the same:
Is there a collective that can be saved from racism and scapegoating by appealing to its material interests? This debate – and the 2016 Democratic primary – continues to rage, as it likely will for all time, like the fires below Centralia, PA. The ability of the mythical “white working class” to vote sufficiently for a black president promising hope and better things would seem to imply the wisdom of such a strategy, despite a hardcore of committed white nationalists who can never be won over. Of course, most people don’t necessarily think in those terms, and indeed, any form of political consciousness can be more difficult to establish than one might assume.
At first, if not actively collaborating or joining up with the Corpos, most Americans continued to go about their business, perhaps wary or hopeful of coming changes. But gradually, even the complacent ones like Jessup begin to get “woke”:
It's a striking confession from a self-described liberal - and his own tensions between fascism and communism come to the fore over and over again. Not long before Jessup is thrown into a concentration camp along with Karl Pascal, he wonders: “I guess you know, the Communists are too theocratic for my tastes. But looks to me as though they have more courage and devotion and smart strategy than anybody since the Early Christian Martyrs—whom they also resemble in hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to get in touch with 'em and see if there's any dirty work at the crossroads I can do for 'em—say distributing a few Early Christian tracts by St. Lenin.” And yet, until the end, he thinks must go it alone, that liberalism is the great differentiator of America, that individualism is worth preserving at any cost.
But indeed, even if Jessup doesn’t get all the way to Communism, this own great awakening comes with the realization of the dangers of the present. We live in a time when many are discovering the looming threats that have been there all along, when solutions like socialism and social democracy have regained their luster as both a moral politics and as a means to keep fascism at bay.
The debates of the mid-1930s sadly – and troublingly – resonate all too clearly with those we continue to have to this day. Is Trump a Huey Long? A Sarason? A Windrip? One of Lewis’s characterization makes the latter sound likely:
Whether tyrant or fascist or petulant child, there comes a time to actively oppose authoritarians of all stripes, and It Can’t Happen Here is an extremely relevant exploration of how to draw that line. It illustrates what to look for, how to remain aware of a creeping totalitarianism, and most importantly, what the consequences might be for realizing too late. show less
In recent weeks and months of this year 2017, a good many Americans have asked themselves the same question. All humans have their limits, and as we find ourselves pushing up against, it becomes a universal quest for self-definition. What would shake me from my complacency?
Such a question plagues Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. A self-described “indolent Liberal” show more through-and-through, he would rather just continue to publish his small-town newspaper, the Daily Informer of Fort Beulah, Vermont. His natural cynicism serves him well during the political rise of Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the Führer-in-waiting and a thinly-veiled version of Huey Long who manages to displace Franklin Roosevelt from the 1936 Democratic nomination by promising to give $5,000 a year for every household, to put the uppity Negroes and Jews in their place, and to strip Congress and the Supreme Court of their Constitutional powers.
While many of the esteemed burghers of Fort Beulah sign right up for Windrip’s promises, however, Jessup remains apart, keeping company with his few fellow skeptical friends. Among these are Buck Titus – essentially the prototype for Dorothy Thompson’s “Mr. H” – Father Perefixe, the local Catholic priest; and Karl Pascal, noted Communist and Jessup’s frequent verbal sparring partner. They are all together listening to the Democratic convention over the radio when eventually Windrip manages to wrest it away from Roosevelt.
Needless to say, he goes on to win the election, ushering in the "American Corporate State," with financiers and big business occupying the prime seats at the table, and Windrip's Ernst Röhm-like consigliere/Secretary of State Lee Sarason pulling many of the strings behind the scenes. As the Sturmabteilung equivalent “Minute Men” (or “MMs”) begin restructuring the country, enforcing Windrip’s rule, arresting members of Congress, and establishing concentration camps, the insidious nature of the new Corpo regime comes into clear focus.
But like today’s debate over whether Donald Trump is a mere symptom of the larger system, or if he’s an aberration in an otherwise-functioning polity, so too do the inhabitants of Doremus Jessup’s Fort Beulah argue about the same:
Altogether too easy to explain everything just blaming it on Windrip … Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the stomach—quack economists with every sort of economic ptomaine! No, Buzz isn't important—it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've got to attend to—the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!
Is there a collective that can be saved from racism and scapegoating by appealing to its material interests? This debate – and the 2016 Democratic primary – continues to rage, as it likely will for all time, like the fires below Centralia, PA. The ability of the mythical “white working class” to vote sufficiently for a black president promising hope and better things would seem to imply the wisdom of such a strategy, despite a hardcore of committed white nationalists who can never be won over. Of course, most people don’t necessarily think in those terms, and indeed, any form of political consciousness can be more difficult to establish than one might assume.
At first, if not actively collaborating or joining up with the Corpos, most Americans continued to go about their business, perhaps wary or hopeful of coming changes. But gradually, even the complacent ones like Jessup begin to get “woke”:
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.
A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were evil. But possibly they had to be violent, because easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise. If our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators and war and blood.
It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was 'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship … It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can blame…no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord!
Is it too late?
It's a striking confession from a self-described liberal - and his own tensions between fascism and communism come to the fore over and over again. Not long before Jessup is thrown into a concentration camp along with Karl Pascal, he wonders: “I guess you know, the Communists are too theocratic for my tastes. But looks to me as though they have more courage and devotion and smart strategy than anybody since the Early Christian Martyrs—whom they also resemble in hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to get in touch with 'em and see if there's any dirty work at the crossroads I can do for 'em—say distributing a few Early Christian tracts by St. Lenin.” And yet, until the end, he thinks must go it alone, that liberalism is the great differentiator of America, that individualism is worth preserving at any cost.
But indeed, even if Jessup doesn’t get all the way to Communism, this own great awakening comes with the realization of the dangers of the present. We live in a time when many are discovering the looming threats that have been there all along, when solutions like socialism and social democracy have regained their luster as both a moral politics and as a means to keep fascism at bay.
The debates of the mid-1930s sadly – and troublingly – resonate all too clearly with those we continue to have to this day. Is Trump a Huey Long? A Sarason? A Windrip? One of Lewis’s characterization makes the latter sound likely:
Daily he wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody about him. How could he carry on his heartbreaking labor if nobody ever encouraged him? he demanded. Anyone, from Sarason to inter-office messenger, who did not play valet to his ego he suspected of plotting against him. He constantly increased his bodyguard, and as constantly distrusted all his guards and discharged them, and once took a shot at a couple of them, so that in all the world he had no companion save his old aide Lee Sarason, and perhaps Hector Macgoblin, to whom he could talk easily…
As a bank clerk might, quite rationally, worry equally over the whereabouts of a hundred million dollars' worth of the bank's bonds, and of ten cents of his own lunch money, so Buzz Windrip worried equally over the welfare—that is, the obedience to himself—of a hundred and thirty-odd million American citizens and the small matter of the moods of Lee Sarason, whose approval of him was the one real fame. (His wife Windrip did not see oftener than once a week, and anyway, what that rustic wench thought was unimportant)…
Just how COULD he get Lee to be a good boy and come play with him again? wistfully wondered the man who now and then planned to be emperor of the world.
Whether tyrant or fascist or petulant child, there comes a time to actively oppose authoritarians of all stripes, and It Can’t Happen Here is an extremely relevant exploration of how to draw that line. It illustrates what to look for, how to remain aware of a creeping totalitarianism, and most importantly, what the consequences might be for realizing too late. show less
[NOTE: I wrote this review in 2012, long before the story in this book came true]
I found this little-known book by accident, and I'm glad I did. Very much in the style of Sinclair Lewis, it's a bouncy enough, readable yarn that draws you to its characters, even across the cultural chasm of 8 decades. But that's not what makes it exceptional. It's a remarkably convincing story of the rise of a fascist dictatorship in 1930s America. Not an imported Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin dictator figure, but show more an authentic, all-American populist demagogue; much like certain figures that have appeared across American politics over the last few decades. The first half of the book, which deals with the rise to power of Buzz Windrip (Democratic party nominee for President), is so realistic and plausible that it is close to terrifying. Even given that the political climate is so radically different today, and the polemic portrayed in the book is so anachronistic, the American people have (perhaps) changed very much less. The call for a strong America, a traditional America, for disposing of the influence of liberal intellectuals, and the elimination of the welfare parasites - this seems to have changed so little in the last 75 years. Even the pivotal (although ultimately disposable) support of the firebrand fundamentalist media preachers is all too easy to relate to. At the bottom line, the victory of fascism hinged on the tacit support, or at least lack of opposition, of the silent majority from all classes, who felt that "a little bit of shaking up" was what America really needed. Much of the second half of the book is rather less remarkable: the day to day struggle (physical and moral) of one such intellectual, and his largely ineffective but tragic opposition to the new regime. Of this there are books aplenty ("Alone in Berlin", "Out of the Night", etc), even though the novelty of the American setting is unquestionably more disturbing. Much more disturbing, in fact, than London's The Iron Heel, which although set in America, is laughably unconvincing in a Bolshevik sort of way. Of course, in the context of the creeping rise of fascism today in my own home country (Israel), such a novel is bound to strike a chord. But the title itself should be enough to make you think twice before dismissing it - even (or perhaps especially) in the land of the free and the home of the brave. show less
I found this little-known book by accident, and I'm glad I did. Very much in the style of Sinclair Lewis, it's a bouncy enough, readable yarn that draws you to its characters, even across the cultural chasm of 8 decades. But that's not what makes it exceptional. It's a remarkably convincing story of the rise of a fascist dictatorship in 1930s America. Not an imported Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin dictator figure, but show more an authentic, all-American populist demagogue; much like certain figures that have appeared across American politics over the last few decades. The first half of the book, which deals with the rise to power of Buzz Windrip (Democratic party nominee for President), is so realistic and plausible that it is close to terrifying. Even given that the political climate is so radically different today, and the polemic portrayed in the book is so anachronistic, the American people have (perhaps) changed very much less. The call for a strong America, a traditional America, for disposing of the influence of liberal intellectuals, and the elimination of the welfare parasites - this seems to have changed so little in the last 75 years. Even the pivotal (although ultimately disposable) support of the firebrand fundamentalist media preachers is all too easy to relate to. At the bottom line, the victory of fascism hinged on the tacit support, or at least lack of opposition, of the silent majority from all classes, who felt that "a little bit of shaking up" was what America really needed. Much of the second half of the book is rather less remarkable: the day to day struggle (physical and moral) of one such intellectual, and his largely ineffective but tragic opposition to the new regime. Of this there are books aplenty ("Alone in Berlin", "Out of the Night", etc), even though the novelty of the American setting is unquestionably more disturbing. Much more disturbing, in fact, than London's The Iron Heel, which although set in America, is laughably unconvincing in a Bolshevik sort of way. Of course, in the context of the creeping rise of fascism today in my own home country (Israel), such a novel is bound to strike a chord. But the title itself should be enough to make you think twice before dismissing it - even (or perhaps especially) in the land of the free and the home of the brave. show less
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