It Can't Happen Here
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Read between February 17 - February 23, 2022
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In October of 1935, the month It Can’t Happen Here was published, William Randolph Hearst encapsuled the problem with a statement that delighted shirt makers but terrified liberals. He counseled his fellow citizens: “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.”
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a fascistic regime of suppression, terror, and totalitarianism—all draped in red, white, and blue bunting. Invoking the highest patriotic principles, Windrip disguises his fascism in the historical trappings of the Republic; his Gestapo, for example, is called the Minute Men.
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The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening) is a somewhat confusing organization—as confusing as Theosophy, Relativity, or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which it resembles. It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.
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.Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children?
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.Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition—shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor—no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade—only of adults—right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!” “Well,
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“Yes!” said Emil Staubmeyer. “Didn’t Hitler save Germany from the Red Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I know!”
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“Now listen, Dad. You don’t understand Senator Windrip. Oh, he’s something of a demagogue—
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What he will do, and maybe only he can do it, is to protect us from the murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviks that would—why, they’d like to stick all of us that are going on this picnic, all the decent clean people that are accustomed to privacy, into hall bedrooms, and make us cook our cabbage soup on a Primus stuck on a bed! Yes, or maybe ‘liquidate’ us entirely!
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Let me put together certain separated phrases out of the sixth chapter of Jeremiah, which seem to have been prophetically written for this hour of desperate crisis in America: “‘Oh ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves together to flee out of the midst of Jerusalem. . .. Prepare ye war. . .arise and let us go up at noon. Woe unto us! for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out. Arise, and let us go by night and let us destroy her palaces. . .. I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with holding it in; I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and ...more
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(4) Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render all homage, do we Americans hold our vast Power, we shall guarantee to all persons absolute freedom of religious worship, provided, however, that no atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, nor any Jew who shall refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, nor any person of any faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to hold any public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge, or as a physician, except in the category of Obstetrics.
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(10) All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive.
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Negroes shall, by definition, be persons with at least one sixteenth colored blood.
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(12) All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except in such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beauty parlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably sacred duties as home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens of the Commonwealth.
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(15) 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 shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet 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, by ...more
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Ten, that all well-paying jobs and businesses held by Negroes will be grabbed by the Poor White Trash among Buzz’s worshipers—and that instead of being denounced they’ll be universally praised as patriotic protectors of Racial Purity. Eleven, that Buzz’ll be able to pass the buck for not creating any real relief for poverty. Twelve, that women will later lose the vote and the right to higher education and be foxed out of all decent jobs and urged to rear soldiers to be killed in foreign wars.
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“They’re only a handful, but just think how small Lenin’s gang was at first, and Mussolini’s and Hitler’s and Kemal Pasha’s, and Napoleon’s! You’ll see all the liberal 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,
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My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to realize that whatever apparent Differences there may be among us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength—though, of course, all this does not apply to people who are racially different from us—we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should all be very glad. And I think we ought to for this be willing to sacrifice any individual gains at all. Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
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Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio broadcasts in the 1930s attracted an estimated thirty million listeners each week, mixed a heavy dose of anti-Semitism with an appeal for a brand of “social justice” based on confiscating wealth. Coughlin became the model for Bishop Prang in Lewis’s novel. But
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U.S. senator Huey Long of Louisiana. The slogan of Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement was “Every Man a King (But No One Wears a Crown).” Lewis revised the slogan in It Can’t Happen Here: “Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.” Like Senator Berzelius (“Buzz”) Windrip in It Can’t Happen Here, Long proposed to limit individual fortunes and inheritances through taxation, to double the amount of money in circulation to facilitate credit, and to provide each family with a guaranteed annual income of upward of four thousand dollars.
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In 1922, the first American local of the German Nazi Party was founded in New York, and by 1935, the German-American Bund claimed a total membership of about ten thousand members. In 1933, William Dudley Pelley founded the anti-Semitic organization Silver Legion, which soon spread across the country and whose members wore silver shirts in imitation of the Brown Shirts in Germany and Black Shirts in Italy.
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February 1933, Franklin Roosevelt (or Rosenfeldt, according to some of his anti-Semitic critics) was the target of a would-be assassin; a disgruntled Italian immigrant killed the mayor of Chicago,
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As early as the first chapter, according to the scholar Robert McLaughlin, “it becomes clear that the installation of a fascist government will not be a revolution or coup d’état; rather, the groundwork for fascism has already been constructed in the ideological worldviews of the majority of Americans. The riposte to the claim that ‘It can’t happen here’ is ‘It already has.’” 12
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In Germany all political parties except the National Socialists were abolished in March 1933, much as in the novel all parties except the Corpos are abolished in August 1937. The book burnings in Germany in May 1933 are replicated in the book burnings by Shad Ladue and his underlings,
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“the lumpen,” the flag-waving conformists or “the American Legion type,” for their apathy in the face of the fascist threat.