He blamed “the lumpen,” the flag-waving conformists or “the American Legion type,” for their apathy in the face of the fascist threat. H. G. Wells later complained to Lewis that he “didn’t show enough the role” of the industrial lobby in right-wing American politics and insisted “that it would be the Babbitts who would be the leaders of fascism in America—backed by the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and the N[ational] A[ssociation of] M[anufacturers].”
