It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

Good old murder, that since the slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed opposition!

Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.

But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed in Buzz Windrip’s fifteen points; believed that when he said he wanted to return the power pilfered by the bankers and the industrialists to the people, he more or less meant that he wanted to return the power of the bankers and industrialists to the people. As month by month they saw that they had been cheated with marked cards again, they were indignant; but they were busy with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and it took the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down into the desert and help steal a friendly country to jab them into awakening and into discovering that, while they had been asleep, they had been kidnaped by a small gang of criminals armed with high ideals, well-buttered words, and a lot of machine guns.

Much as Hitler and the Nationalist Socialists assumed power in Germany in 1933 through democratic means, then abolished democracy, Windrip (“the Chief”) is elected to office fairly, and then establishes martial law in the U.S. He redistricts the country to facilitate his form of governing and seizes control of the press and universities. Some of his changes (e.g., the neutering of Congress and the abolition of the Supreme Court) are immediate and public (windrip) and others (e.g., the erection of concentration camps, the torture and murder of political rivals) so gradual and secretive, they go virtually unnoticed (win-drip).