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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.
What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: ‘Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!’
Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?.
He graduated from Isaiah College—once a bold Unitarian venture but by 1894 an interdenominational outfit with nebulous trinitarian yearnings,
During college, Doremus wrote a great deal of bad poetry and became an incurable book addict,
Bishop Prang thundered from his Sinai which, with its microphone and typed revelations timed to the split-second, was so much more snappy and efficient than the original Sinai.
He called himself an “agnostic” instead of an “atheist” only because he detested the street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional atheists.
Coming from an airless closet, smelling of sacerdotal woolen union suits, in Persepolis, Indiana, it leapt to the farthest stars;
Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for thirty-four years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had he wanted to murder her.
Call me a socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.
It was a pious hermit’s cave with the advantages of leather chairs and excellent rye highballs.
Father Stephen Perefixe, when he read the Fifteen Points, was considerably angrier than Doremus. He snorted, “What? Negroes, Jews, women—they all banned and they leave us Catholics out, this time? Hitler didn’t neglect us. He’s persecuted us. Must be that Charley Coughlin. He’s made us too respectable!”
He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon, Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr. Goebbels
under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.
The few who did fail, most of them newspapermen, disliked the smell of him more than before they had met him. . .. Even they, by the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks upon him, kept his name alive in every column.
ammonia pistol
explained to women voters how kind it was of Senator Windrip to let them go on voting, so far;
Since, if they all stuck together, they might entice 900,000 votes, they had avoided such bourgeois grossness by enthusiastic schisms,
it’ll be a good thing to have Buzz. He’ll put a damn quick stop to all this radicalism—all this free speech and libel of our most fundamental institutions——”
Doremus came out of the Grand Central, at six o’clock, into a gray trickle of cold dishwater from heaven’s kitchen sink.
Caspar Milquetoast.
philoprogenitive
All through the “Depression,” ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was general to the country.
he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.
Everybody delightfully profited, except the very poor, the common workmen, the skilled workmen, the small business men, the professional men, and old couples living on annuities or their savings
he went on loving the boy and wishing he would shut up.
Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak, and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive.
the Booker Washington school of Negroes who counseled patience in the new subjection of the Negroes to slavery,
The Holy City of Moscow! Karl looked upon it with exactly such uncritical and slightly hysterical adoration as other sectarians had in their day devoted to Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, Canterbury, and Benares.
As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the Capitalists were the Communists.
universal partnership, in which the State must own all resources so large that they affect all members of the State,
(There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the Catholic Church is less Puritanical and always more esthetic than the Protestant; and that professional soldiers hate war more than do congressmen and old maids.)
Most Americans had learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people by the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we were the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions were but passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselves with anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must not set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, though foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a
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(The grim national joke of 1933: What’s the capital of the United States? Half of what it was last year.)
In 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, who had been sitting next to the President-elect, by mistake.
Nor was it the first American novel that envisioned a fascist future wrapped in the American flag published during the Depression. It was, in fact, the third, after Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) and Edward Dahlberg’s Those Who Perish (1934).
Lewis’s biographer Mark Schorer bluntly asserts that “It Can’t Happen Here would never have been written if Sinclair Lewis had not been married to Dorothy Thompson.”
It Can’t Happen Here is doubtlessly also indebted to Jack London’s dystopian novel The Iron Heel (1913), which depicts the rise of a ruthless oligarchy in the U.S.
Howard claimed that he had seen a memo from Joseph Breen, Will Hays’s successor as director of the Production Code Administration, claiming that the script contained “dangerous material” and urging a major revision of it, perhaps casting communists rather than fascists as the villains.
Joseph A. Barry, “Sinclair Lewis, 65 and Far from Main Street,” New York Times, 5 February 1950, p. 153.
