It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

Jessup’s sense of social duty is informed by his individualism. He does not believe in collective modes of reform because he views them as absolutist and dogmatic, and he objects to any group insisting that it has the final and perfect solution for society’s ills.

Neither “Fascists,” “Communists,” “American Constitutionalists,” “Monarchists,” nor “preachers” have the answer, because, according to Jessup, “There is no Solution! There will never be a state of society anything like perfect!”

He reflects Lewis’s own values when he insists that “All the Utopias—Brook Farm, Robert Owen’s sanctuary of chatter, Upton Sinclair’s Helicon Hall—and their regulation end in ...

Jessup, like Lewis, shrinks from political activism and believes that a man minding his own business rather than insisting upon saving the masses is a true idealist.

Once the editorial appears, Jessup is immediately hauled off to jail, where he reconsiders his earlier negative attitudes toward violence and wonders if his own conscientious respectability—that is, minding his own business—hasn’t been one of the primary reasons why fascism has succeeded in America.

It is, he thinks, the Jessups “who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest” (see here).

Jessup’s liberal roots firmly place him in a relatively passive and pacifistic political tradition.

He participates in the popular rebellion against the Corpo regime but the values he fights for are associated with the individual rather than with collective action: “I am convinced,” he insists, “that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever”

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.

Referring to the Daughters of the American Revolution

Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours!

“Cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics. I’ve heard of their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I’ve never heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis!”

The Executive has got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.

All the while, Walt Trowbridge, possible Republican candidate for President, suffering from the deficiency of being honest and disinclined to promise that he could work miracles, was insisting that we live in the United States of America and not on a golden highway to Utopia.

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his “ideas” almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.

And it was Buzz’s, not Sarason’s, master stroke that, as warmly as he advocated everyone’s getting rich by just voting to be rich, he denounced all “Fascism” and “Naziism,” so that most of the Republicans who were afraid of Democratic Fascism, and all the Democrats who were afraid of Republican Fascism, were ready to vote for him.

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions,

There was, as yet, no absolute censorship of the press; only a confused imprisonment of journalists who offended the government

the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of “intellectualism.”

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.

In agony Mr. Falck raised his head, dust-smeared from the floor, straightened his shoulders, held up trembling hands, and with such sweetness in his voice as Doremus had once heard in it when men were human, he cried, “Father, Thou hast forgiven so long! Forgive them not but curse them, for they know what they do!” He tumbled forward, and Doremus knew that he would never hear that voice again.

When Dewey Haik became President, then America really did begin to suffer a little, and to long for the good old democratic, liberal days of Windrip.

“More and more, as I think about history,” he pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

(The grim national joke of 1933: What’s the capital of the United States? Half of what it was last year.)

the best-known alternative to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came from one of the primary targets of Lewis’s satire, former governor and 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.”

His political opinions were a bit like those of Rick Blaine in the movie Casablanca. When asked his allegiances by a Gestapo major, Blaine replies, “I’m an alcoholic,” to which the nonaligned prefect of police adds, “That makes Rick a citizen of the world.”

The final rally of Windrip’s campaign takes place in Madison Square Garden two days before the election, an affair sometimes compared to the mass demonstrations at the Berlin Sportpalast organized by Joseph Goebbels on Hitler’s behalf—but Lewis was also prescient. On October 3, 1937, nearly two years after publication of his novel, more than a thousand Storm Troopers rallied at Madison Square Garden in New York, and to mark Washington’s Birthday in February 1939, some twenty thousand members of the German-American Bund and other fascists met in Madison Square Garden to hear a speech by Fritz Kuhn, the so-called “American Führer.”

As if to prove Samuel Johnson’s adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” all of these violations of the Constitution occur under the blanket pretense that they are emergency measures necessary to preserve the American Way of Life.