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It's the #1 bestselling work in
the "classic American literature" category on Amazon dot com—though it's
also available for free through Project Gutenberg Australia or the Multnomah County Library. Salon dot com called it "the novel that foreshadowed Donald Trump's authoritarian appeal."
It Can't Happen Here was written in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis, who in 1930
had become the first U.S. author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Lewis
was known for his 1920s novels like Babbitt and Main Street, which lovingly excoriated
the vacuity of middle-class, middle-American, small-town Rotarians.
Although it's not
considered his best book, It Can't Happen
Here became Lewis's best-selling novel, and when he turned it into a play
the next year it was widely performed in multiple languages. More recently, the novel has gained renewed
attention, becoming an online bestseller, and the topic of frequent
commentaries.
The satirical narrative
features a demagogic presidential candidate who wins support among economically
distressed voters with mesmerizing speeches full of anti-elitist populism;
racist, sexist, anti-Semitic nationalism; inconsistent proposals; and authoritarian
promises to "make America a proud, rich land again." He's published a
ghostwritten book combining boastful autobiography and contradictory policy,
and he slams the press as a bunch of liars.
So, you can see why it
might be of interest.
But the crass and
charismatic Berzelius Windrip—known as Buzz—is of course not the result of any
clairvoyance on Lewis's part, but a riff on the dictators of his day. Lewis was married to the journalist Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed both Hitler and Huey Long in the early 1930s, and
whose work may have provided both impetus and material for Lewis's novel.
Huey Long, in particular,
provided a model for Buzz. The Louisiana
Democrat had been compared to Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, and intended to
challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the 1936 nomination. Instead, Long was shot to death a month
before Lewis's novel appeared, and its explicit references to him were quickly
revised into the past tense.
Pundits on the political right have snarked about the comparisons of Buzz Windrip to Donald Trump, because not only is Windrip a Democrat, but also
his platform, among its various and often conflicting items, proposes economic
redistribution, limits to the size of individual fortunes, caps on dividends,
and five thousand dollars per year to be given to every family. But it's worth noticing that in fact, this is
not what he does once he's elected.
Instead, Windrip's capitalist supporters were well aware of the
loopholes and qualifiers in his platform, and generally find themselves much
more satisfied than his working-class supporters. Buzz promotes and protects
big business, bans strikes and labor unions, and, aside from thus heightening
exploitation and adding new layers of graft and corruption, he mostly enables
economic business as usual.
Windrip does follow through
on the one item in his fifteen-point plan that he has presented from the start
as most important: the consolidation of power in the executive branch. When Congress refuses to approve his demand
for complete control of legislation and suspension of any interference from the
judiciary, Windrip declares martial law, and has troublesome congressmen arrested
for "inciting to riot." His
edicts are enforced by an informal citizen militia he has regularized, known as
the Minute Men, or the MMs. Within the
first year, he has terminated all the older political parties and replaced them
with just one, the American Corporate State and Patriotic Party, whose members
are widely known as the Corpos. Soon
there are concentration camps, filling with a lengthening list of dissidents,
including "such congenital traitors and bellyachers as Jewish doctors,
Jewish musicians, Negro journalists, socialistic college professors" and
so on. The racist and anti-Semitic planks in Windrip's platform are, like his
insistence on centralized executive power, also "vigorously respected,"
in their case because "Every man is a king so long as he has someone to
look down on."
"Every Man a
King" was a motto of Huey Long's, the title of his autobiography and his theme song. Unlike Buzz Windrip, Long
seems to have followed through on some of his populist promises, taking on the
Standard oil trust, and expanding hospitals, schools, roads, and bridges in
public works programs across Louisiana. Though
his methods were autocratic and his power exercised through patronage, his
campaigns helped pushed FDR's New Deal further to the left.
But the mainstream in the
1930s was already further left than it is today. Windrip's redistributive platform reflects a
widespread consensus, and explicitly references Huey Long's Share the Wealth
program, FDR's New Deal, Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California, and
Townsend's social security plans, among others.
When opposition to the Corpo
state gets organized under the leadership of the Republican former candidate, he
declines contributions to the cause from an oil tycoon and tells him that, whatever happens,
you
and your kind of clever pirates are finished. Whatever happens, whatever
details of a new system of government may be decided on, whether we call it a
'Cooperative Commonwealth' or 'State Socialism' or 'Communism' or 'Revived
Traditional Democracy,' there's got to be a new feeling—that government is not
a game for a few smart, resolute athletes like you . . . but a universal partnership, in which the
State must own all resources so large that they affect all members of the State....
It does take a while for
that opposition to get organized, because, as the title suggests, so many
people believe the US immune to fascist tyranny.
The main center of
consciousness in It Can't Happen Here is
the newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, who
recognizes himself as a "small-town bourgeois Intellectual," a "rather
indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal." He prides himself on his broadminded detachment,
right up until he's taken to jail for his own protection, after he publishes an
editorial critical of President Windrip.
Then he thinks the "tyranny of this dictatorship" is the fault
of "all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who
have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest." Thus the novel criticizes Jessup's indolent
complacency, and the narrative trajectory requires his rebellion.
But despite acknowledging
Jessup's flaws, the book aligns us sympathetically with his perspective, and seems to share his resolute anti-Communism,
despite its critiques of the capitalist inequality that can generate support
for fascism. To some extent it also shares
some of his other limits of vision. African-American and Jewish characters are
few and relatively minor, and the only apparently queer character is Windrip's
behind-the-scenes policy-and-propaganda chief, his Steve Bannon figure, if you
will.
More useful, perhaps, are
the observations of the Communist character Karl Pascal, who points out that grinding
poverty existed in the U.S. in the supposedly prosperous times before the Depression, and
that "Buzz isn't important—it's the sickness that made us throw him up
that we've got to attend to."
Of course the novel is
neither a prophecy nor a blueprint, but a satire and a warning, and it remains
worth reading for the provocations offered by its funhouse-looking-glass
reflections of American history, economy, and culture.
