It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  Doremus received from District Commissioner Reed a jolly telegram thanking him for “gallantly deciding turn your great talent service people and correcting errors doubtless made by us in effort set up new more realistic state.” Ur! said Doremus and did not chuck the message at the clothes-basket waste-basket, but carefully walked over and rammed it down amid the trash.

  He was able, by remaining with the Informer in her prostitute days, to keep Staubmeyer from discharging Dan Wilgus, who was sniffy to the new boss and unnaturally respectful now to Doremus. And he invented what he called the “Yow-yow editorial.” This was a dirty device of stating as strongly as he could an indictment of Corpoism, then answering it as feebly as he could, as with a whining “Yow-yow-yow—that’s what you say!” Neither Staubmeyer nor Shad caught him at it, but Doremus hoped fearfully that the shrewd Effingham Swan would never see the Yow-yows.

  So week on week he got along not too badly—and there was not one minute when he did not hate this filthy slavery, when he did not have to force himself to stay there, when he did not snarl at himself, “Then why do you stay?”

  His answers to that challenge came glibly and conventionally enough: “He was too old to start in life again. And he had a wife and family to support”—Emma, Sissy, and now Mary and David.

  All these years he had heard responsible men who weren’t being quite honest—radio announcers who soft-soaped speakers who were fools and wares that were trash, and who canaryishly chirped “Thank you, Major Blister” when they would rather have kicked Major Blister, preachers who did not believe the decayed doctrines they dealt out, doctors who did not dare tell lady invalids that they were sex-hungry exhibitionists, merchants who peddled brass for gold—heard all of them complacently excuse themselves by explaining that they were too old to change and that they had “a wife and family to support.”

  Why not let the wife and family die of starvation or get out and hustle for themselves, if by no other means the world could have the chance of being freed from the most boresome, most dull, and foulest disease of having always to be a little dishonest?

  So he raged—and went on grinding out a paper dull and a little dishonest—but not forever. Otherwise the history of Doremus Jessup would be too drearily common to be worth recording.

  Again and again, figuring it out on rough sheets of copy paper (adorned also with concentric circles, squares, whorls, and the most improbable fish), he estimated that even without selling the Informer or his house, as under Corpo espionage he certainly could not if he fled to Canada, he could cash in about $20,000. Say enough to give him an income of a thousand a year—twenty dollars a week, provided he could smuggle the money out of the country, which the Corpos were daily making more difficult.

  Well, Emma and Sissy and Mary and he could live on that, in a four-room cottage, and perhaps Sissy and Mary could find work.

  But as for himself——

  It was all very well to talk about men like Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger and Romain Rolland, who in exile remained writers whose every word was in demand, about Professors Einstein or Salvemini, or, under Corpoism, about the recently exiled or self-exiled Americans, Walt Trowbridge, Mike Gold, William Allen White, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, Rexford Tugwell, Oswald Villard. Nowhere in the world, except possibly in Greenland or Germany, would such stars be unable to find work and soothing respect. But what was an ordinary newspaper hack, especially if he was over forty-five, to do in a strange land—and more especially if he had a wife named Emma (or Carolina or Nancy or Griselda or anything else) who didn’t at all fancy going and living in a sod hut on behalf of honesty and freedom?

  So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen, teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or chopping-block—particularly when they “had wives and families to support.”

  * * *

  Doremus hinted once to Emil Staubmeyer that Emil was “getting onto the ropes so well” that he thought of getting out, of quitting newspaper work for good.

  The hitherto friendly Mr. Staubmeyer said sharply, “What’d you do? Sneak off to Canada and join the propagandists against the Chief? Nothing doing! You’ll stay right here and help me—help us!” And that afternoon Commissioner Shad Ledue shouldered in and grumbled, “Dr. Staubmeyer tells me you’re doing pretty fairly good work, Jessup, but I want to warn you to keep it up. Remember that Judge Swan only let you out on parole. . .to me! You can do fine if you just set your mind to it!”

  “If you just set your mind to it!” The one time when the boy Doremus had hated his father had been when he used that condescending phrase.

  He saw that, for all the apparent prosaic calm of day after day on the paper, he was equally in danger of slipping into acceptance of his serfdom and of whips and bars if he didn’t slip. And he continued to be just as sick each time he wrote: “The crowd of fifty thousand people who greeted President Windrip in the university stadium at Iowa City was an impressive sign of the constantly growing interest of all Americans in political affairs,” and Staubmeyer changed it to: “The vast and enthusiastic crowd of seventy thousand loyal admirers who wildly applauded and listened to the stirring address of the Chief in the handsome university stadium in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, is an impressive yet quite typical sign of the growing devotion of all true Americans to political study under the inspiration of the Corpo government.”

  Perhaps his worst irritations were that Staubmeyer had pushed a desk and his sleek, sweaty person into Doremus’s private office, once sacred to his solitary grouches, and that Doc Itchitt, hitherto his worshiping disciple, seemed always to be secretly laughing at him.

  * * *

  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.

  When he was with Lorinda, gone was all the pleasant toying and sympathetic talk with which they had relieved boredom. She was fierce now, and vibrant. She drew him close enough to her, but instantly she would be thinking of him only as a comrade in plots to kill off the Corpos. (And it was pretty much a real killing-off that she meant; there wasn’t left to view any great amount of her plausible pacifism.)

  She was busy with good and perilous works. Partner Nipper had not been able to keep her in the Tavern kitchen; she had so systematized the work that she had many days and evenings free, and she had started a cooking-class for farm girls and young farm wives who, caught between the provincial and the industrial generations, had learned neither good rural cooking with a wood fire, nor yet how to deal with canned goods and electric grills—and who most certainly had not learned how to combine so as to compel the tight-fisted little locally owned power-and-light companies to furnish electricity at tolerable rates.

  “Heavensake, keep this quiet, but I’m getting acquainted with these country gals—getting ready for the day when we begin to organize against the Corpos. I depend on them, not the well-to-do women that used to want suffrage but that can’t endure the thought of revolution,” Lorinda whispered to him. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “All right, Lorinda B. Anthony,” he sighed.

  * * *

  And Karl Pascal stuck.

  At Pollikop’s garage, when he first saw Doremus after the jailing, he said, “God, I was sorry to hear about their pinching you, Mr. Jessup! But say, aren’t you ready to join us Communists now?” (He looked about anxiously as he said it.)

  “I thought there weren’t any more Bolos.”

  “Oh, we’re supposed to be wiped out. But I guess you’ll notice a few mysterious strikes starting now and then, even though there can’t be any more strikes! Why aren’t you joining us? There’s where you belong, c-com
rade!”

  “Look here, Karl: you’ve always said the difference between the Socialists and the Communists was that you believed in complete ownership of all means of production, not just utilities; and that you admitted the violent class war and the Socialists didn’t. That’s poppycock! The real difference is that you Communists serve Russia. It’s your Holy Land. Well—Russia has all my prayers, right after the prayers for my family and for the Chief, but what I’m interested in civilizing and protecting against its enemies isn’t Russia but America. Is that so banal to say? Well, it wouldn’t be banal for a Russian comrade to observe that he was for Russia! And America needs our propaganda more every day. Another thing: I’m a middle-class intellectual. I’d never call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it, I’ll have to accept it. That’s my class, and that’s what I’m interested in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want—well, all right, say it, we want cake! And when you get a proletarian ambitious enough to want cake, too—why, in America, he becomes a middle-class intellectual just as fast as he can—if he can!”

  “Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning 90 percent of the wealth——”

  “I don’t think of it! It does not follow that because a good many of the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke—that plenty of actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don’t get any better paid than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the same. It isn’t what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your class—whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I’m tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!”

  “Honestly, Mr. Jessup, that’s damn nonsense, and you know it!”

  “Is it? Well, it’s my American covered-wagon damn nonsense, and not the propaganda-aëroplane damn nonsense of Marx and Moscow!”

  “Oh, you’ll join us yet.”

  “Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin long before the descendants of Dan’l Webster. You see, we don’t like murder as a way of argument—that’s what really marks the Liberal!”

  About his future Father Perefixe was brief: “I’m going back to Canada where I belong—away to the freedom of the King. Hate to give up, Doremus, but I’m no Thomas à Becket, but just a plain, scared, fat little clark!”

  * * *

  The surprise among old acquaintances was Medary Cole, the miller.

  A little younger than Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, less intensely aristocratic than those noblemen, since only one generation separated him from a chin-whiskered Yankee farmer and not two, as with them, he had been their satellite at the Country Club and, as to solid virtue, been president of the Rotary Club. He had always considered Doremus a man who, without such excuse as being a Jew or a Hunky or poor, was yet flippant about the sanctities of Main Street and Wall Street. They were neighbors, as Cole’s “Cape Cod cottage” was just below Pleasant Hill, but they had not by habit been droppers-in.

  Now, when Cole came bringing David home, or calling for his daughter Angela, David’s new mate, toward supper time of a chilly fall evening, he stopped gratefully for a hot rum punch, and asked Doremus whether he really thought inflation was “such a good thing.”

  He burst out, one evening, “Jessup, there isn’t another person in this town I’d dare say this to, not even my wife, but I’m getting awful sick of having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I have to buy my gunnysacks and what I can pay my men. I won’t pretend I ever cared much for labor unions. But in those days, at least the union members did get some of the swag. Now it goes to support the M.M.’s. We pay them and pay them big to bully us. It don’t look so reasonable as it did in 1936. But, golly, don’t tell anybody I said that!”

  And Cole went off shaking his head, bewildered—he who had ecstatically voted for Mr. Windrip.

  * * *

  On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and village and back-hill hide-out, the Corpos ended all crime in America forever, so titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the London Times. Seventy thousand selected Minute Men, working in combination with town and state police officers, all under the chiefs of the government secret service, arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They were tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten released as innocent. . .and two in ten taken in the M.M.’s as inspectors.

  There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but this was adequately answered by Windrip’s courageous statement: “The way to stop crime is to stop it!”

  The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, “Sometimes I’ve felt like criticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did you see what the Chief did to the gangsters and racketeers? Wonderful! I’ve told you right along what this country’s needed is a firm hand like Windrip’s. No shilly-shallying about that fellow! He saw that the way to stop crime was to just go out and stop it!”

  * * *

  Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations of Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey.

  The authorities abruptly closed some scores of the smaller, more independent colleges such as Williams, Bowdoin, Oberlin, Georgetown, Antioch, Carleton, Lewis Institute, Commonwealth, Princeton, Swarthmore, Kenyon, all vastly different one from another but alike in not yet having entirely become machines. Few of the state universities were closed; they were merely to be absorbed by central Corpo universities, one in each of the eight provinces. But the government began with only two. In the Metropolitan District, Windrip University took over the Rockefeller Center and Empire State buildings, with most of Central Park for playground (excluding the general public from it entirely, for the rest was an M.M. drill ground). The second was Macgoblin University, in Chicago and vicinity, using the buildings of Chicago and Northwestern universities, and Jackson Park. President Hutchins of Chicago was rather unpleasant about the whole thing and declined to stay on as an assistant professor, so the authorities had politely to exile him.

  Tattle-mongers suggested that the naming of the Chicago plant after Macgoblin instead of Sarason suggested a beginning coolness between Sarason and Windrip, but the two leaders were able to quash such canards by appearing together at the great reception given to Bishop Cannon by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and being photographed shaking hands.

  Each of the two pioneer universities started with an enrollment of fifty thousand, making ridiculous the pre-Corpo schools, none of which, in 1935, had had more than thirty thousand students. The enrollment was probably helped by the fact that anyone could enter upon presenting a certificate showing that he had completed two years in a high school or business college, and a recommendation from a Corpo commissioner.

  Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the Corpo state to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called “intellectual” teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery, and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from the very first of any taint of “intellectualism.”

  All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

  Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500—except for one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psyc
hology, economics, anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

  Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called “literature”; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political speeches, but the chief choruses were in advertising, party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.

  In the realm of so-called “pure science,” it was realized that only too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete’s foot, canning and fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formul½, cement-road construction, and all other really useful subjects for the formation of the new-world mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operation of tanks, armored cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, though students were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.