It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  “I! Marxian! Good God!” Doremus was pleased to see that he had stirred his son out of his if-your-honor-please smugness. “Why, one of the things I most admire about the Corpos is that, as I know, absolutely—I have reliable information from Washington—they have saved us from a simply ghastly invasion by red agents of Moscow—Communists pretending to be decent labor-leaders!”

  “Not really!” (Had the fool forgotten that his father was a newspaperman and not likely to be impressed by “reliable information from Washington”?)

  “Really! And to be realistic—sorry, sir, if you don’t like the word, but to be—to be——”

  “In fact, to be realistic!”

  “Well, yes, then!”

  (Doremus recalled such tempers in Philip from years ago. Had he been wise, after all, to restrain himself from the domestic pleasure of licking the brat?)

  “The whole point is that Windrip, or anyway the Corpos, are here to stay, Pater, and we’ve got to base our future actions not on some desired Utopia but on what we really and truly have. And think of what they’ve actually done! Just, for example, how they’ve removed the advertising billboards from the highways, and ended unemployment, and their simply stupendous feat in getting rid of all crime!”

  “Good God!”

  “Pardon me—what y’ say, Dad?”

  “Nothing! Nothing! Go on!”

  “But I begin to see now that the Corpo gains haven’t been just material but spiritual.”

  “Eh?”

  “Really! They’ve revitalized the whole country. Formerly we had gotten pretty sordid, just thinking about material possessions and comforts—about electric refrigeration and television and air-conditioning. Kind of lost the sturdiness that characterized our pioneer ancestors. Why, ever so many young men were refusing to take military drill, and the discipline and will power and good-fellowship that you only get from military training—— Oh, pardon me! I forgot you were a pacifist.”

  Doremus grimly muttered, “Not any more!”

  “Of course there must be any number of things we can’t agree on, Dad. But after all, as a publicist you ought to listen to the Voice of Youth.”

  “You? Youth? You’re not youth. You’re two thousand years old, mentally. You date just about 100 B.C. in your fine new imperialistic theories!”

  “No, but you must listen, Dad! Why do you suppose I came clear up here from Worcester just to see you?”

  “God only knows!”

  “I want to make myself clear. Before Windrip, we’d been lying down in America, while Europe was throwing off all her bonds—both monarchy and this antiquated parliamentary-democratic-liberal system that really means rule by professional politicians and by egotistic ‘intellectuals.’ We’ve got to catch up to Europe again—got to expand—it’s the rule of life. A nation, like a man, has to go ahead or go backward. Always!”

  “I know, Phil. I used to write that same thing in those same words, back before 1914!”

  “Did you? Well, anyway—— Got to expand! Why, what we ought to do is to grab all of Mexico, and maybe Central America, and a good big slice of China. Why, just on their own behalf we ought to do it, misgoverned the way they are! Maybe I’m wrong but——”

  “Impossible!”

  “—Windrip and Sarason and Dewey Haik and Macgoblin, all those fellows, they’re big—they’re making me stop and think! And now to come down to my errand here——”

  “You think I ought to run the Informer according to Corpo theology!”

  “Why—why yes! That was approximately what I was going to say. (I just don’t see why you haven’t been more reasonable about this whole thing—you with your quick mind!) After all, the time for selfish individualism is gone. We’ve got to have mass action. One for all and all for one——”

  “Philip, would you mind telling me what the deuce you’re really heading toward? Cut the cackle!”

  “Well, since you insist—to ‘cut the cackle,’ as you call it—not very politely, seems to me, seeing I’ve taken the trouble to come clear up from Worcester!—I have reliable information that you’re going to get into mighty serious trouble if you don’t stop opposing—or at least markedly failing to support—the government.”

  “All right. What of it? It’s my serious trouble!”

  “That’s just the point! It isn’t! I do think that just for once in your life you might think of Mother and the girls, instead of always of your own selfish ‘ideas’ that you’re so proud of! In a crisis like this, it just isn’t funny any longer to pose as a quaint ‘liberal.’ ”

  Doremus’s voice was like a firecracker. “Cut the cackle, I told you! What you after? What’s the Corpo gang to you?”

  “I have been approached in regard to the very high honor of an assistant military judgeship, but your attitude, as my father——”

  “Philip, I think, I rather think, that I give you my parental curse not so much because you are a traitor as because you have become a stuffed shirt! Good-night.”

  25

  HOLIDAYS WERE INVENTED by the devil, to coax people into the heresy that happiness can be won by taking thought. What was planned as a rackety day for David’s first Christmas with his grandparents was, they saw too well, perhaps David’s last Christmas with them. Mary had hidden her weeping, but the day before Christmas, when Shad Ledue tramped in to demand of Doremus whether Karl Pascal had ever spoken to him of Communism, Mary came on Shad in the hall, stared at him, raised her hand like a boxing cat, and said with dreadful quietness, “You murderer! I shall kill you and kill Swan!”

  For once Shad did not look amused.

  To make the holiday as good an imitation of mirth as possible, they were very noisy, but their holly, their tinsel stars on a tall pine tree, their family devotion in a serene old house in a little town, was no different at heart from despairing drunkenness in the city night. Doremus reflected that it might have been just as well for all of them to get drunk and let themselves go, elbows on slopped café tables, as to toil at this pretense of domestic bliss. He now had another thing for which to hate the Corpos—for stealing the secure affection of ChristÃ

  mas.

  For noon dinner, Louis Rotenstern was invited, because he was a lorn bachelor and, still more, because he was a Jew, now insecure and snubbed and threatened in an insane dictatorship. (There is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the régime under which they live, so that even a commercial-minded money-fondling heavily humorous Jew burgher like Rotenstern is still a sensitive meter of barbarism.) After dinner came Buck Titus, David’s most favorite person, bearing staggering amounts of Woolworth tractors and fire engines and a real bow-and-arrow, and he was raucously insisting that Mrs. Candy dance with him what he not very precisely called “the light fantastic,” when the hammering sounded at the door.

  Aras Dilley tramped in with four men.

  “Lookin’ for Rotenstern. Oh, that you, Louie? Git your coat and come on—orders.”

  “What’s the idea? What d’you want of him? What’s the charge?” demanded Buck, still standing with his arm about Mrs. Candy’s embarrassed waist.

  “Dunno’s there be any charges. Just ordered to headquarters for questioning. District Commissioner Reek in town. Just astin’ few people a few questions. Come on, you!”

  The hilarious celebrants did not, as they had planned, go out to Lorinda’s tavern for skiing. Next day they heard that Rotenstern had been taken to the concentration camp at Trianon, along with that crabbed old Tory, Raymond Pridewell, the hardware dealer.

  Both imprisonments were incredible. Rotenstern had been too meek. And if Pridewell had not ever been meek, if he had constantly and testily and loudly proclaimed that he had not cared for Ledue as a hired man and now cared even less for him as a local governor, yet—why, Pridewell was a sacred institution. As well think of dragging the brownstone Baptist Church to prison.


  Later, a friend of Shad Ledue took over Rotenstern’s shop. It can happen here, meditated Doremus. It could happen to him. How soon? Before he should be arrested, he must make amends to his conscience by quitting the Informer.

  * * *

  Professor Victor Loveland, once a classicist of Isaiah College, having been fired from a labor camp for incompetence in teaching arithmetic to lumberjacks, was in town, with wife and babies, on his way to a job clerking in his uncle’s slate quarry near Fair Haven. He called on Doremus and was hysterically cheerful. He called on Clarence Little—”dropped in to visit with him,” Clarence would have said. Now that twitchy, intense jeweler, Clarence, who had been born on a Vermont farm and had supported his mother till she died when he was thirty, had longed to go to college and, especially, to study Greek. Though Loveland was his own age, in the mid-thirties, he looked on him as a combination of Keats and Liddell. His greatest moment had been hearing Loveland read Homer.

  Loveland was leaning on the counter. “Gone ahead with your Latin grammar, Clarence?”

  “Golly, Professor, it just doesn’t seem worth while any more. I guess I’m kind of a weak sister, anyway, but I find that these days it’s about all I can do to keep going.”

  “Me too! And don’t call me ‘Professor.’ I’m a timekeeper in a slate quarry. What a life!”

  They had not noticed the clumsy-looking man in plain clothes who had just come in. Presumably he was a customer. But he grumbled, “So you two pansies don’t like the way things go nowadays! Don’t suppose you like the Corpos! Don’t think much of the Chief!” He jabbed his thumb into Loveland’s ribs so painfully that Loveland yelped, “I don’t think about him at all!”

  “Oh, you don’t, eh? Well, you two fairies can come along to the courthouse with me!”

  “And who may you be?”

  “Oh, just an ensign in the M.M.’s, that’s all!”

  He had an automatic pistol.

  Loveland was not beaten much, because he managed to keep his mouth shut. But Little was so hysterical that they laid him on a kitchen table and decorated his naked back with forty slashes of a steel ramrod. They had found that Clarence wore yellow silk underwear, and the M.M.’s from factory and plowland laughed—particularly one broad young inspector who was rumored to have a passionate friendship with a battalion-leader from Nashua who was fat, eyeglassed, and high-pitched of voice.

  Little had to be helped into the truck that took Loveland and him to the Trianon concentration camp. One eye was closed and so surrounded with bruised flesh that the M.M. driver said it looked like a Spanish omelet.

  The truck had an open body, but they could not escape, because the three prisoners on this trip were chained hand to hand. They lay on the floor of the truck. It was snowing.

  The third prisoner was not much like Loveland or Little. His name was Ben Tripper. He had been a mill hand for Medary Cole. He cared no more about the Greek language than did a baboon, but he did care for his six children. He had been arrested for trying to strike Cole and for cursing the Corpo régime when Cole had reduced his wages from nine dollars a week (in pre-Corpo currency) to seven-fifty.

  As to Loveland’s wife and babies, Lorinda took them in till she could pass the hat and collect enough to send them back to Mrs. Loveland’s family on a rocky farm in Missouri. But then things went better. Mrs. Loveland was favored by the Greek proprietor of a lunch-room and got work washing dishes and otherwise pleasing the proprietor, who brilliantined his mustache.

  * * *

  The county administration, in a proclamation signed by Emil Staubmeyer, announced that they were going to regulate the agriculture on the submarginal land high up on Mount Terror. As a starter, half-a-dozen of the poorer families were moved into the large, square, quiet, old house of that large, square, quiet, old farmer, Henry Veeder, cousin of Doremus Jessup. These poorer families had many children, a great many, so that there were four or five persons bedded on the floor in every room of the home where Henry and his wife had placidly lived alone since their own children had grown. Henry did not like it, and said so, not very tactfully, to the M.M.’s herding the refugees. What was worse, the dispossessed did not like it any better. “ ‘Tain’t much, but we got a house of our own. Dunno why we should git shoved in on Henry,” said one. “Don’t expect other folks to bother me, and don’t expect to bother other folks. Never did like that fool kind of yellow color Henry painted his barn, but guess that’s his business.”

  So Henry and two of the regulated agriculturists were taken to the Trianon concentration camp, and the rest remained in Henry’s house, doing nothing but finish up Henry’s large larder and wait for orders.

  * * *

  “And before I’m sent to join Henry and Karl and Loveland, I’m going to clear my skirts,” Doremus vowed, along in late January.

  He marched in to see County Commissioner Ledue.

  “I want to quit the Informer. Staubmeyer has learned all I can teach him.”

  “Staubmeyer? Oh! You mean Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer!”

  “Chuck it, will you? We’re not on parade, and we’re not playing soldiers. Mind if I sit down?”

  “Don’t look like you cared a hell of a lot whether I mind or not! But I can tell you, right here and now, Jessup, without any monkey business about it, you’re not going to leave your job. I guess I could find enough grounds for sending you to Trianon for about a million years, with ninety lashes, but—you’ve always been so stuck on yourself as such an all-fired honest editor, it kind of tickles me to watch you kissing the Chief’s foot—and mine!”

  “I’ll do no more of it! That’s certain! And I admit that I deserve your scorn for ever having done it!”

  “Well, isn’t that elegant! But you’ll do just what I tell you to, and like it! Jessup, I suppose you think I had a swell time when I was your hired man! Watching you and your old woman and the girls go off on a picnic while I—oh, I was just your hired man, with dirt in my ears, your dirt! I could stay home and clean up the basement!”

  “Maybe we didn’t want you along, Shad! Good-morning!”

  Shad laughed. There was a sound of the gates of Trianon concentration camp in that laughter.

  * * *

  It was really Sissy who gave Doremus his lead.

  He drove to Hanover to see Shad’s superior, District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek, that erstwhile jovial and red-faced politician. He was admitted after only half an hour’s waiting. He was shocked to see how pale and hesitant and frightened Reek had become. But the Commissioner tried to be authoritative.

  “Well, Jessup, what can I do for you?”

  “May I be frank?”

  “What? What? Why, certainly! Frankness has always been my middle name!”

  “I hope so. Governor, I find I’m of no use on the Informer, at Fort Beulah. As you probably know, I’ve been breaking in Emil Staubmeyer as my successor. Well, he’s quite competent to take hold now, and I want to quit. I’m really just in his way.”

  “Why don’t you stick around and see what you can still do to help him? There’ll be little jobs cropping up from time to time.”

  “Because it’s got on my nerves to take orders where I used to give ‘em for so many years. You can appreciate that, can’t you?”

  “My God, can I appreciate it? And how! Well, I’ll think it over. You wouldn’t mind writing little pieces for my own little sheet, at home? I own part of a paper there.”

  “No! Sure! Delighted!”

  (“Does this mean that Reek believes the Corpo tyranny is going to blow up, in a revolution, so that he’s beginning to trim? Or just that he’s fighting to keep from being thrown out?”)

  “Yes, I can see how you might feel, Brother Jessup.”

  “Thanks! Would you mind giving me a note to County Commissioner Ledue, telling him to let me out, without prejudice?—making it pretty strong?”

  “No. Not a bit. Just wait a minute, ole fellow; I’ll write it right now.”

  * * * />
  Doremus made as little ceremony as possible of leaving the Informer, which had been his throne for thirty-seven years. Staubmeyer was patronizing, Doc Itchitt looked quizzical, but the chapel, headed by Dan Wilgus, shook hands profusely. And so, at sixty-two, stronger and more eager than he had been in all his life, Doremus had nothing to do more important than eating breakfast and telling his grandson stories about the elephant.

  But that lasted less than a week. Avoiding suspicion from Emma and Sissy and even from Buck and Lorinda, he took Julian aside:

  “Look here, boy. I think it’s time now for me to begin doing a little high treason. (Heaven’s sake keep all of this under your hat—don’t even tip off Sissy!) I guess you know, the Communists are too theocratic for my tastes. But looks to me as though they have more courage and devotion and smart strategy than anybody since the Early Christian Martyrs—whom they also resemble in hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to get in touch with ‘em and see if there’s any dirty work at the crossroads I can do for ‘em—say distributing a few Early Christian tracts by St. Lenin. But of course, theoretically, the Communists have all been imprisoned. Could you get to Karl Pascal, in Trianon, and find out whom I could see?”

  Said Julian, “I think I could. Dr. Olmsted gets called in there sometimes on cases—they hate him, because he hates them, but still, their camp doctor is a drunken bum, and they have to have a real doc in when one of their warders busts his wrist beating up some prisoner. I’ll try sir.”

  Two days afterward Julian returned.

  “My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I’d waited for Olmsted before, in the car, but I never had the nerve to butt inside. The buildings—they were nice buildings, quite pretty, when the girls’ school had them. Now the fittings are all torn out, and they’ve put up wallboard partitions for cells, and the whole place stinks of carbolic acid and excrement, and the air—there isn’t any—you feel as if you were nailed up in a box—I don’t know how anybody lives in one of those cells for an hour—and yet there’s six men bunked in a cell twelve feet by ten, with a ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except a twenty-five watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling—you couldn’t read by it. But they get out for exercise two hours a day—walk around and around the courtyard—they’re all so stooped, and they all look so ashamed, as if they’d had the defiance just licked out of ‘em—even Karl a little, and you remember how proud and sort of sardonic he was. Well, I got to see him, and he says to get in touch with this man—here, I wrote it down—and for God’s sake, burn it up soon as you’ve memorized it!”