It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  “Like me?” he demanded.

  “Oh—well—sort of.”

  “Oh, shucks! You think I’m still just a hired man! Even though I am a County Commissioner now! and a Battalion-Leader! and prob’ly pretty soon I’ll be a Commander!” He spoke the sacred names with awe. It was the twentieth time he had made the same plaint to her in the same words. “And you still think I ain’t good for anything except lugging in kindling!”

  “Oh, Shad dear! Why, I always think of you as being just about my oldest playmate! The way I used to tag after you and ask you could I run the lawnmower! My! I always remember that!”

  “Do you, honest?” He yearned at her like a lumpish farm dog.

  “Of course! And honest, it makes me tired, your acting as if you were ashamed of having worked for us! Why, don’t you know that, when he was a boy, Daddy used to work as a farm hand, and split wood and tend lawn for the neighbors and all that, and he was awful glad to get the money?” She reflected that this thumping and entirely impromptu lie was beautiful. . .. That it happened not to be a lie, she did not know.

  “That a fact? Well! Honest? Well! So the old man used to hustle the rake too! Never knew that! You know, he ain’t such a bad old coot—just awful stubborn.”

  “You do like him, don’t you, Shad! Nobody knows how sweet he is—I mean, in these sort of complicated days, we’ve got to protect him against people that might not understand him, against outsiders, don’t you think so, Shad? You will protect him!”

  “Well, I’ll do what I can,” said the Battalion-Leader with such fat complacency that Sissy almost slapped him. “That is, as long as he behaves himself, baby, and don’t get mixed up with any of these Red rebels. . .and as long as you feel like being nice to a fella!” He pulled her toward him as though he were hauling a bag of grain out of a wagon.

  “Oh! Shad! You frighten me! Oh, you must be gentle! A big, strong man like you can afford to be gentle. It’s only the sissies that have to get rough. And you’re so strong!”

  “Well, I guess I can still feed myself! Say, talking about sissies, what do you see in a light-waisted mollycoddle like Julian? You don’t really like him, do you?”

  “Oh, you know how it is,” she said, trying without too much obviousness to ease her head away from his shoulder. “We’ve always been playmates, since we were kids.”

  “Well, you just said I was, too!”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  Now in her effort to give all the famous pleasures of seduction without taking any of the risk, the amateur secret-service operative, Sissy, had a slightly confused aim. She was going to get from Shad information valuable to the N.U. Rapidly rehearsing it in her imagination, the while she was supposed to be weakened by the charm of leaning against Shad’s meaty shoulder, she heard herself teasing him into giving her the name of some citizen whom the M.M.’s were about to arrest, slickly freeing herself from him, dashing out to find Julian—oh, hang it, why hadn’t she made an engagement with Julian for that night?—well, he’d either be at home or out driving Dr. Olmsted—Julian’s melodramatically dashing to the home of the destined victim and starting him for the Canadian border before dawn. . .. And it might be a good idea for the refugee to tack on his door a note dated two days ago, saying that he was off on a trip, so that Shad would never suspect her. . .. All this in a second of hectic story-telling, neatly illustrated in color by her fancy, while she pretended that she had to blow her nose and thus had an excuse to sit straight. Edging another inch or two away, she purred, “But of course it isn’t just physical strength, Shad. You have so much power politically. My! I imagine you could send almost anybody in Fort Beulah off to concentration camp, if you wanted to.”

  “Well, I could put a few of ‘em away, if they got funny!”

  “I’ll bet you could—and will, too! Who you going to arrest next, Shad?”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh come on! Don’t be so tightwad with all your secrets!”

  “What are you trying to do, baby? Pump me?”

  “Why no, of course not, I just——”

  “Sure! You’d like to get the poor old fathead going, and find out everything he knows—and that’s plenty, you can bet your sweet life on that! Nothing doing, baby.”

  “Shad, I’d just—I’d just love to see an M.M. squad arresting somebody once. It must be dreadfully exciting!”

  “Oh, it’s exciting enough, all right, all right! When the poor chumps try to resist, and you throw their radio out of the window! Or when the fellow’s wife gets fresh and shoots off her mouth too much, and so you just teach her a little lesson by letting her look on while you trip him up on the floor and beat him up—maybe that sounds a little rough, but you see, in the long run it’s the best thing you can do for these beggars, because it teaches ‘em to not get ugly.”

  “But—you won’t think I’m horrid and unwomanly, will you?—but I would like to see you hauling out one of those people, just once. Come on, tell a fellow! Who are you going to arrest next?”

  “Naughty, naughty! Mustn’t try to kid papa! No, the womanly thing for you to do is a little love-making! Aw come on, let’s have some fun, baby! You know you’re crazy about me!” Now he really seized her, his hand across her breasts. She struggled, thoroughly frightened, no longer cynical and sophisticated. She shrieked, “Oh don’t—don’t!” She wept, real tears, more from anger than from modesty. He loosened his grip a little, and she had the inspiration to sob, “Oh, Shad, if you really want me to love you, you must give me time! You wouldn’t want me to be a hussy that you could do anything you wanted to with—you, in your position? Oh, no, Shad, you couldn’t do that!”

  “Well, maybe,” said he, with the smugness of a carp.

  She had sprung up, dabbling at her eyes—and through the doorway, in the bedroom, on a flat-topped desk, she saw a bunch of two or three Yale keys. Keys to his office, to secret cupboards and drawers with Corpo plans! Undoubtedly! Her imagination in one second pictured her making a rubbing of the keys, getting John Pollikop, that omnifarious mechanic, to file substitute keys, herself and Julian somehow or other sneaking into Corpo headquarters at night, perilously creeping past the guards, rifling Shad’s every dread file——

  She stammered, “Do you mind if I go in and wash my face? All teary—so silly! You don’t happen to have any face powder in your bathroom?”

  “Say, what d’you think I am? A hick, or a monk, maybe? You bet your life I’ve got some face powder—right in the medicine cabinet—two kinds—how’s that for service? Ladies taken care of by the day or hour!”

  It hurt, but she managed something like a giggle before she went in and shut the bedroom door, and locked it.

  She tore across to the keys. She snatched up a pad of yellow scratch-paper and a pencil, and tried to make a rubbing of a key as once she had made rubbings of coins, for use in the small grocery shop of C. JESSUp & J. falck groSHERS.

  The pencil blur showed only the general outline of the key; the tiny notches which were the trick would not come clear. In panic, she experimented with a sheet of carbon paper, then toilet paper, dry and wet. She could not get a mold. She pressed the key into a prop hotel candle in a china stick by Shad’s bed. The candle was too hard. So was the bathroom soap. And Shad was now trying the knob of the door, remarking “Damn!” then bellowing, “Whayuh doin’ in there? Gone to sleep?”

  “Be right out!” She replaced the keys, threw the yellow paper and the carbon paper out of the window, replaced the candle and soap, slapped her face with a dry towel, dashed on powder as though she were working against time at plastering a wall, and sauntered back into the parlor. Shad looked hopeful. In panic she saw that now, before he comfortably sat down to it and became passionate again, was her one time to escape. She snatched up hat and coat, said wistfully, “Another night, Shad—you must let me go now, dear!” and fled before he could open his red muzzle.

  Round the corner in the hotel corridor she found Julian.

  He was s
tanding taut, trying to look like a watchdog, his right hand in his coat pocket as though it was holding a revolver.

  She hurled herself against his bosom and howled.

  “Good God! What did he do to you? I’ll go in and kill him!”

  “Oh, I didn’t get seduced. It isn’t things like that that I’m bawling about! It’s because I’m such a simply terribly awful spy!”

  * * *

  But one thing came out of it.

  Her courage nerved Julian to something he had longed for and feared: to join the M.M.’s, put on uniform, “work from within,” and supply Doremus with information.

  “I can get Leo Quinn—you know?—Dad’s a conductor on the railroad?—used to play basketball in high school?—I can get him to drive Dr. Olmsted for me, and generally run errands for the N.U. He’s got grit, and he hates the Corpos. But look, Sissy—look, Mr. Jessup—in order to get the M.M.’s to trust me, I’ve got to pretend to have a fierce bust-up with you and all our friends. Look! Sissy and I will walk up Elm Street tomorrow evening, giving an imitation of estranged lovers. How ‘bout it, Sis?”

  “Fine!” glowed that incorrigible actress.

  She was to be, every evening at eleven, in a birch grove just up Pleasant Hill from the Jessups’, where they had played house as children. Because the road curved, the rendezvous could be entered from four or five directions. There he was to hand on to her his reports of M.M. plans.

  But when he first crept into the grove at night and she nervously turned her pocket torch on him, she shrieked at seeing him in M.M. uniform, as an inspector. That blue tunic and slanting forage cap which, in the cinema and history books, had meant youth and hope, meant only death now. . .. She wondered if in 1864 it had not meant death more than moonlight and magnolias to most women. She sprang to him, holding him as if to protect him against his own uniform, and in the peril and uncertainty now of their love, Sissy began to grow up.

  29

  THE PROPAGANDA throughout the country was not all to the New Underground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for the N.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the most capable professional journalists of America, they were cramped by a certain respect for facts which never enfeebled the press-agents for Corpoism. And the Corpos had a notable staff. It included college presidents, some of the most renowned among the radio announcers who aforetime had crooned their affection for mouth washes and noninsomniac coffee, famous ex-war-correspondents, ex-governors, former vice-presidents of the American Federation of Labor, and no less an artist than the public relations counsel of a princely corporation of electrical-goods manufacturers.

  The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so wishily-washily liberal as to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but little news from those old-fashioned and democratic countries, Great Britain, France, and the Scandinavian states; might indeed print almost no foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads, trains on time, freedom from beggars and from men of honor, and all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman civilization. But, on the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips—the most popular was a very funny one about a preposterous New Underground crank, who wore mortuary black with a high hat decorated with crêpe and who was always being comically beaten up by M.M.’s. Never had there been, even in the days when Mr. Hearst was freeing Cuba, so many large red headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders—the murderers were always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth of literature, worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the articles proving, and proving by figures, that American wages were universally higher, commodities universally lower-priced, war budgets smaller but the army and its equipment much larger, than ever in history. Never such righteous polemics as the proofs that all non-Corpos were Communists.

  Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of War Luthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed their Masters, the great General Public, on the radio, and congratulated them on making a new world by their example of American solidarity—marching shoulder to shoulder under the Grand Old Flag, comrades in the blessings of peace and comrades in the joys of war to come.

  Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could there be any better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin and the other Nazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie actors who before the days of the Chief were receiving only fifteen hundred gold dollars a week were now getting five thousand?), showed the M.M.’s driving armored motors at eighty miles an hour, piloting a fleet of one thousand planes, and being very tender to a little girl with a kitten.

  Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, “If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe.”

  For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The Chief was photographed playing poker, in shirtsleeves and with a derby on the back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur, and a pair of rugged steel-workers. Dr. Macgoblin in person led an Elks’ brass band and dived in competition with the Atlantic City bathing-beauties. It was reputably reported that M.M.’s apologized to political prisoners for having to arrest them, and that the prisoners joked amiably with the guards. . .at first.

  All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Prussia.

  Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair sofa—the gallant Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant anti-Communist, Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral, Lorant—began to see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest—sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows and then the formal beatings, when the prisoner is forced to count the strokes until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves——

  Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.

  * * *

  America followed, too, the same ingenious finances as Europe. Windrip had promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived to make everybody, except for a few hundred bankers and industrialists and soldiers, much poorer. He needed no higher mathematicians to produce his financial statements: any ordinary press agent could do them. To show a 100 per cent economy in military expenditures, while increasing the establishment 700 per cent, it had been necessary only to charge up all expenditures for the Minute Men to non-military departments, so that their training in the art of bayonet-sticking was debited to the Department of Education. To show an increase in average wages one did tricks with “categories of labor” and “required minimum wages,” and forgot to state how many workers ever did become entitled to the “minimum,” and how much was charged as wages, on the books, for food and shelter for the millions in the labor camps.

  It all made dazzling reading. There had never been more elegant and romantic fiction.

  Even loyal Corpos began to wonder why the armed forces, army and M.M.’s together, were being so increased. Was a frightened Windrip getting ready to defend himself against a rising of the whole nation? Did he plan to
attack all of North and South America and make himself an emperor? Or both? In any case, the forces were so swollen that even with its despotic power of taxation, the Corpo government never had enough. They began to force exports, to practice the “dumping” of wheat, corn, timber, copper, oil, machinery. They increased production, forced it by fines and threats, then stripped the farmer of all he had, for export at depreciated prices. But at home the prices were not depreciated but increased, so that the more we exported, the less the industrial worker in America had to eat. And really zealous County Commissioners took from the farmer (after the patriotic manner of many Mid-Western counties in 1918) even his seed grain, so that he could grow no more, and on the very acres where once he had raised superfluous wheat he now starved for bread. And while he was starving, the Commissioners continued to try to make him pay for the Corpo bonds which he had been made to buy on the installment plan.

  But still, when he did finally starve to death, none of these things worried him.

  There were bread lines now in Fort Beulah, once or twice a week.

  The hardest phenomenon of dictatorship for a Doremus to understand, even when he saw it daily in his own street, was the steady diminution of gayety among the people.

  America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation. Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.

  All that false cheerfulness lessened now, day by day.

  The Corpos found nothing more convenient to milk than public pleasures. After the bread had molded, the circuses were closed. There were taxes or increased taxes on motorcars, movies, theaters, dances, and ice-cream sodas. There was a tax on playing a phonograph or radio in any restaurant. Lee Sarason, himself a bachelor, conceived of super-taxing bachelors and spinsters, and contrariwise of taxing all weddings at which more than five persons were present.