It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  Even the most reckless youngsters went less and less to public entertainments, because no one not ostentatiously in uniform cared to be noticed, these days. It was impossible to sit in a public place without wondering which spies were watching you. So all the world stayed home—and jumped anxiously at every passing footstep, every telephone ring, every tap of an ivy sprig on the window.

  * * *

  The score of people definitely pledged to the New Underground were the only persons to whom Doremus dared talk about anything more incriminating than whether it was likely to rain, though he had been the friendliest gossip in town. Always it had taken ten minutes longer than was humanly possible for him to walk to the Informer office, because he stopped on every corner to ask after someone’s sick wife, politics, potato crop, opinions about Deism, or luck at fishing.

  As he read of rebels against the régime who worked in Rome, in Berlin, he envied them. They had thousands of government agents, unknown by sight and thus the more dangerous, to watch them; but also they had thousands of comrades from whom to seek encouragement, exciting personal tattle, shop talk, and the assurance that they were not altogether idiotic to risk their lives for a mistress so ungrateful as Revolution. Those secret flats in great cities—perhaps some of them really were filled with the rosy glow they had in fiction. But the Fort Beulahs, anywhere in the world, were so isolated, the conspirators so uninspiringly familiar one to another, that only by inexplicable faith could one go on.

  Now that Lorinda was gone, there certainly was nothing very diverting in sneaking round corners, trying to look like somebody else, merely to meet Buck and Dan Wilgus and that good woman, Sissy!

  Buck and he and the rest—they were such amateurs. They needed the guidance of veteran agitators like Mr. Ailey and Mr. Bailey and Mr. Cailey.

  Their feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper, seemed futile against the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It seemed worse than futile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in a world where Fascists persecuted Communists, Communists persecuted Social-Democrats, Social-Democrats persecuted everybody who would stand for it; where “Aryans” who looked like Jews persecuted Jews who looked like Aryans and Jews persecuted their debtors; where every statesman and clergyman praised Peace and brightly asserted that the only way to get Peace was to get ready for War.

  What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do anything except eat and read and make love and provide for sleep that should be secure against disturbance by armed policemen?

  He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on.

  * * *

  In June, when the Fort Beulah cell of the New Underground had been carrying on for some three months, Mr. Francis Tasbrough, the golden quarryman, called on his neighbor, Doremus.

  “How are you, Frank?”

  “Fine, Remus. How’s the old carping critic?”

  “Fine, Frank. Still carping. Fine carping weather, at that. Have a cigar?”

  “Thanks. Got a match? Thanks. Saw Sissy yesterday. She looks fine.”

  “Yes, she’s fine. I saw Malcolm driving by yesterday. How did he like it in the Provincial University, at New York?”

  “Oh, fine—fine. He says the athletics are grand. They’re getting Primo Carnera over to coach in tennis next year—I think it’s Carnera—I think it’s tennis—but anyway, the athletics are fine there, Malcolm says. Say, uh, Remus, there’s something I been meaning to ask you. I, uh—— The fact is—— I want you to be sure and not repeat this to anybody. I know you can be trusted with a secret, even if you are a newspaperman—or used to be, I mean, but—— The fact is (and this is inside stuff; official), there’s going to be some governmental promotions all along the line—this is confidential, and it comes to me straight from the Provincial Commissioner, Colonel Haik. Luthorne is finished as Secretary of War—he’s a nice fellow, but he hasn’t got as much publicity for the Corpos out of his office as the Chief expected him to. Haik is to have his job, and also take over the position of High Marshal of the Minute Men from Lee Sarason—I suppose Sarason has too much to do. Well then, John Sullivan Reek is slated to be Provincial Commissioner; that leaves the office of District Commissioner for Vermont-New Hampshire empty, and I’m one of the people being seriously considered. I’ve done a lot of speaking for the Corpos, and I know Dewey Haik very well—I was able to advise him about erecting public buildings. Of course there’s none of the County Commissioners around here that measure up to a district commissionership—not even Dr. Staubmeyer—certainly not Shad Ledue. Now if you could see your way clear to throw in with me, your influence would help——”

  “Good heavens, Frank, the worst thing you could have happen, if you want the job, is to have me favor you! The Corpos don’t like me. Oh, of course they know I’m loyal, not one of these dirty, sneaking anti-Corpos, but I never made enough noise in the paper to please ‘em.”

  “That’s just it, Remus! I’ve got a really striking idea. Even if they don’t like you, the Corpos respect you, and they know how long you’ve been important in the State. We’d all be greatly pleased if you came out and joined us. Now just suppose you did so and let people know that it was my influence that converted you to Corpoism. That might give me quite a leg-up. And between old friends like us, Remus, I can tell you that this job of District Commissioner would be useful to me in the quarry business, aside from the social advantages. And if I got the position, I can promise you that I’d either get the Informer taken away from Staubmeyer and that dirty little stinker, Itchitt, and given back to you to run absolutely as you pleased—providing, of course, you had the sense to keep from criticizing the Chief and the State. Or, if you’d rather, I think I could probably wangle a job for you as military judge (they don’t necessarily have to be lawyers) or maybe President Peaseley’s job as District Director of Education—you’d have a lot of fun out of that!—awfully amusing the way all the teachers kiss the Director’s foot! Come on, old man! Think of all the fun we used to have in the old days! Come to your senses and face the inevitable and join us and fix up some good publicity for me. How about it—huh, huh?”

  Doremus reflected that the worst trial of a revolutionary propagandist was not risking his life, but having to be civil to people like Future-Commissioner Tasbrough.

  He supposed that his voice was polite as he muttered, “Afraid I’m too old to try it, Frank,” but apparently Tasbrough was offended. He sprang up and tramped away grumbling, “Oh, very well then!”

  “And I didn’t give him a chance to say anything about being realistic or breaking eggs to make an omelet,” regretted Doremus.

  The next day Malcolm Tasbrough, meeting Sissy on the street, made his beefy most of cutting her. At the time the Jessups thought that was very amusing. They thought the occasion less amusing when Malcolm chased little David out of the Tasbrough apple orchard, which he had been wont to use as the Great Western Forest where at any time one was rather more than likely to meet Kit Carson, Robin Hood, and Colonel Lindbergh hunting together.

  Having only Frank’s word for it, Doremus could do no more than hint in Vermont Vigilance that Colonel Dewey Haik was to be made Secretary of War, and give Haik’s actual military record, which included the facts that as a first lieutenant in France in 1918, he had been under fire for less than fifteen minutes, and that his one real triumph had been commanding state militia during a strike in Oregon, when eleven strikers had been shot down, five of them in the back.

  Then Doremus forgot Tasbrough completely and happily.

  30

  BUT WORSE than having to be civil to the fatuous Mr. Tasbrough was keeping his mouth shut when, toward the end of June, a newspaperman at Battington, Vermont, was suddenly arrested as editor of Vermont Vigilance and author of all the pamphlets by Doremus and Lorinda. He went to concentration camp. Buck and Dan Wilgus and Sissy prevented Doremus from confessing, and from even going to call on the victim, a
nd when, with Lorinda no longer there as confidante, Doremus tried to explain it all to Emma, she said, Wasn’t it lucky that the government had blamed somebody else!

  Emma had worked out the theory that the N.U. activity was some sort of a naughty game which kept her boy, Doremus, busy after his retirement. He was mildly nagging the Corpos. She wasn’t sure that it was really nice to nag the legal authorities, but still, for a little fellow, her Doremus had always been surprisingly spunky—just like (she often confided to Sissy) a spunky little Scotch terrier she had owned when she was a girl—Mr. McNabbit its name had been, a little Scotch terrier, but my! so spunky he acted like he was a regular lion!

  She was rather glad that Lorinda was gone, though she liked Lorinda and worried about how well she might do with a tea room in a new town, a town where she had never lived. But she just couldn’t help feeling (she confided not only to Sissy but to Mary and Buck) that Lorinda, with all her wild crazy ideas about women’s rights, and workmen being just as good as their employers, had a bad influence on Doremus’s tendency to show off and shock people. (She mildly wondered why Buck and Sissy snorted so. She hadn’t meant to say anything particularly funny!)

  For too many years she had been used to Doremus’s irregular routine to have her sleep disturbed by his returning from Buck’s at the improper time to which she referred as “all hours,” but she did wish he would be “more on time for his meals,” and she gave up the question of why, these days, he seemed to like to associate with Ordinary People like John Pollikop, Dan Wilgus, Daniel Babcock, and Pete Vutong—my! some people said Pete couldn’t even read and write, and Doremus so educated and all! Why didn’t he see more of lovely people like Frank Tasbrough and Professor Staubmeyer and Mr. R. C. Crowley and this new friend of his, the Hon. John Sullivan Reek?

  Why couldn’t he keep out of politics? She’d always said they were no occupation for a gentleman!

  Like David, now ten years old (and like twenty or thirty million other Americans, from one to a hundred, but all of the same mental age), Emma thought the marching M.M.’s were a very fine show indeed, so much like movies of the Civil War, really quite educational; and while of course if Doremus didn’t care for President Windrip, she was opposed to him also, yet didn’t Mr. Windrip speak beautifully about pure language, church attendance, low taxation, and the American flag?

  The realists, the makers of omelets, did climb, as Tasbrough had predicted. Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern Province, became Secretary of War and High Marshal of M.M.’s, while the former secretary, Colonel Luthorne, retired to Kansas and the real-estate business and was well spoken of by all business men for being thus willing to give up the grandeur of Washington for duty toward practical affairs and his family, who were throughout the press depicted as having frequently missed him. It was rumored in N.U. cells that Haik might go higher even than Secretary of War; that Windrip was worried by the forced growth of a certain effeminacy in Lee Sarason under the arc light of glory.

  Francis Tasbrough was elevated to District Commissionership at Hanover. But Mr. Sullivan Reek did not in series go on to be Provincial Commissioner. It was said that he had too many friends among just the old-line politicians whose jobs the Corpos were so enthusiastically taking. No, the new Provincial Commissioner, viceroy and general, was Military Judge Effingham Swan, the one man whom Mary Jessup Greenhill hated more than she did Shad Ledue.

  Swan was a splendid commissioner. Within three days after taking office, he had John Sullivan Reek and seven assistant district commissioners arrested, tried, and imprisoned, all within twenty-four hours, and an eighty-year-old woman, mother of a New Underground agent but not otherwise accused of wickedness, penned in a concentration camp for the more desperate traitors. It was in a disused quarry which was always a foot deep in water. After he had sentenced her, Swan was said to have bowed to her most courteously.

  * * *

  The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in Montreal, for a general tightening up of precautions against being caught distributing propaganda. Agents were disappearing rather alarmingly.

  Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the same strange man, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with unpleasant eyes, had twice got into conversation with him in the Hotel Wessex lobby, and too obviously hinted that he was anti-Corpo and would love to have Doremus say something nasty about the Chief and the M.M.’s.

  Doremus became cautious about going out to Buck’s. He parked his car in half-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to the secret basement.

  On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a notion that he was being followed, so closely did a car with red-tinted headlights, anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror, stick behind him as he took the Keezmet highway down to Buck’s. He turned up a side road, down another. The spy car followed. He stopped, in a driveway on the left-hand side of the road, and angrily stepped out, in time to see the other car pass, with a man who looked like Shad Ledue driving. He swung round then and, without concealment, bolted for Buck’s.

  In the basement, Buck was contentedly typing up bundles of the Vigilance, while Father Perefixe, in his shirtsleeves, vest open and black dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar, sat at a plain pine table, writing a warning to New England Catholics that though the Corpos had, unlike the Nazis in Germany, been shrewd enough to flatter prelates, they had lowered the wages of French-Canadian Catholic mill hands and imprisoned their leaders just as severely as in the case of the avowedly wicked Protestants.

  Perefixe smiled up at Doremus, stretched, lighted a pipe, and chuckled, “As a great ecclesiast, Doremus, is it your opinion that I shall be committing a venial or a mortal sin by publishing this little masterpiece—the work of my favorite author—without the Bishop’s imprimatur?”

  “Stephen! Buck! I think they’re on to us! Maybe we’ve got to fold up already and get the press and type out of here!” He told of being shadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters, and (since there were too many French-Canadian inspectors about for him to dare to use his brand of French) he telephoned in the fine new German he had been learning by translation:

  “Denks du ihr Freunds dere haben a Idee die letzt Tag von vot ve mach here?”

  And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture as to be able to answer: “Ja, Ich mein ihr vos sachen morning free. Look owid!”

  How could they move? Where?

  Dan Wilgus arrived, in panic, an hour after.

  “Say! They’re watching us!” Doremus, Buck, and the priest gathered round the black viking of a man. “Just now when I came in I thought I heard something in the bushes, here in the yard, near the house, and before I thought, I flashed my torch on him, and by golly if it wasn’t Aras Dilley, and not in uniform—and you know how Aras loves his God—excuse me, Father—how he loves his uniform. He was disguised! Sure! In overalls! Looked like a jackass that’s gone under a clothes-line! Well, he’d been rubbering at the house. Course these curtains are drawn, but I don’t know what he saw and——”

  The three large men looked to Doremus for orders.

  “We got to get all this stuff out of here! Quick! Take it and hide it in Truman Webb’s attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and Mungo Kitterick and Pete Vutong on the phone—get ‘em here, quick—tell John to stop by and tell Julian to come as soon as he can. Dan: start dismantling the press. Buck: bundle up all the literature.” As he spoke, Doremus was wrapping type in scraps of newspaper. And at three next morning, before light, Pollikop was driving toward Truman Webb’s farmhouse the entire equipment of the New Underground printing establishment, in Buck’s old farm truck, from which blatted, for the benefit of all ears that might be concerned, two frightened calves.

  Next day Julian ventured to invite his superior officers, Shad Ledue and Emil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at Buck’s. They came, with alacrity. They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick, and Doc Itchitt—the last an entirely innocen
t participant in certain deceptions.

  They played in Buck’s parlor. But during the evening Buck announced that anyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find it in a tub of ice in the basement, and that anyone wishing to wash his hands would find two bathrooms upstairs.

  Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went to wash his hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one would have expected.

  When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck shrieked with bucolic mirth: “I could scarcely keep a straight face when I heard good old Shad opening the cupboards and taking a fine long look-see for pamphlets down in the basement. Well, Cap’n Jessup, that about ends their suspicion of this place as a den of traitors, I guess! God, but isn’t Shad dumb!”

  * * *

  This was at perhaps 3 A.M. on the morning of June thirtieth.

  Doremus stayed home, writing sedition, all the after-noon and evening of the thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of newspaper in the Franklin stove in his study, so that he could touch them off with a match in case of a raid—a trick he had learned from Karl Billinger’s anti-Nazi Fatherland.

  This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner Effingham Swan.

  On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he was rather noticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who had picked him up in the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now insisted on their having a drink together. Doremus escaped, and was conscious that he was being followed by an unknown young man, flamboyant in an apricot-colored polo shirt and gray bags, whom he recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at a parade in June. On July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to Truman Webb’s, taking an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not to permit any more printing till he should have a release.