It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  Less surprising than any of this were the tidings that Francis Tasbrough, very beautiful in repentance, had been let out of the Corpo prison to which he had been sent for too much grafting and was again a district commissioner, well thought of, and that his housekeeper was now Mrs. Candy, whose daily reports on his most secret arrangements were the most neatly written and sternly grammatical documents that came into Vermont N.U. headquarters.

  Then Lorinda was looking up at him as he stood in the vestibule of his Westbound train and crying, “You look so well again! Are you happy? Oh, be happy!”

  Even now he did not see this defeminized radical woman crying. . .. She turned away from him and raced down the station platform too quickly. She had lost all her confident pose of flip elegance. Leaning out from the vestibule he saw her stop at the gate, diffidently raise her hand as if to wave at the long anonymity of the train windows, then shakily march away through the gates. And he realized that she hadn’t even his address; that no one who loved him would have any stable address for him now any more.

  * * *

  Mr. William Barton Dobbs, a traveling man for harvesting machinery, an erect little man with a small gray beard and a Vermont accent, got out of bed in his hotel in a section in Minnesota which had so many Bavarian-American and Yankee-descended farmers, and so few “radical” Scandinavians, that it was still loyal to President Haik.

  He went down to breakfast, cheerfully rubbing his hands. He consumed grapefruit and porridge—but without sugar: there was an embargo on sugar. He looked down and inspected himself; he sighed, “I’m getting too much of a pod, with all this outdoor work and being so hungry; I’ve got to cut down on the grub”; and then he consumed fried eggs, bacon, toast, coffee made of acorns, and marmalade made of carrots—Coon’s troops had shut off coffee beans and oranges.

  He read, meantime, the Minneapolis Daily Corporate. It announced a Great Victory in Mexico—in the same place, he noted, in which there had already been three Great Victories in the past two weeks. Also, a “shameful rebellion” had been put down in Andalusia, Alabama; it was reported that General Göring was coming over to be the guest of President Haik; and the pretender Trowbridge was said “by a reliable source” to have been assassinated, kidnaped, and compelled to resign.

  “No news this morning,” regretted Mr. William Barton Dobbs.

  As he came out of the hotel, a squad of Minute Men were marching by. They were farm boys, newly recruited for service in Mexico; they looked as scared and soft and big-footed as a rout of rabbits. They tried to pipe up the newest-oldest war song, in the manner of the Civil War ditty “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”:

  When Johnny comes home from Greaser Land,

  Hurray, hurraw,

  His ears will be full of desert sand,

  Hurray, hurraw,

  But he’ll speaka de Spiggoty pretty sweet

  And he’ll bring us a gun and a señorit’,

  And we’ll all get stewed when

  Johnny comes marching home!

  Their voices wavered. They peeped at the crowd along the walk, or looked sulkily down at their dragging feet, and the crowd, which once would have been yelping “Hail Haik!” was snickering “You beggars ‘ll never get to Greaser Land!” and even, from the safety of a second-story window, “Hurray, hurraw for Trowbridge!”

  “Poor devils!” thought Mr. William Barton Dobbs, as he watched the frightened toy soldiers. . .not too toy-like to keep them from dying.

  Yet it is a fact that he could see in the crowd numerous persons whom his arguments, and those of the sixty-odd N.U. secret agents under him, had converted from fear of the M.M.’s to jeering.

  * * *

  In his open Ford convertible—he never started it but he thought of how he had “put it over on Sissy” by getting a Ford all his own—Doremus drove out of the village into stubble-lined prairie. The meadow larks’ liquid ecstasy welcomed him from barbed-wire fences. If he missed the strong hills behind Fort Beulah, he was yet exalted by the immensity of the sky, the openness of prairie that promised he could go on forever, the gayety of small sloughs seen through their fringes of willows and cottonwoods, and once, aspiring overhead, an early flight of mallards.

  He whistled boisterously as he bounced on along the section-line road.

  He reached a gaunt yellow farmhouse—it was to have had a porch, but there was only an unpainted nothingness low down on the front wall to show where the porch would be. To a farmer who was oiling a tractor in the pig-littered farmyard he chirped, “Name’s William Barton Dobbs—representing the Des Moines Combine and Up-to-Date Implement Company.”

  The farmer galloped up to shake hands, breathing, “By golly this is a great honor, Mr. J——”

  “Dobbs!”

  “That’s right. ‘Scuse me.”

  In an upper bedroom of the farmhouse, seven men were waiting, perched on chair and table and edges of the bed, or just squatted on the floor. Some of them were apparently farmers; some unambitious shopkeepers. As Doremus bustled in, they rose and bowed.

  “Good-morning gentlemen. A little news,” he said. “Coon has driven the Corpos out of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Now I wonder if you’re ready with your reports?”

  To the agent whose difficulty in converting farm-owners had been their dread of paying decent wages to farm hands, Doremus presented for use the argument (as formalized yet passionate as the observations of a life-insurance agent upon death by motor accident) that poverty for one was poverty for all. . .. It wasn’t such a very new argument, nor so very logical, but it had been a useful carrot for many human mules.

  For the agent among the Finnish-American settlers, who were insisting that Trowbridge was a Bolshevik and just as bad as the Russians, Doremus had a mimeographed quotation from the Izvestia of Moscow damning Trowbridge as a “social Fascist quack.” For the Bavarian farmers down the other way, who were still vaguely pro-Nazi, Doremus had a German émigre paper published in Prague, proving (though without statistics or any considerable quotation from official documents) that, by agreement with Hitler, President Haik was, if he remained in power, going to ship back to the German Army all German-Americans with so much as one grandparent born in the Fatherland.

  “Do we close with a cheerful hymn and the benediction, Mr. Dobbs?” demanded the youngest and most flippant—and quite the most successful—agent.

  “I wouldn’t mind! Maybe it wouldn’t be so unsuitable as you think. But considering the loose morals and economics of most of you comrades, perhaps it would be better if I closed with a new story about Haik and Mae West that I heard, day before yesterday. . .. Bless you all! Good-bye!”

  * * *

  As he drove to his next meeting, Doremus fretted, “I don’t believe that Prague story about Haik and Hitler is true. I think I’ll quit using it. Oh, I know—I know, Mr. Dobbs; as you say, if you did tell the truth to a Nazi, it would still be a lie. But just the same I think I’ll quit using it. . .. Lorinda and me, that thought we could get free of Puritanism!. . .Those cumulus clouds are better than a galleon. If they’d just move Mount Terror and Fort Beulah and Lorinda and Buck here, this would be Paradise. . .. Oh, Lord, I don’t want to, but I suppose I’ll have to order the attack on the M.M. post at Osakis now; they’re ready for it. . .. I wonder if that shotgun charge yesterday was intended for me?. . .Didn’t really like Lorinda’s hair fixed up in that New York style at all!”

  He slept that night in a cottage on the shore of a sandy-bottomed lake ringed with bright birches. His host and his host’s wife, worshipers of Trowbridge, had insisted on giving him their own room, with the patchwork quilt and the hand-painted pitcher and bowl.

  He dreamed—as he still did dream, once or twice a week—that he was back in his cell at Trianon. He knew again the stink, the cramped and warty bunk, the never relaxed fear that he might be dragged out and flogged.

  He heard magic trumpets. A soldier opened the door and invited out all the prisoners. There, in the quadrangle, Gene
ral Emmanuel Coon (who, to Doremus’s dreaming fancy, looked exactly like Sherman) addressed them:

  “Gentlemen, the Commonwealth army has conquered! Haik has been captured! You are free!”

  So they marched out, the prisoners, the bent and scarred and crippled, the vacant-eyed and slobbering, who had come into this place as erect and daring men: Doremus, Dan Wilgus, Buck, Julian, Mr. Falck, Henry Veeder, Karl Pascal, John Pollikop, Truman Webb. They crept out of the quadrangle gates, through a double line of soldiers standing rigidly at Present Arms yet weeping as they watched the broken prisoners crawling past.

  And beyond the soldiers, Doremus saw the women and children. They were waiting for him—the kind arms of Lorinda and Emma and Sissy and Mary, with David behind them, clinging to his father’s hand, and Father Perefixe. And Foolish was there, his tail a proud plume, and from the dream-blurred crowd came Mrs. Candy, holding out to him a cocoanut cake.

  Then all of them were fleeing, frightened by Shad Ledue——

  His host was slapping Doremus’s shoulder, muttering, “Just had a phone call. Corpo posse out after you.”

  So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of freedom.

  And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can never die.

  Afterword

  As titles go, It Can’t Happen Here is as ironic as The Red Badge of Courage, the title of Stephen Crane’s novel about a soldier afraid of war. Sinclair Lewis began to write his cautionary tale about the rise of American fascism in May 1935, finished a draft on August 12, and completed final revisions on September 28.1 When it appeared on October 21, 1935, near the nadir of the Great Depression, the novel struck a nerve. (The grim national joke of 1933: What’s the capital of the United States? Half of what it was last year.) The economic crisis had sparked extremist political movements in industrialized nations around the world. That is, the American political climate was raucous when Lewis’s novel was issued, the winds gusting with crackpot solutions to the problems of poverty and unemployment or what Lewis describes in the novel as programs “that promised prosperity without anyone’s having to work.”

  Many of them were floated by demogogues with ambition and an agenda, and their schemes often included the nationalization of key industries, the abolition of independent labor unions, the centralization of economic decision making, and income redistribution. The poet Ezra Pound, for example, was attracted to both Benito Mussolini’s fascist politics and C. H. Douglas’s financial theories, which Douglas conceded were incompatible with traditional democracy. Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio broadcasts in the 1930s attracted an estimated thirty million listeners each week, mixed a heavy dose of anti-Semitism with an appeal for a brand of “social justice” based on confiscating wealth. Coughlin became the model for Bishop Prang in Lewis’s novel. But the best-known alternative to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal came from one of the primary targets of Lewis’s satire, former governor and U.S. senator Huey Long of Louisiana. The slogan of Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement was “Every Man a King (But No One Wears a Crown).” Lewis revised the slogan in It Can’t Happen Here: “Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.” Like Senator Berzelius (“Buzz”) Windrip in It Can’t Happen Here, Long proposed to limit individual fortunes and inheritances through taxation, to double the amount of money in circulation to facilitate credit, and to provide each family with a guaranteed annual income of upward of four thousand dollars. In February 1935, according to Axel Knoenagel, “there were supposedly more than 27,000 [Share the Wealth] clubs with a total of more than 7 million members” in the U.S.2 When he died, the “Kingfish,” as he was nicknamed, was building a political machine to supplant the Democrats and elect him President in 1940. In none of these economic plans, however, do the figures make sense. All of them depended upon smoke and mirrors to disguise their impracticality.

  Sinclair Lewis was no wild-eyed leftist. While he had toyed with Fabian socialism as an undergraduate at Yale and worked briefly in 1906–7 as a janitor at Helicon Hall, Upton Sinclair’s utopian community in New Jersey, he was hardly a firebrand. In the mid-1930s, he was a Liberal, a supporter of the New Deal. His friend Ramon Guthrie insisted that “it would be a mistake to attribute to Sinclair Lewis any kind of sustained political conviction,”3 and his wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, later described him as “basically apolitical, but insofar as his social ideas were articulate and consistent, he was an old-fashioned populist.”4 His political opinions were a bit like those of Rick Blaine in the movie Casablanca. When asked his allegiances by a Gestapo major, Blaine replies, “I’m an alcoholic,” to which the nonaligned prefect of police adds, “That makes Rick a citizen of the world.”

  Still, Lewis was alarmed by the threat of despotism and homegrown fascism. As he explained in an interview with the New York Post in May 1936: “I have a vague, general fear that if somebody like Coughlin gets in, there’ll be hell to pay. Either this group could put over a real dictatorship or they could have it taken away from them by a hard-boiled group of reactionaries who to save themselves and their families would overthrow the whole government and substitute their own brand of Fascism.”5

  The moment seemed ripe for right-wing extremism. In 1922, the first American local of the German Nazi Party was founded in New York, and by 1935, the German-American Bund claimed a total membership of about ten thousand members. In 1933, William Dudley Pelley founded the anti-Semitic organization Silver Legion, which soon spread across the country and whose members wore silver shirts in imitation of the Brown Shirts in Germany and Black Shirts in Italy. In February 1933, Franklin Roosevelt (or Rosenfeldt, according to some of his anti-Semitic critics) was the target of a would-be assassin; a disgruntled Italian immigrant killed the mayor of Chicago, who had been sitting next to the President-elect, by mistake. Then in November 1934, Major General Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history to that date, testified before Congress about a military coup planned and sponsored by some anti–New Deal corporate leaders. In other words, “if Long had not been assassinated” in September 1935, as the contemporary scholar Andrew C. Yerkes has argued, “we might be reading [It Can’t Happen Here] as prophecy rather than speculation.”6 Nor was it the first American novel that envisioned a fascist future wrapped in the American flag published during the Depression. It was, in fact, the third, after Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934) and Edward Dahlberg’s Those Who Perish (1934).

  Lewis’s interest in the subject was no doubt piqued by Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler in 1931 and who, in August 1934, became the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany. Lewis’s biographer Mark Schorer bluntly asserts that “It Can’t Happen Here would never have been written if Sinclair Lewis had not been married to Dorothy Thompson.”7 George Seldes, a freelance investigative reporter and, in 1935, Lewis’s Vermont neighbor, similarly claims that Lewis owed “several books to Dorothy, most notably It Can’t Happen Here. . . . She inspired the book” and “gave him the story of Nazi-fascist dictatorships in Europe as she had experienced them.” Thompson also owned a copy of Raymond Gram Swing’s Forerunners of American Fascism (1935), on which Lewis modeled some of the incidents in the novel. Seldes had covered the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s and written an exposé of Mussolini entitled Sawdust Caesar (1935). Lewis had developed the “habit of pumping everyone for information” about the European political scene and, as Seldes remembered, “he especially pumped me on this subject. I had to relate every meeting with Mussolini, every glimpse of him, every day I could remember of the year and more in Rome under Fascism. He pumped day and night, lunch and dinner, cocktail hour and auto trips.”8 To acknowledge Seldes and other reporters who had helped him with the novel, Lewis listed them among the journalists imprisoned by Windrip. It Can’t Happen Here is doubtlessly also indebted to Jack London’s dystopian novel The Iron
Heel (1913), which depicts the rise of a ruthless oligarchy in the U.S. As a young writer early in the century, Lewis not only befriended London but sold him story ideas.

  In 1930, Lewis became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for his five major novels of the 1920s: Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth. In them, he was a provoceteur par excellence, stirring the water rather than calming it. Similarly, he had conceded from the first that It Can’t Happen Here was pure propaganda, though he added that “it is propaganda for only one thing: American democracy.”9 As he once asked his friend Frazier Hunt, “Don’t you understand that it’s my mission in life to be the despised critic, the eternal faultfinder? I must carp and scold until everyone despises me. That’s what I was put here for.”10 As late as 1949, in his last press interview, Lewis reiterated that he was “a diagnostician, not a reformer.”11

  Certainly nothing in It Can’t Happen Here is liable to comfort a reader familiar with world events in the mid-1930s. As early as the first chapter, according to the scholar Robert McLaughlin, “it becomes clear that the installation of a fascist government will not be a revolution or coup d’état; rather, the groundwork for fascism has already been constructed in the ideological worldviews of the majority of Americans. The riposte to the claim that ‘It can’t happen here’ is ‘It already has.’”12 The centerpiece of Windrip’s campaign is his “Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Man,” a hodgepodge of contradictory ideas, many gleaned from Long’s “Share-the-Wealth” platform—which in addition proposes to disenfranchise blacks and atheists and imprison communists, socialists, and anarchists. As Lewis’s hero Doremus Jessup remarks, “Windrip never mentioned free speech and the freedom of the press in his articles of faith.” The final rally of Windrip’s campaign takes place in Madison Square Garden two days before the election, an affair sometimes compared to the mass demonstrations at the Berlin Sportpalast organized by Joseph Goebbels on Hitler’s behalf—but Lewis was also prescient. On October 3, 1937, nearly two years after publication of his novel, more than a thousand Storm Troopers rallied at Madison Square Garden in New York, and to mark Washington’s Birthday in February 1939, some twenty thousand members of the German-American Bund and other fascists met in Madison Square Garden to hear a speech by Fritz Kuhn, the so-called “American Führer.”