(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)"Whenever you hear a prominent American called a 'Fascist,' you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM." --William Randolph Hearst, October 1935, one month after the release of It Can't Happen HereAlthough it's easily my favorite of all the things I do here, there are nonetheless some frustrations that come with writing the CCLaP 100 essay series concerning literary classics: for example, since I choose only books I myself have never read before, the series is missing an awful lot of major touchstones in literary history; and since I only cover a maximum of one title by any given author, this forces me to abandon a whole plethora of other books I think I would've enjoyed reading as well. Take for example early Modernist Sinclair Lewis, who before opening CCLaP I was barely familiar with at all, but am rapidly growing to admire more and more, the more I learn about him; and although my official selection of his for the CCLaP 100 is the masterpiece Babbitt (which I'll be reading later this year), while researching him I also came across a 1935 book of his called It Can't Happen Here that I found simply impossible to pass up.The book is essentially a speculative novel, taking the real events and popular figures of the 1930s to show just how easy it would've been for a fascist takeover of the United States to happen back then, right in the same period where the same thing had already happened in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Scandinavia, and other places; and although the book has been largely forgotten by now, it actually served as a comeback vehicle of sorts for Lewis at the time of its publication, after having a whole string of hits during the Roaring Twenties but rapidly falling out of favor with the onset of the Great Depression. See, for those who don't know, you can think of Lewis as perhaps the Jonathan Franzen or Tom Perrotta of Early Modernism: possessed with a skepticism towards humanity that knew no bounds, he originally became famous for a series of funny yet scathing novels about the naked hypocrisy of the bland middle class, sleepy midwestern suburbs, and conservative religious groups. (In fact, Lewis is widely considered to have written the very first satire of televangelists ever penned, 1927's Elmer Gantry, which has profoundly influenced every televangelism satire that has come since, although of course such people were technically radio stars in Lewis' day.)At the time, such books were eagerly eaten up not just by bitter intellectuals but also the very self-loathing middle-classers he was making fun of, which again like Franzen or Perrotta made him a hit not only academically but among the beach-and-airport crowd; in fact, he famously won the Pulitzer Prize in those years (for 1925's Arrowsmith) just to infamously turn it down, using the occasion to express his open contempt for everything the Pulitzers stood for, and later in life became the very first American to ever win the Nobel Prize for literature. But the audience for witty yet ultimately gentle parodies of the middle class profoundly dried up after the Great Depression hit -- not just because the middle class virtually disappeared, but because they were posthumously blamed for much of the things that had led to the Great Depression in the first place -- with the audience for contemporary novels turning more and more in the 1930s to such progressive social realists as Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. But of course, Lewis never stopped being bitter and angry through those years, and never stopped writing either; and like many political moderates at the time, he too watched with growing horror as these middle-classers he once made gentle fun of started turning more and more to such dangerous ideologues as politician Huey Long (the Sarah Palin of the 1930s) and media star Father Coughlin (the '30s Glenn Beck), and as more and more business tycoons like Henry Ford and celebrities like Charles Lindbergh started opening singing the praises of Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who had of course already successfully taken over their own countries by then, and were manipulating the media into making it seem like everything was going just peachy.It's easy to forget now, but during the nadir of the Great Depression, when unemployment was at its highest and it hadn't nearly been proven yet that Roosevelt's New Deal was actually going to work, the empty promises and hateful blame-shifting of fascism actually looked like a pretty good idea to a growing amount of Americans -- as the old justification goes, after all, "Hitler may be a mean guy, but at least he's building the highways!" -- even while those who were against fascism were walking around in those days self-righteously declaring that such a thing could never happen in such an enlightened, sophisticated democracy as the United States. This book, then, was Lewis' angry response to both those groups, using extrapolation of all the real issues at the time to show that, yes, a fascist takeover of the US actually could happen, and by the way, the reality would be so much worse than any of you rah-rah Jew haters could possibly, possibly imagine.And indeed, one of the reasons this book was so anticipated at the time and later became such a big hit was precisely because of its laser-precise look at all the current issues dominating the headlines during the early 1930s, making it just as important as a historical document as it is simply a novel; I mean, sheesh, just in the first third of the manuscript alone, Lewis makes specific references to Oswald Villard, Norman Thomas, Admiral Byrd, Hiram Powers, Thaddeus Stevens, Brigham Young, Chester Arthur, Billy Sunday, Aimee McPherson, Mother Eddy, Al Smith, Tom Heflin, Tom Dixon, William Jennings Bryan, Herbert Hoover, Senator Vandenberg, Ogden Mills, Hugh Johnson, Frank Knox, Senator Borah, Walt Trowbridge, George Norris, Jim Farley, William Rollins, John Strachey, Stuart Chase, Al Smith, Carter Glass, William McAdoo, Cordell Hull, Bruce Barton, Edgar Guest, Arthur Brisbane, Elizabeth Dilling, Walter Pitkin, William Dudley Pelley, S. Parkes Cadman, Edward Bernays, Upton Sinclair, Charles Beard, John Dewey, General Balbo, Ernest Hanfstangl, Ramsay MacDonald, Jimmy Walker, Olin Johnston, Mayor La Guardia, Eugene Debs, Steve Perefixe, Neil Carothers, Dowie and Voliva, Jeb Stuart, Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, James McPherson, Jane Addams, Mother Bloor and Carrie Nation, many of whom were barely famous even when this book first came out, and of course had already landed in the dustbin of history even by the time World War Two rolled around.And yes, as you can imagine if you're a regular reader here, there are all kinds of ways to directly compare the events of this book with the real events of the Bush administration in the years following 9/11, making it an impressively prescient look at what happened in the US when a quasi-fascist (okay, fascism-friendly) group actually did take over the federal government for a time. See for example the establishment of a new uber-department of the US military in this novel, one that reports not to Congress but directly to the President (think Homeland Security, made by Bush into a White House Cabinet department instead of a new wing of the military); the psychotic powermonger who serves as the vicious puppetmaster behind a genial, populist President (think Karl Rove); the outlawing of criticism against the army ("SUPPORT THE TROOPS, F-GGOT! SUPPORT THE TROOPS, F-GGOT!"); the worship of rural life and the demonization of urban living ("Country First," "Real America"); the elevating of a barely educated blue-collar thug to a position of national importance, because of a freak celebrity status bestowed by a bored media ("Joe the Plumber"); the slow rise of open racism and sexism as legitimate forms of entertainment (where do I even start?); the growing belief that corporate executives are the best-qualified people to lead our country, and the eventual complex intermingling of the private boardroom with the White House Cabinet (again, where do I even start?); the scapegoating of an entire section of the population, one already distrusted by most middle-class Caucasians, as a way to deflect attention from the massive corruption of their chosen officials ("Arabs! Terrorists! BOO!"); the overly quick passing of profoundly paradigm-changing legislation, long before its merits can actually be debated (think Patriot Act); the open mocking of intellectuals and academes in order to deflate their power; a faux-folksy autobiography-cum-manifesto from a major politician, full of empty promises delivered in homespun "common man" language (think Sarah Palin's Going Rogue); the hypocritical claim that censorship is the best way to honor the original intents of the Founding Fathers; a media-driven ad-hoc "populist grassroots movement" not officially associated with a political party, but used bilaterally by politicians anyway to justify the worst of their draconian wishes (the teabaggers in a nutshell); an ineffectual opponent who comes off as elite and impotent at the exact wrong moment in history to do so (think John Kerry); the belief that we must "show" to the rest of the world that we're "real men" and "can't be pushed around," no matter how much damage it causes to international relations (the attitude that virtually defined the Bush administration for eight years); and even a trumped-up war against Mexico when things start going badly for the people in charge, and who need a nation-unifying enemy to divert attention from inner-party conflict (think post-Bush Arizona, "The Wall," ad nauseum). Each and every one of the things just mentioned is found in Lewis' book; and that's astounding, given that it was written almost 75 years before September 11th and the rise of Bushism, and even more astounding when you consider that Lewis told his own story through the filter of a charming faux-Democrat coming to power, not a bumbling faux-Republican.Now, of course, that also brings us to this book's greatest criticism, a pretty fair one in my opinion now that I've read it myself -- that once we actually come to the Presidential win of this charming Huey-Long-type faux-Democrat about halfway through, the book quickly becomes the 1930s equivalent of the cheesy action movie Red Dawn, with for example the construction of public concentration camps, the dissolving of Congress, and the morphing of the former 48 continental state boundaries into nine "administrative districts" all happening before even the first year of this new President's term is finished. (And in fact, speaking of cheesy genre actioners, the original '80s version of the sci-fi series V was itself a modified adaptation of this very book, after a straight adaptation of it by showrunner Kenneth Johnson [originally titled Storm Warnings:] was deemed "too talky" by the network.) And that quite obviously leads us to why It Can't Happen Here is now largely forgotten, and is generally considered by Lewis fans to be one of his minor works, despite it being a fairly massive hit when it first came out (even adapted by the WPA into a highly successful stage play, which at one point during the Great Depression was being performed at 35 different theatres across the nation simultaneously); because once again, just like Franzen or Perrotta, Lewis' early novels are admired so much precisely for the nuanced subtlety he manytimes brings to his points, while here he essentially rants like an angry teenager for nearly 400 pages. But then again, maybe this just proves what a polarizing subject fascism is, and that it's simply impossible to respond to the issue in any kind of nuanced way; and in that regard, just think of how many crappy books and movies have now been made about 9/11 and the Bush years, projects that were made with good intentions but might as well be re-titled George Clooney Screams For Two Hours About What a Monster Dick Cheney Is.In any case, it's for sure a fascinating book, one that for obvious reasons deserves to be much better known these days by the general population than it currently is; and in fact, like I said, the more I learn just about Lewis in general, the more I believe that we're in store soon for a major cultural reassessment of his oeuvre (especially as we approach the 100th anniversaries of many of his most famous titles), a writer who is more and more these days starting to appear eerily ahead of his times, and who still has a lot to tell us about what motivates all those endless SUV-driving, yellow-ribbon-wearing, Joel-Osteen-following soccer moms out there in the "flyover states." Although it should be approached with tolerance and a forgiving mindset, I recommend reading It Can't Happen Here if you get the chance, and see for yourself just how universal the fear of uppity hypocrites has actually been over the course of history.
The Rise of an American Dictatorship7 April 2012tI discovered this book after reading a collection of interviews by Howard Zinn where he described it as a warning about how the United States could become a fascist dictatorship. Zinn's argument was that the US is already heading down that road, though it has not quite reached that point at the time of the interviews. When comparing the United States as outlined in this book and what we perceive today I would also suggest that we have not yet arrived at that point and would also suggest that we may still have some time to go as well. In this review I will begin by discussing this book itself and then consider some comparisons with Ancient Rome.tThis book was written in 1935, a crucial point in 20th century history. The Great Depression was ravishing the western world and millions were unemployed relying on food stamps and whatever job that they could get. One of the things that is mentioned over again is how stockbrokers and accountants have been relegated to jobs that involved digging ditches. In Germany the situation had become so dire that the population had become radicalised and Reichstag consisted of ultra-right Nazis and ultra-left communists. Hitler had allegedly created a panic by burning down the Reichstag and then used that panic to secure his position of power. Things quickly changed as elections were abolished and the storm troopers were put onto the streets to keep order. Germany had ceased to be a democracy and within a few months had become a dictatorship. By the time It Can't Happen Here had been published, book burnings were sweeping Germany, Hitler had purged all of his enemies and perceived enemies, and the Jews and other undesirables were being rounded up and imprisoned.tSo, we jump over the Atlantic to the United States. 1936 would be an election year, and Lewis no doubt wanted this book released to coincide with the lead up to the election. This would not be the last time this happened as numerous books were being published in the leadup to the 2004 election in an effort to prevent Bush from being re-elected. Obviously that did not happen in 2004, but we should continue to hold that period in our mind as this will become important. The reason I say this is because this book was reprinted in 2005, ironically during a time when political polarisation was once again beginning to sweep the United States. However there is a difference between this book and many of the others. It reminded me of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle in that it is a political commentary using a prose story as a vehicle. Come 2004 and we do not see much literature like this but rather collections of non-fiction books that simply provide a list of case studies as to how Bush is a bad president who cares only for the interests of his corporate backers.tLewis shows us how it is possible for the United States to become a dictatorship and how easily this could happen. Obviously the soil has to be right for such a system to grow, and that soil was more than evident in 1935. We were in the midst of one of the greatest economic downturns that the modern world had experienced, capitalism had effectively collapsed, and millions were out of work. In Germany they wanted a saviour and that saviour was Adolf Hitler. In the United States they wanted a saviour, and that saviour was Roosevelt, however Lewis seems to flag the proposition that Roosevelt, in his four years in office, had done little to relieve the suffering of the population. As such he creates a new politician, a Democrat, named Buzz Windthrip, who comes to prominence promising $5000.00 a year for everybody and to return the United States to its former glory. People are caught up in the hype, Roosevelt is sidelined, and Windthrip is elected president.tWindthrip is modelled on Hitler, and the methods that he uses to seize control are more than possible. In one of the chapters Lewis outlines Windthrip's manifesto, and while reading it one questions how Windthrip could conceivably breach the constitution by putting the manifesto in place as one continues to read one can see how this is done. Like Germany, Windthrip establishes his own secret police, the Minute-Men. This name harkens back to the rebellion, where a fledging republican army was being created using the name Minute-Men. They were called as such because they could be armed and ready to fight in a minute. By creating the Minute-Men, Windthrip is conjuring up the revolution, and the changes and freedom that it brings.tNow the United States constitution allows militias, though one should remember that it refers only to lawfully constituted militias. The MMs begin their life as a group of people who like to parade in uniform, however upon his election, Windthrip uses his executive powers to make the MMs a lawful militia. He then uses the militia to shut down congress and the supreme court. All who are considered hostile to his regime are arrested and shot, and those that are ambivalent are put in protective custody. By the time everybody wakes up they discover that the MMs have been elevated above the police and the army and that democracy has died.tThe book shifts perspectives between what is happening at a federal level and the small town experiences of the newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup. Jessup is watching events unfold from the view of a liberal leaning newspaper editor. This is a bad situation to be in because one of the things that the regime seeks to control is information. A rogue newspaper editor is a dangerous person, so Jessup finds himself caught in a situation where if he were to continue he would get into a lot of trouble, and if he were to capitulate he would be denying himself. Also we see how the people of Fort Beulah react to the changes. A number get themselves moved into administrative positions, while other attempt to resist the changes. It is clear that the bullies are using this as an opportunity to promote themselves and their own fortune. We also note how they use fear and spying to maintain control. It is a method that is even used today to maintain control in some groups. The impression is given that if one were to 'dob' on somebody else then the dobber will receive a reward, and control is maintained. However the catch is that the 'dobber' is never truly rewarded, but rather given the impression that they are now in the leaders good books. As such it creates distrust amongst the group as nobody knows who is going to tattle on them.tAnother theme that comes out is how in reality extreme left and right are not necessarily the opposite but rather the same. If you take Nazi Germany and Communist Russia for instance. While ideologically they were the opposite, in reality they were the same. Both were dictatorships, both maintained order through a system of secret police, and both kept the populations oppressed and marginalised. The difference is that in Russia the means of production were in the hands of the state while in Germany the means of production where in the hands of a small group of oligarchs who were in the pockets of the government. As such, there was no difference, and as such this is why people are looking back at that period. Lewis uses the term Corpoism, whereas nowdays we call it corporatism. It seems that modern business is run by a handful of oligarchs connected to the government. If a law upsets the oligarchs, the government will not be able to pass it. We have seen that today with the influence of the oil barons, the health insurers, and the fast food magnates, as well as the media enterprises. Even closer to home in Australia, we see this with the Mining Tax and with the Carbon Tax.tOne of the best ways to attempt to understand the historical forces at play is to compare and contrast these events with past empires and powers. While there is a contrast between 1935 and 2004, there are better comparisons elsewhere, namely with Athens and Rome. With regards to the Bush regime and the Windthrup regime, we see differences with regards to the MMs. Bush did not have his own private army on the streets, and while he did attempt to establish a secret police in the form of the department of homeland security, he never went to the extent of rounding up dissidents. Well, there were arrests arising from the anti-Bush and anti-war protests, but there was no rounding up the anti-war establishment and confining them to concerntration camps. In the end, if it was not for September 11th, then the Bush Administration would have unlikely moved in the direction that he did. If the US is moving towards a corporate dictatorship, it is a slow move. All that really came out of it was endless rhetoric, ridicule of those who did not agree, and military intervention on foreign shores. In the end, the worst we got was 'if you are not for us, you are for the terrorists' though nobody was ever locked up for waving a placard on the streets of New York City stating 'no blood for oil'.tAs for further back, let us consider Athens and Rome. The Athenian democracy probably lasted about two hundred to two hundred and fifty years before it collapsed. Even then, the period of the Thirty Tyrants lasted only a short time before democracy was restored, however this period was what I considered to be the end of the Classical Period, in that supporters of the Thirty Tyrants were rounded up and executed (Socrates being amongst them). This act in and of itself signalled the end of Athenian democracy, and the trigger that brought about its collapse was it's imperial ambitions. It wasn't even the Peloponesian War that brought about its end, Athens could have held out for much longer than it did, if not for the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. As I have indicated elsewhere, the events of the Peloponesian War are uncannily similar to the events of the modern era.tThe second place we look at is Ancient Rome. The republic lasted much longer than Athens, about 450 years, before it finally collapsed to become a dictatorship. However it wasn't a sudden move, but a gradual shift as the government sought to bring in more and more checks and balances to attempt to restrain the power of any single person. However, with the checks and balances in place, nothing could be done. Rome had not had an easy time as a Republic, and as the government began to grind to a halt as the interests of the plebians and the patricians clashed, people would step up and attempt to bring Rome back on track. It is noticeable that both pre-imperial dictators (Sulla and Ceaser) both appealed to the populace against the patricians. It was the same with Augustus, who brought himself to power on the backs of the plebians. While one may suggest that compared with Rome, the United States still has a way to run, if we compare it with Athens, it has already entered the end game. Further, in comparing the United States with Rome, we uncannily find ourselves looking back to Germany of the 1930s, where the totalitarian government (as is the case in this book) rose to power on the backs of the people. In the end, it is not the corporate cronies that we should be wary of, but rather those who reach out to the people and convince the people that they are out to support their interests. One never realises that a populist government will transform into a dictatorship until it has already happened.
What do You think about It Can't Happen Here (2005)?
First Opinion: Eh, the story of a fascist takeover of an idyllic rural Vermont town. Boring. But I'm glad I gave it a chance...This book starts off slowly with loads of exposition into the daily lives and histories of a myriad of residents of Fort Beulah, VT. It chugged along at such a pace that I feared it was shaping up to be another The Plot Against America and almost put it down. But because it was written by Sinclair Lewis and had received some degree of acclaim, I kept plodding through. In the nick of time, Lewis finally introduces Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, the progressive/populist (though racist, misogynist, and anti-semitic) U.S. Senator who is challenging Franklin Roosevelt for the 1936 Democratic presidential nomination. Windrip's main platform issue is the radical redistribution of wealth, promising $5,000 annual salary to each American family, regardless of occupation. Windrip is able to rouse up the neglected, forgotten, disharted rabble, winning the nomination and sweeping the November election. I won't give too much away, but Windrip's private army of hired thugs quickly institutes a national lockdown, concentration camps spring up across the country, and dissidents are whisked away. One aspect of this book that I really liked was that the author fleshed out the detailed mechanics of fascist rule, down to the nitty-gritty dissolution of individual states and the installation of regional and district "commissioners". As I interpreted it, the theme of the novel is that no political party or ideology has a monopoly on totalitarianism. Regardless of noble intentions, the quashing of freedom and the suffocation of dissent will always lead to fascism, no matter which party holds the reins. Sinclair sums it up about 20 pages from the end of the book, when he says of his protagonist, Doremus Jessup, that: "He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson"
—Jace
I think Holly 's review articulated my thoughts on this book the best. Scary in a number of ways, Definitely classist but worth reading. An alternative history very well written and visionary for his time. I had to look up a lot of words, and contemplate numerous cliches that were lost on me. Sinclair does a fine job of innuendo. For instance instead of talking about this particular women having sex graphically like a modern novel, he uses a reference to coughing "for one hour and seventeen minutes according to the colonels' wristwatch". I liked the characters. My favorite were the gas station socialist and communist, I did not agree with the authors stance that communism was only for the Russians and he glossed over the value of Unionization. I see the MM's as todays department of homeland security, the border patrol, the militarization of police departments. The concentration camps as the penal system, which locks up more people than any country on earth. I think fascism is here and not like Sinclair thought, but in many ways, very close.The book did drag on for me, why I didn't give it 5 stars. Having stated all my opinions I would recommend it.
—Stuart
Though this book was based on Long, there are many aspects of this book that hold true today. As a species, we tend to ignore history and repeat it, far too often. We are sometimes complacent and believe that we are protected. We tend to look for blame and not take responsibility. Windrip, a Populist Party Democrat, blames everyone from the rich to the Jews and Communists for the troubles in our country, now deep in the depression. A vote for Windrip will mean a distribution of $5,000 in every pocket, of course the realities of where those funds will come from hasn't hit home, yet. For those who haven't anything to lose (or so they suspect) this seems like a grand idea. The relevance of this book strikes such a familiar chord with the present Obama administration and his band of bullies such as Pelosi. He is a captivating speaker, but as with Windrip, who can remember what he really said?
—Kent
