Terrorism and Political Violence

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It Can't Happen Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis's
Fascist America

Ellen Strenski

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To cite this article: Ellen Strenski (2017) It�Can't�Happen�Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis's Fascist
America, Terrorism and Political Violence, 29:3, 425-436, DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2017.1304760

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Terrorism and Political Violence, 29:425–436, 2017
Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0954-6553 print=1556-1836 online
DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2017.1304760

It Can’t Happen Here,1 or Has It? Sinclair Lewis’s

Fascist America

ELLEN STRENSKI
Department of English, University of California, Irvine, California, USA

Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, anticipated
many aspects of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign and election in his 1935 satirical
dystopia, It Can’t Happen Here. It was his most popular novel to date and is still
satisfying, thought-provoking political theater. Lewis was influenced by growing
totalitarianism in Europe, reported on by his second wife, foreign correspondent,
Dorothy Thompson. Noting the power of Father Coughlin and Huey Long, among
others, to mobilize a public still suffering from the Great Depression, Lewis feared a
fascist takeover of the American government by democratic means. Lewis’s fictional
nightmare features a loutish, ignorant demagogue, who is manipulated by a sinister
ghostwriter adviser. With support from a resentful League of Forgotten Men, the
demagogue is elected President and quickly establishes a military, racist, and
anti-Semitic dictatorship. It Can’t Happen Here dramatizes the dire consequences
of this takeover, which is not taken seriously at first by Lewis’s newspaper editor
protagonist, but then is increasingly resisted. Lewis is a social satirist in the Mark
Twain tradition, and his novel is worth reading today for its suggestive parallels with
current history and its good-hearted humor.

Keywords 2016 presidential election, American fascism, dystopia, It Can’t

Happen Here, satire, Sinclair Lewis

‘‘Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word—
just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got
panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours—
not so worse to have a real Strong Man like Hitler or Mussolini . . . and
have ‘em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous
again.’’2

In 1930, five years before he wrote It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis became
the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy
applauded ‘‘his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with
wit and humour, new types of characters’’3 in a series of five novels, including Bab-
bitt, Arrowsmith, and Elmer Gantry. One of these characters is George Babbitt, so
striking that his very surname survives as a proper noun to describe a complacent
materialist—a ‘‘Babbitt.’’ The title of another one of Lewis’s prizewinning novels,
Main Street, perfectly captures Lewis’s focus on the travails of ordinary Americans,

Address correspondence to Ellen Strenski, Department of English, University of

California, Irvine, 92697, California, USA. E-mail: strenski@uci.edu

425
426 E. Strenski

a sympathy for the common man that also impressed the nominating committee.
And not just Americans. As the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Erik
Axel Karlfeldt, pointed out in 1930, ‘‘To be sure, the town is first and foremost
American, but it could, as a spiritual milieu, be situated just as well in Europe. Like
Mr. Lewis, many of us have suffered from its ugliness and bigotry.’’4
Two more distinctive Lewis characters feature five years later in It Can’t Happen
Here. One is an elected American President who becomes a military dictator with
fascist tendencies, if not a prototypical fascist. This character presents astonishing
parallels to President Donald J. Trump. Another central character in this novel is
the protagonist, a small-town newspaper editor who resists this regime. It Can’t
Happen Here is part prediction, part devastating political satire, part romantic tale
of illicit love, part impassioned warning, part derring-do of brave resistance, part
roman àclef. Karlfeldt’s observation, initially about Babbitt, applies equally well
to It Can’t Happen Here: ‘‘It is institutions as representatives of false ideas, and
not individuals, that Mr. Lewis wants to attack with his satire.’’5 Various institutions
attacked by Lewis over the years include medicine, commerce, and the Church. The
institution Lewis attacks in It Can’t Happen Here is the American political system—
corrupt leaders, bread-and-circus campaigns, and gullible voters. The false idea is
fascism. It all stems from Lewis’s exuberant patriotism and his concern for what
he referred to in his Nobel acceptance speech as ‘‘my own and greatly beloved
land,’’6 then increasingly endangered, as he saw it, by emerging totalitarianism.
In 1935, as Sinclair Lewis was writing It Can’t Happen Here in a mad rush over
several summer months, Europe was in turmoil, while Americans still suffered from
the Great Depression and were falling under the spell of Father Coughlin and Huey
Long. An important influence on Lewis at this time surely was his second wife,
Dorothy Thompson, an American foreign correspondent whose renown ranges from
being featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1939 to being quoted in 2015 by
President Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents Association dinner:
‘‘I raise a glass to [journalists], with the words of the American foreign correspon-
dent Dorothy Thompson. ‘It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty
is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.’’’7 Thompson
had been stationed in Vienna and then Berlin and, notoriously, had interviewed
Adolf Hitler in 1931. She was one of the first journalists to report on—and loudly
condemn—Nazism, for which she was expelled from Germany in 1934, returning
home the year before Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here.
It Can’t Happen Here was Lewis’s most popular novel to date. It tells the story
of Doremus Jessup, editor of a small-town newspaper in Vermont, as Jessup over
several years observes, and then, too late, resists, the rise of a fascist American
dictator. President Buzz Windrip is ‘‘vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily
detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic.’’8 Nonetheless, with the help of the League
of Forgotten Men—a ‘‘mob of camp followers who identified political virtue with
money,’’9 his Minute Men militia of white shirts—’’the shock troops of Freedom!,’’10
and a cunning adviser who was his ‘‘secretary-press-agent-private-philosopher,’’11
Windrip wins, first his party’s presidential nomination, and then the 1936 election.
Lewis, the novelist, concentrates on his charismatic leader, Windrip, with only
casual mention of party politics and the mechanisms that propel his electoral victory.
Character study and the telling detail, not political analysis, preoccupy Lewis.
Windrip is a Democratic Senator who all of a sudden enters the presidential race.
What specifically goes on behind the scenes at the Democratic Party nominating
 It Can’t Happen Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis’s Fascist America 427

convention is hidden, out of the view of everyone—delegates and readers alike.

‘‘Great and dramatic shenanigans’’12 take over. Pageantry flourishes, especially
Windrip’s, whose parade flags, for instance, touted as original Civil War relics,
actually come from a theatrical warehouse. Windrip’s nomination victory is partly
explained because his opponents, including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Frances
Perkins, ‘‘represented integrity and reason, in a year when the electorate hungered
for frisky emotions . . . all the primitive sensations which they thought they found
in the screaming of Buzz Windrip.’’13 Through bombast and sheer presence, Windrip
also wins the general election and immediately ‘‘began, even before his inauguration,
to dictate to the country.’’14 Once elected, he abolishes all political parties and con-
solidates power into his own new party, the American Corporate State and Patriotic
Party, an idea ‘‘more or less taken from Italy.’’15 His supporters are called ‘‘Corpos.’’
The consequences of Windrip’s election are catastrophic. Riots break out; pro-
testers, including congressmen, are shot, sometimes randomly, by Windrip’s militia;
law is subverted; colleges are closed; ‘‘Ringling-Barnum and Bailey universities’’16
are allowed to teach only ‘‘Anglo-Saxon purity’’;17 journalists are sent to prison
or concentration camps, and the unemployed to labor camps; books are burned;
wars are threatened; it is ‘‘maddening that it seems impossible now to know anything
surely’’;18 and a government-in-exile is established in Canada, across a militarized,
closed border.
As prediction, the fascist America of It Can’t Happen Here is alarming but lim-
ited and, when compared to today, easily falsified. President Windrip is a career poli-
tician, not an outsider. Congressional representatives have not been executed. With
the exception of his sinister adviser, a Stephen K. Bannon kind of character, and a
large contingent of military brass, Windrip surrounds himself with other conven-
tional politicians and public figures. Absent from Windrip’s inner circle are family
members, obscure loyalists, and fringe elements. To some extent, as Michael Barkun
points out in this issue,19 the influence of the fringe today can be explained by the
current media ecosystem. In 1935, communication technology provided limited,
and highly institutionalized, media outlets. They tended to exclude fringe predators
from general public notice, thereby protecting the body politic, although in It Can’t
Happen Here propaganda flourishes, of course, once the press is muzzled. In 1935,
political constituencies and protests were slowly mobilized by telegram, mimeo-
graph, and radio, unlike today’s ubiquitous internet and TV platforms that empower
unfiltered fringe ideas and personalities. Even so, the impulse behind Windrip’s three
a.m. emergency radio address is recognizable. Dissent in Lewis’s novel is channeled
initially through editorials, and subsequently a government-in-exile’s pamphlets
smuggled back into the country. It Can’t Happen Here seems old-fashioned and
charmingly vintage in some ways, for example, Windrip’s campaign train:
‘‘scarlet-and-silver, ebony-paneled, silk-upholstered, streamlined, Diesel-engined,
rubber-padded, air-conditioned, aluminum Forgotten Men Special.’’20 Yet even this
example evokes the ostentatious display in Donald Trump’s Boeing 757, ‘‘tricked out
with things like Rolls-Royce engines, 24-karat gold-plated seatbelts, and silk
walls.’’21 The grotesque political world Lewis describes may seem ‘‘over the top,’’
which also happens to be the subtitle of Windrip’s book. But that is how many
observers saw and dismissed Donald Trump, just as Lewis’s indolent newspaper edi-
tor cannot take Windrip’s campaign seriously. In any case, a general reader looking
for a prediction based on sober political analysis would be better advised to read
something else, like Bertram Gross’s Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in
428 E. Strenski

America.22 Moreover, today’s liberals, unlike Lewis’s fictional newspaper editor, are
far from lazy; they are much more engaged right now in protesting the Trump
regime.
Hastily written in four months, It Can’t Happen Here is also rather clunky
fiction that goes on too long and fizzles to an inconclusive end. Many of its
components—plot, pace, setting, character, dialogue, length—are problematic. A
contemporary historian, R. P. Blackmur, reviewing It Can’t Happen Here in The
Nation in 1935, went so far as to declare, ‘‘This is a weapon of the intellect rather
than a novel.’’23 The Kirkus Review explained to booksellers at the time that ‘‘one
can count on Lewis for clever dialogue and amusing situations, pregnant with the
undercurrent of whatever hobby he is astride at the moment, but this book is,
frankly, pretty heavy sledding much of the time,’’24 and cautioned them not to
overstock. This anonymous reviewer complained about the novel, finding in it
‘‘too much of the political pamphleteer.’’25
Moreover, in addition to far right radical fringe elements, there are other
conspicuous absences in It Can’t Happen Here. Religion is ignored once the Father
Coughlin figure is jailed, except to provide one of many contradictory planks in
Windrip’s program: ‘‘we shall guarantee to all persons absolute freedom of religious
worship, provided, however, that no atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, nor
any Jew who shall refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, nor any person
of any faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to hold any
public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge, or as a physician,
except in the category of Obstetrics.’’26 Big Business, too, is only vaguely present,
although Windrip is ‘‘certain that someday America would have vast business deals
with the Russians,’’27 and the newspaper editor, Jessup, worries that once Windrip is
in office, ‘‘the country is going to be run as his private domain!’’28
Lewis deliberately refuses to suggest a remedy for this mayhem, explaining
through his protagonist, Jessup, that ‘‘There is no Solution!’’29 The closest he comes
is to insist that the essential world struggle ‘‘was not of Communism against
Fascism, but of tolerance against . . . bigotry.’’30 He is ‘‘convinced that everything
that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical
spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social
system whatsoever.’’31 Lewis’s novel is not a program; it is a warning, urging readers
to wake up to emerging conditions that are tapping into ‘‘all the justified discontent
there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy.’’32 The
newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, is appropriately nicknamed ‘‘Dormouse’’ by
his wife, and he indeed seems to sleep through the early days of Windrip’s campaign,
escaping from the growing unpleasantness to his attic study: ‘‘He simply did not
believe that this comic tyranny could endure.’’33 However, the regime thrives and
eventually Jessup wakes up and blames himself and all the other ‘‘Respectables’’34
who let it happen. He becomes radicalized, escapes to Canada, and joins the New
Underground.
So if as fiction it is flawed, and Lewis can offer only a somewhat outdated
warning, however pertinent in 1935, why would a reader want to bother with It Can’t
Happen Here today? For three reasons. First, Lewis’s dramatization of President
Windrip’s campaign and his subsequent reign of ‘‘clownish swindlerism’’35 can help
us ‘‘Respectables’’ today understand the general electoral dynamic impelling Donald
Trump’s successful campaign that mystified many. Windrip, too, is an authoritarian,
loutish demagogue who prefers to live in luxury hotels and feeds off the adulation of
 It Can’t Happen Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis’s Fascist America 429

his adoring public while his wife stays home, somewhere out of Washington, caring
for their children. Second, one of the novel’s main characters, Oscar ‘‘Shad’’ Ledue,
who personifies the Forgotten Men voters, can help readers today understand why
voters in 2016 entrusted Donald Trump to shake things up and make America great
again. Finally, Lewis offers us thought-provoking, often quite humorous, entertain-
ment. This long, detailed novel is consoling social satire; it holds up a mirror that
emphasizes distortions from a moral, rational order. This recognition, like a
‘‘Saturday Night Live’’ skit, can be intensely gratifying and reassuring—deviation
from a norm still implies or reinforces the norm. One pleasurable example, that
has nothing much to do with fascism, are the ‘‘dozens of telephone girls and scores
of girl stenographers’’ hired in the campaign. ‘‘Buzz himself had made the rule that
all these girls must be pretty.’’36 Sound familiar?

A Fascist President
President Berzelius ‘‘Buzz’’ Windrip is one of Lewis’s ‘‘new types of characters’’
remarked on by the Swedish Academy. Lewis’s portrait paints an empty, buffoonish
windbag, available to be filled and exploited by his villainous advisor: ‘‘Windrip as
the mask and bellowing voice, with his satanic secretary Lee Sarason, as the brain
behind.’’37 Windrip is an entertainer with ‘‘natural ability to be authentically excited
by and with his audience, and they by and with him.’’38 He is ‘‘a Professional Com-
mon Man . . .. But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified . . . the other
Commoners saw him towering among them, and they raised their hands to him in
worship.’’39 He has their ‘‘every prejudice and every aspiration,’’40 but what he truly
believes is not specified: ‘‘My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they
are, and must continue to be, the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth.’’41
Perhaps he really believes nothing, and is simply an opportunist.
Windrip’s program, such as it is, is vague and contradictory: ‘‘he was all against
the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers . . . he was 100 percent
for Labor, but 100 percent against all strikes.’’42 This absence of a detailed plan is
typical of fascist regimes. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton points
out that the ‘‘ism’’ ending of fascism suggests an ideological coherence, which in fact
does not exist,43 in history or in Lewis’s novel. Indeed, reason, truth, and fact are
held in contempt. Windrip explains, ‘‘it is not fair to ordinary folks—it just confuses
them—to try to make them swallow all the true facts.’’44
What voters get are flattering promises, ghostwritten by his sinister secretary.
Windrip’s book, Zero Hour—Over the Top, like Donald Trump’s The Art of the
Deal, is the ‘‘Bible of his followers, part biography, part economic program, and part
plain exhibitionist boasting.’’45 This ‘‘Bible of Economic Justice’’46 is supplemented
by ‘‘The Fifteen Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men.’’47 In addition to this
‘‘rhapsody of general ideas,’’48 Windrip champions ‘‘figures and facts that were
inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.’’49 All of
it is ‘‘a mishmash of polite regards to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity,
Patriotism, and any number of other noble but slippery abstractions’’50 fabricated by
Windrip’s evil secretary.
The parallels between this presidential secretary, Lee Sarason, and Donald
Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor, Stephen K. Bannon, are striking.
Little is known about Sarason’s background except that he had been a newspaper
editor, and in his writings ‘‘you saw the moldy cellar, heard the whip, felt the slimy
430 E. Strenski

blood.’’51 He becomes Windrip’s ‘‘bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent, economic

adviser.’’52 So, too, Stephen K. Bannon, a former executive at Breitbart News, has
now assumed unprecedented power in the Trump administration. For example,
bloggers for Lawfare, published in cooperation with Brookings, referring to
Bannon’s role on the National Security Council and the Principals Committee,
posted that ‘‘Presidents in the past have adopted ‘Chief Strategists,’ or political
advisors, but have never formally invited one to an NSC subgroup or the NSC
itself.’’53 To some extent, both Bannon and Sarason are their Presidents’ puppet
masters. Bannon has an explicit agenda, for example, stated forthrightly at the
Conservative Political Action Conference on February 23, 2017: national security
and sovereignty, economic nationalism, and ‘‘deconstruction of the administrative
state.’’54 Lee Sarason’s agenda, not disclosed to voters, is ‘‘resolute control by a
small oligarchy. In this he was a Hitler, a Mussolini.’’55
What Windrip’s voters hear is that Windrip will break through the demoralizing
logjam of economic stagnation to provide them security with ‘‘thoroughly tested (but
unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced
by these same highly paid workers very low.’’56 A stigmatized Other is to blame,
‘‘especially people who are racially different from us’’;57 ‘‘nothing so elevates a
dispossessed farmer or factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on
which he can look down.’’58 This denigration of others, reduced to their function
of job competitor, enables Windrip to abstract from them any sense of common
humanity and thereby facilitate public approval of and support for his draconian
methods of social control.
So Windrip vows to protect and increase precious jobs by restricting access to
the available labor pool with exclusionary policies building on white, male privilege.
Women will be relegated to ‘‘such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing
and beauty parlors.’’59 Blacks will be ‘‘prohibited from voting, holding public office,
practising law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar
school.’’60 As for immigrants, ‘‘We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the
country . . . the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks.’’61
Anti-Semitism flourishes with the zenophobia: ‘‘Albert Einstein, who had been
exiled from Germany for his guilty devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the
violin, was now exiled from America for the same crimes.’’62 So, too, Windrip vows
to ‘‘keep all our dollars at home’’63 and curtail the competition of international
trade: ‘‘he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce
its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing then, that it
could defy the World.’’64
Windrip explains how to accomplish all this in his ‘‘gospel of clean and
aggressive strength.’’65 Fundamental change is necessary to clean things up. Indeed,
purification is a theme: ‘‘All through the campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get
lots of jolly humor out of puns on going to Wash., and to wash.’’66 To drain the
swamp? He advocates a strong Executive that can move quickly to reform govern-
ment and corrupt politicians, ‘‘not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer
congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debate.’’67 This sentiment
is echoed in Donald Trump’s ‘‘Inaugural Address’’: ‘‘We will no longer accept poli-
ticians who are all talk and no action—constantly complaining but never doing any-
thing about it. The time for empty talk is over. Now arrives the hour of action.’’68
Action, as Jean Rosenfeld explains elsewhere in this issue, is ‘‘perhaps the most dis-
tinctive aspect of fascism.’’69 Military action is particularly appealing. Both Windrip
 It Can’t Happen Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis’s Fascist America 431

and Trump surround themselves with military officers. Windrip exults in a militant
nationalism and explicitly crows, ‘‘we’ve got to change our system a lot, maybe even
change the whole Constitution’’70 in order to accomplish ‘‘a rejuvenation of the
crippled and senile capitalistic system.’’71 Not long after his election, martial law
is imposed. Change accelerates. In less than two years, Windrip is ousted in a
coup by his decadent adviser, now Secretary of State, and exiled to France. The
treasonous adviser, in turn, is assassinated by the Secretary of War, a puritanical
Colonel whose despotism is worse still. Popular rebellion is finally triggered by plans
to draft five million men to invade Mexico ‘‘as soon as it should be cool enough, or
even earlier, if the refrigeration and air-conditioning could be arranged.’’72 However,
this mass revolt collapses. It is stymied by ignorance because ‘‘neither the Corpos nor
many of their opponents knew enough to formulate a clear, sure theory of
self-government.’’73
Regardless of his ignominious end, Windrip’s campaign and subsequent rule are
stunningly successful theater. His regime depends primarily on stagecraft. Windrip is
‘‘an actor of genius.’’74 The leading role is the Common Man, ‘‘played by a Buzz
Windrip with rapier and blue silk tights.’’75 His sinister adviser writes the script
and directs Windrip in a political melodrama. Although a career politician, Windrip
is made to appear siding with ‘‘the plain people and against all the tight old political
machines.’’76 Lewis’s portrayal of this role is noteworthy because this ‘‘bewitching’’77
populist appeal distinguishes his fictional drama as fascist, and Windrip as essen-
tially a fascist demagogue. Windrip is not interested in just being an authoritarian
dictator, a tyrant dominating a docile, captive population. Windrip, the ‘‘supreme
actor,’’78 inflames mass rallies through ‘‘orgasms of oratory,’’79 and entrances his
supporters. What Windrip apparently wants is to be loved: ‘‘I do want power, great,
big, imperial power—but not for myself—no—for you!’’80 He flatters his supporters,
telling them, ‘‘They said you were no good, because you were poor. I tell you that
you are . . . the highest lords of the land—the aristocracy—the makers of the new
America of freedom and justice . . .. Anybody tries to block you—give the swine
the point of your bayonet!’’81 Windrip wants his supporters’ assent, not just
obedience. They watch what this actor does; his actions speak as loudly as he does,
and voters do not particularly care what he says. What counts with them is his
performance. For example, Windrip offends the Duke of York by refusing to attend
an Embassy dinner, ‘‘thus gaining, in all farm kitchens and parsonages and
barrooms, a splendid reputation for Homespun Democracy.’’82

A Forgotten Man
A second value in Lewis’s novel is its useful anatomy of these supporters, the
Forgotten Men who swallow all this ‘‘sadistic nonsense.’’83 They are ‘‘kind people,
industrious people, generous to their aged, eager to find any desperate cure for
the sickness of worry over losing the job. Most facile materials for any
rabble-rouser.’’84 These voters feel stuck in their humiliating vulnerability by corrupt
politicians beholden to Big Business, and by the ‘‘crooked labor-leaders just as much
as the crooked bosses.’’85 One of these Forgotten Men is Oscar ‘‘Shad’’ Ledue,
Jessup’s handyman, his ‘‘Caliban,’’86 who becomes a ‘‘crusader’’87 for Windrip
and rises to important officialdom in the new administration before he, too, is sent
off to a concentration camp. It is Shad who is heard bellowing that Windrip, even
though he is a former Senator, ‘‘is the first statesman in years that thinks of what
432 E. Strenski

guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics.’’88 Lewis seems
to be intrigued by his character, Shad, who reappears throughout the story as if
Lewis is continually trying to pin him down, expose his motives, make sense of
him. Shad is surly, angry, vindictive, smart, and, especially, he is resentful: ‘‘I don’t
pretend to be anything but a plain working stiff, but there’s forty million workers
like me, and . . . Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like
us need . . . be selfish and vote for the one man that’s willing to give you something—
give you something.’’89
Most telling, in addition to Shad’s susceptibility to Windrip’s appeal, is Shad’s
‘‘silent fury.’’90 Once their roles are reversed, with Shad now a Corpo official, and
Jessup disgraced, Shad tells Jessup, ‘‘I used to mow your lawn . . . and you used to
be so snotty!’’91 Shad is cruel, even sadistic, ‘‘a nasty bully’’92 who, Jessup suspects,
kicks Jessup’s dog. After a mock trial, Jessup’s son-in-law is shot outside a court-
house by a squad that includes Shad, smiling at his gun. Lewis thereby ties Shad’s
bitter indignation, and the grievance and self-pity of the other Forgotten Men, to
their ‘‘hoodlum wrath’’93 and to the dehumanization and systemic brutality used
by Windrip’s regime as a means of social control and domination: ‘‘Into the backs
of the wounded as they went staggering away the M. M. [Minute Men] infantry,
running, poke their bayonets. Such a juicy squash it made, and the fugitives looked
so amazed, so funny, as they tumbled in grotesque heaps!’’94 War, the ultimate form
of violence, is threatened ‘‘just to show the world that we’re the huskiest nation
going.’’95

Cautionary Tale/Fairy Tale

Lastly, It Can’t Happen Here is a successful social satire of President Windrip’s
‘‘comic tyranny.’’ Sinclair Lewis saw himself as an American novelist writing in
the vein of Mark Twain, whom he obviously admired and in his Nobel Lecture called
‘‘perhaps the greatest of our writers . . . that fiery old savage.’’96 Like Twain, scoffing
at American institutions, Lewis holds up a mirror to human nature and distorts it.
We see ourselves in his critique, which, while not particularly flattering, is always
entertaining. Are we the lazy, inattentive editor? The feckless roughneck supporter?
The colluding businessman? The vile adviser? A heroic leader of the New Under-
ground? The flamboyant dictator? Readers may squirm at the recognition, but sim-
ultaneously enjoy Lewis’s warm-hearted, and often very funny, exposure of human
inanity. The ridicule is at times aggressively sarcastic, for example, names: Hector
Macgoblin or Senator Porkwood. The satire can also be more wittily funny and slyly
amusing, ironic. Newspapers have been ‘‘combined by the government into one
sheet, rich in comic strips, in syndicated gossip from Hollywood, and, indeed, lack-
ing only any news.’’97 Windrip’s opponent suffered ‘‘from the deficiency of being
honest and disinclined to promise that he could work miracles.’’98 Like all satire,
It Can’t Happen Here gratifies because it allows readers to feel morally superior.
It inculcates a sense of righteousness, a shared moral code that has been violated,
and it works by shaming the violators. What that principle could be is suggested
by The Nation reviewer, who saw in Lewis’s work a lesson: ‘‘in a comparatively
stable society the liberal can afford to be disinterested and is most valuable so,
but in an unstable society disinterestedness is the very last thing he can afford.’’99
At some point in the narrative, It Can’t Happen Here assumes the consoling qua-
lities of a fairy tale. In addition to implying a violated moral standard, the fictional
 It Can’t Happen Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis’s Fascist America 433

grotesqueries in Lewis’s story function as comfort to insulate us from real folly and
atrocity. For example, there is no premonition in It Can’t Happen Here of the race
warriors, identified by Jeffrey Kaplan100 in this issue, that figure so prominently and
alarmingly today. The racism Lewis depicts in 1935 is the vile, but familiarly domes-
ticated, KKK. After various ordeals, the hero of Lewis’s novel escapes rather easily
from a concentration camp, gets to Canada, comes back to organize the resistance
through education, and, at the end of the story, literally drives off into the dawn.
It Can’t Happen Here is now enjoying resurgent popularity, recently climbing
into the top ten of Amazon rankings. According to Sally Parry, the Executive Direc-
tor of the Sinclair Lewis Society and editor of the Sinclair Lewis Society Newsletter,
‘‘sales are up about 1500% over last year (that’s not a typo).’’101 Parry reports that
she teaches It Can’t Happen Here ‘‘at every presidential election, which gets my stu-
dents to register and usually vote, but this past year it’s hit home in a different
way.’’102 Why that could be is suggested by Michael Meyer, author of the ‘‘Introduc-
tion’’ to the Signet paperback edition: ‘‘I think that many readers have been aston-
ished to realize that Trump Tower has deep—if brittle—foundations in American
culture and politics. What Trump represents is not new or novel: his authoritarian-
ism has always been there despite its gilded populism.’’103 Today, as in 1935, readers
are paying attention to Lewis’s entertaining lesson.
Overall, It Can’t Happen Here may seem like a fictional recipe for American
home-grown tyranny: add together simmering resentment at diminishing economic
expectations, bigotry, an entertaining buffoon, and stir. However, just as we don’t
read Robinson Crusoe to find out what to pack on a solo trek in the John Muir
Wilderness, Lewis does not give us a political blueprint. Lewis is a novelist, like
Daniel Defoe. Reading Robinson Crusoe, we are invited to visit a desert island,
and share with its sole inhabitant Crusoe’s feeling of being totally alone in the world,
separated from all humanity. So, too, we read It Can’t Happen Here to enter an
imaginative world of characters who feel, and act on their feelings, as well: voters
who elect a demagogue dictator, members of his campaign and inner circle, officials
in his administration, and his opponents. The Swedish Academy recognized this
sympathetic quality in Lewis’s fiction: ‘‘It is with living humour that you aim the
blows of your scourge, and where there is humour, there is a heart too.’’104
It Can’t Happen Here is valuable essentially because it is an inviting, heart-felt
construction of a parallel political world: ‘‘a real Fascist democracy!’’105 Lewis is a
compelling novelist. He dares us to dismiss the picture he paints. For example, if
it seems farfetched that ‘‘nearly every college in the country was to have . . . its
own battalion of M.M.’s [Minute Men militias], with drill counting as credit toward
graduation,’’106 then consider the new first-in-the-nation, on-campus firing range
at President Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, the country’s largest Christian
Evangelical university.107 Or, as another example, the Southern Poverty Law Cen-
ter’s Hatewatch report108 on vigilante-style border patrols in Texas, where freelance
militias have been threatening to shoot anyone they find crossing the Mexican bor-
der. Lewis’s empathetic fiction allows us to get inside his alternate world and experi-
ence it imaginatively at second hand. In 2016, President Trump’s victory baffled
many. How could this have happened? Lewis, the ‘‘political pamphleteer,’’ shows
some possible ways. Parallels with our recent election are suggestive, not particularly
accurate, but, nonetheless, frightening, instructive, and entertaining. Like other sat-
irical dystopias, 1984 or A Handmaid’s Tale, for example, It Can’t Happen Here can
definitely be read as a warning. This warning is convincing because of the novelist’s
434 E. Strenski

skill in evoking a political sensibility. Why would voters elect a Fascist? What would
it feel like to live under a fascist regime. How would we react? Lewis’s alarming, but
enjoyable, fictional answers to these questions are more relevant today than any
other time in the last 87 years.

Notes
1. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (New York: Signet Classics, Penguin Random
House, 2014).
2. Ibid., 18.
3. Erik Axel Karlfeldt, ‘‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930’’ (Nobelprize.org. Nobel
Media AB 2014), http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Sinclair Lewis, ‘‘The American Fear of Literature’’ (Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB
2014), http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/lewis-lecture.html.
7. Barack Obama, ‘‘Full Transcript of President Obama’s White House Correspondents’
Association Dinner Toast,’’ Washington Post, April 25, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.
com/news/reliable-source/wp/2015/04/25/full-transcript-of-president-obamas-white-house-
correspondents-association-dinner-toast/?utm_term¼.22914c37f20b.
8. Lewis (see note 1 above), 71.
9. Ibid., 79.
10. Ibid., 94.
11. Ibid., 50.
12. Ibid., 50.
13. Ibid., 86.
14. Ibid., 104.
15. Ibid., 155.
16. Ibid., 209.
17. Ibid., 208.
18. Ibid., 106.
19. Michael Barkun, ‘‘Donald Trump Mainstreams the Fringe,’’ Terrorism and Political
Violence, this issue.
20. Lewis (see note 1 above), 81.
21. Brooke Bobb, ‘‘Hillary Clinton’s Plane vs. Donald Trump’s Plane: The Other
Debate,’’ Vogue, September 26, 2016, http://www.vogue.com/article/travel-hillary-clinton-
donald-trump-planes-presidential-debate-2.
22. Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America (New York:
Open Road Integrated Media, 2016. Originally published by South End Press, 1980).
23. R. P. Blackmur, ‘‘Utopia, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’’ The Nation 141, October 30,
1935, 516, http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=a73f92bf-588b-
4f58-b6d0-1ca1e9261a2d%40sessionmgr102&vid=3&hid=118.
24. Kirkus Review, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/sinclair-lewis-3/it-
cant-happen-here/.
25. Ibid.
26. Lewis (see note 1 above), 61–62.
27. Ibid., 27.
28. Ibid., 106.
29. Ibid., 112.
30. Ibid., 358.
31. Ibid., 359.
32. Ibid., 67–68.
33. Ibid., 143.
34. Ibid., 68.
35. Ibid., 79.
36. Ibid., 81.
37. Ibid., 26.
 It Can’t Happen Here, or Has It? Sinclair Lewis’s Fascist America 435

38. Ibid., 71.

39. Ibid., 72.
40. Ibid., 71.
41. Ibid., 69.
42. Ibid., 56–57.
43. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Random House, 2004), 16.
44. Lewis (see note 1 above), 181.
45. Ibid., 29.
46. Ibid., 75.
47. Ibid., 61–64.
48. Ibid., 99.
49. Ibid., 71.
50. Ibid., 99.
51. Ibid., 29.
52. Ibid., 29.
53. Russell Spivak and Jordan Brunner, ‘‘Is Steve Bannon’s Role on the National Secur-
ity Council Actually Unprecedented?,’’ Lawfare, February 2, 2017, https://www.lawfareblog.
com/steve-bannons-role-national-security-council-actually-unprecedented.
54. Max Fisher, ‘‘Stephen K. Bannon’s CPAC Comments, Annotated and Explained,’’
New York Times, February 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/politics/
stephen-bannon-cpac-speech.html.
55. Lewis (see note 1 above), 55.
56. Ibid., 56–57.
57. Ibid., 69.
58. Ibid., 87.
59. Ibid., 63.
60. Ibid., 73.
61. Ibid., 11.
62. Ibid., 261.
63. Ibid., 91.
64. Ibid., 57.
65. Ibid., 8.
66. Ibid., 53.
67. Ibid., 30.
68. Donald J. Trump, ‘‘Inaugural Address,’’ January 20, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.
gov/inaugural-address.
69. Jean Rosenfeld, ‘‘Fascism as Action through Time,’’ Terrorism and Political
Violence, this issue.
70. Lewis (see note 1 above), 30.
71. Ibid., 79.
72. Ibid., 370.
73. Ibid., 373.
74. Ibid., 71.
75. Ibid., 84.
76. Ibid., 66.
77. Ibid., 71.
78. Ibid., 100.
79. Ibid., 71.
80. Ibid., 99.
81. Ibid., 137.
82. Ibid., 82.
83. Ibid., 8.
84. Ibid., 97.
85. Ibid., 99.
86. Ibid., 83.
87. Ibid., 88.
88. Ibid., 89.
89. Ibid., 89.
436 E. Strenski

90. Ibid., 36.

91. Ibid., 221.
92. Ibid., 178.
93. Ibid., 95.
94. Ibid., 137.
95. Ibid., 16.
96. Sinclair Lewis ‘‘The American Fear of Literature’’ (see note 6 above).
97. Lewis (see note 1 above), 210.
98. Ibid., 33.
99. Blackmur (see note 23 above).
100. Jeffrey Kaplan, ‘‘Red Dawn Is Now: Race vs. Nation and the American Election,’’
Terrorism and Political Violence, this issue.
101. Sally Parry. Personal Correspondence.
102. Ibid.
103. Michael Meyer. Personal Correspondence.
104. Tor Hedberg, ‘‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1930’’ (Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media
AB 2014), http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1930/.
105. Lewis (see note 1 above), 16.
106. Ibid., 152.
107. T. Rees Shapiro, ‘‘Gun-Friendly Liberty University to Open On-Campus Shooting
Range,’’ Washington Post, December 15, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/
grade-point/wp/2016/12/15/gun-friendly-liberty-university-to-open-on-campus-shooting-
range/?utm_term¼.22c0c8ca6802.
108. Bill Morlin, ‘‘Texas Border Militia Leader Sentenced to Prison,’’ Hatewatch, South-
ern Poverty Law Center, January 6, 2016, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/01/
06/texas-border-militia-leader-sentenced-prison.