What I Am Reading: "It Can't Happen Here" by Sinclair Lewis

One of the first books I read after the 2016 election was The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. I purposefully shied away from It Can't Happen Here, the ur-text of the "fascists taking over America" genre, because of its description as being "semi-satirical," and my thought that it might get a bit hokey. This was definitely an under-estimation on my part: after having immersed myself for a bit in the rise of fascism, especially pertaining to the United States, Sinclair Lewis' novel was the book, in my opinion, with its finger on the pulse of the situation in the '30s.

It is a bonus that the novel brings me to the interwar New England of Robert Frost (or in my world, the New England of H.P. Lovecraft). This is a bit surprising for a writer who was from the Minnesota of August Derleth, but the novel is set in the hills and rustic farmhouses of Vermont, properly identifying that the denser town centers would still have grids of streets and back alleyways and multi-story buildings. The novel was published in 1935, and so also has fun little reflections of its time; such as when an older, curmudgeonly character laments that kids these days "get their music by turning a dial." (p. 17). The novel is also as relentless in its contemporary name-dropping as any Cole Porter song.

The book's fascist leader is Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a cornepone demagogue who is described as a very American dictator, having a bit of a Will Rogers folksiness (paraphrase). He is nominated by the Democrats over FDR and Frances Perkins, and includes a platform with a lot of left-wing elements (mercilessly deconstructed by the main characters as excuses for various forms of dictatorship). I might have seen this as both-sides-ism if I hadn't read Hitler's American Friends previously, with the Depression-era anti-bank and anti-corporate populism mixing with nativism and nationalism in the hands of Father Coughlin and the like (there is even a Father Coughlin character, one of the first disappearances of the regime). On a platform of a guaranteed $5,000 yearly income and the like, Windrip defeats Walt Trowbridge, genial midwestern Republican nominee, and becomes President.

This is all in the background of the book, though not as far in the background as the election of President Lindbergh is in The Plot Against America. The main characters are the family and associates of Doremus Jessup, small-town newspaperman in Fort Beulah, Vermont; a middle-class radical more out of anti-establishment sentiment than any ideological convictions. Doremus observes the rise of Windrip with middling consternation, including the immediate overthrow of the government by the Minute Men (M.M.'s), Windrip's paramilitary. His regime quickly eliminates the state boundaries and divides the country into eight provinces, which are subdivided into districts and counties. They proceed to run an increasingly brutal and kleptocratic regime, targeting Jews and African Americans. They are stylized as the Corpo regime, after all corporations and unions are syndicated and become part of the government; and any unemployed are put into a labor camp and kept in perpetual servitude.

Doremus struggles with his ideology throughout the novel; at the point of the government's rearrangement, he is in opposition to any forms of utopianism. After his arrest for a negative editorial, however, he realizes that these normcore values are precisely what abetted the Corpo regime in its rise. He continues to reject the squabbles of the Communists though, and explicitly states that he cannot transcend his own class biases. Doremus proceeds through a world of oppression and into the world of the New Underground, as he sees his son-in-law murdered, his newspaper taken over, an escape to Canada stymied, and his forced servitude as a Corpo propagandist. He is not accepted by the Communist underground, as they are still intolerant of middle-class "social fascists" and he does not see his values as aligning with that of the proletariat. He instead joins the N.U., run from Canada by Walt Trowbridge, who managed to make his own dramatic escape. Eventually, Doremus is arrested and thrown into a concentration camp, where his old towny friends in the N.U. gradually are brought in to join him. His lover is able to arrange his escape from the camp and to Canada, where he writes propaganda for a while before being sent back in to the country. Windrip is overthrown in a coup, and a rebellion springs up against his successor when a war with Mexico is being arranged. Doremus is sent, in the end, to Minnesota, to serve as an Underground organizer.

I didn't want to go too deeply into the specific plot of the novel, as it is a classic work of American literature and easily accessible to anyone. I am more interested in what it has to say about Trump voters, and what its attitudes are toward marginalized people. The primary antagonist within the actual framework of the novel (though not its political backstory) is Shad Ledue, formerly Doremus' shiftless handyman who ascends the Corpo ranks. At this and some other points, the depiction of the regime and its supporters is tinged with elitism, as many of them are shown to be thuggish backwoods farmers in opposition to educated and middle-class folks. However, other characters in the Corpo ranks exist, such as Effingham Swan, an aristocratic (Brahmin?) higher official who is able to maintain his distance from his work of death sentences and summary executions. Fascism thus is shown not to be simply the province of thugs or gangsters ("public enemies" in the day's parlance). Meanwhile, those who attend the Madison Square Garden Windrip rally are "not romantic; they were people concerned with the tailor's goose, the tray of potato salad, the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the owner-driven taxi, with, at home, the baby's diapers, the dull safety-razor blade, the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken" as well as some more haughty middle-class types denigrating "the bums on relief." (p. 116). During the eventual rebellion, targeted persuasion is needed because of the political vacuity of people like these who have no preference between the sides. In other words, Lewis does not let the American voter off the hook. Beyond this, the main commentary applicable to the electorate is that concerned but inactive liberals are the problem. While writing propaganda against the regime, as Doremus synthesizes suppressed news from the real world, he reflects,

…that he was hearing, all at once, of the battle of Waterloo, the Diaspora, the invention of the telegraph, the discovery of bacilli, and the Crusades, and if it took him ten days to get the news, it would take historians ten decades to appraise it. Would they not envy him, and consider that he had lived in the very crisis of history? Or would they just smile at the flag-waving children of the 1930's playing at being national heroes? For he believed that these historians would be neither Communists nor Fascists nor bellicose American or English Nationalists but just the sort of smiling Liberals that the warring fanatics of today most cursed as weak waverers. (Ch. 26)

(This brought to mind the supercilious historians joking about the struggles of the protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale.)

On the other subject, the primary protagonists are all rural white bourgeoisie; but there are some interesting glimpses of Jews and African Americans, as well as roles for women in the Underground. When the M.M.'s overthrow Congress, some of the first violence is against a protesting group of African Americans, who are there to get one of the only black Congressmen released from "protective" custody. Windrip's policy plan essentially relegates African Americans to a lower caste, not entitled to jobs or pay above a working-class status. One of the additions to Doremus' concentration camp is a black Professor who was not protesting the regime when arrested, but was simply making a speech supporting eventual improvement in African American financial conditions. Meanwhile, violence against the Jews is depicted early and often, in a manner clearly ripped from the headlines on Nazi Germany. It is narrated that "there is no greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and silliness of the regime under which they live," (p. 293). At the same time, neither Jews nor African Americans play much of a role in the Underground, other than a note during the rebellion that some Jews in NYC seize key infrastructure points, and some other appearances as faceless activists. One of my favorites, which I will indulge in, comes during the protests outside nominee Windrip's rally prior to the election:

"A block from it some thirty M.M.'s, headed by a battalion-leader - something between a captain and a major - started raiding a street meeting of Communists. A Jewish girl in khaki, her bare head soaked with rain, was beseeching from the elevation of a wheelbarrow, "Fellow travelers! Don't just chew the rag and 'sympathize!’ Join us! Now! It's life and death!" Twenty feet from the Communists, a middle-aged man who looked like a social worker was explaining the Jeffersonian Party [FDR's 3rd party], recalling the record of President Roosevelt, and reviling the Communists next door as word-drunk un-American cranks...

The thirty M.M.'s cheerfully smashed into the Communists. The battalion leader reached up, slapped the girl speaker, dragged her down from the wheelbarrow. His followers casually waded in with fists and blackjacks. Doremus, more nauseated, feeling more helpless than ever, heard the smack of a blackjack on the temple of a scrawny Jewish intellectual.

Amazingly, then, the voice of the rival Jeffersonian leader spiraled up into a scream: "Come on, you! Going to let those hellhounds attack our communist friends - friends now, by god!" With which the mild bookworm leaped into the air, came down squarely upon a fat Mickey Mouse, capsized him, seized his blackjack, took time to kick another M.M.'s shins before arising from the wreck, sprang up, and waded into the raiders as, Doremus guessed, he would have waded into a table of statistics on the proportion of butter fat in loose milk in 97.7 per cent of shops on Avenue B." (p. 115-6)

Thrilling as I found it, even this involves mainly the heroism of a liberal intellectual-type. So specific Jews and blacks don't have much page-time, though women fair a bit better. Doremus' lover Lorinda Pike is one of the most competent resistance workers in their outfit, and Doremus' daughter Mary commits the most specific act of violence of any in their cell, performing a kamikaze aerial assassination of Effingham Swan. Even so, she is driven mainly by a mad revenge for Swan's ordered murder of her husband earlier in the story.

Gay people are given an even worse showing, as the primary (implied) gay character, Lee Sarason, is depicted as engaging in Caligula-like orgies once he ousts Windrip; despite previously having been very competent and calculating as Windrip's Chief of Staff and puppetmaster. These limitations, though perhaps reflective of an upper middle-class writer of his time (elite enough to have just won the Nobel Prize) definitely date the book somewhat.

As noted, the book is somewhat satirical in tone. In fact, early on I reflected that it was nice to have a political satire that wasn't about McCarthyism, and proceeded to realize that this thought came from the prose reminding me of Alan Drury: somewhat airy and whimsical, but with a firm backstop of White Picket Fences and Apple Pie. A bit of the sardonic stuff reminded me of Mencken as well, though that might just be the chronological proximity. Despite this tone, the book is also unflinching in the (imagined but inspired) depictions of the brutality of the regime’s concentrations, firing squads, the nacht und nebel, and other practices ripped from its contemporary European headlines. Anyway, in spite of its flaws, I found myself looking forward every night to returning to the book, and I'm glad that I have been building up the 1930s background (and the 20-teens background) enough to appreciate this classic in full.