IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE by Sinclair Lewis

 Partially finished Mo 9/11/23

This is a very old paperback that according to the flyleaf... 'I read to page 124 and skimmed to the end in April 2007'. 

Too much...I get the satire. I heard a Jordan Peterson podcast where he wondered how accurate the projections were about the future that were posited in 1923 about 2023. This is the problem with this book. It's impossible to read this as a modern reader without thinking of Donald Trump. It seems like all the 'Conservative' ideas were alive and well in the 1930's and still infecting our political system today. 

From an excellent post by University of Oxford:

"In 1930, Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and has since been praised for his satirical takes on materialism and consumerism in American culture between the two World Wars. His writing career began in newspaper and magazine journalism, and It Can’t Happen Here was written after he won the Nobel Prize.

It has become arguably his most enduring novel, perhaps due to the chillingly recognisable depiction of the rise of a populist leader in America. The novel explores implications of creeping fascism and far-right ideologies, many of which have gained popularity and mainstream coverage since the ascendancy of Donald Trump in the present day. Lewis saw totalitarian patriotic populism emerging in his own period and used the novel to satirise society’s failures to halt its ascendancy. 

In the novel, Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated by a fictitious zealot, Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip, thanks to his appeals to ‘traditional’ values and his hateful position on immigration. Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, bears shocked witness to this unexpected rise to power. Eventually, Jessup must go into hiding, and ultimately escapes to Canada. Readers may find an interesting echo of this in Margaret Atwood’s pregnancy dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), in which an exit into Canada is similarly presented as a political dissident’s only chance of escape. 

The extract from Sinclair’s novel here is the first chapter of the novel, opening with details of a Ladies’ Rotary Dinner – an event at which politicians, activists, and lobbyists present their causes and fundraise through speeches and networking. One speech in the scene is by General Edgeways. His rhetoric is war-mongering and self-congratulatory: ‘we must be prepared to defend our shores against all alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves “governments” and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields.’ Some of these positions are repeated later in the extract by Mrs Gimmitch. She advocates for war to protect the United States from those ill-defined European nations suggested by the General. In this portrayal, Lewis lampoons the idea that American nature is inexhaustible, and presents the isolationist character of totalitarian ideology.

Opening with this dinner scene, Lewis creates at times hilariously exaggerated and insidious portraits of people who hold perspectives that make the election of someone like Windrup possible: the apathy of certain characters (Mrs Doremus suggesting the one voice in the room against an aggressively isolationist policy is a ‘silly Socialist’); the vehement pro-war sentiment of the local elite and industrialists (such as Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner); and the capacity of third-generation immigrants to forget their origins and “pull up the ladder” behind them (Louis Rotenstern, a third-generation Pole who believes: ‘We ought to keep all of these foreigners out of the country,’ seemingly forgetting that his grandfather was born in Prussian Poland). In this way, Lewis establishes a social setting in which immigrants reject their cultural and ethnic identities women advocate for their own oppression, and local elites lobby for conflicts that can only be financially beneficial to themselves. These, the scene implies, are the circumstances under which far-right populism can foment and become successful. And so, the scene is set for the descent into Windrip’s Nazi-like populist regime, fuelled by propaganda. Journalist Jessup struggles to understand the shift in the political discourse, but finds that, despite his work, he is almost powerless. While he is not a wholly likeable character, Jessup is a plausible protagonist. Lewis writes him as a kind of everyman, flawed and at times even misogynistic, whose journey from the dining room where he hears ridiculous propaganda to the underground resistance is one that dwells on the necessity of individual action to resist the creep of fascism."