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This Novel Imagines Fascism in the 1930s USA
Sinclair Lewis’s ‘It Can’t Happen Here’
The American writer Sinclair Lewis published his novel It Can’t Happen Here in 1935. It describes a near-future fascist takeover of the United States in the next presidential election.
How It Starts
It’s 1936 in Vermont, and “the handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved for the Ladies’ Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.” Mired in the Depression, Americans were “serious now,” and the middle-aged were reflective about the generational gap between their own experiences and those of the youth. Babies born during the Great War were “ready to go to college…or to another war, almost any old war that might be handy.”
A general addresses the crowd at the Hotel Wessex, claiming that the United States has no imperialistic aims: “Our highest ambition is to be darned well let alone!” (Three years later, of course, the United States will have plans “to invade Mexico as soon as it should be cool enough, or even earlier, if the refrigeration and air-conditioning could be arranged.” But let’s not skip too far ahead.)
The Daughters of the American Revolution, in the opinion of Doremus Jessup, the cynical editor of the Fort Beulah Daily Informer, “spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled,” and their organization “has contrived to be just as ridiculous as the unhappily defunct Kuklux Klan, without any need of wearing, like the K.K.K., high dunces’ caps and public nightshirts.” One of the D.A.R.’s members is Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, who Lewis perhaps modeled on the right-wing anti-communist activist Elizabeth Dilling, according to a new Afterword by Gary Scharnhorst in the Signet Classics edition.
Who’s Afraid of Fascism?
A banker complains: “Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word — just a word!”
