Sinclair Lewis said,
“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
It Can’t Happen Here is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later novels to match the power of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith.
A cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, it is an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. Written during the Great Depression, when the country was largely oblivious to Hitler’s aggression, it juxtaposes sharp political satire with the chillingly realistic rise of a president who becomes a dictator to save the nation from welfare cheats, sex, crime, and a liberal press.
Called “a message to thinking Americans” by the Springfield Republican when it was published in 1935, “It Can’t Happen Here” is a shockingly prescient novel that remains
as fresh and contemporary as today’s news.
Summary and Study Guide
Overview
It Can’t Happen Here, a political novel by Sinclair Lewis first published in 1935, details the rise, consolidation, and partial collapse of an American fascist dictatorship. The book is told primarily from the perspective of Doremus Jessup, an owner-editor of a small-town Vermont newspaper and self-described middle-class liberal intellectual. Jessup is 60 years old at the start of the novel.
Jessup begins as a cynical but detached observer of politics but over the course of the novel becomes an active member of the resistance, paying heavy personal costs. The book describes how easy it would be for a charismatic, populist politician to rise to power during times of economic crisis and implement totalitarian rule in America, in contrast to many characters in the novel who argue that totalitarianism can’t happen in America.
Lewis argues for a politically-engaged and informed population that can resist the empty promises of demagogues, as well as for establishment political and economic elites to be aware of how they might be creating the conditions that allow totalitarianism to flourish.
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After his inauguration, Windrip moves rapidly to consolidate his power.
He makes his private militia, the Minute Men, an official part of the US Army and ends
the power of Congress and the Supreme Court, making himself the unchecked leader of the country. “Temporary” martial law is declared and resistance is violently put down by the Minute Men.
Windrip also implements labor camps for the unemployed, and suspected dissidents are rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Women, African Americans, and Jews have their rights suppressed, and Sarason constructs a massive propaganda apparatus that takes over newspapers and schools. Jessup initially despairs to Windrip’s election.
However, after he hears a story of a rabbi and a professor being murdered by a Windrip cabinet member, he takes action. He writes an anti-Windrip editorial, which leads to his arrest by his old handyman, Shad Ledue, who now leads the local Minute Men.
During the trial, Jessup’s son-in-law interrupts, and he is summarily executed. Jessup’s paper is forced to print regime propaganda, and Minutemen raid his home several times looking for banned books. Jessup’s best friend, Buck Titus, warns him that he is likely to be arrested and sent to a concentration camp at any moment and arranges for the family’s escape to Canada. However, they are unable to cross the border and are forced to turn back.
After several of his friends are sent to Trianon, the local concentration camp, Jessup quits at the paper and forms a cell of the New Underground, a Canada-based resistance group led by Walt Trowbridge. Jessup, his lover Lorinda Pike, Buck Titus, and his daughters Mary and Sissy all become members of the cell, which publishes news critical of the regime and assists refugees fleeing to Canada. However, Jessup’s work is eventually discovered and he is sent to Trianon, where he is regularly beaten and tortured.
While Jessup is imprisoned, his cell continues to operate, albeit in a diminished capacity. His daughter, Mary, whose husband was killed defending Jessup, joins the Women’s Flying Corps and eventually kills the judge responsible by crashing her plane into his. Jessup’s youngest daughter, Sissy, seduces Shad Ledue and gathers information about him, which she uses to have him sent to Trianon. Ledue is then burned to death by the other prisoners.
At the same time, the regime begins to buckle under the pressure of supporting the ever-growing Army and MM, as well as due to economic mismanagement and graft. By early 1939, Windrip has become increasingly paranoid and power-hungry, and rebellions have begun in in the Midwest. Sarason becoming frustrated with Windrip, takes power in a bloodless coup.
However, his weak and ostentatious rule quickly loses support, and he is in turn deposed by Colonel Haik, the leader of the Minute Men. Haik’s rule is even harsher than Windrip’s or Sarason’s, and in a last-ditch effort to reinvigorate patriotism, he declares war on Mexico, which instead provokes wide-ranging revolt against the regime. The rebels seize territory in the Midwest but then settle into a stalemate caused by the collapse of the education system.
Lorinda and Sissy arrange for Jessup’s escape from Trianon; he flees to Canada,
where he continues his work. However, Jessup becomes frustrated living in exile,
and desires to return to America as a spy. After Haik’s coup, his request is granted.
The novel ends sometime in the early 1940s, with Jessup undercover and running
a New Underground cell in regime-controlled Minnesota.
The novel is broken into three sections, with Chapters 1-12 introducing the primary characters and describing the conditions that allow Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip to rise to become president. Chapters 13-18 describe the rapid consolidation of Windrip’s regime and the erosion of democratic norms. Chapters 19-38 cover the resistance struggle against the regime, focusing on Jessup, his family, and his friends.
The book begins in 1936, as Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip campaigns for the Democratic nomination, running on a populist platform that promises to restore American prosperity and glory while portraying himself as an anti-politician and avatar of the common man. While Windrip is a charismatic and popular politician, the intellect behind his campaign
is his secretary, Lee Sarason. Doremus Jessup, a newspaper owner-editor in Fort Beulah, Vermont, covers the rise of Windrip and fears that Windrip will implement totalitarian rule if elected. However, he does little and is frequently told by others that such a thing would be impossible. Windrip wins the Democratic nomination and easily defeats his Republican opponent, Walt Trowbridge.
Rating:
Misattributed (About this rating?)
Internet memes purporting to quote a statement by 20th-century novelist Sinclair Lewis about fascism coming to America have circulated more or less continuously since the mid-2000s, even though there is no evidence he ever penned or uttered this statement: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
This example was posted to Facebook on March 12, 2024:
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) produced such 20th-century classics as “Main Street,”
“Elmer Gantry,” “Dodsworth,” and “Babbit,” also literally wrote the book on the fascist takeover of America. The premise of “It Can’t Happen Here,” published at a time (1935) when authoritarian regimes were flexing their muscles all across Europe and Americans had great difficulty imagining a Hitler or Mussolini coming to power in the Land of the Free, was that it can happen here.
It Can’t Happen Here – Wikipedia
It Can’t Happen Here (gutenberg.net.au)
In the novel, Lewis painted a vivid counterfactual portrait of a United States of America sliding into dictatorship, one that is still cited as a cautionary tale to this day. As The Paris Review noted on Nov. 16, 2016:
Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, is sold out everywhere online. If you’re wondering why, here’s the synopsis: “The main character, Buzz Windrip, appeals to voters with a mix of crass language and nativist ideology. Once elected, he solidifies his power by energizing his base against immigrants, people on welfare, and the liberal press.”
However, nothing resembling the statement “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross” appeared in that book, or indeed in anything else Lewis wrote during his lifetime.
And although it sounds like a sentiment Lewis would have agreed with, according to the website of the Sinclair Lewis Society there is no evidence he said it:
Here’s our most asked question:
Q: Did Sinclair Lewis say,
“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”?
A: This quote sounds like something Sinclair Lewis might have said or written, but we’ve never been able to find this exact quote. Here are passages from two novels Lewis wrote that are similar to the quote attributed to him.
From It Can’t Happen Here: “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.”
From Gideon Planish: “I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bankbook and the three golden balls.”
There was also a play called Strangers in the late 1970s which had a similar quote, but no one, including one of Lewis’s biographers, Richard Lingeman, has ever been able to locate the original citation.
The same quote has been erroneously attributed to Louisiana governor and U.S. senator Huey Long (1893-1935), who, ironically, was said by some to be a real-life model for Lewis’s fascist leader in “It Can’t Happen Here.” A similar quote (probably spurious as well) attributed to Huey Long after his death was, “When fascism comes to America,
it will be called anti-fascism.”
Though we have found passages by other authors that share certain words, phrases, and sentiments in common with the quote attributed to Lewis, we have not found an exact match anywhere. We came across this bit, for example, in coverage of a speech by one James Waterman Wise Jr. in the Feb. 5, 1936, edition of The Christian Century:
James Waterman Wise, Jr., in a recent address here before the liberal John Reed club said that Hearst and Coughlin are the two chief exponents of fascism in America. If fascism comes, he added, it will not be identified with any “shirt” movement, nor with an “insignia,” but it will probably be “wrapped up in the American flag and heralded as a plea for liberty and preservation of the constitution.”
And this observation appeared in John Thomas Flynn’s “As We Go Marching,” published in 1944: But when fascism comes it will not be in the form of an anti-American movement or pro-Hitler bund, practicing disloyalty. Nor will it come in the form of a crusade against war.
It will appear rather in the luminous robes of flaming patriotism; it will take some genuinely indigenous shape and color, and it will spread only because its leaders, who are not yet visible, will know how to locate the great springs of public opinion and desire and the streams of thought that flow from them and will know how to attract to their banners leaders who can command the support of the controlling minorities in American public life. The danger lies not so much in the would-be Fuhrers who may arise, but in the presence in our midst of certainly deeply running currents of hope and appetite and opinion. The war upon fascism must be begun there.
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Sources:
Close, Kerry. “Sinclair Lewis Novel ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ Sells Out Online.”
Time. 16 November 2016.
Flynn, John Thomas. As We Go Marching. Auburn, AL:
Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 1944. ISBN 9781610164979.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Doubleday, 1935.
Harris, Malcom. “It Really Can Happen Here: The Novel That Foreshadowed
Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Appeal. Salon. 29 September 2015.
The Christian Century, Volume 53. “Speakers Draw a Dark Picture of the Future.” Chicago: Christian Century Company, 1936
The Sinclair Lewis Society. “Here’s Our Most Asked Question.” 2012.
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