A Cautionary Tale
Stephen Peters
The familiar “When fascism comes to America, it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible” is frequently attributed to Sinclair Lewis. Though there is no evidence that he ever actually said this, maybe he should have. It pretty well encapsulates how Bud Windrip comes to power in Lewis’ 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here.
Lewis models Windrip on Louisiana’s Huey Long. Like Huey, Windrip has the “power of bewitching large audiences.” His saccharin oh-golly country-boy patriotism goes down like Shoofly Pie soaked in maple syrup, and he is “an actor of genius,” who “in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” He “was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar early detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture.” Windrip is a familiar and entirely predictable American camp revival/stump campaign character—a sweaty would-be Caesar in a white three-piece suit.
How he is able, given his manifest dishonesty, to bamboozle his followers is of course the mystery of all Bud Windrips, Huey Longs, and George Wallaces. Why do so many of “the people” willingly fall in line behind him? A cynical opportunism, for one. Philip, the grown son of Lewis’ point of view character and mouthpiece, Doremus Jessup, goes along to get along. He rationalizes that Windrip and Co. aren’t really so bad, that they have done “some good things,” and, gosh, here’s an opportunity for career advancement. Spite, for another. Shad, Doremus’ one-time hired man, a nasty, mean-spirited, conniving piece of work in the best of times, rises in Windrip’s paramilitary force to get even with all he has ever felt inferior to. Aside from the opportunists and the resentful, the great mass of Windrip’s League of Forgotten Men follow, in Lewis’ novel and perhaps in all times, out of confusion, fear, and helplessness.
It Can’t Happen Here points a blunt finger at our blindness to our own history and to our less-than-honorable motivations in the plain face of tyranny. The line, “It can’t happen here,” comes early in the novel and is answered with a blistering account that should make contemporary readers sit up straight: Doremus Jessup answers that “there is no country in the world that can get more hysterical—yes, or more obsequious!—than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana. . .” just “listen to . . . Father Coughlin on the radio—divine oracles, to millions. . . Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember the war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! . . .Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, . . . Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?. . .Remember the Kentucky night-riders? . . . Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings?”
Anyone who remembers Senator Joe McCarthy or, more recently, recalls the embarrassing moments of climate change denials and when, in a tiff with France, so-called serious people actually took to calling French fries “Freedom Fries” will hear the resonances in this partly quoted passage. The trampling on individual rights and the disregard of uncomfortable facts are hallmarks of fascism. It Can’t Happen Here is a cautionary tale that stands the test of time.