Sauk Centre-born Sinclair Lewis wrote a 1935 dystopian novel entitled It Can’t Happen Here. A big seller in its day, it faded to near oblivion. Now it’s suddenly back again, its sales increasing, along with performances across the nation of a 1936 play based on that book.
The reason? Donald Trump.
The novel is a nightmarish account of what happens after a “populist” candidate named Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip is elected president of the United States.
Candidate Windrip launches a noisy, rousing campaign, promising his cheering crowds he will make the nation great again. Like Trump, Windrip’s campaign style in the novel is politically incorrect to an outrageous degree as he insults, stereotypes and scapegoats people. He blasts liberal progressives, the press and anyone who dares to criticize him or his “Corporatist Party.” Using divisive rhetoric, he glories in America-first rhetoric, promising a return to prosperity, traditional values and – not least – $5,000 cash in the pockets of every citizen.
Windrip’s speaking style is brash and bullying, gussied up with phrases of golly-gosh boosterism in his efforts to sound like the put-upon little guys, the white working men who’ve been economically disenfranchised during the Great Depression. Windrip sounds like a kissin’ cousin of one of Lewis’s most vivid creations – that windbag circuit preacher, Elmer Gantry. He lies, exaggerates and distorts. The crowds eat it up because they mistake his crude disregard for truth as refreshing honesty, something brand new, so unlike those other two-faced lying politicians and their lackeys in the press.
In the 1936 presidential election, Windrip wins over two other candidates because of a split vote. He rapidly morphs from folksy know-it-all to jack-boot dictator. He suspends rights, forbids dissent and demonstrations, muzzles the press, starts a paramilitary organization of sadistic goons known as the Minute Men, initiates kangaroo courts, recruits domestic spies everywhere, turns states into “administrative regions” and opens concentration camps that include instances of torture and murder. A war with Mexico is started. The protagonist of the book is a Vermont newspaper owner/reporter named Doremus Jessup, whose office is stalked by censors and who wavers in his opposition to Windrip and his minions. He eventually decides to fight back with other “New Undergrounders” but only after much death and damage has ensued.
Make no mistake: I do not think for a minute Trump will morph into a dictator like Windrip (praise be to the Constitution’s checks and balances), nor do I think such state-sanctioned murderous mayhem as portrayed in Lewis’s book will happen in the United States.
Lewis based Windrip, roughly, on the populist rabble-rouser Louisiana Gov. Huey Long, who planned to run for president but was assassinated just before Lewis’s novel was published. Lewis conjured his disturbing plot from the early Nazis’ rise to power and from the human-rights abuses and brutalities happening in dictator Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union.
I am somewhat hesitant to recommend this book. It is not one of Lewis’s finest novels – far from it. The creaky plot, slap-dash as a comic book, could be described as melodrama meets apocalypse. Populated by mostly cardboard-character types, the crowded story roars along like a clanky train. Some of the dialogue is groaningly awful, like the talk of the auto mechanic who sounds like he took a couple of night courses called “Karl Marx and Class Struggle.”
OK, that said, here’s the good news: The novel, despite its clunkiness, is still compelling because along the way Lewis’s famous sharp satirical jabs and acid wit are on full display, ranging from sly to sledgehammer. Uneven as the book is stylistically overall, Chapter 25 and a few other sections are masterfully written.
Another reason the book is intriguing is because Windrip, in his campaign style, is indeed eerily like the outrageous Trump, that shrewd loose-cannon “entertainer” who broke all the rules to win the big prize.
Yet another reason to read it is because it’s a cautionary tale about how slick demagogues in times of discontent whip up fears, divisiveness and prejudices among listeners. Windrip, ever the crowd-pleaser, offers simplistic solutions to complicated problems and big bouquets of promises to gain power.
For those reasons, I would recommend It Can’t Happen Here.
Here’s Windrip:
“My one ambition is to get all Americans to realize that they are and must continue to be the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth; and second, to realize that whatever apparent differences there may be among us in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength – though, of course, this does not apply to people who are different from us – we are all brothers, bound together in the great and wonderful bond of National Unity for which we should all be very glad.”
Voters beware!
