It must seem a little late, to put it mildly, to be reviewing a book today that was first published almost 90 years ago. In fact it could not be more timely.
What supposedly “can’t happen here”, as the title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel* has it, is the election of a fascist as president of the United States. But – not to give anything away that cannot be read on the book’s back cover – it both can and does happen.
The fascist, Senator Buzz Windrip, is portrayed as a combination of fake religious fundamentalist and snake oil salesman. He is aided in his quest for the Democrat nomination and the presidency by a Methodist episcopalian bishop, a leader of the American Legion, a jack-of-all-trades quack surgeon and a devious, cynical and creative special adviser (as he would be called nowadays).
His appeal is an emotional one aimed at the League of Forgotten Men, who want to make America proud and prosperous again, and at the educated, wealthy, genteel, racist, antisemitic Daughters of the American Revolution and their banker, industrialist and professional menfolk who discuss at their New England garden parties the iniquities of the labour unions and the respective merits of Hitler and Mussolini.
Windrip’s political rival, the Republican Walt Trowbridge, is an honest, intelligent, sober candidate who does not realise that he hasn’t a chance in hell against the unprincipled, populist, charismatic Windrip.
But the real hero is Doremus Jessup, editor of a small-town newspaper in Vermont, who is one of the few in his circle of family, friends and neighbours who can see Windrip for the dangerous shyster he is:
“In both editorials and news stories he went after Buzz Windrip and his gang with whips, turpentine and scandal,” as Lewis puts it.
Not surprisingly for a book that has achieved the status of a modern classic, Lewis writes in a style that ranks as easy-to-read even by today’s standards, with the text broken into short chapters. The action moves on at pace to hold the attention. The author uses sardonic humour to mock Windrip and his followers and occasionally muses philosophically on the evils that America had committed even at that time in well-meant but vain attempts to force its version of freedom on those who never asked for it.
But for all its humour, this is not basically a funny book. It is deadly serious as it charts America’s fictional descent into the same actual nightmare that was gripping Europe at the time, complete with concentration camps, torture and arbitrary executions. The humour declines as the horror of the story unfolds. In the end it is a political thriller as good as the best of them.
Lewis’s novel is set in the 1930s in America. We know that in fact America re-elected Franklin Roosevelt as president in 1936. It didn’t really happen there then, and it can’t happen here now. Can it?
*It Can’t Happen Here. By Sinclair Lewis. Penguin Modern Classics 2017. First published 1935.
