The Peripatetic Preacher Reads “It Can’t Happen Here”

I am currently in our cabin in the mountains of New Mexico and blessed with near unlimited reading time. As a reader, I tend to devour books in great chunks, and like nothing better than sitting in the cool highland mountains, surrounded by pines and aspens, covered by a crystalline blue sky, gorging myself on the printed word. I read on my Kindle or holding an actual book—either way will do for me. This trip I have four books with me to pour through, and the one I finished today was Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here.

I imagine some of you have heard of this book; it has come back into favor a bit with the election of Donald Trump as president. Before you stop reading this, fearing another angry screed against our 45th president, I want to assure you that that is not my central intent. By way of full disclosure, I felt and still do feel that the election of 2016 was a tragic one in many ways, and that the US is suffering internally and externally under the supposed leadership of a man who is woefully unprepared for the task he has been assigned. Yet, he has been duly elected, and I can only continue to hope for some successes in spite of his quite obvious limitations.

The Lewis book is a too long assault on the dangers of authoritarian government coming to the US. Lewis was writing, of course, in the shadow of Hitler and Mussolini who had become erstwhile dictators of their respective countries, and there were voices in America at that time who praised those despots quite freely and openly, claiming that their strong-arm rule had brought to Germany and Italy unparalleled peace and prosperity. Persons like Charles Lindbergh, the heroic pilot, first transatlantic solo flyer, cozied up to Der Fuhrer, and urged his country to stay out of any European conflict. For a time, he was a possible candidate for president.

Lewis, that bold satirist, who in five best-selling novels of the 1920’s had skewered many respected middle-class values like unfettered capitalism and evangelical religion, was not satisfied to allow the dictators and their supporters to go unscathed. Hence, in about four months he wrote this novel as his announcement that the way of Hitler must never be the way of America. The book is quite simple, a victim of its hasty composition, and a pure piece of propaganda. Yet, it presents to us moderns warnings still worth considering as we witness the apparent attack on many of our traditional democratic practices, not only by the current occupant of the White House, but equally by a host of religious and governmental persons who have not carefully read the constitution or the stories and aims of those who wrote it.

Lewis’ story is easily summarized. An apparent hayseed governor of an unnamed state becomes president, espousing a 15-point plan that includes a promise of $5000 or more per year to every family in the country. This man’s name is Barzelius Windrip, a combination of Huey Long of Louisiana, a governor who promised a radical redistribution of wealth in America, and Father Coughlin, a rabble-rousing priest with a large radio audience who constantly stirred up fear of Communism, an evil, he said, spawned from the bowels of hell. Franklin Roosevelt is running for a second term, but the

New Deal is stalled and the electorate is restive, looking for something new. The autocratic Windrip is just the thing, many conclude, and he is elected. Very soon, as he had vowed, the power of the White House is greatly enhanced, the congress becoming little more than a rubber stamp for Windrip’s power grabs. Soon, any who would disagree are thrown into prison or murdered or terrorized by the Minute Men, an army organized by Windrip’s minions, consisting of angry and disaffected men who once were nobodies but now with uniforms have become enforcers of the new policies.

The small-town newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup, Lewis in thin disguise, becomes finally Windrip’s furious and stalwart antagonist, though at first he is merely a quiet and respectable liberal voice for reason and science. He always claimed to be for the forces of reason, he says, but could not quite understand the fanaticism of John Brown, who in the cause of abolition resorted to murder. Jessup cannot conceive of that sort of revolution against tyranny, no matter how terrible. However, by the end of the novel, Jessup has escaped to Canada and has become a spy for the forces of revolution against Windrip and his successors, willing to risk his life, and yes even to kill, for the freedoms that he has seen disappear.

Several quotations from the book struck chords in me concerning the present state of our republic. The first has to do with the power, or lack thereof, of the spoken word:

“Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his (Windrip’s) speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason (Secretary of State), Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the review “Of Thee I Sing”—little Buzz (Windrip’s old nickname) had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the country poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors. Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.”

One could easily describe any number of political platforms, whether Democratic, Republican, or Independent as “wings of a windmill,” more moved by the empty air than by careful thought. And how often have we listened to a politician with rapt attention and then failed to remember what actually was said? Of course, more than a few sermons might equally be so categorized.

Liberals, such as I consider myself to be, ought be stung by these lines from Doremus Jessup.

“The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest….It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt ourselves superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was

‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution, and now the Fascist Dictatorship. It’s I who murdered Rabbi de Verez (a victim of Windrip’s administration). It’s I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord! Is it too late?”

When children are separated from their families at our borders as a part of a “no tolerance” doctrine of immigration, is it my timid soul and lazy mind that allows that horror to go unquestioned?

Lewis summarizes much of what he has tried to say in his book with these words of Jessup found near the end of the story.

“More and more, as I think about history, “he pondered, “I am convinced that everything that is worthwhile in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men (and women) of ritual and the men (and women) of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men (and women) of science and of silencing them forever.”

As I watched when President Trump left the G-7 summit in Canada this week, refusing to join in the crucial discussion of climate change with the most powerful leaders on the planet, and after having torn the US from the nearly-universally acclaimed Paris Climate Accord, I witnessed a person of apparent barbarism who was silencing those who rely on science. And I just knew that I could not remain silent and allow the barbarians to win.

Donald Trump is no Hitler, no Mussolini, no Barzelius Windrip. But he represents values that are not mine, he acts with little reason, and governs with little reading or preparation, trusting his “gut.” You and I are called by Lewis to speak up, to act up, and not to allow the wonders of our democracy, a free and critical press, a thoughtful and potent congress, a reasonable and well-researched judiciary, be silenced by would-be autocratic barbarians. It Can’t Happen Here is not a great book, but it is a potentially terrifying one. Without doubt, it says things we always need to hear, and especially in these troubling times in which we are living.