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Sinclair Lewis
IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE (1935) Reviews by Patrick Killough Review I. For Barnesandnoble.com Your Title: It Can't Happen Here Rating of book reviewed: FOUR STARS * * * * Here is how your review will appear on the title page: Patrick Killough (patrick@thekilloughs.com), studying Rotary's first 100 years, November 30, 2004, Review Title: Revolution As Seen By Rotarians Only a year after Hitler and the Nazis had reached power by constitutional means in Germany, Sinclair Lewis was writing IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. Step by step, Lewis showed how a similar fascist takeover might very well happen here in the sober, God-fearing USA. First, an unscrupulous but popular western Senator might defeat Franklin Roosevelt for the Democratic Party nomination for President in 1936. He would then win the general election and within eight days cow Congress into giving him power to legislate by decree. Step by step campaign rhetoric gives way to lying, deceit, violence, concentration camps and torture. All this is observed and participated in by small town Vermont newspaper proprietor, Doremus Jessup, a principled man who stands up to the dictatorship at no little cost to himself and his family. This novel depicts American anti-semitism and anti-black racism as it might play into the hands of a native American dictator. IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE is also a study in political science and sociology. The novel shows how people in power instinctively reach out to personal cruelty and torture of their opponents. In 2004-2005 Rotarians around the world celebrate 100 years of Rotary. As in BABBITT and ELMER GANTRY, the author once again depicts American Booster and Rotary Clubs and Rotarians as typical, easily led business-class American, just the two-legged sheep to make dictators thinkable. Early on (1905 - 1940) Rotary and the other eleven major service club types were lambasted by serious literary opponents. In the United Kingdom George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton made fun of pretentious small-minded businessmen and of Rotarians' irreverent practice of calling their betters by their first names. In the United States Rotary and its brethren were notably savaged by two men working almost as a team, H.L. Mencken and Harry Sinclair Lewis. To both men a typical Rotarian businessman exemplified Mencken's 'boobus Americanus.' During his heyday (1920 - 1930) Sinclair Lewis made repeated fun of Rotary and other Booster clubs. Every word in Chapter One of IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE is about a Vermont Rotary Club meeting held not long before the 1936 presidential election. At the height of the campaign, the novel's hero Delphically confides to two friends who will never give up resisting the dictatorship, 'This is a revolution in terms of Rotary. ' Readers who are Rotarians will therefore watch with bated breath as the various attendees of Chapter One's Ladies Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club react throughout 37 more increasingly terrible chapters to the rising bloody tyranny of America's first Great Dictator. Also recommended: Sinclair Lewis, Babbit, Elmer Gantry. James M. Hutchisson, The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930. 11/30/2004 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- II. REVIEW FOR ROTARY GLOBAL HISTORY FELLOWSHIP REVIEW TITLE: ROTARY CLUB ELEMENTS IN SINCLAIR LEWIS'S 1935 NOVEL: IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. SInclair Lewis's 1935 novel IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE is one of several by Lewis in which members of American social, fraternal and service clubs, especially Boosters, Rotarians and Kiwanians, play striking roles. Indeed, Lewis, as he probed more widely and deeply into American ways, found something like a "cult" of service to others growing as a post-evangelical Christian force in American middle class society. Such secular service had both its ennobling and its silly aspects, he judged. IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE is written about the years 1936 to 1939, the very near future looming just after the book was being written. The Great Depression was deepening. There was 30% unemployment in America. It became hard for businessmen to make feasible plans either for themselves or for their children because hope was dying throughout the land. Huey Long was assassinated while the novel was going to press. Father Charles Coughlin continued to thunder from Detroit for a while on the airways. Liberals fought fascists and communists. Middle-class Americans were confused and no longer self-starting. It was Lewis's thesis that under such circumstances Rotarians and other Babbitts and easily led conformists of America were ripe for misleading by charismatic charlatans. And one such demagogue, fictional Western U.S. Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, wrested the Democratic party nomination for President away from Franklin D. Roosevelt and then defeated a Republican and other candidates in the November 1936 general election. Within eight days of becoming President, Windrip and his evil Caligula-like kingmaker Lee Sarason reduced Congress and the courts to impotency via declaring a national emergency and arresting enough opponents to bring the rest to heel. In the next few months, ruling virtually by decree, Windrip and Sarason created an American corporatist state modeled on Hitler's Germany: anti-Negro, anti-Jewish, enforcing their will through SS-like American Minute Men militias. At novel's end, after much terror, concentration camps and general evil, Windrip had been exiled to France and Sarason assassinated. A Puritan Army General now reigned in a new country whose states have been abolished and which has mobilized 5 million men to invade Mexico. Yet a democratic counter revolution did rise up (with Rotarians on both sides) and controlled half the old USA. No one adhering to any of the several then competing political persuasions believed that the old USA would, could or should be re-established. Where is Rotary in all this? The novel IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE has 38 Chapters. Every single word in Chapter One (nine pages long in my 1993 Signet Classic pocketbook) is about a May 1936 Rotary Club evening meeting in the Hotel Wessex. The Fort Beulah, Vermont Rotary Club is holding its annual Ladies' Night Dinner. Most of the novel's major characters are either present or talked about before and long after the meeting. The meeting begins with humorous skits by members. But America has now in 1936 endured seven years of the Great Depression and is in a serious and sober mood. Food served is nothing special. There are two outside speakers of national stature, a retired army brigadier general, Herbert Edgeways, and an intellectual gadfly and twit Mrs. Adelaide T. Garr Gimmitch (she continues through the novel; the general does not). Present were the flower of Fort Beulah, many men in evening clothes. "The tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square were bright with candles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels and small silk American flags stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner "Service Before Self, ..." The general warned that America must arm itself to the teeth -- but only for peace. Mrs. Gimmitch was the quintessential D.A.R. member addressing the Fort Beulah Rotarians and their ladies (styled Rotary Anns--she implied that she herself is one). She urged women not to make much of their recent enfranchisement. They would do best to scurry back into their homes and serve their husbands and children. America is grown selfish. The solution is for businessmen to bring back prosperity and for labor unions to shut up. Maybe we need a war to teach us Discipline! Will Power. Character! The Brigadier then agreed that "power is its own excuse." "No body in God's world ever loved a weakling." It is right to beat up Red students. He sat down "to ecstasies of applause." There are no more Rotary Club meetings in the novel. But individual Rotarians do take their place for, against or compromising with the coming fascist state: --(1) Emil Staubmeyer was local superintendent of schools. He wildly led the cheering for the jingoistic remarks of General Edgeways. Later he would swing behind the fascist takeover. He was also given control of Doremus Jessup's newspaper. --(2) Reverend Mr. Falck was sitting beside his friend Doremus Jessup. He was an aging, gentle Episcopalian priest whose grandson loved Jessup's daughter. The priest died being tortured in prison invoking God's curse on the fascists, "for they know what they do." --(3) The novel's hero, Doremus Jessup, is 60 year old editor of the Daily Informer. His face did "not shine upon the General and Mr. Staubmeyer" during the Rotary Club discussion. He became slowly but increasingly involved in the counter-revolution, despite beatings and imprisonment. He achieved national leadership in the counter-revolution. --(4) During the Rotary meeting Francis Tasbrough, quarry owner and Fort Beulah's "most substantial industrialist," rose and squashed criticism of Mrs Gimmitch's anti-fascist views. Later, although often protected from bullies as a boy by Doremus, he testified against him at a fascist trial. --(5) Medary Cole, President of the Rotary Club, wondered if Jessup's interventions with speakers and critics were a joke. With Doremus it was always hard to tell. --(6) Louis Rotenstern, conservative, "America first," Jewish tailor ended the Rotary program by singing such patriotic ditties as "Marching Through Georgia, "Dixie" and "Old Black Joe." His fortune declined severely under fascism. Rotary meeting ended, Frank Tasbrough then invited Doremus and other choicer males among the Rotarians to his house for an "after-party." Present there were host Frank Tasbrough, four years younger than guest Doremus Jessup. Also Miller Medary Cole, Superintendent Staubmeyer, Tasbrough's Episcopalian pastor Rev. Mr. Falck and, named for the first time, (7) Roscoe Conkling Crowley, "the weightiest banker in Fort Beulah." Tasbrough groused about "Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together to control the country." Doremus foresaw that if Senator Windrip were to win in November 2004, he would create "a real fascist dictatorship." Everyone else expressing opinions pooh-poohed the notion that this could happen in "a country of freemen." Quite a few chapters of IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE are introduced by quotations from ZERO HOUR, the MEIN KAMPF pre-election ramblings of Senator Windrip. The passage before chapter 16 ends, "My only longing is to Serve." COMMENT: it would be easy to write 20 more pages detailing the political and moral evolution of the people at the initial Rotary Club meeting. Not very many attendees turned out well. The best framework for how to predict how Rotarians and other middle class Americans will react to a fascist takeover may be given in the little mediation of Chapter 20: "Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn 'reasonable' and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed final quarter keep you alive." The Rotarian friends of Doremus Jessup are rather evenly strewn among those groups. A Delphic utterance by editor Jessup to two non-Rotarian friends (they will later prove heroes) during the Presidential campaign is "This is revolution in terms of Rotary" (Ch. 10). What does that mean: a revolution cannot be made in America except on terms that Rotarians understand and accept? No fascist revolution can succeed without Rotarians? An aphorism to mull over. Later the revolutionists demonstrated in another way the accuracy of Jessup's prediction, "This is revolution in terms of Rotary" by selecting "a ship's steering wheel" to be the new symbol of the American Minute Men/Storm Troopers. This symbol seemed wondrously apt as suggesting "the Ship of State ... the wheels of American industry ... and particularly the wheel emblem of the Rotary Club." (Ch. 17) A few pages later, as fascist anti-semitism reached even conservative hitherto Republican Fort Beulah, Jewish Harry Kindermann was frozen out of contracts. Jessup's former yardman, Shad Ledue, now a fascist Gaulleiter, had always called Kindermann "a fresh Kike." Proof: "He had laughed at the flag, the Church and even Rotary." (None of these charges was true.) The novel's final explicit reference to Rotary (Ch. 20) reminds us that Medary Cole, the miller, had once been President of the Rotary Club of Fort Beulah. It turns out that Rotarian Cole had voted for Windrip for President but now and then at least momentarily lost his illusions. But a day later he would change his mind and gambol back to greener pastures, bleating enthusiasm for the thugs now ruling America. FINAL COMMENTS: Only one Rotary Club meeting is mentioned, at the tale's very beginning. It is possible that the new fascist government abolished service clubs. It was responsible after all for the "Gleichschaltung of Mississippi." We are not told what happened to Rotary. We do know that some fraternal organizations were encouraged by government, to stay on and keep yipping it up for the fascists. This is not an easy book to analyze either for its Rotary specifics or for its politics. Basically, the Rotarians of Fort Beulah are seen to be no better and no worse, braver or more cowardly, than other middle class American leaders and "samurai." Each Rotarian and Rotary Ann reacts to political stimuli as an atomic, fundamentally unsocialized individual, seeking his or her own narrow personal or family interest. But that is the way almost every literary creation of Sinclair Lewis gets through life. -OOO- Patrick Killough 06/21/2005 Black Mountain, North Carolina, USA ==-=-=-=--=-=-=-=---=-=-=- ONE MORE REVIEW TO FOLLOW. 06/21/2005 TPK |