Much as Hitler and the Nationalist Socialists assumed power in Germany in 1933 through democratic means, then abolished democracy, Windrip (“the Chief”) is elected to office fairly, and then establishes martial law in the U.S. He redistricts the country to facilitate his form of governing and seizes control of the press and universities. Some of his changes (e.g., the neutering of Congress and the abolition of the Supreme Court) are immediate and public (windrip) and others (e.g., the erection of concentration camps, the torture and murder of political rivals) so gradual and secretive, they go virtually unnoticed (win-drip). As if to prove Samuel Johnson’s adage that “patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” all of these violations of the Constitution occur under the blanket pretense that they are emergency measures necessary to preserve the American Way of Life.
The parallels between historical figures and events in Germany and characters and events in Lewis’s novel do not end here. Like Hitler’s Mein Kampf (or, for that matter, Long’s Every Man a King), Windrip’s Zero Hour is regarded as a “Bible” by his followers. The German Storm Troopers, or SA, were the model for the Minute Men or MM, the Nazi Resistance for the New Underground. Dr. Joseph Goebbels and Werner von Blomberg were the originals of Dr. Hector Macgoblin and Dewey Haik. Hermann Göring and Ernst Röhm suggested Lee Sarason, who dies as Röhm died during the Night of the Long Knives in early July 1934. In Germany all political parties except the National Socialists were abolished in March 1933, much as in the novel all parties except the Corpos are abolished in August 1937. The book burnings in Germany in May 1933 are replicated in the book burnings by Shad Ladue and his underlings, including the torching of Doremus’s “dearest treasure, the thirty-four-volume extra-illustrated edition of Dickens.” (For the record, soon after finishing the novel, Lewis acquired just such an edition of Dickens’s complete works.13) Lewis even imagines an American equivalent of the Horst Wessel song, “Bring Out the Old-Time Musket” composed by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, modeled on the right-wing writer Elizabeth (Mrs. Albert W.) Dilling. Lewis’s novel was also prescient in anticipating the colonial and imperial designs of fascist states. It describes in its final pages the start of a U.S. war with Mexico months before Italy invaded Ethiopia and years before Germany annexed the Sudetenland and Austria and invaded Poland.
As Lewis depicts the future, given a choice between freedom and security in the election of 1936, Americans opt for security. Ironically, the Corpos and their candidate Windrip, a “ringmaster-revolutionist,” promise bread and circuses but deliver only the circus, such as by founding “Ringling-Barnum and Bailey universities.” The small-town editor Doremus (door-mouse) jokes after the election that Windrip “had taken to riding down Pennsylvania Avenue on an elephant.” But he cannot remain complacent after his son-in-law is shot. He soon realizes that
“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 demogogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”14
He blamed “the lumpen,” the flag-waving conformists or “the American Legion type,” for their apathy in the face of the fascist threat. H. G. Wells later complained to Lewis that he “didn’t show enough the role” of the industrial lobby in right-wing American politics and insisted “that it would be the Babbitts who would be the leaders of fascism in America—backed by the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, and the N[ational] A[ssociation of] M[anufacturers].” Other critics wondered why Lewis had portrayed the leader of the anti-fascists, Walt Trowbridge, the candidate Windrip defeats in 1936, as a Republican. Lewis had a ready answer: “The Republican represents the old school of honesty and integrity. It takes that kind of leadership to defeat fascism.” He was probably thinking of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan. “I think Arthur Vandenberg would be a good Presidential candidate,” he told an interviewer later. “I like Arthur. I think he is an honest man.”15
Certainly Lewis failed—or refused—to sketch a solution to the threat of fascism. He was a social satirist, not a systematic political thinker or theorist. Worth noting, however, is that while Windrip’s platform consigns women to the home and domestic duties (like the Nazis’ Kinder, Küche, Kirche), all of the significant female characters in Lewis’s novel, except Doremus’s wife, Emma, are active in the Resistance. To be sure, the novel closes with the founding of the vaguely Social Democratic “American Coöperative Commonwealth” by opponents of the Corpo regime. But as a liberal humanist, Lewis’s response to those critics who thought he should have provided a map out of the quagmire may be found in a single sentence in the novel: “I am convinced that everything that is worth while 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.”
In any case, most of the reviewers commended Lewis for his audacity, if not his artistry. His friend Clifton Fadiman lauded It Can’t Happen Here extravagantly in the New Yorker: “one of the most important books ever produced in this country. . . . It is so crucial, so passionate, so honest, so vital that only dogmatists, schismatics, and reactionaries will care to pick flaws in it.” Fanny Butcher declared in the Chicago Tribune that it exhibited “the passion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a chorus joined by E. H. Walton in the Forum (“an important piece of political pamphleteering”) and R. P. Blackmur in the Nation (“a weapon of the intellect”). Malcolm Cowley considered it “a vigorous antifascist tract” even if it was “not much of a novel” and J. Donald Adams echoed the point in the New York Times Book Review: “exciting reading, even if it does nothing to advance Mr. Lewis’s art as a novelist.” Robert Morss Lovett agreed in the New Republic that the novel “carries freight in abundance, of large importance, under high steam power of righteous indignation and generous good will.” Lewis Gannett was paradoxical in his praise in the New York Herald Tribune: “It is his worst book since Elmer Gantry; I think it is also, and more truly, his best book since Arrowsmith.” Though in the novel Lewis is critical of communists and fascists alike for their intolerance and bigotry, Granville Hicks asserted in the Marxist magazine New Masses that Lewis had “written a courageous and tremendously useful book.”16 It was an even greater commercial than critical success. It became the bestselling novel of Lewis’s career to date, with total sales of some 320,000 copies.17 With a circulation of more than sixty thousand, the New York Post serialized it without abridgment in the summer of 1936.
Long before it became a bestseller, Hollywood had taken notice. Lewis sold movie rights to MGM while the novel was still in manuscript. The studio commissioned a shooting script by the playwright Sidney Howard, a Pulitzer Prize recipient for drama in 1925 who had adapted Lewis’s Dodsworth the year before; cast the venerable Lionel Barrymore, recipient of the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1931, in the lead role as Doremus; built the sets; and then canceled the film in mid-February 1936. Exactly what happened depends on who tells the story. Lewis insisted that the Production Code Administration, popularly known as the Hays Office, in “a fantastic exhibition of folly and cowardice” had effectively banned the film for fear of “international complications.” That is, the Office had interfered to avoid offending the German and Italian governments.
Because he had sold film rights for a flat sum, Lewis had no financial interest in the movie, but he was outraged nevertheless. “Are we . . . to be delivered over to a film industry whose every step must be governed by whether or not the film will please or displease some foreign power?” he asked. “Democracy is certainly on the defensive when two European dictators, without opening their mouths or knowing anything about the issue, can shut down an American film.”18 The Council of the Authors’ League of America, at a meeting on February 26, 1936, condemned the Hays Office for its action while the German film association announced that it was “very friendly of America to halt such a
film” and described Lewis as a “full-blooded Communist.” (Thompson quipped, “I’m glad they don’t make [him] an anemic one.”19) For his part, Howard claimed that he had seen a memo from Joseph Breen, Will Hays’s successor as director of the Production Code Administration, claiming that the script contained “dangerous material” and urging a major revision of it, perhaps casting communists rather than fascists as the villains. According to Howard, Breen did not “ban” the film: “He just talked the producers out of making it.”20 Meanwhile, Louis B. Mayer, head of studio operations for MGM, played dumb. He announced that the project had been postponed because it was too expensive, though the studio had already invested around $200,000 in it.21 Finally, Schorer offers an explanation that seems too clever by half: “the motive for stopping the film was probably less political than economic. Not only would this film have been banned in Germany and Italy and other foreign markets, but probably all Metro films would henceforth have been kept out of Germany and Italy.”22 But the reason for the ban would have been the political content of the film, so on what basis does Schorer speculate that Mayer’s motive for canceling production was “less political than economic”? In this instance, the economic is the political.
While not adapted to the screen in 1936, the novel was adapted to the stage in 1937 under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project, a part of the Works Progress Administration. Lewis collaborated on the script with Jack Moffitt, an experienced playwright and screenwriter, though not happily. Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theater Project, reminisced later that Lewis and Moffitt feuded all the while they were working on the play in separate suites of the Essex House in New York. Or as Flanagan put it, “The play was produced by polygenesis. It was partly created by Mr. Moffitt, who paced up and down in his apartment at the Essex House and threatened, if Mr. Lewis did not omit certain scenes and include others, various unusual reprisals; it was simultaneously springing almost visibly from the brain of Sinclair Lewis, who, in another apartment of the Essex House, composed and acted every part differently every day.” Still, the play was a smash hit. Twenty-one different productions opened simultaneously in eighteen different cities on October 27, 1937—with four productions in the New York area, the main one at the Adelphi Theater and another in Yiddish, as well as a Spanish production in Tampa and an African-American production in Seattle. The play “seemed to have practically unlimited audience appeal,” according to Flanagan. The Adelphi production was performed ninety-five times over the next few weeks to audiences totaling 110,518 people; the Yiddish version was played eighty-six times to 25,160 people. “In an amazing variety of methods, in English, Yiddish, and Spanish, in cities, towns and villages, before audiences of every conceivable type, It Can’t Happen Here played, under Federal Theatre, 260 weeks, or the equivalent of five years.”23 In 1938, Lewis published a revised version of the script, and on August 22 of that year, he debuted in the role of Doremus in a summer stock production in Cohasset, Massachusetts. Fay Wray, best known as the damsel in distress in the original King Kong (1933), met him in Hollywood as he was preparing to act in the play. “He was unattractive in appearance—tall, gangly, and skeletal, his narrow face pockmarked, his teeth and fingers yellow from smoking,” she remembered. But “he had fallen in love with the theater and saw it as a fresh life experience.”24
Lewis abandoned literature for the next few years to work almost exclusively as an actor, director, and theatrical producer. But he remained the provocateur onstage that he had always been in his best writing, especially in It Can’t Happen Here. As the final curtain falls in the revised theatrical version of the play, Doremus waits to die in an assault by armed fascists—but confident of the eventual triumph of “the free inquiring, critical spirit” incarnate in his grandson. As recently as 2011, the play was performed at twenty theaters across the U.S. to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of its premier in 1936. Lewis’s message—his protest of middle-class complacency and intellectual regimentation, what we today call “political correctness” on both the left and the right—remains as relevant and timely as ever.
—GARY SCHARNHORST
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
Notes
1Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), p. 609; Frederick Betz and Jörg Thunecke, “Sinclair Lewis’s Cautionary Tale It Can’t Happen Here,” Orbis Litterarum, 52 (1997), 36.
2Knoenagel, “The Historical Context of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here,” Southern Humanities Review, 29 (Summer 1995), 225
3Guthrie, “Sinclair Lewis and the ‘Labor Novel,’” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ns 2 (1952), 72–73; rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, ed. Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), p. 172.
4Thompson, “The Boy and Man from Sauk Centre,” Atlantic Monthly, 206 (November 1960), 42.
5Quoted in Betz, “‘Here Is the Story the Movies Dared Not Make’: The Contemporary Context and Reception Strategies of the New York Post’s Serialization of It Can’t Happen Here,” Midwestern Miscellany, 29 (Fall 2001), 35.
6Andrew Corey Yerkes, “‘A Biology of Dictatorships’: Liberalism and Modern Realism in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here,” Studies in the Novel, 42 (Fall 2010), 292.
7Schorer, p. 608.
8Seldes, Witness to a Century (New York: Ballantine, 1987), pp. 293–94; rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, pp. 262–63; Betz and Thunecke, p. 49.
9“Lewis Says Hays Bans Film of Book,” New York Times, 16 February 1936, pp. 1, 35
10Hunt, One American and His Attempt at Education (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1938), pp. 253–54; rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, pp. 97–98.
11Joseph A. Barry, “Sinclair Lewis, 65 and Far from Main Street,” New York Times, 5 February 1950, p. 153.
12McLaughlin, “Mark Schorer, Dialogic Discourse, and It Can’t Happen Here,” in Sinclair Lewis: New Essays in Criticism, ed. James M. Hutchisson (Troy, NY: Whiston, 1997), pp. 21–37.
13Allen Austin, “An Interview with Sinclair Lewis,” University of Kansas City Review, 24 (1958), 206; rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, p. 327.
14Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here. New York: Signet Classics, 2005. 186.
15Austin, pp. 205–6; rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, p. 326.
16Fadiman, “Books: Red Lewis,” New Yorker, 29 October 1935, p. 99; Butcher, “Sinclair Lewis Uses Dictator for New Satire,” Chicago Tribune 19 October 1935, p. 16; Walton, Forum 94 (December 1935), p. vi; Blackmur, Nation, 30 October 1935, p. 516; Cowley, The Dream of the Golden Mountains (New York: Viking, 1980), pp. 296–97; Adams, “America Under the Iron Heel,” New York Times Book Review, 20 October 1935, p. 1; Lovett, “Mr. Lewis Says It Can,” New Republic, 6 November 1935, pp. 366–67; Gannett, New York Herald Tribune, 21 October 1935, p. 13; Knoenagel, p. 232.
17Schorer, p. 610.
18“Lewis Says Hays Bans Film of Book,” p. 35.
19“Lewis Book Ban Pleases Italian, German Chiefs,” Washington Post, 17 February 1936, p. 3.
20Schorer, p. 616; “Sidney Howard Backs Lewis in Film Row,” New York Times, 23 February 1936, p. 3.
21“Studio Chief Denies Ban,” New York Times, 16 February 1936, p. 35.
22Schorer, p. 616.
23Flanagan, Arena (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940); rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, pp. 254–56.
24Wray, On the Other Hand: A Life Story (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989); rpt. in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, p. 265.
Selected Bibliography
Works by Sinclair Lewis
Hike and the Aeroplane (1912, writing as Tom Graham)
Our Mr. Wrenn (1914)
The Trail of the Hawk (1916)
The Job (1917)
The Innocents (1917)
Free Air (1919)
Main Street (1920)
Babbitt (1922)
Arrowsmith (1925)
Mantrap (1926)
Elmer
Gantry (1927)
The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928)
Dodsworth (1929)
Ann Vickers (1933)
Work of Art (1934)
It Can’t Happen Here (1935)
The Prodigal Parents (1938)
Bethel Merriday (1940)
Gideon Planish (1943)
Cass Timberlane (1945)
Kingsblood Royal (1947)
The God-Seeker (1949)
World So Wide (1951, posthumously)
Bibography and Criticism
Anderson, Carl L. The Swedish Acceptances of American Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957.
Chalupova, Eva. “The Thirties and the Artistry of Lewis, Farrell, Dos Passos and Steinbeck.” Brno Studies in English 14 (1981): 107–15.