More than 80 yeas ago, at a time in US history where many issues that have come to shape today’s society and the world were on the minds of Americans, Nobel Prize winning novelist Sinclair Lewis stepped into the future and wrote the novel “It Can’t Happen Here”, which in a number of ways far too long to list, in actuality fully described today’s society, an election that foretold the presidential election of 2016, and numerous elements that are today of major significance in the society created by the outcome of that election.
While it is unquestionable that the novel’s primary antagonist, the man elected President of the United States in the 1936 election, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, was modeled after then Louisiana Senator Huey Long, the parallels to the current occupier of the Oval Office are unmistakable, as are the tactics used to gain election and the lies, deceit and flaunting and abandonment of Constitutional institutions and rights that have been central to the current administration.
It Can’t Happen Here
With backdrops of years of economic and social upheaval due to the Great Depression at home, and with the rise of European fascism abroad, Windrip campaigned on a generally populist but thoroughly disjunctive platform, promising restored prosperity and “greatness”, a return to traditional values, and above all, a payment to each citizen of the sum of $5,000 per year. His campaign was based on a declaration of “Fifteen Planks” to be implemented upon his inauguration. This 15 included the following:
All financial and banking activities would be taken over by the federal government including the nationalization of all mines, oilfields, water power, public utilities, transportation, and communications;
”Approved” labor and farmers organizations were given seats of power, with all those deemed “Communist” or “Pretend” outlawed;
Complete, guaranteed Freedom of Religion, except for atheists, agnostics, believers in Black Magic and Jews, who were to be prohibited from holding any public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge, or physician;
All Negroes were to be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they were to be taxed 100% of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year;
All women, with two exceptions (nurses and those working in beauty parlors) were to return to their “Sacred” duties of home-maker;
Any person advocating Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism was be subject to trial for high treason, and the death penalty; and finally
Congress shall see that the Constitution is amended to provide that the president shall have sole authority to institute and execute all measures necessary for the conduct of the government and that the Supreme Court will have removed its power to negate in any manner the acts of the President.
Running as a Democrat, Windrip defeated incumbent President Franklin D. Roosevelt for the party’s nomination, and then gop nominee Walt Trowbridge in the general election. Immediately, Windrip began one-man dictatorial rule, giving political power only to his select few friends and to corporate leaders, thus beginning an era deemed “Corpo” rule, or Corpoism”. This included the jailing of most members of Congress and of the Supreme Court, the establishment of a new militia, the “Minute Men”, who were given authority to enforce by any means, including the flogging, beating and jailing, or killing, of any and all suspected dissenters, the total suspension of the free press with only pro Corpo news allowed publication, the end of the existence of the 48 states, with US land newly divided into administrative sectors with his appointed administrators, the suspension of the nation’s court system, replaced by military kangaroo courts, with the government takeover of all universities, most being closed, and eventually with their facilities used, along with other buildings, as concentration camps for citizens not towing the Windrip-imposed government line.
While there no longer remained a free press, there eventually sprang up a “New Underground” that among other activities did its best to inform unknowing citizens of the beatings, incarnations and on a frequent basis, the killing, of dissenters.
Eventually, Windrip lost favor with his own small group of enablers, and was in fact exiled to France, with his Secretary of State, long time-advisor, and likely the real creator of the new government establishment including the Fifteen Planks, Lee Sarason, naming himself the new president. However, his reign was short-lived, due to personal extravagance and weaknesses, and he soon was killed by General Dewey Haik, who himself assumed the office of president.
While Communists and other radicals, Jews and Negroes were the initial scapegoats blamed by the government for the country’s woes, with declining blind allegiance and growing dissent, President Haik eventually extended that to Mexicans, and in fact as a
distraction to the fact of increasing unrest, a war with Mexico was begun, complete with outrageous propaganda about the criminal conduct of Mexicans and likewise about the great and continual victories of US troops against this sworn enemy.
Despite this, another general, Emmanuel Coon, defected to the resistance, taking with him much of the US Army, and Civil War-like skirmishes eventually break out in portions of the country.
Small-town newspaper publisher Doremus Jessup is the novel’s hero, who having endured the taking of his paper, his home and his family, and his concentration camp incarceration complete with squalid conditions and regular beatings, remains undaunted, and after his eventual escape and exile to Canada, returns as a secret agent of the “New Undergound” spreading truth to the ever-growing body of dissenters, seeking information and support for the eventual return of the country to democratic, constitutional rule. That eventuality is left to the speculation of the reader.
“Whatever might happen, exulted Doremus, the revolt proved that belief in America and hope for America were not dead.
“These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed in Buzz Windrip’s fifteen points; believed that when he said he wanted to return the power pilfered by the bankers and the industrialists to the people… As month by month they saw that they had been cheated with marked cards again, they were indignant; but they were busy with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and it took the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down into the desert and help steal a friendly country to jab them into awakening and into discovering that, while they had been asleep, they had been kidnapped by a small gang of criminals armed with high ideals, well-buttered words, and a lot of machine guns.”*
As Lewis left the reader hanging in 1935, so do we, today, await the eventual outcome of today’s “small gang of criminals “ and the salient question: Can America ever return to its democratic, constitutional, honorable, decent past and heal from the wounds inflicted by the 45th president and his criminal administration?
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*”It Can’t Happen Here”, Sinclair Lewis, ©1935, Signet Classic Printing 2014, p. 371
