It Can't Happen Here

Revisiting America’s Most Persistent Political Warning

At Theodore’s Books, my independent bookstore on Long Island, customers from across the political spectrum come in with urgent questions about the state of the union. Like almost everything else in America, the inquiries reflect a stark bipolarity: not only can’t we agree on the answers, we can’t even agree on the questions.

From the left, those questions include:

A) Will Trump cancel the midterm elections?

B) Is democracy as we know it over?

C) Why do you sell books written by right wing extremists?

From the right:

A) Will the Democrats be taken over by left wing socialists?

B) Has the left become a bastion of anti-Semitism?

C) Why do you sell books written by left wing lunatics?

Here are the answers to both sides:

A) No.

B) No.

C) It’s called freedom to read.

The frequency and urgency of the questions recently persuaded me to visit our classics section in search of a book that reflected a similar distress in American politics.

I found it in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, about a fascist takeover of our government. But the title is misleading. What the book really asks is: “can it?”

Lewis’s title is as provocative now as it was when the book was written in 1935. At the time, fear and insecurity created the conditions for demagogues from both the left and the right. There was widespread concern that America’s liberal tradition was unraveling.

Lewis had a unique understanding of this dynamic. He was married to Dorothy Thompson, who interviewed Hitler and wrote a series of articles between 1931 and 1935 warning Americans about the Nazi agenda. His plot integrated real events in Germany (such as the growth of the Gestapo and the Bundestag’s willing surrender of its constitutional authorities to Hitler) and wrapped them in an entirely American veneer. A demagogue runs for president, exploiting the misery and insecurities of Depression-era voters, he wins, and soon consolidates his power. Congress surrenders its powers to the administration. Soon, an armed militia, “The Minutemen,” is deployed across the country. Citizens are detained, harassed, beaten, arrested, and murdered. Detention and concentration camps are set up. The media is regulated. Dissent is quashed. Courts become tools of the state to exact vengeance. Some citizens willingly, even jubilantly, support the new authoritarian government. They become the cogs, gears, and cranks of a fascist machine that crushes our freedoms in the name of security. Others resist. Many prefer to be left alone.

The protagonist in Lewis’s novel is Doremus Jessup, a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal,” who happens to publish a local newspaper in Fort Beulah, Vermont. Jessup is a proud individualist. He shrinks from political activism, believing that the organizing of collective movements can only replace one set of absolute dogmas with an opposite set of absolute dogmas. But as events worsen, he wonders if “The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor 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.”

The book itself raises fraught comparisons to today’s politics.

Several months ago I wrote about an extraordinary, but little known novel, The Oppermann’s, which follows a prosperous German Jewish family and their neighbors as they confront the escalating repression and violence of the Third Reich.

It was written by Lion Fuechswanger in Germany around the same time Lewis was pondering It Can’t Happen Here. (Fuechswanger even makes a cameo appearance in Lewis’s book). However, I’ve been criticized for suggesting that while some of today’s policies and political rhetoric may be reminiscent of the past, comparisons between contemporary America and the totalitarian reality of Nazi Germany are ultimately more evocative than accurate. Let me be clear: the totality of the Third Reich included a takeover of the constitutional authority of the parliament (The Enabling Act of 1933), and the methodical and systematic scaling up of the national means to identify, persecute, discriminate, confiscate, segregate, concentrate and annihilate Jews, dissenters and other “enemies of the state.” We’re nowhere near that totality. We have an authoritarian administration that caters to the impulses of extremists. But the question remains: can a fascist (or for that matter, Marxist) dictatorship, complete with concentration camps and the quashing of all dissent, happen here?

The answer in Lewis’s story: it depends on you.

Jessup initially chooses a path of least resistance. He doesn’t march, distribute leaflets, or support his favorite candidates. The people around him choose their own responses. Some succumb, others fight to the death.

It’s only when Jessup realizes that events require more than his own individualism that he escalates his plans. The plot progresses through moments that are by turns chilling, depressing, and exhilarating.

The lesson - applicable to the 1930s, 1950s, and now - is that political tipping points are indeed possible, and it requires an informed citizenry to pull us back from sliding to any extreme.

Jessup (Sinclair) writes near the end: “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.”

That’s the very basis of why I opened Theodore’s Books after a lifetime in the political trenches. And speaking of Theodore Roosevelt, Lewis’s book reminds me of the answer I give people who ask, in their deep uncertainty, from the left or right (but mostly in the center): “What can I do?”

Roosevelt’s response: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”

That is the ultimate lesson of It Can’t Happen Here.

If you’d like to continue the conversation, join us for Steve Israel’s Book Club on July 7 as we dig deeper into the themes and enduring relevance of It Can’t Happen Here.

Thanks for reading Rep. Steve Israel on Books and Politics! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

From the latest book releases to exclusive author events—stay up to date with Theodore’s Books by subscribing to our newsletter!