It Can't Happen Here

Written in Four Months, Relevant for Ninety Years

Sinclair Lewis, America’s first Nobel laureate in literature, wrote It Can’t Happen Here in four months in 1935, compelled by what he was watching happen in Germany, Italy, and — closer to home — in the political movements of Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the various American fascist organisations that were drawing genuine crowds in the mid-1930s. The novel arrived in bookshops in October 1935. Huey Long had been assassinated six weeks earlier.

Lewis’s premise is both specific and carefully constructed. Buzz Windrip is not a monster. He is a backslapper, a charmer, a man of the people who speaks in the vernacular of ordinary Americans and whose campaign promises are a mixture of economic populism, nationalist grievance, and contempt for coastal elites. He wins the 1936 election. Within a year, Congress is dissolved, the Supreme Court is stripped of authority, and a paramilitary force — the Minute Men — is enforcing compliance. This is Lewis’s central argument: fascism does not come as invasion. It comes as election.

Doremus Jessup and the Mechanics of Complicity

The novel’s protagonist is Doremus Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah Informer in Vermont — a sensible, sceptical, liberal man who watches Windrip’s rise with discomfort but, initially, without alarm. He is not the first to resist. He is not a hero by temperament. What Lewis traces with great precision is the series of small moral surrenders that precede the larger ones, and the moment at which surrender is no longer possible without ceasing to be a recognisable version of oneself.

Jessup’s trajectory — from observer to compliant subject to, finally, active resistor — follows the logic of a man waking up too slowly to a reality that was assembling itself while he was being reasonable. Lewis does not portray him as a coward. He portrays him as normal. That is the point. The danger is not that the wrong people will support fascism. It is that the right people will wait too long to oppose it.

The Mechanics of Democratic Collapse

What Lewis understood in 1935 — and what makes the novel so persistently useful — is that democratic collapse is not a sudden rupture but a gradual institutional erosion. Windrip does not abolish elections; he controls their outcomes. He does not ban the press; he prosecutes hostile editors for sedition. He does not eliminate the courts; he replaces the judges. Each step is individually defensible. The cumulative effect is totalitarianism. Lewis’s version of American fascism is not imported but homegrown — using American rhetoric, American symbols, and American resentments as its raw material.

The novel’s title is its argument. The most dangerous response to authoritarian politics is the confident certainty that it cannot succeed here, in this country, with these traditions. That certainty, Lewis shows, is not a protection. It is an invitation.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A prescient, unsettling political satire that reads less like historical fiction and more like a field guide — whichever decade you happen to be reading it in.

The American Context in 1935

When Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here in October 1935, the American political landscape included several movements that his novel drew on directly. Huey Long, the Louisiana senator who had built a political machine of genuine populist power and was widely considered a potential presidential candidate, was assassinated six weeks before the book appeared; his “Share Our Wealth” movement provided several elements of Buzz Windrip’s platform. Father Charles Coughlin, the “Radio Priest” who commanded an audience of tens of millions, was moving steadily toward anti-Semitism and sympathy with European fascism. The Silver Shirts, the Black Legion, and various other American fascist organizations were drawing real crowds.

Lewis had spent years in Europe watching fascism consolidate in Germany and Italy, and he had watched Americans look at those developments with the comfortable certainty that it could not happen in their country. The phrase “it can’t happen here” was already, in 1935, a piece of political complacency as recognizable as the American flag, and Lewis made it his title precisely because it was the attitude he was attacking.

Windrip and the American Tradition

Buzz Windrip is not a foreign import. He is recognizably and specifically American — his rhetoric is the rhetoric of the camp meeting and the county fair and the Fourth of July speech, his promises are the promises of American populism, and his contempt for elites is expressed in exactly the language that American political culture has always used to mobilize resentment. Lewis understood that American fascism, if it came, would not arrive wearing a European uniform. It would arrive wearing overalls and speaking in the idiom of the people.

This is why the novel has retained its relevance through decades of American politics that have produced no actual Windrip but several figures who share his rhetorical toolkit. Lewis was not a prophet in any narrow sense — he did not predict specific events — but he understood the underlying social and political conditions that make democratic backsliding possible, and those conditions have not significantly changed.

The Minute Men and Institutional Collapse

One of Lewis’s most precise observations is the speed at which institutions collapse once a sufficiently determined political will turns against them. The press, the judiciary, the universities, the local governments: each falls faster than the people inside them expected, because each was designed for a world in which the other institutions were functioning and providing the mutual support that makes any single institution viable. Remove that support — make the courts compliant, make the press afraid, make the universities dependent on state funding that can be withdrawn — and each institution becomes isolated and vulnerable in ways it was never designed to withstand alone.

Doremus Jessup, as a newspaper editor, is a useful protagonist for this argument because his professional life requires him to pay attention to the mechanisms of public discourse. He watches those mechanisms being subverted with the horrified clarity of someone who knows exactly what is happening and cannot stop it, and his trajectory from observer to complicit subject to resistor maps the experience that Lewis believed most Americans would undergo if it came to that.

The novel ends not with triumph but with continuity: Jessup is still resisting, still alive, still part of a movement that has not won but has not been destroyed. Lewis was not optimistic enough to write a happy ending. He was honest enough to write a credible one.