In 1935, writing in The New Yorker , Clifton Fadiman pronounced Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here as “one of the most important books ever produced,” that all Americans must read to help save the country from impending political failures and potential tyrannies. This chilling, prescient story, along with other dystopian tales, is being rediscovered with the rise of authoritarianism around the world.
Sinclair’s novel has an ambitious, anti-immigrant, isolationist demagogue running for the presidency and winning. Berzelius Windrip, ‘Professional Common Man’, promises poor, angry voters that he will make America rich again, but takes the country down a path that has grave consequences. Daily Informer editor Doremus Jessup and the protagonist of the novel has a premonition in the run-up to the presidential poll that there is a possibility of “a real fascist dictatorship.” Windrip or Buzz is a bubbling individual, and this character appears to have been drawn from real life — and amid the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany and Senator Huey Long in Louisiana.
‘We want Buzz!’
“People will think they’re electing him to create more economic security. Then watch the Terror!” Friends laugh away Jessup’s fears — “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly!” The only thing the Vermont-based old-fashioned liberal journalist and a “cynic” can do is “write another editorial viewing-with-alarm” but result day shows his articles haven’t worked. Windrip has on his side a newspaperman, Lee Sarason. He was officially Windrip’s secretary but he did much more, being “bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent, economic adviser” all at once.
Both masters of fictional imagination, Sarason is believed to have written Windrip’s lone book, “part biography, part economic program, and part plain exhibitionistic boasting, called Zero Hour — Over the Top. ” It contained more suggestions for “remoulding the world than the three volumes of Karl Marx and all the novels of H.G. Wells put together,” the narrator tells us. Lewis, chronicling life in Depression-era America, was alarmed at the tightening of government spending and raising of taxes, suffering of the masses, the sense of helplessness — all fertile ground for sowing seeds of bigotry and fanaticism. Windrip wins with the support of the poor who marched with placards saying, “We are on relief. We want to become human beings again. We want Buzz!”
Jessup attends a Windrip rally and remembers the multitude of admirers, but not a word of what was said. Windrip’s 15-point manifesto promises to stop immigration among other things, including “prison or the death penalty” for anyone advocating communism. Once in the White House, he descends into totalitarianism, forcing refugees to flee, pushing political opponents into camps. A work of fiction, written five years after Lewis had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, has now come back to haunt America and the world in real life.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
