Picture this: it’s an election year in America during a period of economic uncertainty. Millions of impoverished, disillusioned voters want solutions. Suddenly they’re being promised by a charismatic outsider and “Professional Common Man”, who throws his hat into the ring for the presidency and pledges to “make America a proud, rich land again”.
We could be talking about 2016, but this is the premise of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, reissued to mark Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Lewis’s satirical novel looks at what happens when Buzz Windrip sweeps to power, promising a glorious new era for America, but whose reign becomes increasingly authoritarian. Doremus Jessup, an elderly newspaper editor in a small Vermont town, tries to fight against the tide as a fascist dictatorship takes hold — but is it too little, too late?
The novel was first published in a year when race riots broke out in Harlem; Roosevelt’s New Deal appeared to be coming to nothing and America teetered on the brink of a new depression. The New York Times reported on the mood at a meeting of bankers in New Jersey; “America is tired of adventure and anxious”, the people wanted “safety and conservatism again”. In Germany, of course, Hitler was on the rise.
“It can’t happen here” could easily have been the catchphrase of liberals who in 2016 didn’t believe that Britain would vote for Brexit and were again shocked that the US would elect Trump. The Times’s review in 1935 described the book as “more vivid and readable, whether as entertainment or warning” than most novels. Will it be on Donald’s reading list?
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, Penguin Modern Classics, 384pp, £8.99