Sinclair Lewis's Novel on Facism - "It Can't Happen Here" (1935) - A Preview of Donald Trump
Sinclair Lewis's story about a populist that was published in 1935 seems to predict the rise and actions of Donald Trump.
The President is Berzelius Windrip, a self-styled populist who attacks the media that is critical of him. To curry favor and access, William Randolph Hearst directs his newspapers to praise the president and his policies. The president, taking advantage of an economic crisis, gets Congress to sign blank checks over to the military and pass stringent and possibly unconstitutional laws, e.g. such as punishing universities that do not promote his policies. Eventually, he takes advantage of the crisis to convene military tribunals for civilians, and denounce all of his detractors as unpatriotic and possibly treasonous.
This pre-Trump presidency articles notes the similarities between Trump and the Windrip, but minimizes the possibility that Trump would actually carry through with his policies or that Congress would act as described in the book. Yet, here we are.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/12/03/sinclair-lewis-predicted-trump-and-us.html
It’s an election year, in a time of economic uncertainty. Running for president is a ranting populist type who has a bestselling book that is part biography, and part shameless boasting. He promises to “make America a proud, rich land again,” rails against blacks, Jews, and Mexicans, and makes it a point of criticizing the press, whose editors he accuses of “plotting how they can put over their lies, and advance their own positions.”
* * *
Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here during a bleak period in American and world history. In Europe, the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party, with its overt anti-Semitism, hostility to a free press, and violent tendencies, was a major cause for alarm. In the U.S., populist demagogues from both the left and right, like Louisiana Senator Huey Long and radio priest Father Charles Coughlin, were stirring up a populace still in the throes of the Depression, while FDR’s New Deal programs of economic recovery seemed bogged down and stalled. Organizations sympathetic to the Nazis began to pop up in cities like New York and Chicago. And a major figure like press lord William Randolph Hearst could declare—in the same month Lewis’s novel was released—“Whenever you hear a prominent American called a fascist, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal citizen who stands for Americanism.”
Inspired by all this, Lewis rushed his book into publication, where it became an instant bestseller. But its flaws are all too obvious. It Can’t Happen Here is a slapdash novel, over-written and over-wrought, stuffed with too much plot. “Almost all the reviewers complained about it, but regarded it as a must read,” says Meyer. Or, as the review in The New York Times put it, “the book is exciting reading, even if it does nothing to advance Mr. Lewis’s art as a novelist.”
And it’s not as if It Can’t Happen Here was totally prescient about the future. It’s extremely doubtful that Trump will invade Mexico, bar blacks from voting or holding public office, jail journalists who criticize him, shove his political opponents into concentration camps, and demand Jews support “our ideals,” all of which Windrip does (although if you substitute Muslims for Jews, this aspect of Trumpism is eerily similar to Windrip’s form of bigotry). In this sense, says Meyer, Lewis was right, “not about America, but what was going on in Europe. He was wrong about the fragility of American democracy.”
= new reply since forum marked as read
