On re-reading the classics

I first read Sinclair Lewis' novel, It Can't Happen Here, over twenty years ago. I found a copy of the book, a hardcover British edition dated 1936, in a used book store in Bergen, Norway. I had recently acquired some of the early letters about the founding of the LFS, and seen the title listed in several recommended sections, so naturally I checked that section for any books by Lewis. Time and a host of other books since then had erased many of my memories of that novel, first published in America in 1935. Still, almost every year someone nominates It Can't Happen Here for the Hall of Fame award. Every year it falls short, and I remind myself that I need to re-read the book.

Recently a weird idea crept into my head. By strange synchronicity, ‘King Lear’ and ‘Sinclair’ sound very much alike. A long time fan of the poet John Keats, I remembered his poem, “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” and the English Lit geek in me thought it might be neat to use this poem as jumping off point to riff on rereading Sinclair; thus perhaps the strangest review in life that appears elsewhere in this newsletter. I read It Can't Happen Here and a biography on Lewis, and found to my surprise that it's a damn good book, and he led quite an interesting life. Though no one can say he's a libertarian, he certainly is a contrarian, an ambitious writer who found himself a perpetual outsider then as well as now. He dedicated his 1927 novel Elmer Gantry to H. L. Mencken, and saw it banned in Boston as well as other cities. His more famous novel Main Street (1920) also was banned by overly sensitive towns. Lewis was a masterful satirist, who wrote about smalltown life and conformity. His novels are filled with idealists, rebels, non-conformists, many who ultimately fail to break free but instead fall back into the sludge of their bland communities.

Lewis recognized the threat of state control. Critics usually allude to It Can't Happen Here as showing the growth of right wing tyranny in America, yet this is because people see socialism as to the left and fascism as to the right on the political spectrum. Lewis once wrote that “[w]hen fascism arrives in America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” and today this concept is firmly rooted in evangelical Republican Party conservatism. So in that sense, the corporate Rotarian fascism portrayed in the book certainly stems from the right. But we can't forget that Buzz Windrip, the American Führer who rises to fame and power in the novel, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Democrat primary. The key platforms in Windrip's campaign all are working class related, and he draws his support from the less fortunate (he also courts big business and a host of contradictory interests as well).

When re-reading It Can't Happen Here, I was shocked at how much I had forgotten. The quick rise of despotism seems a little unreal, but happens to this day in many other countries, with little room for resistance. Witness the despair in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the former breadbasket of Africa, where people are reduced to eating rats to survive, and government agents abroad justify this as quaint tribal delicacies. America in the 1930s, in the midst of a crushing depression, might have experienced the same fate. Our perceptions are clouded by what we see today, and we all probably think, like many of the respectable people in the novel as they were hauled away to concentration camps, or saw former friends summarily shot in the streets, that it still can't happen here.

What protagonist Doremus Jessup sees as “this comic tyranny” of Windrip's reign, becomes a series of tragedies, one after the other, as people lose life and hope while the party members willingly give up their humanity. It can't happen here? Really? Our own Imperial President assumes greater power with each legislative interpretation. In the guise of “security” we lose freedoms almost daily, and in many cases remain blissfully unaware. So far there are no concentration camps, but instead countless lists and databases, each secret and classified. And yet people justify and support their very existence, as supposedly critical tools in the never-ending “War on Terror.” There's a thin line indeed between being on a list so prone to error that toddlers and Senators are denied the ability to board airplanes, and ending up behind bars for crimes unstated, with no recourse of habeas corpus.

So, if you want a terrifying work of fiction, read Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. This is a novel that highly deserved the Hall of Fame award, which long has been overdue recognition from a group that promotes the way liberty is discussed in fiction. I only hope that next time twenty years does not pass before I re-read this book.