It Can't Happen Here
First edition, 1935
It Can't Happen Here (1935) by Sinclair Lewis is a dystopian political satire that imagines the rise of American fascism in the immediate aftermath of the New Deal era. Set in 1936, the novel follows Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a folksy, populist demagogue who campaigns on economic promises and traditional values, defeats Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency, and within months transforms the United States into an authoritarian corporate state. The Minute Men, his paramilitary enforcers, suppress dissent through violence and imprisonment. At the center of the novel is Doremus Jessup, a mild, liberal newspaper editor in Fort Beulah, Vermont, whose gradual radicalization under the Corpo regime gives the novel its moral spine. Lewis wrote the novel in four months in the summer of 1935, drawing heavily on the reporting of his wife Dorothy Thompson, who had interviewed Hitler and was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany. It became an immediate bestseller, selling more than 320,000 copies.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, black cloth, spine stamped in gilt. New York: Doubleday Doran, 1935. #11167.
Fine copy in a near fine dust jacket showing minor rubbing and slight wear to spine ends. The jacket has a few minuscule nicks and a 1" tear on the front lower panel, discreetly mended on the reverse. An exceptional copy of this significant title.
Hardcover. First Edition. Octavo, black cloth, spine stamped in gilt. New York: Doubleday Doran, 1935. #11167.
Fine copy in a near fine dust jacket showing minor rubbing and slight wear to spine ends. The jacket has a few minuscule nicks and a 1" tear on the front lower panel, discreetly mended on the reverse. An exceptional copy of this significant title.
Additional Details
It Can't Happen Here opens at a Rotary Club dinner in Fort Beulah, Vermont, in the spring of 1936, and the opening carefully conveys small-town civic complacency, with its polite evasions, and the comfortable assumption that the worst things happening elsewhere couldn't happen here. Doremus Jessup, editor of the local paper, watches the political temperature rise with the skepticism of a man who has seen too much to be easily alarmed, and too little to know what alarm is actually warranted.
Windrip's campaign is a precise catalogue of demagogic technique. His book Zero Hour, ghost-written by his sinister secretary Lee Sarason, combines vague economic promises with appeals to patriotism, family, and a Christianity stripped of any moral content. He invokes the Founding Fathers while proposing to dismantle what they built. Bishop Prang, a radio preacher with a vast following, delivers the religious sanction. The Minute Men, his paramilitary organization, supply the muscle. Lewis modeled these elements directly on figures he saw around him like Huey Long, Father Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, the German-American Bund, and the various shirt movements that had proliferated across the country.
Once in power, Windrip moves with the speed Lewis had observed in Europe. Congress is sidelined. The Supreme Court is packed. The country is reorganized into districts under appointed commissioners. Concentration camps appear. The Minute Men operate outside the law and below the law simultaneously. Jessup, who had spent the campaign season reasoning that Windrip couldn't really mean what he said, finds that he did.
The novel's center is Jessup's slow, reluctant transformation from observer to participant. He is not a heroic figure by instinct. He is a liberal of the old school, more comfortable with argument than action, and Lewis is affectionate but not uncritical toward him. Jessup's personal life during the regime's consolidation includes his relationship with Lorinda Pike, an activist whose clarity he admires and cannot quite match, and his concern for his daughter Sissy, caught between the old world and the new. When the Minute Men finally come for him, it is almost a relief as the waiting is over.
Lewis does not offer a triumphant resistance narrative. Jessup escapes from the concentration camp, joins the underground, publishes a seditious newsletter, and continues to resist. But the novel ends not with liberation but with Jessup slipping across the border into Canada, the regime still in power, the country still in the grip of something it chose. The point is less whether resistance succeeds than whether it is undertaken at all.
The novel was written at speed, and it sometimes shows. The prose is uneven, the satire occasionally broad, the minor characters sometimes cartoonish. Lewis's contemporaries said so, and they were not wrong. What they also recognized, and what has kept the book in print, is that Lewis had "successfully plagiarized our social atmosphere," as one 1935 reviewer put it. The machinery he described was not imagined. It was assembled from parts already in circulation.
Windrip's campaign is a precise catalogue of demagogic technique. His book Zero Hour, ghost-written by his sinister secretary Lee Sarason, combines vague economic promises with appeals to patriotism, family, and a Christianity stripped of any moral content. He invokes the Founding Fathers while proposing to dismantle what they built. Bishop Prang, a radio preacher with a vast following, delivers the religious sanction. The Minute Men, his paramilitary organization, supply the muscle. Lewis modeled these elements directly on figures he saw around him like Huey Long, Father Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, the German-American Bund, and the various shirt movements that had proliferated across the country.
Once in power, Windrip moves with the speed Lewis had observed in Europe. Congress is sidelined. The Supreme Court is packed. The country is reorganized into districts under appointed commissioners. Concentration camps appear. The Minute Men operate outside the law and below the law simultaneously. Jessup, who had spent the campaign season reasoning that Windrip couldn't really mean what he said, finds that he did.
The novel's center is Jessup's slow, reluctant transformation from observer to participant. He is not a heroic figure by instinct. He is a liberal of the old school, more comfortable with argument than action, and Lewis is affectionate but not uncritical toward him. Jessup's personal life during the regime's consolidation includes his relationship with Lorinda Pike, an activist whose clarity he admires and cannot quite match, and his concern for his daughter Sissy, caught between the old world and the new. When the Minute Men finally come for him, it is almost a relief as the waiting is over.
Lewis does not offer a triumphant resistance narrative. Jessup escapes from the concentration camp, joins the underground, publishes a seditious newsletter, and continues to resist. But the novel ends not with liberation but with Jessup slipping across the border into Canada, the regime still in power, the country still in the grip of something it chose. The point is less whether resistance succeeds than whether it is undertaken at all.
The novel was written at speed, and it sometimes shows. The prose is uneven, the satire occasionally broad, the minor characters sometimes cartoonish. Lewis's contemporaries said so, and they were not wrong. What they also recognized, and what has kept the book in print, is that Lewis had "successfully plagiarized our social atmosphere," as one 1935 reviewer put it. The machinery he described was not imagined. It was assembled from parts already in circulation.