AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Nytimes books to read 20179/25/2023 ![]() ![]() A recent Nobel Prize winner, known for his superhuman productivity, Lewis churned out the entire manuscript of “It Can’t Happen Here” between May and August of 1935. She noted that Long’s populist message and swaggering style reminded her of Hitler, and according to Lewis’s biographer, Richard Lingeman, Lewis took the message to heart. Back in the United States, Thompson interviewed Huey Long, who had vowed to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the presidency in 1936. Lewis’s second wife, the journalist Dorothy Thompson, provided much of the inspiration for “It Can’t Happen Here.” In 1931, she interviewed Hitler, scoffing at his “startling insignificance” when encountered face-to-face. The only viable options will be to get out of the country - or to join an armed underground resistance. If Lewis’s postelection vision is what awaits us, there will be little cause for hope, or even civic engagement, in the months ahead. Today’s readers, by contrast, are playing catch-up, scrambling to think through the implications of an electoral fait accompli. ![]() In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States. Yet the graphic horrors of Lewis’s vision also limit the book’s usefulness as a guide to our own political moment. Within a week of the 2016 election, the book was reportedly sold out on .Īt a moment when instability seems to be the only constant in American politics, “It Can’t Happen Here” offers an alluring (if terrifying) certainty: It can happen here, and what comes next will be even ghastlier than you expect. Today, Lewis’s novel is making a comeback as an analogy for the Age of Trump. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. “It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. The reality of the new situation feels unspeakably awful, “like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.” Jessup faces the presidential inauguration in a state of high distress, convinced that the nation is careering toward its doom, but that nobody - least of all his fellow liberals - can do much to stop it. When Election Day comes to pass, Jessup learns that his editorials have not done the trick. “Oh - write another editorial viewing-with-alarm, I suppose!” “What can I do?” he agonizes night after night. But Jessup, a small-town Vermont newspaper editor and a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental liberal,” worries about the devastation ahead. ![]() “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly!” they assure him. Friends scoff at this extravagant concern. Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” sees something dark and terrible brewing in American politics - the potential for “a real fascist dictatorship” led by the up-and-coming populist candidate Berzelius Windrip. The anxiety began well before the Cleveland convention, where the candidate of the “Forgotten Men,” the one who declared Americans “the greatest Race on the face of this old Earth,” seemed likely to clinch his party’s presidential nomination. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |