It Can’t Happen Here Study Guide

Sinclair Lewis was born and raised in a small town in Minnesota. He attended Yale University, where he began writing for the university literary magazine, and then spent several years working as an editor and journalist around the U.S. in order to fund his dream of writing novels. While his first five novels did not sell widely, his sixth, Main Street (1920), was an instant bestseller. This novel, which satirizes the life of Lewis’s native small town, turned Lewis into a national celebrity. His next two novels, Babbitt (1922) and Arrowsmith (1925), were also spectacularly successful satires about American middle-class life. Lewis would continue publishing novels for two more decades and his work was still very popular, but none of his fifteen later novels approached the wild popularity of these three early novels. Still, the early novels were influential enough to win Lewis the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, making him the first American to do so. Lewis divorced his first wife, the editor Grace Livingston Hegger, in 1925 and married his second, the reporter Dorothy Thompson, three years later. Thompson became one of the first prominent women in American journalism, and she was the first American journalist forced out of Nazi Germany by Hitler’s regime. In fact, her research in Germany was the basis for It Can’t Happen Here, and the farm where she and Lewis lived in Barnard, Vermont starting in 1928 was the model for Doremus Jessup’s farm in the town of Fort Beulah. In the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis descended into serious alcoholism, divorced Thompson, and continued to write, including briefly in Hollywood. He died of alcohol-related illness in 1951. While Lewis was undoubtedly among the most popular novelists of his generation, his work is read less and less frequently today—although his social criticism is still relevant, and there was a significant resurgence of interest in It Can’t Happen Here after the 2016 presidential election.

It Can’t Happen Here is set in the turbulent 1930s, a time of serious economic desperation and political turmoil in the United States and Europe. The Great Depression was in full swing, while fascist governments were taking over Europe—starting in Italy and Germany—and authoritarianism was quickly becoming the norm there. In fact, Sinclair Lewis viewed these two phenomena as connected: he thought that economic crisis gives dishonest politicians an incentive to make impossible promises by guaranteeing that desperate voters will flock to them, seeking a solution to their woes. In 1936, while President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal work and relief programs made him relatively popular, his reelection was by no means a guarantee. In fact, Louisiana’s corrupt, populist governor Huey Long—the model for Buzz Windrip—was planning to challenge Roosevelt that year. He went on a national speaking tour and won a mass following, until an opposing politician’s son-in-law assassinated him in September. Sinclair Lewis had just finished It Can’t Happen Here the month before, and he made a few last-minute changes to account for Long’s death. With Long out of the picture, Roosevelt easily won reelection. However, many historians have argued that even Roosevelt turned towards authoritarianism in the late 1930s (for instance, by trying to pack the Supreme Court with loyalists). Still, authoritarianism was far more widespread in Europe, most noticeably in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Communist Russia. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini first coined the term fascism to describe his far-right political movement, which built a nationalist dictatorship in the hopes of eventually creating a new Italian empire. Mussolini’s political tactics—like paramilitary organizing, propaganda, and severe repression—became the basis for Hitler’s government in Germany. After being appointed as Chancellor in 1933, Hitler quickly dismantled Germany’s democracy by arresting members of the Reichstag (parliament) and then forcing through a law that gave him the power to set all laws. (Buzz Windrip does the same in It Can’t Happen Here.) In other words, Hitler took fascism to terrifying new levels—and Sinclair Lewis knew this firsthand because his wife, Dorothy Thompson, was the first American journalist to be kicked out of Nazi Germany for criticizing the government. While many Americans assumed that fascism couldn’t spread the same way in the U.S., Lewis thought that a figure like Huey Long could easily set up an American dictatorship the same way that Hitler set up a German one: by charismatically responding to the common people’s hopes and fears, winning power legitimately, and then creating a state of emergency to justify eliminating their opposition and the democratic checks and balances on their power.

Sinclair Lewis is still best remembered for his early novels Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and Arrowsmith (1925), which satirize different aspects of early 20th century American life. The most significant biographies of Sinclair Lewis are Mark Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961) and Richard R. Lingeman’s Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (2005). It Can’t Happen Here is commonly read alongside Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), which is set just a few years later (in 1940) and also depicts the United States electing a fascist tyrant. Similarly, Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908) describes a right-wing dictatorship taking over the U.S. in the early 20th century and ruling for several centuries, and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962) tells an alternate history in which the Axis Powers win World War II and rule over the United States. Many classic dystopian novels share Lewis’s concern about the dangers of tyranny—they include George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). However, Lewis’s depiction of American tyranny in It Can’t Happen Here is primarily based on historical facts, including controversial Louisiana governor Huey Long (the model for Buzz Windrip) and the Nazi regime in Germany (the model for many of Windrip’s policies). The most significant works about Huey Long’s life and legacy include his autobiography Every Man a King (1933), his political platform My First Days in the White House (1935), and T. Harry Williams’s biography Huey Long (1969). Robert Penn Warren’s famous novel All the King’s Men (1946) is also based on Long’s political career. Meanwhile, Lewis primarily learned about the Nazi regime from his wife, Dorothy Thompson, who worked as a foreign journalist in Nazi Germany. She summarized her concerns in the book I Saw Hitler (1932) and explained the broader context of Nazism in Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States (1938). Similarly, Steven Michels analyzes the political themes in Sinclair Lewis’s work in Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy (2016). Finally, in It Can’t Happen Here, Doremus Jessup carries around a copy of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (two volumes in 1918 and 1922). This book serves as a powerful metaphor for the way that Windrip’s authoritarian style of politics was overtaking democracy across the western world in the early 1900s.