Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in It Can’t Happen Here, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Fascism
Liberalism and Tolerance
Morality and Resistance
Political Communication and Mass Media
Summary
Analysis
At the elegant Hotel Wessex in the fictional town of Fort Beulah, Vermont, the local Rotary Club hosts a Ladies’ Night Dinner. The event is mostly serious in tone—like everything else in the nation in 1936. One of the speakers is Herbert Y. Edgeways, a retired brigadier general. Another is Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, a famous anti-women’s suffrage activist who now wants to “maintain the purity of the American Home” by making everyone who works in Hollywood take a patriotic oath.
The novel’s opening scene firmly anchors it in the specific political context of 1936, which modern readers must understand in order to grasp Sinclair Lewis’s motivation and message. It was an election year, and the U.S. was deep in the Great Depression. President Roosevelt’s New Deal program was popular, but still not fully implemented, and the populist governor Huey Long was planning to challenge him for the Democratic Nomination. Meanwhile, fascism was growing in Europe, with leaders like Hitler taking power in the hopes of “maintain[ing] the purity” of their nations. While the U.S. never went down the same fascist route, Sinclair Lewis saw that it clearly could, and he wanted to warn his readers against it. He created exaggerated characters, like Edgeways and Gimmitch, to show the underlying authoritarian, nationalist groupthink that lurked behind the politics of his time. Modern readers may find the novel an entertaining escape or a dire warning, depending on their own political context.
Themes
In his “manly yet mystical rhapsody” of a speech, General Edgeways declares that the U.S. needs to defend itself from foreign influence and maintain peace by spending as much as possible on weaponry. Everyone loves the speech, except the local newspaper editor Doremus Jessup and a few “crank pacifist women.”
Edgeways’s speech and the audience’s response show how easily selfish, destructive proposals—like investing in war with the excuse of preserving peace—can become popular, common-sense ideas in a democracy. Specifically, Edgeways’s speech echoes a common idea in fascist politics: that all nations are always competing to project their power through military might and conquest, so our nation has to do more than any other. In fact, modern readers may feel that this attitude really is a political consensus in the U.S. today.
Themes
Mrs. Gimmitch is next. Back during the Great War, the narrator notes, she fought to send canaries to American soldiers. Today, she spends her time “purifying the films,” organizing the Republican Party, and writing children’s books (although she has no kids). She’s also a lifelong member of the Daughters of the American Revolution—which Doremus Jessup considers a ridiculous and hypocritical organization. Gimmitch wears a giant floppy hat over her gray hair and a flower pinned to her silk dress.
If Edgeways represents the militaristic side of fascism, then Gimmitch represents its cultural, propagandistic side. She wants to censor any media that doesn’t repeat her narrow ideas about what the U.S. is and should be. Her naïve proposals may seem less harmful than Edgeways’s call for war, but over the course of the novel, Lewis hopes to show that they’re extremely dangerous nonetheless.
Themes
Instead of voting, Mrs. Gimmitch announces, women should stay home and have six children each. The cranky young widow Lorinda Pike calls out to ask what women should do if they “can’t hook a man,” but Gimmitch replies that any truly charming woman can. Gimmitch complains about selfish labor unions extorting noble businessmen by seeking better wages for themselves and higher taxes on the rich. She announces that Americans need to learn discipline, then turns to General Edgeways and declares that they ought to learn it by fighting another war. The crowd cheers.
Lewis’s political satire rests on the irony in Gimmitch’s speech: she demands policies to strengthen a social hierarchy that doesn’t even benefit her. Suffragists won women like Gimmitch the power to participate in politics, and she is using this power to undermine her own interests. Moreover, while many Americans certainly agreed with Gimmitch that women should be nothing but mothers and homemakers, few would have forced them to do so through official policies. Thus, Lewis uses Gimmitch’s exaggerated proposals to point out the undercurrent of anti-democratic, intolerant, and authoritarian thinking in American culture.
Themes
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The red-faced, portly General stands and announces that war would be far better than the current “so-called peace”—in which unions, writers, and newspapermen are attacking the Constitution and trying to turn the U.S. into the Soviet Union. He declares that even though his speech was about peace, he really wants the U.S. to dominate the world, because “power is its own excuse!” He wants the U.S. to be more like Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. He celebrates how Nazi-style military training has become normal in U.S. schools, and how nationalists are infiltrating and beating up pacifist student groups.
General Edgeways gives away the real motivation behind all of his and Gimmitch’s empty talk about discipline, values, and cultural purity. They want power. They believe that a great nation is one that dominates and subjugates other nations, and they think that every American should work tirelessly to fulfill this vision of greatness (whether they agree with it or not). Thus, even though Edgeways originally proposed investing in the military to preserve peace, now he admits that he really wants constant war. This pattern repeats itself throughout the book, and in real life: some politicians act entirely out of narrow self-interest but cover up their real motivations by talking about values like security and justice. Lewis’s satire aims to make this duplicity as obvious as possible.
Themes
Lorinda Pike stands up to complain about the General’s “sadistic nonsense,” but the wealthy local quarry owner Francis Tasbrough interrupts and silences her. Then, the slim, graying Doremus Jessup stands up to speak. He’s successful and well-connected in town, but he’s considered eccentric and snobbish for his political beliefs. He declares that freedom of speech doesn’t apply to criticizing the Army or Daughters of the American Revolution, and he thanks the General for revealing “what the ruling classes of the country really want.” (Rotary Club president Medary Cole can’t tell whether or not Jessup is joking.) Lorinda Pike stands and melodramatically apologizes to the General, who humbly bows and accepts her compliments.
Lewis introduces the novel’s protagonist, Doremus Jessup. However, the reader meets Jessup through the fanatical audience’s unsympathetic eyes, and not through the same sympathetic narrator that will go on to follow Jessup for the rest of the novel. Like Lorinda Pike’s apology, Jessup’s speech is completely satirical—he presents an exaggerated version of Gimmitch and Edgeways’s beliefs in order to show how dangerous their style of politics can become. In this way, Jessup is a mouthpiece for Sinclair Lewis himself, who wrote this novel for precisely the same reasons. He depicts a crazed, fascist United States to help ordinary Americans better understand and identify the anti-democratic tendencies in their politics.
Themes
The dinner ends with a series of nationalistic songs. The singer, Louis Rotenstern, is a beloved local patriot who proudly denies his Polish, Jewish roots and campaigns to keep “the Kikes [and] the Wops and Hunkies and Chinks” out of the country. The whole crowd sings along. Doremus Jessup’s wife, Emma, sarcastically praises him for shutting up Lorinda Pike. The Jessups agree not to invite “the Siamese elephant, the Gimmitch,” over to their home for a drink.
Louis Rotenstern’s songs use ethnic slurs to refer to Jewish, Italian, Central European, and Asian immigrants. The juxtaposition between Rotenstern’s songs and his self-destructive political ideology is significant. It shows how, by treating politics as mere entertainment, people can easily lose sight of its true consequences. By appealing to people’s emotions and sense of identity, Rotenstern helps build a consensus around Edgeways and Gimmitch’s dangerous policies—without forcing his audience to ever actually consider them as policies. Thus, this is Sinclair Lewis’s first warning (of many) that politics should be about reason, not emotion, and seek compromise, not domination.
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