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Chapter 12
Themes
and Colors
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
In Zero Hour, Windrip writes that when he retires, he wants to move to a place like Florida or Santa Fe and spend his time reading classic literature. Even though Doremus Jessup knew that Windrip would win the election, he’s still alarmed. “Hell with this country,” he thinks, and he decides to lock up in his study and read the classics. He tries and fails to relearn Latin, and he starts feeling guilty for disengaging from politics. Windrip is trying to form a congressional majority by blackmailing his opposition, challenging election results, and even making one congressman disappear.
Unlike in Windrip’s epigraph, Jessup retreats from the world not to relax, but because he feels powerless. He doesn’t know what, if anything, he can do to fight Windrip’s coming tyranny. He tries to bury his head in the sand—but, tellingly, he fails. He feels such a strong moral obligation to act that he cannot stop thinking about the country’s descent into fascism. Ultimately, this sense of morality is what sets Jessup apart from most of the people around him.
Active
Themes
Since the Depression started in 1929, Jessup has felt stuck and insecure. For centuries, capitalism and the U.S. government gave Americans “the privilege of planning.” Jessup’s minister grandfather planned to give Jessup’s father a theological education and build a new family house. Then, Jessup’s father saved money so that Jessup could go to college and pursue his dream of working in publicity. But now, Jessup has no idea what the country’s future will hold, so he can’t make any plans for his family. As an editor, he’s used to knowing all about history, politics, and economics, but he suddenly feels like he knows nothing—and like nobody else does, either.
Lewis argues that stability and order help a society develop by enabling people to make and execute long-term plans. In this kind of society, people can choose their own life paths and freely pursue new, innovative ideas. The Depression already disrupted this stability by destroying people’s livelihoods and confidence in the financial system. Then, the American people elected Windrip because he promised to end the crisis and bring back the stability of the past. But Jessup thinks that Windrip will do the opposite instead: he will undermine stability further by taking away the fundamental freedoms on which it is based.
Active
Themes
Julian Falck visits Fort Beulah on Christmas break, and Jessup gives him a ride home one night. On their way, they stop at John Pollikop’s garage for gas, and they meet Karl Pascal, the communist mechanic. Pascal tells Jessup that he’s actually excited for Windrip to take office, since there’s nothing like a “pro-plutocrat, itching militarist dictator” to start the revolution. Falck asks how Pascal can reconcile communism with loving the U.S. Pascal replies that he loves the U.S.’s informality and democratic spirit but hates its extreme inequality and low wages. Jessup asks if Soviet forced labor camps are any better than the U.S.’s poverty wages, but Pascal calls this a weak comeback and insists that Americans will “do [communism] a whole lot better.”
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Themes
The theatrical John Pollikop, the garage’s owner and Jessup’s former bootlegger, stops in to chat. He makes fun of Karl Pascal and says that the socialists would have defeated “Buzzard Windrip” if they had the communists’ support. Pascal jokes that Pollikop has never really read Marx and declares that Windrip’s election is just a reflection of the country’s deeper economic issues. In fact, Pascal and Pollikop are still merrily debating when Jessup and Julian Falck drive away.
Active
Themes
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Doremus Jessup has always sought alone time in his study, where his family and the townspeople can’t bother him. Now, he spends his evenings there, meditating, editing articles, and avoiding Windrip’s supporters. After returning home from Pollikop’s garage, he finishes an editorial about the threat to democracy from communism, fascism, and all the other utopian ideologies that believe they can save the world. Society can never be perfect, Jessup writes, and people will always envy their neighbors and face the same issues, like aging, disease, and natural disasters. Only arrogant “rabble-rousers” think that they know the definitive solutions to these problems.
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Themes
Jessup notes that people have believed they can save the world for centuries, from Peter the Hermit (who led the Crusades) and John Ball (who led a rebellion to redistribute wealth in the 14th century) to the Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and utopian religious leaders like John Alexander Dowie. He decides that Brigham Young was the only “rabble-rouser” who actually created something enduring. And he concludes that he respects the non-idealists who don’t think they have the solution to everything, and who don’t rush to murder everyone who disagrees with them.
Active
Themes
Jessup even starts to wonder whether the American Revolution and the Civil War were worth it. Couldn’t the U.S. have gradually abolished slavery, Jessup asks, instead of sending a generation of men to die in the Civil War, which fueled a Southern racist backlash and eventually led the U.S. into the Spanish-American War? Couldn’t the Thirteen Colonies have stayed in the British Empire and helped establish true world peace? Is the U.S. really any better off than Canada and Australia? Of course, conservatives are just as bad as the radicals—especially when they scorn everyone who wants to improve society. Above all, Jessup admires the Abolitionists. He just wishes they were less idealistic. He concludes that “idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress.”
