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
Doremus Jessup, whose father, Loren Jessup, was a pastor, grew up surrounded by literature in Fort Beulah. He attended the nearby Isaiah College, then became a reporter for newspapers around Massachusetts. He even worked in Boston, which he found thrilling but exhausting. When Jessup’s father died, he left behind a small estate, which Jessup used to move home and buy a stake in the Weekly Informer newspaper. In the 35 years since, he has bought the paper outright and turned it into the Daily Informer.
Jessup’s upbringing shows that he belongs to New England’s long tradition of liberal intellectuals and religious leaders. He has deep roots in Fort Beulah and plays an important role in the community’s collective life. He is educated and relatively wealthy, but money is by no means his primary motivator in life. Thus, in the broader political scheme of the novel, Jessup represents the high-status professionals and public intellectuals who want to serve the common good and have the means to do so, but who often stand to lose wealth, status, or power if they do—particularly under a dictatorship.
Themes
Jessup is a fair, competent, and politically independent editor. He and his wife, Emma, first met in high school, and they now have three children. The oldest is 32-year-old Philip, a successful lawyer. Next is 30-year-old Mary, the wife of a respected local doctor, Fowler Greenhill, and mother of an eight-year-old son, David. The youngest is 18-year-old Cecilia, or “Sissy,” who is in high school and hopes to become an architect.
Jessup’s family members all play important roles in the plot, but Sinclair Lewis also uses them to explore how people from Jessup’s social and economic class can respond to tyranny differently, with varying effects. Of course, Jessup’s class background is also Lewis’s, as well as many of his readers’. Thus, Lewis uses the Jessup family to offer a practical roadmap—and a series of practical warnings—for how to act under tyranny.
Themes
Doremus Jessup parks his Chrysler in his ugly cement garage, and on his way into the house, he smacks his shin on the lawnmower, which the family’s “incompetent and vicious” handyman Oscar “Shad” Ledue has left out. Inside, he goes up to the study, which is his personal haven in his unassuming white clapboard house. It’s a complete mess, filled with assorted books and junk.
Lewis carefully points out the flaws and inconveniences in Doremus Jessup’s life: his garage is ugly, his handyman is a fool, and his study is in disarray. Yet Jessup tolerates these imperfections and continues to live a relatively satisfying, quiet life. This makes him unlike most of the acquaintances he met after dinner, who are wealthier than him but still obsessed with getting even more money, power, and status. Of course, this basic conflict between humility and destructive greed is central to the novel’s political drama.
Themes
Jessup sits and opens his mail. The Isaiah College professor Victor Loveland has written to report that his students are now conducting military drills, and that the Board of Trustees—including Frank Tasbrough—has banned all criticism of the military. The family mutt, Foolish, comes into the study and wakes up Jessup’s caged canary. The familiar animals soothe Jessup, and he forgets his worries and falls asleep.
Loveland’s letter shows how, long before the election, the U.S. is already gravitating toward fascism: speech is no longer free, and the division between military and civilian life is disappearing. The canary in Jessup’s study is a clear reference to the idiom of a “canary in the coal mine”—or an early indicator of coming danger. Of course, Lewis uses this heavy-handed metaphor to suggest that many more atrocities are coming, and that Jessup should not be so complacent. After all, if nations show warning signs of fascism long before they actually hand power to fascist dictators, then intellectuals like Jessup ought to recognize the signs and start fighting back as soon as possible. (This is precisely what Lewis was trying to do by publishing this book.)
Themes
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