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
The prison van takes Doremus Jessup to the Trianon concentration camp, which occupies the filthy, derelict buildings of an old girls’ school nine miles from Fort Beulah. The camp superintendent, Captain Cowlick, is too mild-mannered to support torturing the inmates—but also too mild-mannered to stop the Minute Men from doing so. When Jessup first arrives, Cowlick lets him spend a month in the hospital, and the drunkard prison doctor even lets Dr. Olmsted visit him from Fort Beulah. Olmsted updates Jessup on his family and friends: Emma, Mary, and Sissy are safe at home, Lorinda Pike is still free, and Buck Titus is at a different camp. Julian Falck, now a Minute Men Squad-Leader, is still feeding information to the New Underground. And Olmsted is still distributing pamphlets and helping refugees escape to Canada.
The Trianon camp’s leadership is just as dysfunctional as the rest of Windrip’s bureaucracy. Cowlick may be responsible and humane, but he still does the administration’s bidding by letting his guards act out their worst impulses. This shows how, under fascism, even though ordinary bureaucrats might not participate in or agree with atrocities, they’re forced to tolerate them anyway. Fortunately, thanks to the regime’s incompetence, most of the Fort Beulah New Underground is still free—and Doremus Jessup gets to keep coordinating with it. Even with the novel’s protagonist in prison, then, the fight to save the U.S. from Windrip is still far from over.
Themes
After leaving the hospital, Doremus Jessup is lucky to be assigned to clean the camp (instead of having to chop trees on the sadistic Ensign Stoyt’s chain gang with the other inmates, or suffer in solitary confinement or torture chambers). With this job, Jessup’s longtime “bourgeois pride” starts to fade—although, to Karl Pascal’s disappointment, he’s still no communist. Cleaning also gives Jessup the opportunity to chat with the other prisoners—including two of his cellmates, Pascal and Henry Veeder, as well as Raymond Pridewell, Louis Rotenstern, Clarence Little, and Victor Loveland.
Jessup has spent his whole life writing, editing, and managing a newspaper. This is why janitorial work helps him overcome “bourgeois pride”—it reminds him about the dignity in ordinary manual labor. Of course, Jessup is still privileged to have this job, since the rest of the prisoners have to do backbreaking manual labor. Ironically, despite receiving this special treatment, Jessup is also the guiltiest of all the prisoners. For instance, Veeder, Pridewell, and Loveland are in Trianon for briefly complaining about the government, while only Jessup actually joined the effort to overthrow it. Thus, as horrific as Jessup’s experience has been under the Windrip government, Lewis reminds the reader that many people still have it far worse.
Themes
Jessup shares his tiny cell with five other men. He gradually gets used to the stench and the indignity of his condition, but he never gets used to the waiting. He doesn’t know if he’ll get shot, be freed, or manage to escape. He and his cellmates constantly discuss escape plans, but they know that there are snitches everywhere. For instance, Clarence Little reports Henry Veeder’s escape plan and gets released as a reward. Emma, Mary, Sissy, David, and even Philip (who’s now a judge for the Corpos) all visit Jessup, but under the Minute Men’s supervision, they can’t say anything interesting. Jessup also receives plenty of useless, censored letters. He starts to wonder if freedom would even be worth it.
Life at Trianon is miserable, but in this passage, Lewis emphasizes several ways in which it’s no different from ordinary life under the Windrip administration. For instance, Jessup is unable to plan anything, feels a constant sense of anticipation and foreboding, and can’t find accurate information about the government—just like when he was editing the Informer and settling into retirement in the outside world. Thus, the concentration camp is only an intensified version of the fascist world outside—which is why Jessup starts to wonder if life would even be worth living if he managed to escape.
Themes
Karl Pascal becomes Jessup’s closest friend and confidant in the camps. Most communists get shot immediately, but Pascal knows all of the guards’ dirty secrets, so they actually treat him well and bring him gifts. When Aras Dilley gets transferred to Trianon, even he starts bowing down to Karl Pascal.
Pascal knows how to fight the Minute Men on their own terms: he understands that might makes right under fascism, so he protects himself from the guards’ abuses by becoming a serious threat to their own safety.
Themes
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On one September morning, Jessup watches Ensign Stoyt and the firing squad march Henry Veeder out of the quad. He hears gunshots, then sees them return with Veeder’s body. Worse still, Julian Falck and his grandfather, the Rev. Mr. Falck, arrive at Trianon. The guards repeatedly torture Julian, the first Minute Men spy captured in the area. Jessup worries that, with Julian gone, Shad Ledue will finally rape Sissy.
In the camps, the government metes out the most serious punishments to the least serious offenders. Jessup’s cousin Henry Veeder gets executed for the minor crime of complaining about the government stealing his house. His death, like Fowler Greenhill’s, offers a dire warning about fascism’s potential to invert the basic tenets of politics, turning the government into a tool for spreading senseless cruelty and unspeakable violence. Julian Falck also pays a serious price for daring to oppose the government—but the government tortures him instead of murdering him, because he has important information about the New Underground.
Themes
By the end of September, Doremus Jessup starts to recover from all the beatings—but then Ensign Stoyt conveniently drags him out of bed in the middle of the night, beats him, and takes him to Captain Cowlick’s office. Cowlick offers to give Jessup a clean bedroom and preferential treatment if he reports on Julian Falck’s “subversive activities.” Jessup refuses, so Ensign Stoyt drags the Rev. Mr. Falck into the room and declares that he has snitched on Jessup. But Falck denies it, so Stoyt knocks him to the floor and kicks him while he prays to God for vengeance.
The guards want to turn Jessup against his New Underground comrades, so they give him special treatment. Sometimes, they’re unusually humane, so that he knows what he stands to gain if he gives away his comrades; other times, they’re exceptionally cruel, to show him the consequences if he doesn’t. Yet this is far from the first time that Jessup has had to choose between his own self-interest and the common good. And not even Trianon can compromise his staunch commitment to the latter principle.
Themes
The novel quotes a long excerpt from a Parisian literature professor’s article about visiting the U.S. The professor adores the Minute Men’s dynamic parades, and when he visits a government labor camp, all the workers assure him (through a translator) that they are happy to be there and well-fed. Hector Macgoblin tells the professor that there are no “concentration camps,” just re-education schools to free unfortunate souls who have been brainwashed by liberalism. The professor concludes that France and Great Britain should give up parliamentary democracy and embrace “the all-powerful Totalitarian State.”
This ironic interlude serves to once again underscore propaganda’s power. The professor understands none of the horrors that the reader has seen, because his only source for information about the Windrip administration is the administration itself. When he reports his findings to people across the world, they will develop an equally unrealistic vision of the administration. Indeed, when he encourages France and Great Britain to embrace Windrip’s model, this also shows how tyranny can spread across borders, as fascists learn from their successful counterparts in other countries. Of course, this is indirectly Lewis’s way of warning his American readers against idealizing Italy and Germany, which at the time of the book’s publication (1935) were projecting an idealized image to the outside world by using the same kind of extreme censorship tactics as Windrip.
Themes
The next month, John Pollikop gets arrested and dragged to Trianon. He and Karl Pascal instantly start bickering about socialism and communism—and Doremus Jessup feels relieved. Meanwhile, Shad Ledue is angry. The administration refuses to promote him, despite his amazing skill at arresting traitors, and all of his old friends are afraid of him now. He wants Sissy Jessup—she has stopped visiting, but he’ll do anything to have her.
In Trianon, John Pollikop and Karl Pascal recreate their real-world dynamic from the auto shop. Lewis uses this humorous scene to once again emphasize that Trianon is just an extension of the rest of fascist society, as well as to mock radical activists’ tendency to get so stuck in theoretical arguments that they fail to address dire challenges in the real world. Meanwhile, Shad Ledue’s disappointment shows how fascism also fails its most loyal soldiers. First, it attracts them through false promises. Ledue thinks that he will get promoted just for succeeding at his job, when in reality, promotions are part of a corrupt patronage system—the only way to get promoted is by either sabotaging or paying off one’s superiors. Second, Ledue thought that cruelty and violence would win him respect and popularity, but now, he realizes that it just isolates him from everyone else.
Themes
