In Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian political novel It Can’t Happen Here, the populist senator and “Professional Common Man” Buzz Windrip wins the 1936 presidential election and turns the United States into a fascist dictatorship. Before the election, most Americans complacently assume that fascism “can’t happen here”—but after the election, it’s already too late to stop it. The novel follows Doremus Jessup, a small-time Vermont newspaper editor, as he watches Windrip completely transform the U.S. in a matter of months. Everyone who speaks, writes, or protests against the government starts to disappear, leaving Jessup to decide how he and his newspaper, the Daily Informer, can contribute to the fight for democracy.
The novel begins at a Rotary Club meeting in Jessup’s hometown of Fort Beulah, Vermont. The portly retired general Herbert Y. Edgeways and the zealous anti-women’s rights activist Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch give passionate speeches calling for the U.S. to start a major war, “purify” the media, and crack down on its opponents (like communists, Jews, women, Black people, and labor unions). After the dinner, Jessup discusses the nation’s fragile political situation with his friends, including wealthy businessman Francis Tasbrough and brutish school superintendent Emil Staubmeyer. Like Edgeways and Gimmitch, most of Jessup’s friends think that the popular senator Buzz Windrip will save the nation from communism and the Great Depression. They think the U.S. is too free and democratic to become a dictatorship—but Jessup disagrees.
The novel explains that Doremus Jessup grew up in Fort Beulah, where his father Loren Jessup ran the Universalist church. Jessup has spent more than half of his 60 years running the Daily Informer. He and his wife Emma live in an elegant old farmhouse and have three children: Philip (a lawyer who lives in Massachusetts), Mary (who is married to the local doctor Fowler Greenhill), and Sissy (who is still in high school).
The whole family attends a picnic at Jessup’s cousin Henry Veeder’s farm. Jessup listens to the radio in horror as the country’s most popular radio host, the Bishop Paul Peter Prang, enthusiastically endorses Buzz Windrip. The Great Depression is in full swing, and Prang’s millions of followers—economically distressed white people who call themselves the “League of Forgotten Men”—are a powerful voting bloc. Jessup is “a mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal,” so Windrip’s theatrical style and extreme, contradictory promises fill him with fear and worry.
Surely enough, Windrip defeats President Franklin D. Roosevelt to win the Democratic nomination. His official platform includes nationalizing any industry and banning any labor union he pleases, guaranteeing a minimum income and capping the maximum income, expanding the military while shutting down the legislative and judicial branches, and taking away the civil and economic rights of Jewish people, Black people, women, communists, and pacifists. Doremus Jessup sees that this is a recipe for totalitarianism: Windrip wants to seize absolute power, then dismantle the democratic freedoms that Americans have cherished for generations.
Windrip campaigns tirelessly around the country and builds a mass following. His campaign team is crucial to this effort—including the militaristic colonel Dewey Haik and especially the conniving political strategist Lee Sarason. Doremus Jessup points out Windrip’s lies in impassioned Daily Informer editorials, but the people around him—like his brutish handyman, Shad Ledue—believe everything that Windrip says. When Jessup attends a Windrip rally in New York, he learns how charismatic Windrip really is: even though Windrip doesn’t make any coherent point, he’s so passionate and relatable that people genuinely start to believe that he will solve all of their problems. Unsurprisingly, Windrip defeats Republican nominee Walt Trowbridge in the election. The same night, Windrip’s supporters and his massive private militia, the Minute Men, march through the streets around the country, and Doremus Jessup receives a death threat on his porch.
Until after the inauguration, only a few people in Fort Beulah really understood the threat that Windrip posed to democracy. Besides Jessup, these people included the communist union organizer Karl Pascal, Jessup’s daughter Sissy, her boyfriend Julian Falck, Jessup’s scrappy best friend Buck Titus, and Lorinda Pike, a widowed local tavern owner with whom Jessup is carrying on an affair. When Windrip takes office, he immediately arms the Minute Men, sends them to arrest Congress, and orders them to kill anyone who protests his administration. He overthrows the Supreme Court, bans every political party besides his own, and starts heavily censoring the media. He even dissolves the “League of Forgotten Men” and makes Bishop Prang mysteriously disappear. Next, he reorganizes the U.S. into eight large provinces and appoints the Corpos, a board of loyal industry and worker representatives, to run the U.S. economy. By printing too much money, Windrip seriously worsens the Great Depression. He quickly abandons his promise to pay every American family a minimum of $5,000 a year—instead, he forces all unemployed people into labor camps, where they work for $1 a day (and pay 70 to 90 cents per day for room and board).
However, Windrip’s opponent in the election, Walt Trowbridge, manages to escape to Montreal. He sets up a resistance organization called the “New Underground,” which starts publishing uncensored news, helping refugees escape north, and planning to overthrow Windrip.
Windrip’s purges quickly reach Vermont—which is now part of the Northeastern Province, District Three. When the loyal, foolish brute Shad Ledue becomes the county commissioner in Fort Beulah, Doremus Jessup realizes that he can no longer publish what he wants in the Daily Informer. But he strongly believes that the public must learn about the government’s crimes—like how it covers up Secretary of Education Hector Macgoblin murdering his old biology professor Willy Schmidt and the respected Rabbi Vincent de Verez in a fit of drunken rage. When Jessup publishes a bold editorial criticizing the administration, an angry mob tries to lynch him. Shad Ledue arrests him instead, and the effete “gentleman-Fascist” military judge Effingham Swan forces him to publish pro-government news and train Ledue’s incompetent new assistant, Emil Staubmeyer, to replace him as editor. When Jessup’s son-in-law Fowler Greenhill barges into the courtroom to defend his character, Judge Swan gets annoyed and sentences Greenhill to death. A firing squad immediately murders him. Grief-stricken Mary Greenhill moves back to Jessup’s house with her son David.
Rebellions break out around the U.S., so Windrip makes criticizing the government a crime punishable by death. The government starts building concentration camps around the country, including near Fort Beulah at Trianon. Shad Ledue starts going through Jessup’s papers, and Buck Titus tells the Jessups that they must escape to Canada immediately. One winter night, he drives the family down icy backwoods trails to the Canadian border—but the Minute Men stop them and make them return home.
Jessup’s son Philip, now a loyal Corpo, visits and warns him about the consequences of opposing the government. In fact, Jessup knows that he’ll inevitably end up in the camps, so he decides to finally fight for his principles. He quits the Informer and tries to join the Communist Party’s resistance movement—but they reject him, so he joins the New Underground instead. He starts a local chapter with a group of people, including Buck Titus, Lorinda Pike, the Informer typesetter Dan Wilgus, and the farmer Truman Webb. They start writing, printing, and distributing pamphlets with real news about the Windrip administration and fiery editorials defending democracy. But the movement requires sacrifices. Lorinda Pike worries that her affair with Doremus is interfering with their activism, so she moves away. Julian Falck and Sissy Jessup sacrifice their relationship to become spies for the New Underground: Julian joins the Minute Men and Sissy Jessup starts dating Shad Ledue to get information out of him.
Eventually, a Corpo spy tracks down Jessup’s group, and the Minute Men arrest him, Buck Titus, Truman Webb, and Dan Wilgus. They go to the concentration camp, where Effingham Swan sentences Jessup to torture and 17 years of imprisonment. The camps are horrible: all of the prisoners have to do hard labor, and many die at the guards’ hands—including Wilgus, Henry Veeder, and the professor Victor Loveland. Jessup befriends the communist activist Karl Pascal, then realizes that Pascal also wants to create a dictatorship. Later, the Minute Men catch Julian Falck spying on them, so they send him to the camps and brutally torture him. Finally, to everyone’s surprise, Shad Ledue loses his job in the Minute Men and comes to the Trianon camp as a prisoner. The other prisoners don’t know why he’s there, but they hate him and burn him alive in his cell.
Meanwhile, in the free world, Mary Greenhill executes a plot to avenge her husband’s death. She joins the military, becomes a fighter pilot, and then flies her plane straight into Effingham Swan’s. They both die in the collision. The Jessup household breaks up. Emma takes David to live with Philip, while Sissy goes to live with Lorinda Pike and work in the New Underground full-time. Then, the novel explains how Shad Ledue ended up at Trianon: on one of his dates with Sissy, he proudly told her about a scheme he was running to extort the Minute Men. Sissy reported this to Francis Tasbrough, who is now the District Commissioner. Tasbrough imprisoned Ledue—probably to take over the extortion scheme for himself.
After Shad Ledue’s death, the novel quickly reaches a hair-raising climax. First, the Windrip administration collapses: Lee Sarason overthrows Windrip and starts a war with Mexico, and then Dewey Haik murders Sarason and takes over the presidency for himself. Back in Vermont, Lorinda Pike bribes a Minute Man named Aras Dilley to help Doremus Jessup escape from the Trianon camp. It works. Lorinda and Sissy bring Jessup to Montreal, where he joins the New Underground’s leadership. Around the same time, the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Emmanuel Coon, starts an organized military revolt against the government. The novel ends with Doremus Jessup traveling through Minnesota as an undercover agent, organizing a network of New Underground spies who are persuading the public to join the rebellion.
