Doremus Jessup’s newspaper, the Daily Informer, represents the free press’s role in a democracy, effective journalism’s power to improve society, and the dangers of censorship. The paper is Jessup’s life’s work: when the novel begins, he has dedicated more than 35 of his 60 years to running it. Thousands of people read everything he writes, and while his editorials are often controversial, they consistently shape the political conversation in his corner of Vermont.
Then, Buzz Windrip becomes a national phenomenon. His primary communications strategy is mass media—and specifically the radio, which allows him and his followers (like Bishop Prang) to instantly spread propaganda around the whole country. Local newspapers like Jessup’s start to seem irrelevant and powerless, because their facts and rationality are no match for Windrip’s grandiose rhetoric and empty promises. In other words, the U.S. falls into tyranny in part because the free press is not powerful, organized, or committed enough to show the public the dangers that Windrip poses to them.
After Windrip takes power, he starts censoring the press. Suddenly, Jessup can no longer write freely, and nobody can find out about Windrip’s increasingly horrific abuses of power. Jessup takes one final stand by publishing an honest editorial criticizing the government—and then the administration takes over his paper and forces him to publish exclusively favorable news. The Daily Informer turns from a defense against government propaganda into a tool for it. With no access to independent information, Americans start to blindly trust the administration. Thus, the Daily Informer’s relatively bland name actually represents the humble but absolutely essential role that journalists play in a democracy: they must simply inform people of the truth, day after day, so that the public can make better decisions and protect themselves against tyrants.
The Fort Beulah Daily Informer Quotes in It Can’t Happen Here
“All this trouble and the Corpos—They’re going to do something to you and me. We’ll become so roused up that—either we’ll be desperate and really cling to each other and everybody else in the world can go to the devil or, what I’m afraid is more likely, we’ll get so deep into rebellion against Windrip, we’ll feel so terribly that we’re standing for something, that we’ll want to give up everything else for it, even give up you and me. So that no one can ever find out and criticize. We’ll have to be beyond criticism.”
“No! I won’t listen. We will fight, but how can we ever get so involved—detached people like us—”
“You are going to publish that editorial tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of arrest—sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying blows and then the formal beatings, […] the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang themselves—
Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette.
The Fort Beulah Daily Informer Symbol Timeline in It Can’t Happen Here
