Zero Hour, Buzz Windrip’s purported autobiography (which was actually written by Lee Sarason), demonstrates how propaganda works: it uses the power of storytelling to manipulate its audience’s emotions and distract them from political realities. Sinclair Lewis underlines this point by starting chapters five through twenty of It Can’t Happen Here with increasingly absurd excerpts from Windrip’s fictional book.
Zero Hour is a nauseating slew of nonsense: it covers an impossibly wide range of topics, which it links through anecdotes, jokes, and appeals to emotion, rather than logic and evidence. For instance, in one passage, the book argues that Marxism is wrong by comparing it to a pair of suspenders and invoking the names of several American founding fathers. The book offers the clearest demonstration of Windrip’s rhetorical strategy: he tries to sound persuasive, without actually persuading anyone of any real point. That way, everyone can like him, but nobody has to hold him accountable for any particular beliefs. In a nutshell, he is an entertainer masquerading as a politician and asking for power. This is what makes him so dangerous.
But Sinclair Lewis also uses Zero Hour to make a metafictional point about his own work and influence. He wrote It Can’t Happen Here in part to dissuade the American public from electing a demagogue like Huey Long in 1936. But crucially, he approached a deadly serious topic—genocidal fascist tyranny—through satire. He did this because he knew that stories are more effective persuasive tools than facts. In this sense, Lewis’s novels were also propaganda tools—and he chose to write pro-democracy propaganda precisely because he knew how powerful anti-democracy propaganda could be. Thus, Windrip’s absurd but influential autobiography demonstrates Lewis’s deep faith in his own writing’s power to transform public opinion and shape his nation’s future.
Zero Hour Symbol Timeline in It Can’t Happen Here
