It Can’t Happen Here Themes

In Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, the charismatic, folksy U.S. Senator Buzz Windrip builds a massive popular following during the Great Depression, wins the 1936 presidential election, and then transforms the U.S. into a totalitarian, fascist dictatorship. The novel’s protagonist, the small-town newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, watches his nation and community collapse as Windrip dismantles Congress and the Supreme Court; hands virtually unlimited power to his own private militia; passes ruthless labor…

In It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis thoroughly rejects Buzz Windrip’s style of populist fascism, but he also recognizes that many of the underlying problems that could have driven people to it in the 1930s—like economic desperation and social isolation—required real political solutions. Thus, beyond merely telling his readers which political values to reject, Lewis also offers an alternative vision of a healthier, more egalitarian system. Through the eyes of the…

It’s no coincidence that in It Can’t Happen Here, the protagonist Doremus Jessup is a newspaper editor, and the demagogue Buzz Windrip builds his following primarily through the popular Bishop Prang’s weekly radio show. Later, Windrip rules the U.S. with an iron fist by censoring all the news, while Jessup tries to fight back by publishing opposition pamphlets with the New Underground. Clearly, then, Sinclair Lewis sees how the media—and especially the…