It Can't Happen Here, a novel by Sinclair Lewis; first published in 1935; Signet Classics edition published in 2005, with an introduction by Michael Meyer; $7.95 in paperback.

Reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

Among the good reasons to read old books is this: They help overcome the illusion of novelty.

When we rely too heavily on contemporary sources of information, it's easy to believe that our problems are entirely modern, forgetting that "modern" is the most transitory adjective in the English language.

We come to believe that we face new problems that require new solutions. And to find them, we are so often told, we may have to set aside some of our most cherished values from that old reality which is no longer quite relevant.

This is pretty much hogwash, and old books can help us figure that out.

I found It Can't Happen Here in the Glover Public Library years ago, interested because I’d heard it was set in Vermont, and because I’d enjoyed Sinclair Lewis’ satirical insights into American society in his more famous works: Main Street, for example, and particularly Elmer Gantry.

The moral collapse of those icons of TV evangelism, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, may have come as a surprise to some. They were routine and predictable to anyone who'd read Elmer Gantry.

But that was a book about religion, the temptations of the flesh, the lure of the dollar, the corruption that always seems to come with power. Universal themes in any era.

What could a novelist of the 1930s possibly have to say about the new political realities of post-9/11 America?

I picked up a new edition of It Can't Happen Here to find out.

Sinclair Lewis was writing about an America that faced a new international reality, the sudden rise of fascism in Western Europe.

Communism had been a force to worry about for a generation by then, an entirely alien system that arrived in revolutionary fashion in a very alien place.

But fascism had just taken over two western democracies, places many Americans, or their parents or grandparents, had come from.

Like a dangerous habit, it was at once distasteful and alluring to Americans.

"This gospel of clean and aggressive strength is spreading everywhere in this country among the finest type of youth," General Herbert Y. Edgeways tells the Fort Beulah Rotary Club in the novel’s first chapter.

It was a serious occasion, Lewis notes. "All of America was serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929."

The assembled Rotarians had already heard from Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, a national power in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

And here, early in the book, is a sample of the author’s style, in his effort to write a funny book about a subject he took very seriously, indeed:

The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening) is a somewhat confusing organization — as confusing as Theosophy, Relativity, or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which it resembles. It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.

Doremus Jessup is our protagonist. It is of passing interest to this reviewer that he is 60 years old, which I was as recently as three months ago, and publishes a newspaper in Vermont.

I suspect that Fort Beulah is a fictional version of Barre, with large granite quarries and a small newspaper, the Daily Informer.

Lewis was clearly worried about fascism's appeal to his troubled country, and didn’t share the confidence of many of his peers that "it can’t happen here."

He retreated to Vermont and wrote the book quickly over the summer of 1935. It is set in 1936, the year Franklin Roosevelt ran for his second term as president.

In Lewis’ America, FDR faces a surprisingly tough challenge for the Democratic Party’s nomination from Senator Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, a spellbinding orator with a knack for telling every audience exactly what it wants to hear.

At first, Doremus Jessup "could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences."

The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

But behind Buzz Windrip is the brilliant and all-but-invisible Lee Sarason, "officially his secretary but known to be much more — bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent, economic adviser; and in Washington Lee Sarason became the man most consulted and least liked by newspaper correspondents in the whole Senate Office Building."

Any resemblance to current players on the political stage is of course entirely coincidental. Lewis was an acute social critic, but hardly a prophet.

As shaped by Sarason, a man who "never once used contact as a transitive verb," Senator Windrip is a fascist disguised as a populist. In the campaign for nomination, he takes a page from Huey Long and promises a $5,000 bonus to every man in America.

He denounces fascism from every rostrum, yet fashions a platform that speaks to that doctrine’s appeal to angry and confused voters who need a scapegoat to blame for their economic misery.

Labor unions will be embraced as Bureaus of the Government, as long as they eschew "the menace of destructive and un-American Radicalism."

Jews will be protected from discrimination, but those who refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament will not "be permitted to hold any public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer, judge, or as a physician, except in the category of Obstetrics."

Negroes will be subject to the same constraints, but those who spend their lives in honest labor suitable to their race will receive a pension of $500 per year.

Women will have an honored place in Windrip's new America, of course, but "all women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except in such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beauty parlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably sacred duties as home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens of the Commonwealth."

Finally, Congress shall reduce itself to an advisory capacity to the President, and the Supreme Court will lose its power to negate Presidential decrees.

It seems incredible that Americans would, at any time, elect a president on such a platform. But Lewis was much closer than we are to the remarkable political success of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy.

He was also writing before the war in which America spent so many lives and so much treasure to defeat the fascists. It was only after the war began that support for fascism would be, on its face, un-American.

In 1935 Hitler and Mussolini led highly civilized western nations that supported them, and seemed a strong bulwark against the threatening expansion of Godless Communism.

Lewis devotes the first third of his novel to convincing the reader that it can happen here. It is a skillful and detailed argument, all the way down to Buzz's oddly echoing promise to get the billboards off America’s highways.

The author’s genius lies in depicting the kinds of ordinary Americans who would be susceptible to fascism’s appeal.

People like Doremus’ hired man, Shad Ledue, who longs for authority and resents those whose success give them the power to order him around.

People like the quarry owner Francis Tasbrough, who befriends Doremus but despises him for "always being agin the government — kidding everybody — posing as such a Liberal that you’ll stand for all these subversive elements."

People like the suave John Sullivan Reek, who embraces dictatorship as a natural outlet for his deeply buried sadism.

People like Doremus’ son Phil, who sees a chance for advancement in a new regime, and prates that "you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs."

And people like Doremus Jessup himself, who had grown smug in the sense that he understood his country well, and knew where it was going. Doremus suddenly finds himself hamstrung by uncertainty.

Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone monk stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, "If I only knew more!...Yes, and if I could only remember statistics!"

Buzz Windrip wins the presidency. In short order most of Congress is in jail and an alarmed citizenry rebels. But Windrip’s fast-growing squad of Minute Men prevails, and blood flows deep in the streets of Washington.

"We can go back to the Dark Ages!" Doremus muses in despair. "The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance is so thin!"

How far are we removed, in 2005, from the society Lewis was observing 70 years ago?

Harking back to the First World War, he recalls the days "when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles.’"

Weren’t our politicians ordering "Freedom fries" in the buildup to the war in Iraq?

Lewis recalls "the hick legislators in certain states" who "set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution."

Didn’t school authorities in Kansas just hold hearings on the wisdom of adding the theory of "intelligent design" to their textbooks’ chapters on evolution?

Doremus muses on the country’s dangerous impulse to "cure the evils of Democracy by the evils of Fascism."

And are we not being urged to meet the threat of the sinister advocates of a Muslim theocracy by falling back on the moral absolutes of a Christian theocracy?

I don’t mean to leave the impression that It Can’t Happen Here is nothing more than a political treatise. It is a fine novel.

Doremus Jessup, a small, tired man whose wife calls him "Dormouse," must decide whether, and how, to resist the new order of things, and survive the consequences.

It’s a good read, for all that it’s an instructive read.

And will Doremus leave us with a final recipe to preserve the values of the America we love?

But he saw now that he must remain alone, a "Liberal," scorned by all the noisier prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But at worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny should finally dominate the world.

Sinclair Lewis still has a great deal to tell us, after all.