January 11

It Can't Happen Here (1935)
By Sinclair Lewis

Lewis's Babbitt was published about 15 years before It Can't Happen Here, and the earlier novel tells the story of a middle class American who is trying to move up the social ladder.  By 1935 Sinclair Lewis had become the first American to win the Nobel prize with his stories of America.  This later work was written in a 2-3 month time frame, and reading it made me feel like I was on a speeding train moving toward a cliff.

Lewis writes an alternative history in which a populist demagogue, "Buzz" Windrup, campaigns as the common man, assuring all Americans they will earn $5000/year ($90,000 in today's dollars) if they elect him.  Americans love Buzz and make up ditties to sing his praises. He becomes president in 1936, beating FDR in the Democratic primary and going on to defeat a more liberal Republican candidate.  Told from the perspective of a seasoned Vermont newspaper editor, Doremus Jessup is immediately suspicious of Buzz's claims, but is still stunned by the level of Buzz's repressive activities.  Once in the White House, Buzz starts a new kind of citizen militia, the Minute Men, or MM, who have powers to arrest anyone Buzz deems a threat, like journalists and college professors.  A few Americans escape to Europe or Canada, until the Minute Men close off the border, but most are still enthralled with Buzz, waiting for their income to increase.  The Jessups' incompetent hired man, Shad Ledue, is promoted to a high regional position and constantly intimidates the family who tried to help him.  Anyone who resists is sent to a concentration camp, and people are shot if they so much as raise an argument.  Doremus eventually joins an underground movement, working for the Republican candidate who lives in Canada.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, but Buzz is forced out, only to have the country taken over by his creepy assistant, who doesn't last long in the office.  Doremus continues working for the underground.  What surprised me was Lewis's prescience in foreseeing what would happen in Germany - true, this story takes place in the US, but it had all the trappings: the camps, the squelching of news, discrimination against Jews and African-Americans - of Nazi Germany.  Philip Roth's The Plot Against America uses a similar story line, and reads much more convincingly, but Roth has the advantage of the perspective of history.