I suppose I should be more familiar with Sinclair Lewis’ work. I have heard his name bandied about since high school and know titles like Elmer Gantry, but until now I have never read him. That changed after I saw a reference to his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. I had heard of this title too, but it was always in the context of a high school or college history class when we were discussing the short lived “share the wealth” program of one time governor and later Senator from Louisiana, Huey Long. This was my first real brush with the idea of populism and while I guess it made sense in a historical context, American Populism and Fascism were lever linked, at least not in my studies. So, anyway, I heard mention of this book and its exploration of the growth of and takeover by Fascists in 1936 America I rushed out and bought it.

I’ve heard on some other podcasts that there was a run on this book and it ended up back in the NYT Best Seller List before the 2016 election. I guess none of the people who bought it read it though as we ended up with a populist president, and now have the same populist president now. At any rate, I picked up a copy and started in on it. This review will be a little different as I am only going to BROADLY call out the plot events and evolution because this is a book that everyone should read (and I hesitate to add this clause) while you still can. The parallels of the story in this book, especially the first hundred and fifty or so pages, and the 2024 election are almost unbelievable. As I read further into the story the more disturbed I became. In the 1930s, especially at the end of the Great Depression where the US government was so worried about communists and socialists pulling a Moscow 1917 due to the harsh economic realities of the time that Roosevelt was able to get the New Deal passed. The jobs programs created there and the stabilizing effect of regulatory controls of banks, the establishment of the break between investment and savings banks, and more regulation of industry and tolerance of unions helped prevent what many in power saw as a landscape ripe for communist agitation. Huey Long, as mentioned earlier, was a champion of the “Share the Wealth” program was gunned down in the Louisiana state house. 

I don’t pretend to know if Lewis was modeling his political antagonist Berzelius Windrip on Long, or Mussolini, or Hitler, or Franco, but he seems to contain elements of all of them. Mussolini and Hitler get name checked a few times in this novel so the audience of the time could see the danger that these men and their countries were especially after they drifted further and further into dictatorship. The conditions that led to fascism in Europe were not unlike the conditions that led to the New Deal. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s have a look at the characters and I apologize in advance. I don’t know if it is novel writing in the 30s or something but the names in this book are memorable if only because they are so… well… you’ll see what I mean.

Doremus Jessup - Our main character, editor of the local newspaper in a small Vermont town
Emma Jessup - Doremus’ wife. She is sort of ambivalent to everything
Sissy Jessup - Doremus’ youngest daughter. Recent high school graduate.
Mary (jessup) Greenhill - Doremyus’ oldest daughter. Married to Dr. Mark Greenhill
Mark Greenhill - Married to Mary
Walter Trowbridge - Outsted Presidential candidate and leader of the resistance from Canada
Mr. Tasborough - Owns the local quarry
Buck Titus- Doremus’ best friend and the owner of a hunting lodge in the woods
Shad Ledue - Doremus’ handyman, later the District Commander and leader of the local Minute Men
Lorinda Pike - Owner of the local tea house, Doremus’ girlfriend (it’s complicated)
Hector McGoblin - Advisor to President Windrip and later Secretary of Treasury
Lee Sarenson - Advisor to President Windrip and later Secretary of State
General Haik - Leader of the Minute Men and then the entire military
Mary Candy - Cook in Doremus Jessup’s home
Karl Pascal - Local machinist and communist
Bishop Prang - Advisor to President Windrip while on campaign. Has nationwide evengelical, racist, radio show
Effingham Swan - District Commissioner of Northern New Hampshire and Vermont

There are other characters buried in here but for the most part this is all we’ll need to make sense of this story here.

So, while there is a through line plot for our hero, Doremus Jessup, in It Can’t Happen Here, this is more of an exploration of an idea or events than it is a character story. For me the first 150 pages or so when Doremus is mostly an observers and chronicler of the slide of the US into a fascist state were almost all set dressing for the story that rounds out the rest of the book. Namely, what do people do average Americans do when their system of government is subverted.

We open at a dinner party where we are introduced to Doremus Jessup editor of the local newspaper and one of the middle class or upper middle class in the town of Fort Beulah, Vermont. After the meal they listen to the radio news and we learn that the US is in the middle of the 1936 Presidential Campaign. Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip runs strong on the Democratic Party side with Franklin Roosevelt (Progressive) and Walt Trowbridge (Republican) splitting the opposition vote. Windrip is presented through speech transcriptions and excerpts from his book “Zero Hour” that lead every chapter until around Chapter 13 or thereabouts. Each of these exerpts leads off the chapter and gives some visibility and characterization to Buzz Windrip even though he never interacts with the main characters in the story. What’s interesting in the first few chapters here is that Doremus and his family don’t really take the Windrip presidency with any seriousness. Who would vote for someone who promises to throw out minorities, rails against the Jewish ownership of banks, plans to impose protectionist tariffs even though the US is barely limping out of the Great Depression, and finally, silencing dissent on college campuses and mass media. Who would vote for someone who promised a $5000 per year income benefit to every American? (adjusted for inflation as of 2025 that is $114,000). No one, Jessup believes, because it’s clearly bullshit, but he can see the impact that the regular radio addresses, rallies, and sermons have converted a lot of the low income and unskilled workers in and around Fort Beulah. The most important of these is the Jessup household’s handyman, Shad Ledue. Forever on the verge of being fired for not being a very good handy man, Shad becomes our lens into which we view and interact with the Windrip presidency. But that doesn’t happen for a while. In the early parts of the book Shad is the first to throw his support behind Windrip’s campaign because he believes it will make him able to escape generational poverty. Some of the locals are like him as well and as the campaign goes on they get more and more overt in their support. Shad eventually gets himself fired from the Jessups but not to worry, he has become the precinct captain of the local force of militia who report directly to Buzz Windrip, the Minute Men. There is a pretty good description of how all of the campaigns function, and ultimately how at the convention Windrip’s use of the Reverend’s reach, and his appeal to the historical conflicts that the US has faced using veterans of the Civil War as props, and clear racist conservatism via the Daughters of the American Revolution propel him to the top of the ticket. Lewis takes time to describe the convention in detail and how Windrip’s theatrical nature helps sway the sea of delegates.

Once he’s installed as President, though he refuses to live in the White House and instead lives in the top floor of a Washington hotel, Windrip begins his plan to consolidate power and remove the checks and balances that keep things functioning. First he arrests and imprisons the Reverend that helped push him over the finish line, then all of the congresspeople from the opposing party. After those steps, Windrip then breaks the country down into 8 districts with their own governors and Minute Man police forces. Creates a new singular political party “the Corpos” and taken control of all facets of the economy, military, and education. 

This is when the US has gone completely fascist. All of the people who were hard Windrip supporters march and threaten everyone else that payback time is coming. This includes Shad Ledue who already has an axe to grind with Doremus Jessup because of the way pre-Windrip society was organized, Jessup was Ledue’s boss and their relationship has always been somewhat fraught. Shad Ledue wasn’t a great handyman but Doremus kept him employed partly out of a sense of pity.

With Ledue in power now as the regional Commander of the Minute Men he has the ability to torment Jessup and his family. But for now the Minute Men have more important work than tormenting Doremus Jessup, they are rounding up communists and social agitators, social democrats, and eventually anyone from the opposition party and sending them to work camps. Once in the camps the workers are leased out to industry and paid a dollar per day, 90 cents of which is taken for room and board. Whole families of the unemployed are relocated this way. 

Very shortly afterward the government open concentration camps to house political prisoners that the Windrip administration uses for propaganda purposes. They make films of the camps where the inmates are “gently re-educated” into patriotic Americans. Speak highly of the food and the necessary work, etc…  When in reality they are hard labor prisons and the sadistic guards torture and beat the inmates to force them to reveal the names of potential enemies of the state.

Jessup decides to quit the paper but he is arrested and taken into a “trial” before the magistrate Effingham Swan because of an editorial he wrote that was critical of Buzz Windrip. Swan tells that Jessup that he would like to kill him but he is going to remain free for now so he can train up another editor to take over the paper. During this hearing, Jessup’s son in law is brought in and threatens Effingham over the whole situation. Effingham has him taken outside and shot.

Jessup returns home. Mary learns that her husband is dead and her child has no father. She falls into a great, deep, silence and stays that way for a lot of the novel. Emma doesn’t really care about the state of the politics of the world and is, like always, more concerned with keeping a nice home and having friends. Jessup returns to the paper and begins training his replacement. During this time Shad Ledue continues to torment the family. He arrests and/or beats several of the smaller characters from the beginning of the story including Karl Pascal. Karl, as we learn quickly, is a communist and they are the first real targets of the Minute Men. 

Let’s speed this up. Things get bad enough that one of Jessup’s friends suggests that he, Sissy, and Emma flee to Canada. With the expectation that he’ll be scooped up and shot in the head like his son in law, Jessup agrees. After a harrowing trip north in a blizzard the group is unable to get over the border and returns home. 

Jessup’s son visits and spends all of his energy trying to talk his father into supporting president Windrip. Jessup decides then that he may not be able to break the government but he can’t sit back and do nothing. He gets some help from his friends and steals an old manual printing press from the newspaper basement and sets it up in the basement of one of their homes. They begin printing pamphlets criticising the government and distributing them around the state. Employing Sissy and her potential boyfriend, Mrs. Candy even, and others, the pamphlets give them all a sense of purpose.

The Minute Men begin burning books. Dozens if not hundreds of titles are declared illegal. Shad Ledue leads the Minute Men to Jessup’s home where they beat him and take all of the books in his study and burn them. Sissy tries cozying up to Shad Ledue to get information about upcoming raids so that she can warn people. She flirts with Shad but he isn’t a rapist, though he nearly does rape her. Sissy, as we remember, is barely 18 years old. Jessup warns her to stay away from him, but she’s sure she can maintain control of the situation. Meanwhile her boyfriend enlists in the Minute Men and begins to act as a double agent, later he is discovered and sent to the concentration camp. Lorinda works as as a delivery person and information gatherer from her tea house. She spends nights at Buck’s in bed with Doremus Jessup. Their relationship has changed though and they both know it.

The printing press operation is eventually discovered as are several articles and papers that Jessup had hidden in his study. He’s is beaten mercilessly and thrown into the concentration camp. In there with some of his compatriots, Karl, for example, they spend their days wandering around in a fenced yard or doing manual labor. In between this are more merciless beatings where the Minute Men try to get additional names of potential revolutionaries from all of them. Eventually the Minute Men begin to turn on each other and Shad Ledoux is stripped of his title and incarcerated for graft.

We also get a nice little aside here in that the US has been building up its military for a war of expansion into Mexico and Canada and one of the branches most in need of people is the Air Corps. Mary signs up and trains as a pilot. She has been single minded and mostly out of the story. We get this one chapter where we learn that she’s become a single engine fighter pilot and has stolen grenades with the plan to blow up the plane carrying Effingham Swan. The grenades don’t work but ramming his plane does and they are both killed. Ironically, Mary is awarded a posthumous medal.

Emma goes to live with her son. 

Lorinda bribes guards at the concentration camp to get Doremus out and he escapes to Canada. After a few months of recovery he agrees to return to the US as a spy and agitator. 

Okay So that was probably more dense in plot description than was probably necessary. Still, even this is just scratching the surface of the novel. Viewed through the lens of history it is clear that Sinclair Lewis was sounding the alarm as the US in 1935 was pushing towards the same trajectory as both Italy and Germany. Two countries where fascism has - at least temporarily - righted their economies. Huey Long was a populist Louisanna senator who was preparing a run for president under the Share the Wealth program which, like in this book, promised each American $5000 per year. Every man a king but no one wears a crown. Long was an agitator of both parties, though a Democrat he was pretty far left. At any rate he didn’t get a shot at the presidency because he got a shot in the belly on the steps of the Louisanna State House. 

Long is, at least a little, the model for Buzz Windrip and some of Long’s sayings make their way into WIndrip’s book “Zero Hour” that we get snippets from leading into the first 15 chapters. There is a quote from Long that seems most appropriate to mention here. “When fascism comes to America it will be wearing the clothes of Americanism.”

So, jump ahead to 2023 and the ascendancy of the Trump campaign to the front of the Republican ticket. Some of the stuff that Windrip did in the book Trump does while campaigning. He holds long rambling rallies with little substantive information, publicizes grievances, attacks enemies relentlessly and not in the “proper” way that politicians generally disagree, rails about the current administration and promises a better world once he is elected to undo all of the wrongs that the current administration has created. He cultivates a deep relationship with very popular religious figures which helps swing the vote then, once in office, abandons those leaders and their followers almost instantly and carries out an agenda that will harm them in the long run. Economic policy, domestic law enforcement, and militarization are all part of the ongoing plan to remake America into his image. 

I found myself checking the publication date as I was reading. It was like, at least for the first 150 pages or so it was a description of the current United States and I am writing this in June of 2025. The parallels between the fictional Windrip and actual Trump administrations are not only visible, they are terrifying. And, like the remaining 200 or so pages of Sinclair’s book we are all Doremus Jessup and family struggling under the boot of authoritarianism. Why Trump hasn’t banned oppositions parties (yes) he has damn well created his own, Trumpists, with their own political and social ideology Trumpism. You can map Lee Sarensen to Steven Miller, in fact that was how I pictured Lee as I was reading the novel, Peter Hegseth as General Haik, etc.. All of these people map to the characters in the book. It’s easy to see Trump as Windrip almost like Sinclair Lewis could see 90 years into the future.

Where It Can’t Happen Here was once a dystopian thought experiment of what would happen if fascism took hold in the US, it is now a document of how fascism took over the US 90 years later. 

Go read it and shiver.