Hot on the heels of 1984, Sinclair Lewis’s speculative satire It Can’t Happen Here is surging to the forefront of a suddenly very popular genre, prophetic dystopian lit. It Can’t Happen Here will probably be the next novel to sell out on Amazon; right now, it’s the number-two recommended read by booksellers capitalizing on the current craze.
It happened last summer too: Donald Trump was an unassailable force leading into the primaries with his populist pitch and authoritarian-sounding promises that resonated with Americans who felt they’d been forgotten. Neo-fascist comparisons cropped up. And think pieces remembered It Can’t Happen Here—because the rise of such a leader meant we might actually be hurtling toward an authoritarian American dystopia, I guess.
At the time, I ran to my nearest used book merchant and picked up a copy. Not so much to turn on to its prophecy but because I feel undeservedly possessive of Sinclair Lewis (according to family lore, Lewis and my glamorous great-aunt Betty were best friends), and I was embarrassed never to have read the one everyone was suddenly talking about.
It’s not that great, turns out.
President Buzz Windrip, truculent populist well-timed for an anxious age, defeats both a principled Republican and an unpopular President Roosevelt in 1936. His administration sets up prison camps—one of which, on the campus of Dartmouth College, holds our hero, Doremus Jessup, throughout the novel’s plodding midsection. (Freshmen marching to class in matching red beanies and class sweaters would have looked perhaps inspirationally proto-military to Lewis, who lived nearby in Vermont in the 1930s.) Doremus is a newspaper editor in northern Vermont with an utterly conventional wife; children who love him though some who betray him; and a frank socialist innkeeper for a girlfriend—in the end, Doremus joins the resistance in Canada, and the book trails off short of their success. We’re to take heed Doremus has sufficient spirit to conquer fascism, and that if only there were more of his type it might not have happened here after all “…for a Doremus Jessup can never die.”
The enterprising skeptic, an affectionate observer of American life, grateful for social comforts but contemptuous of middle-class conformity and especially sensitive to the devilish cruelty of an uneducated mob—this type, “a Doremus Jessup,” is the ideal hero to take on American fascism. Doremus, incidentally, sounds an awful lot like Sinclair Lewis. And in that case, those of us apparently desperate for an ideal literary hero to see us through the terror of the Trump years can’t do much better than the collected works. Elsewhere than It Can’t Happen Here there is, in the best of Sinclair Lewis, no better guide to this awkward American moment…
Babbitt, 1922
The prototypical American businessman, wholly predictable in his tastes and aspirations, finds his apotheosis in President Trump. Until Lewis introduced the world to George F. Babbitt, there was no name for such a man, but the runaway success of the novel proves just how exactly everyone recognized Lewis’s archetype. (Personally, I think Babbitt could be loosely based on my grandfather, Aunt Betty’s brother.) George Babbitt is not a bad man, but his empty ethic, reaffirmed only by his peers’ all wanting the same material successes, fails him at times of uncertainty. Some critics call Babbitt an indictment of the moral failure of the American middle class: Babbitt’s desire to break away from an unsatisfying social life—and his inevitable return to it—tell us that in every crass and boring businessman there is a caged spirit. The crasser the man, we might wonder, the greater the spirit raging against the cage.
Elmer Gantry, 1927
Elmer Gantry, “eloquently drunk,” is an ambitious, dishonest, charismatic leader of men. The masses throng to hear him. He’s an evangelical preacher eventually, but a seminary dropout and an a carousing traveling salesman when the novel opens. His unrepentant womanizing and instinctive desire for power and prestige are driven from the start by a persistent sense of his own inadequacy. The Reverend Dr. Elmer Gantry, probably a sociopath, provokes the brutal beating of another minister turned Scopes Trial atheist. Commanding and conspicuous charisma tramples the intellectual honesty of the rigorous skeptic—watch out, Doremus!
Main Street, 1920
Never has any novel so perfectly captured the mutual contempt, oddly affectionate, between boring old carbon-copy middle-American life and the liberal-minded young people it suffocates. Carol Milford, hung up on the world of ideas she just barely tasted as a college girl, tries to reform her husband’s hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Her unforgivable arrogance is not lost on the down-home folks, but she’s right that Main Streeters, in love with their own provincialism, are missing out on life’s finer and fuller offerings. It just goes to show your Trumpist next door neighbors, or your snooty Clinton-supporting city cousins, probably don’t like you much either right now. But could we call ourselves a free people if we weren’t taking perverse pride in our irreconcilable differences?
Dodsworth, 1929
A humble and inquisitive transformation relieves one lovable captain of industry of his needy and nervous wife, a socialite who finds him unfashionable and prefers the exotic sorts they meet on a European tour. Sam Dodsworth takes sober stock of his life and leaves his frivolous wife Fran, in the end, for a worldlier, lower-maintenance Edith, a divorcee, a self-possessed American expatriate in Venice. If Lewis’s Sam has a message for our anxious America it’s probably that the rewards of living well, rather than rushing around after flighty fulfillments and trending titles, say, are worth the work and the wait.
Americans leave home seeking assurance we’re better off where we started out; we travel abroad in order to feel more at home when we return than we did before we left. Sam and Edith found a little more than that in each other, of course, when neither had anyone else to go back to any longer. And Lewis’s satire shows us this too—the charming silliness of Americans abroad, preoccupied with ourselves and our countrymen, orbiting the Ritz-Carlton (or, perhaps someday, a Trump Hotel).
It’s another distinctly American silliness, worthy of the master of the social novel, that’s driven Americans to seek answers from a lesser Sinclair Lewis satire. When, really, who is this president if not another Babbitt but with Elmer Gantry’s excellent crowd skills and unchecked ambition, who’s pitted Main Streeters against Carol Milfords?
