Teaching It Can’t Happen Here in the Trump Era

In the dystopian 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis imagines what it would look like if fascism came to the United States. It Can’t Happen Here is a richly productive text for anybody interested in teaching fascism, but the work requires pedagogical caution, as students tend to find it overwhelming, especially in the post-2016-election era. In this short essay, I consider how best to teach students to read a novel that, though originally intended as a satirical take on the political situation of the United States and the world in the interwar period, has now become unnervingly relevant and prescient.

Bitter Cry of Progress

New laws call for new stories, and in the early 1900s those stories were increasingly told by muckraking journalists, documentary photographers, and social reformers. Upton Sinclair, Lewis Hine, Jane Addams, and many others focused on the evils of street work, including sexual bartering. But circulation managers professionalized and stepped up their newsboy welfare work. The proliferation of precociously cute newsboy images in advertisements and comic strips further neutralized reform efforts and legitimized newspapers’ use of child labor. Ethnic newspapers multiplied during this period and developed their own sales and distribution forces. Also propelling newspapers into the new century were automobiles, which presented newsboys with a new occupational hazard. Pushed and pulled by the commercial interests of publishers, and the social agendas of reformers, and the economic needs of their families, this generation of newsies rose up to assert their own vision of progress.

The Morning and the Evening Star

Freud said that Americans are immature because they channel their libido into moneymaking. In Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis seems to agree. It is generally thought that his 1927 novel, Elmer Gantry, continues the critique, exposing American religiosity as itself fundamentally commercial. I argue that Lewis’s project is deeper and more complicated than the standard reading admits and that it derives ultimately from Dante’s idea of the aspirations and errors of love. (Dante is a favorite author of Lewis’s and figures in Babbitt as the one notable from the past who is conjured up in the Babbitts’ séance.) Novels that shock are often read crudely at first, and Lewis’s novels are no exception. I argue that Lewis ultimately agrees with Elmer’s sermon: love is indeed “the morning and the evening star.” As in Dante, so in Lewis: love can aspire, but it can also be deflected and stunted in many ways. Moneymaking is one form of stunting; excessive interest in sex is another (and a better one in Dante’s view, because it is closer to what really matters). And perhaps worst of all, it can be blinded by intellectual pride, a vice from which the agnostic novelist and former ministerial student was in no way free. The novel does criticize George Babbitt the avaricious, it does criticize Elmer Gantry the libidinous, but it reserves its deepest and saddest condemnation for the Lewis surrogate, Frank Shallard, who cannot find anything worthy of his love.

Sinclair Lewis

Harry Sinclair Lewis (b. 1885–d. 1951) was an astute critic of American society and the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in the prairie town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis was eager to experience life beyond his hometown. He graduated from Yale University and punctuated his education by trips to England and Panama, as well as work as a janitor at Upton Sinclair’s artistic colony Helicon Hall. Following graduation, he was a newspaperman, a creator of plots for Jack London, and a translator of poetry from the French and German; he also worked for the publishing firms of Frederick Stokes and George H. Doran. Lewis’s first novel, the boy’s adventure tale, Hike and the Aeroplane (1912), was written under a pseudonym. During his lifetime, he wrote over 100 short stories and twenty-three Novels. His first adult novel was the romantic adventure Our Mr. Wrenn (1914). Other novels in this decade included The Trail of the Hawk (1915), about a young pilot; The Job (1917), notable for its portrayal of a successful young businesswoman; and Free Air (1919), an early road novel. Lewis’s life changed forever with the publication of his hugely popular Main Street (1920), a novel that critiqued small-town life. Lewis wrote four other best-selling novels in the 1920s. Babbitt (1922) examined the culture of business, and Arrowsmith (1925) delved into the world of medicine, a tribute to his father and brother, who were both doctors. Lewis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith, but famously declined it, saying that he didn’t believe in literary competition. Elmer Gantry (1927) took on corruption in evangelical religion, while Dodsworth (1929) sent a retired businessman to Europe to reevaluate his life. Lewis’s winning of the Nobel Prize in 1930 was controversial in America, where many felt he was too critical of the United States. However, Lewis’s critiques of American society continued in the second half of his career with such novels as Ann Vickers (1933), which examined women’s suffrage and penal reform, and Cass Timberlane (1945), a meditation on the state of marriage. His two most controversial novels post-1930 were It Can’t Happen Here (1935), about a fascist who is elected president, and Kingsblood Royal (1947), about a veteran who discovers that he has a black ancestor, and becomes ostracized from his middle-class life. Biographer Richard Lingeman said of Lewis, “He wrote with a real moral passion. He really cared.”