Sunday, June 6, 2021

It Can Happen Here

 

            Americans had all sorts of reasons for ignoring the fascism that gripped Italy and Germany in the thirties. The national tendency toward isolationism is perennial, and even the less xenophobic often convinced themselves that the autocratic regimes in Europe were necessary to keep the threat of Communism at bay. Less understandable was the complacence with which Americans watched so many of their fellow citizens turn into fascists. Some American writers and artists—not many—sounded the alarm, among them Sinclair Lewis and Mari Sandoz.

Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here in 1935, two years after Hitler took power. His villain is not Hitler but a very American kind of con man. Lewis begins in Fort Beulah, Vermont, where Doremus Jessup, the editor and owner of the local paper, can read the signs that the demagogue Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, assisted by the radio evangelist Methodist Bishop Paul Peter Prang and the kingmaker Lee Sarason, will win the Democratic nomination and the presidency. And so he does.

            Lewis says of Fort Beulah, “It was a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand bodies—the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.”

            Windrip gets elected because the white trash (represented by Doremus’s handyman, Shad Ledue) think he’s promised them incomes of five thousand dollars a year, the anti-Semites love his Jew baiting, the businessmen and bankers ignore his claim that he’ll nationalize various industries and strictly regulate the banks, thinking that he’s really for them, the militarists see him as the answer to American laxity, and so on. With Windrip no one reads the signs, or everyone ignores them. With Hitler, no one read the book, or everyone ignored it. Windrip organizes a militia before his election, and arms them afterward. He calls his Brown Shirts the Minute Men.

            Windrip consolidates power and Doremus feels it closing in, but not until he is called into court (just as his lover, Lorinda Pike, is leaving the courtroom) and his son-in-law is murdered by the Minute Men does he realize how far things have gone. He collaborates for a while by helping the local pedant Emil Staubmeyer to take over as editor of the paper. An attempt to flee to Canada fails. As more and more people (the Jewish merchant Rotenstern who supported Windrip, for instance) are sent to concentration camps, Doremus quits the paper. When he is approached by an agent of exiled Walt Trowbridge, the candidate who lost to Windrip, Doremus organizes a local chapter of the New Underground.

            He is eventually sent to a concentration camp, and while he is there, Windrip is deposed by Sarason, and then Sarason is overthrown by a general named Haik. Lorinda Pike arranges Doremus’s escape, and they have an idyllic few weeks before she goes to start another New Underground chapter. He goes first into Canada, but then returns to spread information in aid of a real armed uprising that begins in the Midwest. Lewis leaves it hanging here with the future in doubt, but with some hope.

  Mari Sandoz’s Capital City, published in 1939, is not a national allegory like Lewis’s. Sandoz concentrates more on midwestern complacencies and bigotries, and on a portrait more specifically fashioned by her knowledge of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Franklin, the capital of Kanewa (as in Kansas-Nebraska-Iowa), is smaller and more provincial that its larger neighbor Grandapolis, from which it somehow wrested capital status in the past. The Grandapolis paper loves to publish any news showing Franklin’s provincialism, gaucherie, and brutality.

The Franklin establishment—the old money, the elite banking and high-end-merchant class, the police, the legislature, and the local paper—are anti-labor, anti-poor (they call them “the reliefers”), anti-Semitic, and pretty much anti-anything-that-ain’t-us.

The Capital City is the main character of the book, according to Helen Stauffer (Mari Sandoz, Boise State University Western Writers Series 63). But if so, the main character is an antagonist, and the protagonists are the people who try to hold back the corruption and the worst of the damage. These include most importantly Hamm Rufe, who, although living in obscurity in a squatter’s camp called “Herb’s Addition,” on a hill above the city, belongs to one of the city’s most prominent families. His real name is Rufer Hammond, and he is named after his progressive grandfather, George Rufer, who started the university and published a liberal newspaper. The family has since become as reactionary as the other elite families, though Hamm’s mother, Hallie Rufer Hammond, shows some awakening of conscience at the end of the book, rebuilding some of the squatter’s shacks in “Herb’s Addition” that have been torched by an arsonist. Another of the protagonists is Hamm’s friend Dr. Abigail Allerton, author of an exposé of the city titled Anteroom for Kingmakers (ostensibly about the history of the Frontier Hotel) and a history professor at the Franklin university until her fellow townspeople find out what’s really in her book and put pressure on the university. Lew Lewis is another, a labor leader who takes a bullet for his efforts to organize his strikers, but recovers. There is also Carl Halzer, a farmer who watches with dismay the increasingly corrupted farmers’ association and becomes a candidate for senator of the state. Entering the action of the book late is the woman who nursed Hamm back to health after a severe beating in Boston and whom he married and lived with for some years, Stephani Kolhoff.

Sandoz ‘s prose here lacks any stylistic polish, and she throws names at us—hundreds of them—with fire-hose force. The reader has to sit back and try to keep up, relying on her repetition to stay oriented. It helps to read the book in large chunks.

Reactionary Franklin is brutal and violent, most notably in strikebreakers hired by the transport company with the connivance of the politicians, and in the activities of the fascist group, the Gold Shirts, who include prominent young men of the town such as Harold Welles, the son of Hamm’s oldest friend, Colmar (Cobby) Welles, whose suicide really starts the action of the book. Cobby’s is one of two suicides among Franklin’s elite, the other being Penny Hammond, wife of Hamm’s brother Cecil (Cees) Hammond, who takes sleeping pills when she finds herself pregnant with a child fathered by someone other than her husband. There are a number of murders: the orphan Spaniard and Jewish kids taken in by a town doctor and a university professor are killed by a hit and run driver, apparently deliberately; an Italian immigrant is nearly wrongfully convicted of the murder of his hunting buddy, who was killed over sexual jealousy; and the murder of two small twin boys by the strikebreakers, who shoot up their car by mistake, precipitates some of the book’s concluding action, which results in the state supreme court striking down the anti-picketing law that has been the cover for much strikebreaking violence. That decision is a bit of irony, however, as it comes at the same time as the election of a governor who promises not to be restrained by any law in his strikebreaking activities.

On the eve of the election Halzer makes a barn-burning speech against the reactionaries that gets him arrested, though he ultimately wins the senate race, and Abigail sells the film rights for Anteroom. But the governor’s election goes to the demagogue Stetbettor, the negotiations with the strikers break down, and the new governor calls in the national guard. Curiously, Sandoz chooses to give this bleak apocalypse happy endings for her couples: Carl Halzer and Stephani Kolhoff get together, with Hamm’s blessing, and the young couple whose troubles we’ve been watching since the first pages, Mollie Tyndale and Burt Parr, get the blessing of her father, along with a wad of cash and orders to get out of town and make a life for themselves somewhere far away from the benighted streets of the Capital City.

Both books are funny, though the humor can be very dark. The focus of Sandoz’s book is narrower than that of Lewis, enabling a little more depth of character, but neither writer is aiming at character study. What comes through clearly in both books is the precariousness of a political order and standard of decency that we imagine, at our peril, to be unchanging and unchangeable.

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