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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in It Can’t Happen Here, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Fascism
Liberalism and Tolerance
Morality and Resistance
Political Communication and Mass Media
Summary
Analysis
In Zero Hour, Windrip quotes a passage from II Kings in the Hebrew Bible, in which a messenger from the invading Neo-Assyrian Empire tells the people of Jerusalem that the Empire will help them survive by taking them to a land of abundance. The chapter begins with Shad Ledue establishing County B’s local government in Fort Beulah. He takes over the old county courthouse and hires Emil Staubmeyer as the Assistant County Commissioner for the Beulah region. Doremus Jessup realizes that he’ll get to see the Windrip administration up close.
This chapter’s epigraph is yet another example of Sinclair Lewis’s use of irony: the messenger appears to be saving the people of Jerusalem by promising them riches and safety, but he’s really announcing that the Empire is about to invade and force them off their land. There’s an obvious parallel between this quote and Windrip’s political strategy: Windrip also appeases the public with false promises of wealth and glory, when his real plan is to rob them blind. Of course, the quote also represents Shad Ledue taking over Fort Beulah with the same false promises as Windrip.
Themes
The Minute Men are growing, as its members now receive salaries on top of their almost limitless “expense money.” Thousands of National Guard members and Great War veterans are signing up, and Lee Sarason is creating Minute Men battalions at every college in the nation. Still, most new recruits are down-and-out farmers, factory workers, and criminals. The Minute Men start calling Windrip “the Chief” and assembling to sing their poorly written new anthem, “Buzz and Buzz.”
Windrip exploits his absolute control over the national budget to expand his loyal private army. Unlike an ordinary army, which would pledge to serve a nation in its entirety, the Minute Men pledge to serve Windrip as an individual. By making the Minute Men the best alternative for desperate job seekers during the Depression, Windrip creates a system of organized corruption, in which the only route to wealth and power for most Americans is by doing Windrip’s personal bidding.
Themes
Then, crisis strikes: someone realizes that the Soviet emblem is actually a five-pointed star, just like the Minute Men’s. The Minute Men order every member to propose a new emblem. They end up choosing Lee Sarason’s proposal: a ship’s wheel, which symbolizes the government, the automotive industry, and the Rotary Club. Sarason proudly announces that the wheel also resembles the Nazis’ swastika and the KKK’s triangle logo. “Buzz and Buzz” is rewritten to name the steering wheel instead of the star.
Lewis uses this inane “crisis” to suggest that fascism is tragic and terrifying in large part because it’s so foolish. Apparently, Windrip, Sarason, and millions of Minute Men failed to recognize this serious design error for months because they know nothing about the communists they despise so obsessively. Their solution is just as foolish: Sarason holds a rigged contest, chooses his own emblem, and invents an incoherent justification for it. Lewis’s message is that because fascism rewards loyalty and bans dissent, it reshapes society around leaders’ dangerous half-baked ideas.
Themes
Windrip declares that the League of Forgotten Men is no longer needed, since it is already victorious. So, he dissolves it. He also dissolves all political parties except his own, the American Corporate State and Patriotic Party. Lee Sarason creates the “Corporate State” based on Mussolini’s Italy: the economy is divided into six industries, each industry chooses worker and employer representatives, and these representatives elect the National Council of Corporations, which sets all business-related policy. Of course, President Windrip appoints Lee Sarason as the National Council’s permanent chairman. Sarason gets the deciding vote over all policy and absolute power to ban anyone unfit from the Council. The Council also bans all labor strikes.
Windrip really dissolves the League because of its political demands and its connections with Bishop Prang. Like most authoritarians who can get away with it, Windrip also dissolves other political parties in order to crush his opposition and increase his chances of staying in power. He replaces these independent organizations with a new system that ultimately answers to his right-hand man, Lee Sarason, and therefore gives him near absolute control over the economy. The council system’s real purpose is not to set industrial policy, but rather to give workers and business leaders the illusion of power, so that they do not turn against the administration.
Themes
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Windrip’s Corporatist supporters call themselves “Corpos,” but their enemies call them “Corpses.” They promise that as soon as they can find the money, they will give every family $5,000. In the meantime, the Minute Men take all unemployed people to labor camps and hire them out to private companies for a dollar a day. The government announces that it has miraculously ended unemployment. The companies fire all their higher-paid employees, who quickly join the camps and retake their old jobs at the new dollar-a-day rate. Of course, room and board at the camps costs them 70-90 cents per day. While some of these workers are frustrated to have lost their homes, cars, and bathrooms, the daily announcements from Windrip’s administration make them feel better by reminding them that they’re helping build a whole new world, and that they’re superior to Jewish and Black people.
Whereas a universal $5,000 wage would create a vast middle class, universal labor camps give the government and big businesses a nearly unlimited supply of nearly free labor to increase their profits. Windrip continues abandoning his campaign promises whenever it’s convenient and profitable, but the public seems to be resisting him less and less—whether because people who oppose the government understand the repression that they’ll face or because they increasingly accept Windrip’s public messaging. In fact, it’s no accident that this messaging grows more absurd at the same time as his policies grow more dystopian and repressive. Lewis uses this pattern to show how profoundly unchecked power can corrupt society, and how easily ordinary people can be tricked into accepting it.
Themes
While the government’s $5,000 promise eventually fades away, it does fulfill its other promises, like inflation: wages triple, while prices rise by far more than triple. Scared by the price increases, foreign countries stop importing American food. But big business owners double their wealth by immediately paying off their debts and refusing to raise wages.
Just as Jessup and his wealthy pro-Windrip friends predicted, the new administration’s economic policies favor the elite, not common workers. This runaway inflation isn’t an accident—it’s an intentional strategy to dramatically redistribute wealth toward Windrip and his allies.
Themes
The government also fulfills its promises to minority groups. Minute Men massacre Black people in the South, leading to riots. Jewish people are required to pay double for hotels, stock trade commissions, and bribes to government inspectors. In Fort Beulah, the patriotic Louis Rotenstern gets to keep his shop as long as he charges Minute Men a fraction of the official price. But the Jewish merchant Harry Kindermann loses all his business. He ends up selling sausages on the street and living in a shack, where his wife dies of pneumonia.
Windrip’s racist policies likely remind readers of historical fascist atrocities—especially the Holocaust. But it’s essential to recall that Sinclair Lewis wrote this book very early in Hitler’s regime, before the Holocaust began. In fact, Nazi Germany’s racial policies in 1936 were very similar to the discriminatory laws that Lewis describes in this passage. He uses this passage to draw an explicit connection between the widespread anti-Semitism in the U.S. and the institutionalized anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany.
Themes
After all of the unemployed go to labor camps, social workers have nothing to do. So, the government hires them in the camps to identify everyone who opposes the Minute Men and Corpos. Any social workers who object to this work get sent to jail, or to the Minute Men’s private concentration camps. Around the country, local Minute Men also get free rein to arrest and torture anyone they want. Dissidents who can afford to flee start leaving for Canada, Mexico, and Europe, where they begin publishing anti-government magazines. The government seriously tightens border security to stop these “lying counter revolutionists.”
The government effectively creates a secret police to eradicate free thought and severely punish anyone who does it. Yet the fleeing dissidents show that this effort can never fully succeed—and no matter how dire the situation becomes, a small subset of people will always be willing to put their lives on the line for democracy. Again, readers may view this passage as prescient, because it closely resembles what actually happened throughout Nazi-occupied territories in Europe during the decade after Lewis published this book.
Themes
Twelve Minute Men guard Walt Trowbridge, who is settling into a dull retirement at his South Dakota ranch. On the Fourth of July, Trowbridge invites his guards to join in the fireworks and beer. They do, and while they nap after the festivities, a plane full of soldiers quietly lands on the ranch. The soldiers handcuff the Minute Men and then fly Trowbridge to safety in Canada. Trowbridge starts an opposition newspaper, and Doremus Jessup and thousands of other dissidents start smuggling copies down into the U.S. By the end of the year, Trowbridge has set up a “New Underground” to help thousands of Americans escape to Canada.
By showing the clever forces of democracy outsmart the foolish troops of fascism, Lewis again suggests that one of democracy’s great advantages is that it distributes wealth and power based on merit, while fascism does so based only on loyalty—and systematically rewards incompetent yes-men as a result. Indeed, Trowbridge’s New Underground offers a rare glimmer of hope in the novel’s otherwise bleak version of the U.S. In fact, Lewis names the New Underground after the Underground Railroad in order to show that the fight against fascism would have to be just as vast and important as the fight against slavery.
Themes
