Previous
Chapter 21
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
Berzelius Windrip celebrates his birthday, December 10, by outlawing all opposition to the government. The punishment will be execution or imprisonment in the regime’s new concentration camps. John Sullivan Reek and Shad Ledue open a concentration camp at Trianon, an old girls’ school near Fort Beulah.
Windrip’s new policy is a monumental step toward further repression and violence. But it probably won’t surprise most readers, because it’s just a way to formalize the protocol that Windrip’s regime already follows. Lewis’s message is clear: from repression and propaganda to concentration camps and mass murder, all of fascism’s most abhorrent crimes can also “happen here” in the U.S.
Themes
Doremus Jessup learns that all around the country, people are rebelling against the Minute Men—and then being captured and executed, left and right. Americans everywhere are watching what they say and even start using code names for Windrip and Sarason. There is a “nameless and omnipresent” sense of fear. More and more well-known public figures—including several well-known journalists—have gotten arrested for opposing the government.
As tensions rise, Jessup still wonders if he can do more to help fight Windrip. Yet he knows that he’s already under close surveillance, that he will be killed if he joins the resistance, and that disorganized rebellions are unlikely to overthrow the government. In fact, by showing the government crush these rebellions, Lewis presents the reader with a series of key political questions: what kind of popular movement would it take to stop a fascist government? How large should it be, how should it be organized, and what should it believe in?
Themes
The government is also burning subversive books. Dewey Haik elects Effingham Swan and Owen J. Peaseley to set the list for the Northeastern Province. They ban idealistic writers like Thoreau and Emerson, plus “atheistic foreigners” like Wells and Tolstoy. One night, Shad Ledue visits the Jessups to check their books, but Doremus has already hidden his subversive ones, and Ledue doesn’t find them. Instead, he confiscates Jessup’s father’s beloved 34-volume Dickens box set. Later, Doremus attends the book burning with the Rev. Mr. Falck. Karl Pascal turns up and demands his books back, and Shad Ledue sends Pascal to the Trianon concentration camp. He’s the second Fort Beulah resident to go, after an electrician who has already died and been forgotten. There is almost no dissent left in the U.S.
The fascist crackdown continues—and it’s brutally effective at suppressing dissent. With book-burning and concentration camps across the country, the U.S. has become all but unrecognizable in less than a year. Even for a committed democrat like Doremus Jessup, resisting the government looks less and less worthwhile. Thus, even though Lewis suggests that people will always resist tyranny and fight for democracy no matter how dire the situation, he also shows that the situation can become extremely dire. After all, fascists can use the powers of the state to consistently win this fight and crush democracy activists. In fact, as Shad Ledue’s behavior shows, fascists can use the power of the state to attack pretty much whomever they want, for any reason they can imagine.
Themes
