A Novel More Prescient Than Fiction

In 1935, American novelist and playwright Sinclair Lewis published a novel he meant to be a cautionary tale about the rise of an authoritarian government in the United States. But when read in today's political climate, the book seems less a work of fiction than a prescient foreboding of what was to come.

The basic plot of  It Can't Happen Here involves a pompous, blustering, populist politician who gets elected president running on a platform that is anti-woman, anti-Jew, and anti-black, by making promises he can never deliver on, by accusing the news media of spreading lies, and by proclaiming only he can cure the country's ills and "make it great again." Once he takes office, he begins issuing orders that by-pass the law-making powers of Congress and the legal review of the judiciary, and strips the rights of millions of people.

What sounds like a plot torn from today's headlines was actually written 80 years before the election of Donald Trump to the White House.

Sinclair's bitingly witty story holds so many parallels to the results of the 2016 election and its aftermath as to be unnerving. Written at a time when fascist governments were popping up throughout Europe, the book was inspired by the naïve belief of Americans at the time that what was happening across the Atlantic "can't happen here."

Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip is a populist U.S. senator loosely based on the bombastic southern Senator Huey Long, whose quest for the presidency was ended by an assassin's bullet in 1935. Windrip curries the favor of Americans disgruntled over the economic blight of the Great Depression by claiming he would end unemployment, much as Trump promised to "bring jobs back" to America.

Men of Little Intellectual Curiosity

A man of little intellectual curiosity, Windrip claims his autobiography is the world's greatest book next to the Bible, the same claim made by an equally incurious Trump about his ghostwritten autobiography The Art of the Deal. Windrips' political base is a rag-tag group of agitators called The Minute Men, or MMs for short. Think of the MMs as a combination of the Tea Party radicals and Alt-Right white supremacists who helped put Trump into office.

Windrip runs for office, much as Trump did, with promises of taking power in Washington away from industrialists and bankers and giving it back to the little man. Once in power, however, Windrip begins appointing incompetent cronies to key government leadership roles.

Sound familiar? Trump, who promised to "drain the swamp" in Washington, filled his Cabinet with controversial D.C. insiders, family members, wealthy financiers, corporate CEOs, and lobbyists—most of whom were appointed to their offices without approval from Congress.

Almost immediately, Windrip by-passes Congress and begins issuing executive orders ending President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal social programs, stripping women of the right to vote, and Jews and blacks of their civil rights. He replaces key military leaders with buffoons from the Minutemen, and abolishes all regulations on businesses.

In the first few days of his administration, Trump used executive orders to strip regulations on banks, industry, and polluters; demanded the repeal of President Obama's Affordable Care Act; ordered the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants (at least those who are non-Anglo); began caging Hispanic immigrant children, and removed the nation's top military and national security leaders from the National Security Council, replacing them with his Alt-Right strategist, Steve Bannon. Bannon, a self-professed white nationalist, didn't last long, of course, and as of this writing he is facing federal criminal charges for fraud.

To consolidate power, Windrip sends handpicked "commissioners" to assume the leadership of local governments. The move is very similar to the Nazis use of gauleiters to take control of areas of Germany. Trump hasn't done that—yet—but several Republican governors have dispatched "emergency managers" to take over local government bodies in their states. (Two such emergency managers were charged with felonies for their roles in the Flint, Michigan drinking water fiasco.)

Windrip fails to make good on any of his campaign promises save one; he ends unemployment by sending the unemployed to labor camps. Workers from labor camps are provided to companies for a small fee. This, of course, means those companies lay off regular workers who, now unemployed, are sent to labor camps.

As one of his first acts, Trump rescinded President Obama's executive order to withdraw federal prisoners from privately operated prisons, which have been criticized for bolstering their profits by outsourcing inmates as prison laborers.

Building Walls to Keep Us In

Windrip fulfills one of Trump's campaign promises when he strengthens border security to prevent illegal immigration out of the United States into Canada and Mexico. Walls, after all, keep people in as well as out. Trump has not succeeded in building his promised border wall, but his incompetence during the Covid-19 crisis forced the bulk of Europe to ban U.S. travelers from visiting their countries—essentially building a wall to keep us in. The only wall Trump succeeded in building so far is an "unscalable" wall around the White House grounds.

Eventually, as Windrip consolidates his power, he does away with all political parties except the new Corporatist Party, whose members are called Corpos. The country is now ruled by and for corporations and wealthy oligarchs, the very definition of fascism as defined by the father of fascism, Italy's Il Duce, Benito Mussolini.

Trump stuffed his Cabinet with wealthy and mostly incompetent corporate donors. His economic policies have benefited major corporations at the expense of American workers. His trade war with China did nothing to hurt that country while devastating a large part of the American agricultural sector. Even before the pandemic, Trump's job numbers were plunging despite burgeoning corporate profits.

Lewis narrates his story through the disbelieving eyes of Doremus Jessup, a middle-aged newspaperman who cannot believe his fellow citizens don't see the slow creep of growing totalitarianism in the country. When MMs begin to terrorize the citizenry, people assume they are just a small minority of rabble-rousers. Even when Windrip establishes concentration camps to house his enemies, many in the country simply cannot believe the United States is falling victim to corporate fascism. They continue to believe "it can't happen here." By the time they realize it has happened here, it is too late.

Trump has praised white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and QAnon conspiracy theorists. He ordered federal police and troops to attack peaceful demonstrators so he could be photographed holding a Bible outside a Washington church. His followers have attacked synagogues and mosques, and gunned down cops. Federal agents clad in unmarked military uniforms kidnapped peaceful protesters in Portland, Ore., threw them into unmarked vehicles, and held them without just cause. Alt-Right armed militia are being allowed to patrol American streets. One of those "minutemen," a 17-year-old teenager with an illegal weapons, is now accused of murdering two people.

And still too many Americans refuse to see this country's slide into authoritarianism. They still believe "it can't happen here."

Lewis's inspiration for this book was simply the time in which it was written. In the 1930s, the United States was still recovering from the Great Depression. Ninety percent of the country's wealth was owned by only three percent of the population. (Today, after 30 years of Reaganomics, only one percent of Americans own the bulk of the nation's wealth).

Dissatisfaction over the slow economic recovery spawned several populist movements, many of them pro-fascist. In 1932, a group of wealthy conservatives attempted a coup to overthrow the government and establish a fascist government. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History on this blog.)

Lewis doesn't spare any political movement in this book. He views any strongly held belief system, political or religious, as potentially authoritarian. All it takes is a populace too wrapped up in their own lives to not recognize what's happening about them, or not caring what's happening as long as it doesn't happen to them.

There is no happy ending to this book. There is no great uprising of patriots; many of those who most loudly proclaimed their patriotism in the beginning of the book end up in the MMs or working for Windrip, just as the Republican Party—which initially opposed Trump's candidacy—is now his greatest enabler.

 Far more than Orwell's 1984 or Huxley's Brave New World, It Can't Happen Here is a cautionary tale  all Americans should be reading—and heeding—today.

Nearly 100 Years after the Bonus March, Trump is Making the Same Mistakes

A beleaguered president, facing an uncertain reelection amid the worst economic crisis of the century, unleashes the U.S. Army to attack nonviolent demonstrators protesting the president’s policies in front of the White House.

If you think I’m talking about Donald Trump’s June 1 use of federal troops to clear the streets in front of the White House of protesters, you’d be right. But there was another failed president who also used federals troops to attack demonstrators. If Trump thinks a “show of force” against recent protesters—not to mention his threat to send federal troops into states to quell demonstrations and riots—will get him reelected, he should look back on how such actions worked for one of his Republican predecessors, Herbert Hoover.

Nineteen thirty-two was an election year. Hoover was beleaguered by the Great Depression which started in 1929 when the stock market crashed. The last thing Hoover needed was a horde of ragged protesters setting up shanty towns in Washington, DC, and calling them “Hoovervilles.”

Promised Bonus for Veterans

The protesters in this case were veterans of the First World War, then known only as The Great War. In 1924, Congress authorized compensating war veterans for the wages they lost while serving in the military. However, this “bonus,” as it was called, would not be paid out until 1945.

As the Depression flung much of the country into poverty, war veterans began lobbying Congress for an earlier pay out of the bonus. Congress agreed to provide the veterans half of their bonuses as “loans.” That, however, was not enough and the veterans began marching toward Washington demanding the remainder of their bonuses. Thus, began the Bonus March.

The first Bonus Marchers reached D.C. that May and set up camps along Pennsylvania Avenue and other parts of the city. By summer, the number of protesters swelled to more than 40,000. Only around 17,000 were actual veterans; most of the rest were family members of the marchers. Though the vets fought the war in segregated units, there was no segregation among the Bonus Marchers. Black and white veterans marched shoulder to shoulder.

On July 28, then Attorney General William Mitchell—in a move that Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr­ would repeat nearly 100 years later—ordered Washington police to disperse the protesters. The veterans resisted, and two were killed by police. Hoover then ordered the U.S. Army to clear away the marchers and their Hooverville campsites. The man in charge of the operation was then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

MacArthur organized a force of 500 infantrymen, 500 cavalrymen, and six tanks backed by some 800 police officers. Leading the cavalry was Maj. George Patton, Jr. Both men would go on to become WWII legends. But they had something else in common.

Unusual Army Officers

MacArthur and Patton were both wealthy officers in a time when the U.S. Army was woefully underfunded and most officers and enlisted men were little better off than their civilian counterparts. MacArthur was the scion of Lt. Gen. Arthur MacArthur, Jr., a Civil War hero whose rose to one of the highest ranks in the Army. Patton was born into a modest family, but married a wealthy woman and adopted her family’s political views.

MacArthur viewed the veterans as traitors, accusing them of being communists and saying, “Pacifism and its bedfellow communism are all around us.” Patton also saw the protesters as “reds” and told his men, “If you must fire do a good job—a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson…”

Among the marchers was Joe T. Angelo, who had been Patton’s orderly during the war. Angelo received the Distinguish Service Cross for saving Patton’s life on the battlefield.

Bonus Marchers flee Army tear gas.
 Source: National Archives

In the late afternoon, the federal troops began to move against the bonus marchers. Patton’s cavalry led the assault, followed by the infantry and tanks. The horse soldiers charged into the protesters with sabers drawn. The infantry followed with fixed bayonets and lobbing tear gas at the marchers. Tanks rolled over the shanty towns. Soldiers set the remains ablaze.

Two veterans died in rout, and dozens more were injured. A baby also died, apparently asphyxiated by the tear gas.

In the aftermath of the battle, Angelo approached his former commanding officer whose life he’d once saved. Patton refused to acknowledge the veteran, saying, “I do not know this man. Take him away and under no circumstances permit him to return.”

The next day, Hoover’s election opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, read a newspaper account of the attack. He turned to campaign aide, Felix Frankfurter, and said, “Well, Felix, this will elect me.” FDR went on to win in a landslide.

Repeating Mistakes

Nearly 100 years after the Bonus March, we are now seeing many of the same social elements that created that disaster—joblessness, poverty, and economic and social repression—compounded by a deadly pandemic and the unprecedented incompetence of Donald Trump and his fellow travelers. Trump blames the violence of the demonstrations on the today’s “reds,” the anti-fascist Antifa. (In fact, there is evidence agitators from the misnamed and extremist right-wing Patriot Movement may be to blame.) Desperate to look in control of the situation—or in his defense secretary’s words “dominate the battle space”—Trump has and continues contemplating turning the American Army on the American people.

One can almost hear Joe Biden turning to one of his campaign aides and saying, “Well, this will elect me.”