American author Sinclair Lewis was born in Minnesota in 1885. He refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize in 1926 - because he believed he should have won it earlier. His high opinion of his writing was vindicated when was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930. He was the first American to receive this award.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
He was a writer ahead of his time. In 1917 he wrote a novel, The Job, espousing the cause of women in a male-dominated work force.
Una Golden refuses the attentions of a couple of young men in her home town, and goes to New York: "She had become a feminist demanding the world and all the fullness thereof as her field of labor."
Una graduates from a business college and finds employment in an office as a stenographer, attached to one of the senior men in the establishment. She takes on Girl Friday duties: dealing with correspondence, answering the telephone, filing documents, maintaining a newspaper clipping service and supervision of the office boy - ". . . she was as profoundly bored as an explorer in the arctic night".
After several similar positions, Una joins the staff of a real estate firm and, after showing talent for writing property descriptions, accepts the opportunity to prove that "since women have at least half of the family decisions regarding the purchase of suburban homes, women salesmen of suburban property should be at least as successful as men".
With this success, she moves on and becomes a dominant player in an entrepreneurial firm, establishing a chain of hotels: "a creator, a real manager, unhampered by unwillingness . . . to accept women as independent workers." The year is 1917.
During her time in New York, Una experiences life in a variety of accommodations - and meets a variety of men and women. She has a brief, unsuccessful marriage and though at the end of the novel Sinclair Lewis has his heroine firmly established in the business world, he could not have envisaged a woman, an African American, as vice-president of the United States.
His ability to predict future trends is disturbingly more evident in It Can't Happen Here. In 1935, when this novel was first published, it was classified as dystopian. Today the early chapters can be classified as contemporary.
Significantly, republished in 2017, the cover notes of the new edition declare: "A vain, outlandish, anti-immigrant, fear-mongering demagogue runs for President of the United States - and wins."
The scene is set with "all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy". Enter Berzelius Windrip "(who) for all his clownish swindlerisms, (offered) a free vigor which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled and senile capitalistic system".
Windrip, in this case, is a Democrat whose "one ambition is to get all Americans to realise that they are, and must continue to be, the greatest race on the face of this old Earth".
He will "not be content until this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home". Of course, the press, and those who disagree with him, are liars and "there were riots . . . all over Washington, all over America".
He has created a quasi-military group, the Minutemen, that he implores "Boys! I need you! Help me - help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you - give the swine the point of your bayonet!"
After winning the election, Windrip appoints cronies to key positions. He moves into the White House and one of his first actions as president is to demand the passage of a bill that gives him "complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything it might amuse him to do".
Both houses of Congress reject the bill. Windrip declares a state of emergency and declares Martial Law.
Only at this point, one hopes, the story becomes dystopian - the state of emergency is enforced by Windrip's Minutemen, now recognised as an auxiliary of the Regular Army.
The government of President Windrip displays many of the features of totalitarianism. The population, including many of those who voted for Windrip, become disillusioned when promises are not fulfilled. Starting with an underground movement, the country slides into a state of civil war.
In the final chapter, Lewis declares that "the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and silencing them forever".
However, as Lewis manages to do in many of his novels, the final line has a note of optimism.
Writing It Can't Happen Here in the 1930s, Sinclair Lewis was watching the rise of the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe. Did he believe the same thing could happen in America? In the light of recent events at the White House it is re-assuring to know that "it couldn't happen there". Not there, in the United States of America. Could it?
