IT Can't Happen Here - Huey Long

Huey Long

Reviewers at the time and literary critics ever since have emphasized the connection with Louisiana politician Huey Long, who was preparing to run for president in 1936. According to Boulard (1998), "the most chilling and uncanny treatment of Huey by a writer came with Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here." Lewis portrayed a genuine American dictator on the Hitler model. Starting in 1936 the WPA, a New Deal agency, performed the theatre version across the country. Lewis had the goal of hurting Long's chances in the 1936 election. (Perry 2004) argues that the key weakness of the novel is not that he decks out American politicians with sinister European touches, but that he finally conceives of fascism and totalitarianism in terms of traditional American political models rather than seeing them as introducing a new kind of society and a new kind of regime. Windrip is less a Nazi than a con-man-plus-Rotarian, a manipulator who knows how to appeal to people's desperation, but neither he nor his followers are in the grip of the kind of world-transforming ideology like Hitler's National Socialism.