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  • 2016-12-29 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Sinclair Lewis Say This About Fascism in America? (en)
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  • Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), the American novelist hailed for such 20th-century classics as Main Street, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, and Babbit, also literally wrote the book on the fascist takeover of America, it turns out. The premise of It Can't Happen Here, published at a time (1935) when authoritarian regimes were flexing their muscles all across Europe and Americans had great difficulty imagining a Hitler or Mussolini coming to power in the land of the free, was that it can happen here. Lewis painted a vivid counterfactual portrait of a United States of America sliding into dictatorship, one that is still cited as a cautionary tale to this day: As Time magazine noted on 16 November 2016, It Can't Happen Here was completely sold out on Amazon.com and Books-A-Million within a week of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The election's aftermath also saw the recirculation of a famous quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis, a line often said to have come directly from the novel: When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. Although that statement sounds like a sentiment Lewis would have agreed with, there's no record of his actually writing or saying it, according to the web site of the Sinclair Lewis Society: The same quote has been erroneously attributed to Louisiana governor and U.S. senator Huey Long (1893-1935), who, ironically, was said by some to be a real-life model for Lewis's fascist leader in It Can't Happen Here. A similar quote (probably spurious as well) that came to be attributed to Huey Long after his death was, When fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-fascism. Though we have found passages by other authors that share certain words, phrases, and sentiments in common with the quote attributed to Lewis, we have not found an exact match anywhere. We came across this bit, for example, in coverage of a speech by one James Waterman Wise Jr. in the 5 February 1936 edition of The Christian Century: And this observation appeared in John Thomas Flynn's As We Go Marching, published in 1944: (en)
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