It can't happen here

[New York: Doubleday Doran & Company, Inc., 1935. / First edition. Signed by author on front free endpaper. [vi], 458 pp. Original black cloth with gilt spine lettering. Front hinge cracked but holding, else Near Fine in an attractive example of the rare silver dust jacket, Very Good+ and unclipped ($2.50) with rubbing, small chip along top of front panel, a little foxing to flaps. / $3,000 from the people at reference 6]

I have finally finished this 375 page book, bought at the beginning of May and noticed at reference 1. As with my previous encounters with the author, it was not read in one go, rather a stop-start affair, but I do get there in the end.

A book which was prompted by the rise of Hitler in Germany and by the various more or less unpleasant groups of both left at right at that time, both in Europe and the USA. Published not long after the very different 'Brave New World' and near fifteen years before '1984', this last derived as much from Stalin as Hitler.

The fictional campaign to get the chap who turned into a dictator elected which occupies the first half of the book is very much the sort of campaign that gave the US President Trump. A dictator who did not, however, last very long, being driven to a comfortable exile by his right hand man, who was in turn shot by a military man. A shooting which I imagine was prompted by Hitler's liquidation of the SA not long after getting into power. The book ends with a not very satisfactory invasion of Mexico. Along the way we have a good number of people escaping to Canada, escapes reminiscent of the underground railway of the last years of slavery - for which see reference 7.

The main character of the book is a decent, ordinary chap - Doremus Jessup - who runs a small-town newspaper in the (fictional) Fort Beulah of Vermont. The sort of fairly ordinary person in whom Lewis seems to major - and we see events largely through his eyes.

Events which include the concentration camps, beatings and executions which characterised Hitler's early years in power, before he scaled up. So unpleasant enough, but a bit more homely than, for example, the camps of Poland. You could bribe the guards. From which I associate to a story told me by someone who had spent serious time with the Military Police, to the effect that no prison is truly closed. There are always going to be guards and guards are only human. You can always find one who will help you get stuff in and out. The being long before the invention of drones and probably before drugs - other than alcohol and tobacco - were a problem.

An interesting read; a lucky find. We will see what BH makes of it, then I might have another go.

PS: and while I did flag a bit along the way, Lewis does do funny as well. So picking page 211 at random we have: ' [a good wheeze for making money would be] getting some real, genuine, old hand-hewn beams that everyone wants so much now in those phoney-Old English suburban living rooms. Well look! Round here there's ten million old barns with hand-adzed beams just falling down...'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-heat-of-day.html.

Reference 2: It Can't Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis - 1935.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here.

Reference 4: 1984 - George Orwell - 1949.

Reference 5: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - 1932.

Reference 6: https://www.burnsiderarebooks.com/.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad.