Sinclair Lewis: An American Oracle

It seems odd to write the profile of a long dead author with Current Affairs as one of the tags. By the end of this post you will know why it is entirely appropriate here.

In my second or third year of college, seeking a break from chemistry text books, I stumbled upon a novel called Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis in the dusty stacks of the English Lit section of the school library. I had never heard of the book nor the author and must confess that I picked it up solely for the unusual sounding title. The book proved to be very interesting. I had never read anything like that before about America written by an American. In a laconic, peaceful and polite manner, Lewis methodically devastated two iconic pillars of American society - middle class consumerism and small business.  It was a stunning, if not a stirring eye opener. My thought was "Was the guy a communist?" He wasn't, I found out later.  In fact, Lewis was the quintessential middle class, liberal, educated American who was viscerally opposed to all forms of oppressive orthodoxy whether it issued from the left or the right of the political spectrum. He didn't seek his heroes or philosophy from outside America. He has been called a "satirist" and a "realist." But I suspect that at heart, Lewis was a romantic. He was focused on America which he wished to see become the symbol of fairness and decency.

After Babbitt, I looked for more volumes by Lewis but my college library had no other book by the author. I didn't think about Lewis for a long time and later once again, I found him in a library, this time in the excellent public library system of Omaha, Nebraska. I quickly read three more of his books and  watched the movie adaptation of another. Two of the books, Main Street and It Can't Happen Here were satires in the same free swinging vein of Babbitt, written not with bitterness or anger but with pessimistic resignation, humor and both microscopic and telescopic insights. The third, Arrowsmith is a departure from the style - a gentle tribute to a country doctor and his dedication to humane scientific research (Lewis was the son and grandson of doctors, born in Sauk Center, Minnesota).  In Main Street, Lewis' target was small town America - its genteel stuffiness, reverse snobbery of anti-intellectualism and close minded prejudices lurking behind the outwardly calm and order. Elmer Gantry (I saw the movie, haven't read the book) was another withering satire which caused an uproar among the clergy and pious churchgoers by exposing the hypocrisy and lechery of a charlatan preacher. (Burt Lancaster was fantastic in the movie version.)

I am currently in the middle of an anthology of short stories by Lewis and this post was inspired by my thoughts straying once again to his literary legacy. The real reason I am writing about Sinclair Lewis today is the novel he wrote many years after Main Street, Babbitt and Arrowsmith. It Can't Happen Here was published in 1935  when America was in the painful throes of the Great Depression and the gathering storm of fascism brewing in Italy, Germany and Spain was not on the mind of the average American.

Although It Can't Happen Here (ICHH) is generally categorized as satire, it is more of a cautionary tale. I first read it in the early 1990s, enjoyed it but didn't take Lewis' fantasy about America's easy descent into fascism quite seriously. The rude shock of the (s)election of George W. Bush in 2000, the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq made me reach out for the book once again just before the 2004 presidential election for a quick re-read. This time, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  It was as if Lewis had time traveled into GWB's presidential reign and gone back to write a dire warning. 

Set in the bucolic backdrop of Fort Beulah in peaceful Vermont and seen through the shrewd eyes of the middle aged, thoroughly decent, small town newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, the book is deceptively laid back, funny and almost childishly capricious in its narrative reach.  Buried inside the patina of placidity are terrible pointers that totalitarianism need not arrive with a clap of thunder but can happen quite imperceptibly if the common man can be convinced to become the enabler in a fascist creep up within a seemingly democratic and open society by appealing to his fears, prejudices and selfish interests.

So what is it about ICHH's message that makes it chillingly prescient and as fresh as our currrent headlines? Consider, compare and contrast the following scenarios in the fictional reign of Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip (1934 - 1938) and that of the real George W. (Dubya) Bush (2000 to present). (Buzz was shadowed by a Rovian figure who groomed him for years to one day launch him on the national / international stage!)

• A populist leader (a Democrat in the book) is elected on a simplistic platform of petty nationalism, military jingoism, wearing religiosity on one's sleeve and not so veiled anti-intellectualism. ( Buzz (like Bush) even pronounced the United States of America as the U-nited States of America! )
• Government was not to function just as an institution of public service but an efficient corporation as well. Buzz's administration was proudly named the "Corporate- Government" or "Corpo" for short.  Its most trusted ally and beneficiary was big business, not the common man who brought it to power.
• The freedom of the judiciary was severely curtailed in order to strengthen presidential powers. Suspension of the habeas corpus, use of secret military tribunals, arrests on suspicion alone (while going from home to the hardware store) and concentration camps were the order of the day.  It was all made possible by invoking threats to national security.
• Dangers to peace, prosperity and national security were blamed on certain groups of "un-American" people who could be then be persecuted and their loyalties questioned. In Buzz's case, they were communists, Jews, Negroes and atheists. The logic was that as long people can look down upon someone else, they feel good about themselves, no matter how miserable they actually are.
• Citizens and public officials  were encouraged to spy and tattle on their friends, neighbors and employees. (See Joe's post on Michelle Malkin)
• Big city clergy of affluent churches enthusiastically supported the government's efforts at curtailing freedoms and promoting war efforts when promised a bigger role for religion (Christianity) in public affairs.
• Drumming up public support for the invasion and occupation of other nations who didn't play by our democratic rules and Christian values - all for the good of their savage souls.
• An actual pre-emptive invasion of Mexico on the flimsy and concocted grounds that Mexico was planning an attack on El Paso, San Antonio, Laredo and other US border towns.
• Newspapers and radio were mostly cowed down into compliance or enthusiastically on board with the government's vision of America and the world. Public protest to the "Corpo" appeared in the form of anonymous underground pamphleteering. (Blogs?)

And there is more.  ICHH is often compared to George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. But there is a crucial difference between it and its British counterparts. Orwell and Huxley described totalitarian regimes already in place where the subjects see the light from within an oppressive system.  Lewis warns about the danger of an open society sliding into a fascist mode using the very processes of democracy which we take for granted as "abuse proof." 

Lewis wouldn't have cared much for the comparison of his books or his style to that of others. Brainy, socially awkward and painfully shy, he was a misfit pretty much wherever he was. Too smart and open minded for the mid western small town of his birth, he also chafed at the ivory tower snobbery of Yale and New York where he was respectively educated and spent his working life. He dismissed literary tradition as so much baloney. According to him, every story teller has a personal story to tell, be it Homer, Shakespeare, friends gathered around a campfire or the bone wary traveler in a caravanserai in the desert. According to Lewis, it did not matter what someone else had said before - it matters only what you want to say next.

It surprises me somewhat that so few have read Sinclair Lewis.  The younger generation of Americans is mostly oblivious of Babbitt and Main Street.  Not even many of my American contemporaries who were of high school and college age in the sixties and seventies, have read him.  It is as if this brilliant writer who jolted America into paying attention to his incisive thoughts and their own shortcomings when he was alive, just disappeared when he died. It is all the more mystifying because Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature.  His critics carped that he garnered the prize for his "unfair" skewering of America which pleased the snooty and envious Europeans.  I would like to believe that it was because he was a darned good writer. Lewis himself would probably have dismissed his own genius (as he indeed did) as nothing more remarkable than the ability to "sit on the seat of your pants all the time" in a chair and write.

Comments

[Dean C. Rowan]

I confess that although I am not at all oblivious of Lewis, it is my misfortune that I haven't read anything of his. Obviously, I should plan to do so, and not merely because he anticipated Buzzsh. The lesson to be learned from this juxtaposition of a work of literature and a political state of affairs separated by three generations is not that Lewis was prescient, but that America toys with fascism as a matter of course.

Lewis a frustrated romantic? You may be right, judging from his autobiography for the Nobel Foundation. He wishes he could depict his life "as possessing some romantic quality," but notes that instead it "has been a rather humdrum chronicle of much reading, constant writing, undistinguished travel à la tripper, and several years of comfortable servitude as an editor." There are several other allusions to unachieved glory in the brief vita, which concludes with a sense of a tentative hope surrounding his "first authentic home" and the prospects of the "beginning of a novelist's career" after his "awkward apprenticeship with all its errors."

Our remoteness from Lewis and his work underscores the loss of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., whom I read, predictably, as a post-adolescent, but not since then.

[Ruchira Paul]

Dean:
Thanks for linking to Lewis' autobigraphical page on the Nobel Foundation site - very nice.

You are probably right. It was not so much prescience as the keen and sardonic power to observe the chinks in the heroic armor of a great nation which, as you say, "toys with fascism as a matter of course," simultaneously believing that "It Can't Happen Here."

While the tendency to throw democratic values out the window has been mostly apparent in US foreign policy of Pax Americana, even during benign regimes (Vietnam, Cuba, Central / South America and the Middle East), I would like to know if any other US presidency, including that of Richard Nixon's, came as close to playing by Buzz Windrip's play book in domestic policy as Bush-Cheney-Rove have.

Unless it is required reading in an English lit class, it is always difficult to go back and "discover" an older author who is more or less out of style, although not out of context. I doubt that I would have read Sinclair Lewis now, had it not been for my chance encounter with Babbitt on a lazy afternoon in my youth. In case anyone decides to read just one book by Lewis, I recommend "Main Street."

[Sujatha]

Got it (or rather, a 2-in-1 book with both Main Street and Babbitt in the same hardcover)! I couldn't find 'It Can't Happen Here', but will look for it once I'm done with these.

[Ruchira Paul]

Sujatha:

Main Street and Babbitt are probably the two best choices for an introduction to Sinclair Lewis' oeuvre - at least as works that we associate him with most closely. As for ICHH, don't worry. You probably have got a pretty good idea of what that book describes from my short report and the last six years of Bush-Cheney-Rove.

Remember, Lewis wrote Main Street and Babbitt in the 1920s. Once you get settled in the rhythm of his slightly old fashioned style of prose and focus on the content, you will see how "contemporary" Lewis remains.

[Shunya]

An enticing profile of Lewis. I'm one of those who haven't read him but thanks to a recent gift from a friend I now have ICHH on my shelf and reading list. :)

[Ruchira Paul]

A recent gift of ICHH? Must be an old fashioned friend or someone sick of the Bushies. Let us know how you like it.

[Lee]

I have read the book. The closest this country has come to its vision was President for life, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

[gaddeswarup]

I am reminded of Ben Franklin's words at the Constitutional Convention on September 17, 1787 at the age of 81:
“… I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general government necessary for us, there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and I believe further that this is likely to be well administered for several years, and can only end in despotism as other forms before it,when people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

[M E-L]

I read ICHH a couple of years ago and also noticed the many parallels -- right down to the rally at Madison Square Garden. Also, his paramilitary group is called the Minutemen.

The book is available online here.