Sinclair Lewis: Native Fascism. Sinclair Lewis’s fifteenth book also appeared in 1936, and its title is an indication of the jolt it was meant to give to American complacency. It Can’t Happen Here is the story of the American republic transformed into a Fascist corporate state through a military coup d’état made possible by an electorate which was attracted by share-the-wealth schemes, anti-minority agitation, and primitive emotionalism. The methods of the Nazis and Fascists are applied to eradicate the democratic system and even the boundaries of states. The country is divided into eight provinces, concentration camps devour the dissenters and the suspect, and all of American life is harshly regimented. Lewis’s hero is “bourgeois intellectual” Doremus Jessup. After he has lost his newspaper, his daughter, and his son-in-law, he becomes a member of the New Underground. When revolution wins back only half the country, he enters the other half as a secret agent. This novel has most of the faults and virtues of Lewis’s other books: character merging into caricature, complete lack of subtlety, and embarrassingly awkward dialogue; but with this there is accurate social criticism, a genuine if crude vitality, and—particularly in this novel—a very earnest concern for American traditions. Lewis’s point is made clear as Jessup reflects that
the tyranny of the dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogue wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.
John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway: Liberal Causes Abroad. Glenn Spotswood’s geographical and political odyssey, abruptly ended by a rebel bullet in the Spanish Civil War, forms the central theme of Dos Passos’ Adventures of a Young Man (1938). Politically conscious even as a boy, Glenn becomes successively a transient worker, a cum laude college graduate, a Communist labor organizer, and a disillusioned member of a splinter group. Clearly and dispassionately, Dos Passos allows his story to unfold. There are unsavory, dislikable characters such as fierce but noncombatant Comrade Irving Silverstone and sinister Jed Farrington, an American Communist who, as a Spanish loyalist colonel, divides his lethal attentions between the rebels and political unreliables. But one has the feeling that the author is not leaning in any direction. In the prose poems interspersed throughout the novel, however, Dos Passos lectures his reader. The concluding paragraph analyzes the growth of the American Communist Party and explains the gullibility of the Americans deceived by it. The last lines tell the reader that
only a people suspicious of self-serving exhortations willing to risk decisions, each man making his own, dare call themselves free, and that when we say the people, ... we mean every suffering citizen, and more particularly you and me.
A little less obvious was the position of Ernest Hemingway in his fine novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Hemingway would very probably disclaim any intent to write a political novel, but his book teaches a lesson in one of the oldest and surest ways—by example. Robert Jordan has left his instructorship in Spanish at the University of Montana to go to Spain as a demolition expert for the loyalists. Although he has placed himself under Communist discipline for military reasons, he is not a Communist. He is a teacher who has taken a most un-sabbatical leave to fight Fascism in a country he loves. Following the pattern of most of these books, Hemingway sums up a few pages from the end. Badly injured and unable to make his escape, Jordan lies waiting in the forest to fight a fatal rearguard action which will buy time for his escaping friends. He thinks:
I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting and I hate very much to leave it.
In Number One (1943), Dos Passos shifted from dictatorship abroad to dictatorship at home. Chuck Crawford is reminiscent of the late Huey Long of Louisiana. Magnetic, dynamic, and unscrupulous, Chuck wins the governorship and then goes on to the United States Senate. His personal aide is the alcoholic Tyler Spotswood, Glenn’s older brother. Served up as the goat in an oil lease scandal which breaks about Chuck’s head, Tyler allows himself to remain silent and be convicted. This is primarily because of Glenn’s last letter from Spain exhorting Tyler not to let them “sell out” the people at home. Tyler apparently feels that his conviction is an atonement for failure to accept the responsibility which Sinclair Lewis also said devolved upon each citizen. In the novel’s last three lines Dos Passos looks the reader squarely in the eye: “weak as the weakest, strong as the strongest, the people are the republic, the people are you.”
The Grand Design appeared in 1949 to complete the District of Columbia trilogy. In this third novel, Dos Passos’ style remains the same—detached and impersonal, straightforward and clear. His politics (in the prose poems) seem unchanged. He appears to be liberal, to retain his sympathy for the smaller people having a difficult time economically. Since the book covers the war years, the danger represented by the Axis powers is evident, but the equally pernicious influence of militant international Communism is equally clear. Although the book is jammed with characters from many political strata, its primary focus is the career of Millard Carroll, who leaves his Texarcola business to join the New Deal Farm Economy Administration. As the war progresses, Carroll comes to feel that the Four Freedoms are being forgotten in its prosecution. He sees personal jealousies and conflicts within the administration. By implication, the program which produced relocation camps for Japanese-Americans helps to complete his disillusionment. Finally, crushed by personal tragedy, he resigns. The last line of the last prose poem tells the reader, “Today we must learn to found again in freedom our republic.”
George Weller: International Communism. In 1949 George Weller’s The Crack in the Column drew attention to one of the widespread areas in which the Comintern was trying to extend Russian domination. The scene is Greece. The novel reaches its climax when ELAS, the army of the Communist-dominated EAM popular front group, fights the British in the streets of Athens while the American army contains the Germans’ last great effort in the Ardennes. Shot down earlier on a mission, American bomber pilot Tommy McPhail decides not to be evacuated by the underground net of British Major Walker. He remains to engage in similar behind-the-lines work. Walker becomes McPhail’s tutor in global politics as well as espionage. His primary subject is the need for the United States to accept responsibility for creating international conditions favorable to the West, as he says Britain has done. Walker tells McPhail that the United States must learn to recognize Soviet strategy and combat it by such means as permanent American bases in the Middle East. Once again, the most explicit statement of the book’s message is saved for the end:
You Americans just pay your way out of the positions of the last war, then [help] your way back into the same positions in the next. You forget that war is continuous and this everlasting series of visits to the strategic pawnshop a wasteful streak of postponement of the eventual showdown.