It Can't Happen Here

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Poster for the stage adaptation of It Can't Happen Here, Oct. 27, 1936 at the Lafayette Theater as part of the Detroit Federal Theater

It Can't Happen Here is a semi-satirical political novel by Sinclair Lewis published in 1935 . It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius "Buzz" Windrip, who resembles (to some extent) the flamboyantly dictatorial Huey Long of Louisiana and Gerald B. Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose far-right views earned him the nickname "The Jayhawk Nazi". It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.

In 1936, Lewis and John C. Moffit wrote a play version, also titled It Can't Happen Here, which is still produced. The stage version premiered on October 27, 1936 in several U.S. cities simultaneously, in productions sponsored by the Federal Theater Project.

A 1968 television movie, Shadow on the Land (alternate title: United States: It Can't Happen Here) was produced by Screen Gems as a pilot for a series loosely based on this book. ^[1] At the time it was decried by critics (such as TV Guide's Cleveland Amory) as preposterous, since Americans would never allow the events and situations in the film to occur.^{[citation needed]}

Inspired by the book, director–producer Kenneth Johnson wrote an adaptation titled Storm Warnings, in 1982. The script was presented to NBC, for production as a television mini-series, but the NBC executives rejected the initial version, claiming it was too 'cerebral' for the average American viewer. To make the script more marketable, the American fascists were re-cast as anthropophagic extraterrestrials, taking the story into the realm of science fiction. The new, re-cast story was the mini-series V, which premiered on May 3, 1983.^[2]

[edit] Variations

On the Mothers of Invention album Freak Out!, there is an a cappella song titled "It Can't Happen Here", which is about the social and political upheaval of the mid to late 1960s.

An early short story from Saul Bellow titled, "The Hell It Can't," can be read as a response to Lewis' novel.

[edit] See also

• It Happened Here

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Full text of It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis (1935)
• Book review
• It Can't Happen Here from Australian Project Gutenberg
• Public Enemy by Joe Keohane, Boston Globe, December 18, 2005.