It Can Happen Here: Jack London Sinclair Lewis Philip Roth

It can happen here. “It” is right wing revolution in America. That will never happen here, we assume. But the unimaginable does happen here in three daring counterfactual novels by Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth. Not where or how it was supposed to happen. For the usual suspects, alien ideologues, are nowhere to be seen. Instead, insiders make the revolution. Outsiders, those frightening “others” who have had different names throughout history, do not make it. Insiders do it. In "The Iron Heel", London imagines a proto-fascist Oligarchy that precipitates its overthrow of the elected government by throwing a bomb in the House of Representatives in 1913. "It" happens again in 1936 when President Buzz Windrip shows his true colors as a fascist in "It Can’t Happen Here" and again in 1940 when President Charles Lindbergh acts on the same sympathies in "The Plot Against America". These catastrophes accompany a century of war and economic dislocation that are in the history books and help to make the timing of right wing takeovers plausible. Few readers of "The Call of the Wild" know that London was a committed Socialist whose works influenced George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell praised The Iron Heel’s political prescience, but was less sure of its literary strengths. Nonetheless, the novel is a formidable work of imagination that has been called America’s "1984". "It Can’t Happen Here" was published just before FDR’s second term when the country was in deep depression and Hitler’s rise had barely begun. "The Plot Against America" overlaps in time with this novel and takes the reader into the 1940s. All three novels underscore the historical strengths of native right wing movements. Fascism did not happen here, but these novels powerfully evoke its dark potential in American life.