Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can’t_Happen_Here
Basically in the 1936 Presidential Elections Franklin Delano Roosevelt fails to be renominated and a man named Berzilius Windrip is nominated by the Democrats. He’s a very charismatic man and is fascistic in politics. In the general elections Windrip defeats both Roosevelt and the Republicans. As President he sets up a dictatorship including a SA like group called the Minute-Men and persecutes politicial dissenters. After about a year he’s overthrown by his right hand man Lee Sorensen who in turn is overthrown by General Dewey Haik who to unite the populace goes to war against Mexico. But at the same time a rebellion breaks out which takes over most of the West. By the end of the book the rebellion is in stalemate but it seems they will win eventually.
Yeah, from reading the description you posted, I thought “You know, that sounds a lot like…”
Sure enough, I was right.
Hmmmm…too “cerebral” for the average American viewer? Strange, but likely true.
Spoke
February 6, 2010, 4:39am
3
Sounds like it was written with Huey Long in mind.
One of my favorite books.
Long actually makes the comparison in the book itself (Bishop Prang is based on Coughlin):
Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real Fascist dictatorship!"
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” snorted Tasbrough. “That couldn’t happen here in America, not possibly! We’re a country of freemen.”
“The answer to that,” suggested Doremus Jessup, “if Mr. Falck will forgive me, is ‘the hell it can’t!’ Why, there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical–yes, or more obsequious!–than America. Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listen to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio–divine oracles, to millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President Harding’s appointees? Could Hitler’s bunch, or Windrip’s, be worse? Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage’ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles’? And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the–well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? . . . Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? . . . Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition–shooting down people just because they might be transporting liquor–no, that couldn’t happen in America! Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We’re ready to start on a Children’s Crusade–only of adults–right now, and the Right Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!”
Philip Roth had his own, more recent take on the subject: The Plot Against America - Wikipedia
I have a First Edition of this book.
Considering the date of the writing of that book it seems to have been a sort of a satire against the Bush administration.
FriarTed:
V?
Yes.
