This blog closes with a 750-word comprehensive AI essay.
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Everyone has read animal farm by George Orwell, and I am currently reading IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE, by Sinclair Lewis.
Although not often compared together, they’re about fascists or dictators or authoritarians.
Second, there is a similarity of style, because both authors in these two books present a very dry presentation of the awful slide toward ugly authoritarianism. The prose that tells us what is happening in both cases is rather pedestrian and dry, no doubt deliberately.
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You're right to draw a connection between Animal Farm and It Can’t Happen Here, even if they’re not frequently placed side by side. Both books portray the rise and consolidation of authoritarianism in ways that are chilling precisely because of their dry, almost bureaucratic tone. That stylistic restraint may be one of the most effective tools both Orwell and Lewis use—it mirrors the banality of evil before Hannah Arendt coined the phrase.
A few key points of comparison:
1. Satire Without Laughter
Both novels are satirical, but the tone is rarely humorous. The absurdities of the regimes—talking pigs drafting constitutions, or a buffoonish American president dissolving Congress—are delivered with a flat affect. The horror comes not from fireworks or melodrama, but from how plausible everything seems, moment to moment.
2. Dull Prose as Political Commentary
As you’ve noted, the pedestrian prose may be deliberate. Orwell and Lewis often write in the plain style of newspaper reports or civic instruction manuals, which underscores how authoritarianism often presents itself as normalcy. It's not jackboots and lightning bolts—it’s the slow paperwork of repression, the committee meeting, the local enforcer with a clipboard.
3. Revolutions That Betray Themselves
Both novels depict movements that begin with populist rhetoric and end with repression. In Animal Farm, the Seven Commandments are slowly edited until “All animals are equal” becomes “...but some animals are more equal than others.” In It Can’t Happen Here, the promise of reform and anti-elitism gives way to camps, secret police, and media control. The style matches the substance: incremental betrayal.
4. Cynicism as a Narrative Weapon
The emotional flatness in the narration conveys a kind of existential fatigue, as if both authors are warning: Of course this is happening. Why would you expect better? That shared bleakness in tone—more resignation than rage—functions as a subtle indictment of the reader’s complacency.
5. The Reader Becomes the Witness
Neither book tries to "sweep you off your feet." Instead, the reader becomes an increasingly uneasy witness. Orwell's narrator doesn’t weep when Boxer is sent to the glue factory; Lewis’s Doremus Jessup isn’t a fiery revolutionary, just a thoughtful man slowly cornered by a tide he underestimated.
So while the surface details differ—talking animals versus American politics—the bones of the two books are strikingly similar. The detached, dry style mirrors the dull bureaucratic mechanisms through which democracy dies—not with a bang, but with a thousand memos.
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IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE borrows many things directly from the Nazis, which of course were contemporary for the author and his readers.
The Nazis had the SA private army, and in IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE the fascist political party has a huge private army of hundreds of thousands.
The Nazis quickly banned other political parties, as did Lewis’ book.
A certain bishop was portrayed as the brains behind the fascist president, yet he disappears off to a secret prison quickly after the election. (This is presently drily and you can hardly believe such a plot twist is a fait accompli so fast!).
There is a great deal of sanctioned and violent bullying in both Germany 1934 and US 1937, just the same.
Jewish professors were left penniless in 1934, and we see the same in Lewis.
Windrip attacks universities suddenly and early in his term.
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Exactly—and you're drawing out one of the most unsettling strengths of It Can’t Happen Here: how bluntly and rapidly Lewis transposes the Nazi playbook into an American setting, but delivers it with eerily calm narration, as though none of it should surprise us.
Here are a few expanded thoughts to build on your observation:
1. Parallels to the Nazi Machinery Are Unmistakable, but Refracted Through Americana
The private militia in the novel—the Minute Men—are a barely disguised version of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung or Brownshirts). Like the SA, they are thugs recruited from the working class, deployed to suppress dissent, and act outside the law but with state approval. That Lewis invents an army of hundreds of thousands of American enforcers feels both ridiculous and, terrifyingly, believable. He’s saying: It wouldn’t take much.
Similarly, the immediate outlawing of other political parties after President Windrip’s rise mimics Hitler’s Enabling Act of 1933, which dismantled Germany’s multiparty system almost overnight. Lewis collapses this process into a few chilling lines of flat prose, which seems to reflect not dramatic license but historical realism.
2. The “Brains Behind the Throne” Trope and the Fate of Allies
The character of Bishop Prang, who seems like a religious kingmaker or a proto–Rasputin, is discarded almost immediately after Windrip takes power—just like the Nazi regime eliminated early allies once they became inconvenient. (Think of Ernst Röhm, head of the SA, who was purged during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.) That Lewis does this in passing, as you noted, enhances the novel’s mood of creeping dread: even the powerful are not safe. It's the casualness that’s chilling.
3. Sanctioned Bullying and Public Rituals of Fear
From street beatings to arrests of journalists, Lewis catalogs a rising culture of sanctioned cruelty. But again, the prose stays dry—he writes of raids, disappearances, and show trials with the tone of a small-town newspaper covering zoning changes. The normalized brutality feels spiritually identical to Germany's 1934–1937 period: a society where no one knows what’s legal anymore, only who is powerful.
4. The Speed of Collapse as a Warning
You pointed out the “fait accompli so fast!” feeling. This is key. The plot doesn’t build gradually—it slides downward fast, like a society that thought it had brakes but didn’t. The fact that everything is narrated with such restraint—no italicized horror, no gasp—seems like Lewis is warning his readers: this is exactly how fast it can go, and you’ll barely notice until it’s over.
5. A Nazi Blueprint, Written in Real Time
Unlike Orwell’s Animal Farm, which was written after the fact (post–Stalin consolidation), Lewis is writing during the rise of fascism. In 1935, Hitler was in power, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, and Huey Long was making populist waves in the U.S. Lewis was watching it all happen, not with hindsight but with a present-tense, dread-soaked immediacy. That makes the book not only prescient, but also urgent—and the flatness of the prose becomes a mirror to the everyday complicity and numbness that lets fascism thrive.
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When was IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE published - 1935, 1937? The internal setting is clearly 1936 (election year so stated) and 1937.
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It Can't Happen Here was published on October 21, 1935, by Doubleday, Doran and Company . The novel is set in the near future of 1936, focusing on the presidential election and the subsequent events in 1937, as the fictional fascist regime consolidates power in the United States.(Wikipedia)
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And when did Huey long die? He’s clearly the asinine bombastic model for Windrip.
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Huey Long died on September 10, 1935, just six weeks before It Can’t Happen Here was published (October 21, 1935).
You're absolutely right that Buzz Windrip is a thinly veiled caricature of Huey Long—bombastic, populist, faux-folksy, and dangerously authoritarian. Lewis was writing the novel while Long was still alive and politically ascendant, and likely completed it before Long’s assassination. The character of Windrip captures Long’s tone, his demagogic energy, and even his “Share Our Wealth”–style economic promises.
So although Windrip isn't a one-to-one match (he also borrows traits from figures like Father Coughlin and Mussolini), Huey Long is clearly the blueprint, and the timing of the novel's publication makes that all the more stark.
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It might have been distracting that Long was barely in the grave. Yet, had Long been alive, who knows where that would have led. Long - Windrip is like Hearst - Kane soon after.
One even wonders if transferring Huey Long into the novel's character had some indirect influence on the way that Orson Wells transferred Hearst into Kane just a couple years later.
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That’s a sharp and richly layered observation—there’s real cultural resonance in the way both Lewis and Welles transmuted powerful public figures into fictional archetypes, barely veiled and just recent enough to sting.
You’re right: It Can’t Happen Here appeared just weeks after Huey Long’s death, and had he still been alive, Lewis might have pulled his punches slightly—or the public reaction might have been more explosive. As it stands, the timing gave Lewis a strange advantage: he could lampoon Long while sidestepping charges of libel, and simultaneously leave readers with a disturbing hypothetical—what if he had lived? Buzz Windrip becomes a ghost of the American future, not its past.
The parallel you draw to Hearst–Kane is especially apt. Citizen Kane premiered in 1941, five years after It Can’t Happen Here, and only a few years after Hearst tried to crush its release. But like Lewis with Long, Welles wasn’t just doing a hatchet job—he was building a mythos, using the biographical as raw material for a national cautionary tale.
And as you suggest, it’s entirely plausible that Welles (who was voraciously well-read, politically attuned, and theater-savvy) took a cue from Lewis’s technique. Windrip is not an impersonation of Long; he’s an amalgam of American temptations—greed, ignorance, jingoism, religiosity, and power-worship. Likewise, Kane is more than Hearst: he’s the embodiment of capitalism’s seduction and rot.
If nothing else, It Can’t Happen Here proved that American audiences could handle (and maybe needed) literary facsimiles of real political actors, filtered through fiction to bypass defenses. Welles may have seen that precedent and thought: If Lewis could do it with Long, I can do it with Hearst.
It makes for a compelling chain:
Long → Windrip → a template for demagogues in American fiction
Hearst → Kane → a prototype for the corrupted self-made man
Both are American tragedies written in the style of modern myth.
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But could Huey Long death have detracted from the impact of the novel. The novel was an intended portrayal of what would happen if Huey Long, who while writing it was very much alive, won the nomination in 1936. That was the intention in the book - and the book would’ve been in press at the time of death.
But the book appeared in a very different context, or no one needed to worry the least bit about Long and his millions becoming a very real madman presidential candidate, since he was several weeks dead.
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Absolutely—Huey Long’s sudden death in September 1935 likely blunted the immediate political impact of It Can’t Happen Here, or at least shifted the lens through which it was received.
Here’s how we might think about it:
1. The Book’s Target Vanished Weeks Before Launch
At the time Sinclair Lewis was writing the novel (spring and summer 1935), Huey Long was actively preparing to run against FDR in 1936. His “Share Our Wealth” clubs had millions of members. He was by far the most visible populist threat to American democracy, and Lewis clearly meant the book as a warning shot—a "here’s what could happen if this man wins" political parable.
But Long was assassinated on September 10, and the book hit shelves on October 21. So when readers picked it up, the real-world corollary to Buzz Windrip was already dead, and the sense of “this could happen next year” had instantly softened into “this could have happened.” That undercut the urgency. The headline had changed.
2. From Political Fiction to Political Fable
Had Long lived, the novel might have stirred direct political controversy, perhaps even galvanized opposition or hardened support. Instead, it entered the world as a speculative alternate history, not a forecast. Reviewers and readers could now distance themselves: This isn’t about 1936 anymore—it’s just a what-if. The tone shifted from alarm to allegory almost overnight.
3. Less Threat, More Thought Experiment
By the time it was reviewed, critics were no longer grappling with Long as a 1936 candidate but treating the novel as a meditation on American susceptibility to fascism. That may have helped the book age better, in the long run, but at the moment of release it likely diluted its firepower. It’s the difference between a novel warning of a coming storm and one describing a storm that never came.
4. What Might Have Been
There’s a real counterfactual here: What if Long had lived until 1936? The book might have been seen as subversive, even dangerous—perhaps banned in some circles. Lewis may have become a political lightning rod, not just a literary voice. As it happened, he published a sharply political novel into a vacuum where its most explicit referent was conveniently no longer a threat.
Summary:
Huey Long’s death robbed It Can’t Happen Here of some of its immediacy and potency, transforming it—just weeks before publication—from a red-alert political novel into a cautionary fable. It’s still powerful, but it didn’t provoke the kind of public reckoning that might have followed if the man it thinly veiled were still alive and on the campaign trail.
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750 word essay at the level of New York Review of Books.
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When the Target Vanishes: Huey Long, Sinclair Lewis,
and the Muted Detonation of It Can’t Happen Here
When Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here in October 1935, he could not have foreseen that his novel’s most direct political analog—Huey P. Long—would be assassinated just six weeks before the book’s release. The timing was not merely tragic or coincidental; it fundamentally altered how the novel landed in the American political consciousness. It Can’t Happen Here, written as a thinly veiled warning against Long's very real presidential ambitions, entered the world as a cautionary tale whose central menace had, quite literally, vanished.
At the time Lewis wrote the book, Huey Long was arguably the most formidable populist threat to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Long had built a national movement on the back of his “Share Our Wealth” program, rallying millions with a potent cocktail of economic redistribution, personal charisma, and authoritarian style. He had already served as governor of Louisiana and was serving as a U.S. Senator while effectively continuing to rule the state through loyal surrogates. Long’s speeches were folksy and inflammatory; he cast himself as a tribune of the common man and regularly assailed the wealthy, the press, and Roosevelt himself. By mid-1935, it was widely assumed that Long intended to run as a third-party candidate in 1936, potentially splitting the Democratic vote and throwing the election to the Republicans. Roosevelt reportedly considered Long his most dangerous rival.
Lewis's novel is a mirror held up to this very moment. It Can’t Happen Here tells the story of Buzz Windrip, a bombastic, anti-intellectual, pseudo-populist who rises to the presidency by promising $5,000 annual payments to all citizens, restoring traditional values, and putting America first. Once in power, Windrip quickly dismantles democratic institutions, bans other political parties, creates a paramilitary force modeled on Hitler’s Brownshirts, and plunges the country into a thinly disguised dictatorship. The protagonist, a Vermont newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup, watches in horror as the country surrenders to demagoguery and fear.
The connections to Long are obvious and intentional. Windrip’s diction, messianic promises, and folksy malevolence echo Long’s public persona. Lewis even credits Windrip’s rise to a half-mad religious figure, Bishop Prang, much like Long’s real-life collaboration with Father Charles Coughlin, the influential and anti-Semitic radio priest. Lewis wasn’t simply inspired by Long—he was staging a fictional scenario that would unfold if Long captured the White House.
But by the time It Can’t Happen Here hit shelves in October, the scenario had become moot. On September 10, Long was fatally shot in the Louisiana State Capitol by Carl Weiss, a 29-year-old physician. The man Lewis hoped to portray as the plausible face of American fascism was no longer a threat. As a result, the novel was received not as political prophecy but as political parable.
This shift had consequences. It Can’t Happen Here was still widely read and praised, and it sold well. But it did not provoke the kind of cultural tremor Lewis may have anticipated. Had Long still been alive—still planning his third-party bid, still lacerating Roosevelt from the right—the book might have been seen as incendiary. It could have become part of a national debate about the future of American democracy. Instead, the timing of Long’s death rendered the book a thought experiment, a chilling what-if, rather than a partisan provocation.
It’s worth comparing this to the reception of Citizen Kane six years later. When Orson Welles created Charles Foster Kane as an unmistakable avatar of William Randolph Hearst, the real Hearst was not only alive but actively working to destroy the film. That live tension between character and referent charged the film with subversive energy. By contrast, It Can’t Happen Here lost its lightning rod at the very moment it might have sparked a national reckoning.
Lewis's prose, too, may have contributed to this transformation from alarm to allegory. The novel is written in a surprisingly dry tone, almost journalistic in its detachment. Terrible events—a coup, the imprisonment of dissenters, the collapse of legal norms—are narrated with grim understatement. This stylistic choice underscores the banality of authoritarianism, how it arrives not with grand fanfare but with forms filed in triplicate and loyalists quietly promoted. But it also allowed readers to experience the novel as distant, even abstract, once Long was no longer a looming reality.
In the long view, It Can’t Happen Here has proven enduring precisely because it outgrew its original target. Buzz Windrip may have started as Huey Long in fictional dress, but he has since come to represent a more generalized American susceptibility to strongmen and demagogues. The novel’s eerie relevance during the Trump era prompted new readers to rediscover its warnings. But it is worth remembering that when the book was first conceived, it was not just a warning about authoritarianism in the abstract—it was a laser-focused alarm about a real man, with real power, who nearly changed American history. The fact that he died before the book was published turned It Can’t Happen Here into something more subtle and less explosive. The warning was still valid. But the fuse had been cut.
