It Can't Happen Here

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For The Pet Shop Boys's film of a similar name, see It Couldn't Happen Here.

Poster for a stage adaptation of It Can't Happen Here, ca. 1936-7 at the Detroit Federal theater

It Can't Happen Here is a 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.

[edit] Variations

It Can't Happen Here is thought by some to have inspired Philip K. Dick's science fiction novel The Man in the High Castle and/or Philip Roth's 2004 alternate history novel The Plot Against America.

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. The story remains a Nazi allegory, right down to the swastika-like emblem used by the Visitors.

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.

On the song "California Uber Alles" by the Dead Kennedys, they refer to the novel in the lyric "Close your eyes/can't happen here"^{[citation needed]}