Doremus’s realization (chapter 19):
“The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jesups who have let the demagogues wriggle in,without fierce enough protest.”
It Can’t Happen Here quote of the day. From Chapter 19:
“An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is,one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks–it just confuses them–to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day.”
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip
The Sinclair Lewis It Can’t Happen Here quote of the day:
In chapter 7, at the political convention at which Windrip is nominated to run for president, one of his cohorts reads out a letter purportedly making Windrip’s platform clear:
“…the letter explained that [Windrip] was all against the banks but all for the bankers–except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 percent for Labor, but 100 percent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World…and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly.”
In Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here, Doremus’s son, Philip, defends Windrip, who is running for president. (see chapter 5):
“‘Now listen, Dad. You don’t understand Senator Windrip. Oh, he’s something of a demagogue–he shoots off his mouth a lot about how he’ll jack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he won’t–that’s just molasses for the cockroaches. What he will do, and maybe only he can do it, is to protect us from the murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviks that would–why, they’d like to stick all of us that are going on this picnic, all the decent clean people that are accustomed to privacy, into half bedrooms, and make us cook our cabbage soup on a Primus stuck on a bed! Yes, or maybe ‘liquidate’ us entirely! No sir, Berzelius Windrip is the fellow to balk the dirty sneaking Jew spies that pose as American Liberals!’
“‘The face is the face of my reasonably competent son, Philip, but the voice is the voice of the Jew-baiter, Julius Stretcher,” sighed Doremus.”
[Later, once Windrip takes over as president and turns the country into a fascist dictatorship, Philip, a lawyer, goes along, making excuses for the dictators, rationalizing away what they do, and so succeeding within that system–even becoming a judge himself. His only concern about his father is that his father’s opposition will harm his own prospects.]
As noted in my last post, for the next several posts, I am going, quite simply, to set out quotes from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. As you read them, their relevance to today’s political scene should be apparent, and I hope they will inspire you to obtain and read the entire book. So, here’s the second excerpt (this one is from chapter eight. Doremus Jessup is considering the appeal of the presidential candidate, Berzelius Windrip):
“Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, … watching Senator Windrip…could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store… .
“…[Berzelius] was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts–figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.
“But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat-a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Cleveandian-Wilsonian Democrat–and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.”
I’ve been away from this blog for a few months–family illnesses to deal with, but they are, for now, dealt with–and I’m back!
I’ve just finished reading Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. The novel was written in 1935, using the ambitions of the demagogue Huey Long as its basis. But, it reads, at times, as if Lewis had used a time machine to come forward to 2017, had taken what is happening now in America, and returned to his own time to write his work. (Of course, one could argue that the more things change, the more they stay the same. But that would only indicate that Lewis understood something about the weaknesses in the nature of man and in American society that is universal and not unique to his era.)
The book’s nominal protagonist is a mild-mannered, liberal, small town Vermont newspaper owner/editor by the name of Doremus Jessup. But the true main character of the novel is our society as a whole. The book uses the novel form as mechanism to present a thinly veiled treatise on the way in which fascism and totalitarianism can happen here. This use of the novel form seems to have fallen out of fashion in the last half of the 20th century, the concept of what a novel should be and do having narrowed considerably. But, that is a subject I will address separately in a later post. Today, and for the next several days, I am going to present some quotes from It Can’t Happen Here, which I expect may strike a chord of familiarity with the reader, as they did with me.
Here is the first. (A number of chapters begin with an excerpted quote from the fictional book, Zero Hour, by Berzelius Windrip, the demagogic senator who becomes president in the novel. This one precedes Chapter 11.):
“When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, ‘Buzz, you’re the thickest-headed dunce in school.’ But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The United States Senate isn’t so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip”
Yes. The Magnificent Seven is a movie, not a book, and this year’s version is a remake at that. I don’t usually bother going to see remakes, but in this instance I was curious because Antoine Fuqua, who decided to remake the film, said it was because he was so affected by Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, and by John Sturges’s 1960 American version. In an interview on National Public Radio, Fuqua specifically noted the effect that the social messages in John Sturges’s 1960 American version had on him.
In the 1960 version, seven gunslingers hire on to help a Mexican village fight off a band of bandits who have been repeatedly raiding their village for supplies. In Fuqua’s 2016 version, seven gunslingers hire on to help an American western town fight off a villainous mine owner who owns the local sheriff and wants to run them out and take their land.
The 1960 version had tremendous and varied social messages imbedded in it. I did not expect Fuqua’s version necessarily to have the same messages, but had hoped, based on his interview, that it would have some social import. Having now seen his film, and considering his interview statements, I am puzzling over why he bothered to remake it (other than to give Denzel Washington an old west gunslinger role to play and making money–but then, one could make any western. He didn’t need to do it under this title).
Fuqua’s version is an adequate western by 2016 standards, but it simply provides the well-worn good guy-bad guy dynamic; the character of it’s heroes (or should one say, anti-heroes?) are not so much developed as “suggested.” They are “types,” and where they are given history or motivation, those read as thin.
Fuqua’s version borrows a few lines from the 1960 film, but the impact is not the same. For example, in the 1960 version, Eli Wallach, as the bandit, says of the villagers, “if God didn’t want them sheered, he would not have made them sheep.” He adds that not to “sheer” them (take their goods periodically) might even be sacrilegious. The Wallach villain says this as an explanation and a shrugging philosophical excuse. Despite his villainy, he has a certain humor and human quality about him. He may not be sympathetic, but he is given a motivation that, from his point of view, is understandable. Fuqua’s villainous mine owner says the same line after a killing spree, and with total contempt, but no truly compelling motivation. Furthermore, his evil is utterly cartoonish and overdone at this point, so the line reads as overkill (pardon the pun). By contrast, in the 1960 version, each and every character–from the seven to the farmers to the bandit–is fully developed.
So far as social import goes, Fuqua’s film might as well be one of the old cattlemen versus fence-building farmer movies combined with the stylistic tradition of The Wild Bunch, or Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns. On the other hand, the Sturges version made many social points–from the very beginning of the film, where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen brave violent opposition to transport an Indian to be buried in a cemetery where white men lie, to lines like those of Charles Bronson, when little boys of the village, who have more or less adopted him, call their fathers cowards, and he spanks one hard, responding:
“Don’t you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there’s nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That’s why I never even started anything like that… that’s why I never will.”
The 1960 version allowed the Seven to be heroic, while showing that true bravery–what it takes to be “a man” is more complex than shooting a gun, and that the seven recognize it.
Finally, the writing in the 1960 version was magnificent. There is so much wonderful dialogue that allows the actors to reveal character, while simultaneously moving the plot along and furthering the social themes of the film. This is in no way matched by the most recent version, nor did it seem to me that such an effort in the writing was even made.
For examples of the wonderful dialogue in the 1960 version, click here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054047/quotes. Though I have watched many westerns since, this was one of only two western films I liked for a very long time, and even now, one of the two best, because it is not merely a western, it is more. So even if you are not a lover of westerns, please, please, PLEASE, try watching the old 1960 version some time and see what you think. And let me know what you think!