It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Read Free Book Online

which, with its microphone and typed
revelations timed to the split-second, was so much more snappy and
efficient than the original Sinai. In detail, he preached
nationalization of the banks, mines, waterpower, and transportation;limitation of incomes; increased wages, strengthening of the labor
unions, more fluid distribution of consumer goods. But everybody
was nibbling at those noble doctrines now, from Virginia Senators to
Minnesota Farmer-Laborites, with no one being so credulous as to
expect any of them to be carried out.
    There was a theory around some place that Prang was only the humble
voice of his vast organization,“The League of Forgotten Men.” It
was universally believed to have (though no firm of chartered
accountants had yet examined its rolls) twenty-seven million
members, along with proper assortments of national officers and
state officers, and town officers and hordes of committees with
stately names like “National Committee on the Compilation of
Statistics on Unemployment and Normal Employabilityin the Soy-Bean
Industry.” Hither and yon, Bishop Prang, not as the still small
voice of God but in lofty person, addressed audiences of twenty
thousand persons at a time, in the larger cities all over the
country, speaking in huge halls meant for prize-fighting, in cinema
palaces, in armories, in baseball parks, in circus tents, while
after the meetings his brisk assistants accepted membershipapplications and dues for the League of Forgotten Men. When his
timid detractors hinted that this was all very romantic, very jolly
and picturesque, but not particularly dignified, and Bishop Prang
answered, “My Master delighted to speak in whatever vulgar assembly
would listen to Him,” no one dared answer him, “But you aren’t your
Master—not yet.”
    With all the flourish of the League and itsmass meetings, there
had never been a pretense that any tenet of the League, any
pressure on Congress and the President to pass any particular bill,
originated with anybody save Prang himself, with no collaboration
from the committees or officers of the League. All that the Prang
who so often crooned about the Humility and Modesty of the Saviour
wanted was for one hundred and thirty million peopleto obey him,
their Priest-King, implicitly in everything concerning their
private morals, their public asseverations, how they might earn
their livings, and what relationships they might have to other
wage-earners.
    “And that,” Doremus Jessup grumbled, relishing the shocked piety of
his wife Emma, “makes Brother Prang a worse tyrant than Caligula—a
worse Fascist than Napoleon. Mind you, I don’t
really
believe all
these rumors about Prang’s grafting on membership dues and the sale
of pamphlets and donations to pay for the radio. It’s much worse
than that. I’m afraid he’s an honest fanatic! That’s why he’s
such a real Fascist menace—he’s so confoundedly humanitarian, in
fact so Noble, that a majority of people are willing to let him
boss everything, and with a country this size, that’squite a job—quite a job, my beloved—even for a Methodist Bishop who gets
enough gifts so that he can actually ‘buy Time’!”
----
    All the while, Walt Trowbridge, possible Republican candidate for
President, suffering from the deficiency of being honest and
disinclined to promise that he could work miracles, was insisting
that we live in the United States of America and not on a golden
highway to Utopia.
    There was nothing exhilarating in such realism, so all this rainy
week in June, with the apple blossoms and the lilacs fading,
Doremus Jessup was awaiting the next encyclical of Pope Paul Peter
Prang.

5
I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in
spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or
the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they can
put over their lies, and advance their own positions and fill their
greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who