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Sinclair Lewis - It Couldn't Happen Here with Daniel K. Williams · Christians Reading Classics

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: In 1935, the renowned American novelist Sinclair Lewis published a novel that was very different in some ways from his previous work.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: The title, It Can't Happen Here.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is a dystopian political novel in the same mode as Jack London's earlier The Iron Heel, and it's a precursor in the genre of such works as George Orwell's 1984, which was published a bit later in 1949.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Just as fascism was taking hold over Europe, Sinclair Lewis asked, Could the same happen in America?
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And if it did, what might it look like?
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: We learn the answer through the experiences of the novel's protagonist, one Doramus Jessup.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Here is how Lewis introduces this character early in the novel.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Doramus Jessup, editor and proprietor of the Daily Informer, the Bible of the conservative Vermont farmers up and down the Beulah Valley, was born in Fort Beulah in 1876, only son of an impecunious Universalist pastor, the Reverend Lauren Jessup.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: His mother was no less than a bass of Massachusetts.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Reverend Lauren, a bookish man, found fond of flowers, merry but not noticeably witty, used to chant, Alas, alas, that a bass of mass should marry a minister prone to gas.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he would insist that she was all wrong, ichtheologically.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: She should have been a cod, not a bass.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: There was in the parsonage little meat but plenty of books, not all theological by any means, so that before he was twelve, Doramus knew the profane writings of Scott, Dickens, Zackeray, Jane Austen, Tennyson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tolstoy, Balzac.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: He graduated from Isaiah College, once a bold Unitarian venture, but by 1894, an interdenominational outfit with nebulous Trinitarian yearnings.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: A small and rustic stable of learning in North Beula, 13 miles from the fort.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But Isaiah College had come up in the world today, excepting educationally, for in 1931, it held the Dartmouth football team down to 64 to 6.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a new podcast from Mirror Orthodoxy.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am Nadia Williams, book's editor here at Mirror Orthodoxy, and director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Ashland University.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And today I have the privilege of talking with my favorite American historian, Daniel K.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Williams.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Dan is the author of several books, including God's Own Party, The Making of the Christian Right, Defenders of Dan Born, The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Wade.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And his newest book, Out October 1st, is Abortion and America's Churches, a religious history of Roe v.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wade.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: He is Associate Professor of History at Ashland University.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for being here today.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you for having me, Audia.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to talk with you.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to open with a somewhat more uh general question before we get to it can't happen here.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: What is a classic?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is it enough that we're reading this particular book 90 years after publication?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Or what other criteria would you add?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think a classic is something that speaks across eras, that speaks to a subsequent generation as well as his own, and that's why it has enduring power.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: I think a classic is in some ways in the mind of a beholder.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there are certain books from the 1930s, for example, that some people today would very much consider classics, and other people would say perhaps are not worth reading.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe when we get into this book, we'll even find a divergence of opinion here as to whether it really does transcend time periods.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: I would argue that it does.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's certainly true that not every work has enduring power.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And there are some works that have had a wide audience for a few years after it's published, even revivals.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then at a certain point in time, they're they're more or less forgotten, only to be then rediscovered sometime later.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, what one example of uh a literary master who was maybe not appreciated in the immediate aftermath of his death, but that then experienced a revival uh much later would be Walt Whitman of the 19th century.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: In his own day, there were there were poets uh like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that were far more popular.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and yet uh today I think he's arguably the most famous poet or close to the most famous poet of the 19th century.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's sometimes difficult to tell uh in the immediate aftermath of a person's death or or the decades subsequent to someone to a work's publication whether uh an author or a book will be able to speak across time periods.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: But but the works that have been most widely regarded as classics, I think have that one aspect in common.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: That is, they in some way address themes about humanity or or about truth that speaks across generations.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's also a humbling reminder to us, um, not just as readers, but for those of us who are writers, that um like you just don't know what's gonna happen to your books, who will read them and for how long or not.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it's okay.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: God holds all this in his hands.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, let's start with some background about Sinclair Lewis.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: Who was he?
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: Sinclair Lewis was part of the lost generation of writers, and that that is a formal term that's used to describe a generation of people born between about 1883 and 1900.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: These were people who experienced World War I as young adults and were profoundly shaped by it, often in ways that that were traumatizing.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And Sinclair Lewis was part of this generation.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: He was born in 1885 uh in Minnesota.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: He had a difficult upbringing, but then he ended up going to a Oberlin Preparatory Academy, which was a high school associated with Oberlin College.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in the 1890s, it was an evangelical uh institution, very liberal uh politically and to a certain extent theologically as far as evangelicalism was concerned, but but still very devout and very fervent in its its belief in those northern evangelical principles of the 19th century that paired individual conversion with social uplift.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so Sinclair Louis experienced uh a conversion and was uh a devout Christian for several years in his teens.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: He then went to Yale, he lost his faith, he became an atheist for the rest of his life.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: He began magazine writing uh in after leaving college.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: That was pretty typical for authors of the early 20th century.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: There were numerous writers who got their start uh in publishing magazine pieces.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: And then he wrote his first major novel in 1920 that really put him on the map, uh, and that was Main Street.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps in some ways it remained his favorite novel.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: It uh described uh the Midwest, uh, a small town of the Midwest in ways that that I think channeled what Sinclair Lewis became famous for, that is, his ability to satirize the commonplace, uh to lampoon without derisively mocking.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: That is, he was able to identify those things that that were quintessentially American or essentially American, and perhaps look critically at those aspects, but not completely dismiss them.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the novel did become a major success.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: He then went on to write uh other novels, Babbitt, uh published in 1922, which in some ways epitomizes uh the 1920s, and then uh Aerosmith in 1925, which is sometimes regarded as his greatest work by by many critics.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_01: He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Aerosmith.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_01: He turned it down.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Uh why?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: He argued that it should have gone to Main Street, not Aerosmith.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: So then uh he published uh Elmer Gantry in 1927, uh, which was famous enough to give us a phrase that has remained in the English language of an Elmer Gantry as someone who's a religious hypocrite, uh usually a uh preacher who is is not living up to their own uh professions.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it in many ways it it satirizes the fundamentalism and and the show business quality of religion in the 1920s, including people like uh Amy uh Semble McPherson, who makes an appearance in disguised form, uh thinly disguised form in the novel.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then in 19 uh 30, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: He was the first American ever to be awarded uh Nobel Prize in in literature.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Did he accept that one?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: He accepted that one.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: He gave uh an acerbic address, uh accepting it, uh criticizing uh American literary critics and and others uh criticizing Americans in general, but he did accept the Nobel Prize.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: But in 1935, he was uh considered on the decline.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: He had had a couple of novels that were widely panned in the early 1930s.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: People thought that he just wasn't living up to his former standards.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in 1937, his second marriage, his first marriage ended in divorce, but in 1937 his second marriage would end in divorce.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: That was still in the future, but but he was drinking heavily as he often did, and and by 1937 he would check himself into a rehab facility, though it didn't take.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: He ended up uh dying of alcohol-related complications at the age of 65, some years later.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but it this novel in some ways was his last hurrah.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And although it did not sell as widely as some of his other novels in his lifetime, it is considered by many, including uh the Encyclopedia Britannica now, as his most famous work.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is what people remember Sinclair Louis for.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess that's one of the things we'll be talking about, is what has given this book in particular uh the enduring power that it has uh had.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's unfortunate.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's an unfortunate life story, but um it seems like so many writers from novelists from the from his generation had this same story.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was extremely common.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at other writers of his generation, people like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and people that today might be lesser well-known, like uh John Dos Pasos, um, and and of course, the most famous uh novelist of the 1920s of Scott Fitzgerald, uh most of them were typified by dark, realistic novels, that is, novels that that described the people of their own time in ways that were depressing, not necessarily in gothic terms, not horror, but simply uh an expression of depression at the banality of life, that most of the major characters are people who who are ordinary people searching for meaning and maybe not exactly finding it.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And nearly all of those writers were heavy smokers, uh alcoholics, uh people who had lost their faith if they ever had a faith to begin with, and more than that, maybe people who had lost their faith in life, people who were who were simply uh depressed at the at the state of the world.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: So that wasn't necessarily what most Americans were reading.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you look at the best-selling novels of each year, you can find plenty of novels that are that are almost escapist.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: So the best-selling novel of the 1930s by far was Gone with the Wind, that sold a million copies within two years of his publication, and then another million by the end of the 1930s.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that, of course, is a novel of nostalgia, of looking back at this lost world uh with wonder and and uh longing.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And of course, has its own issues uh today with uh how how it treats race and the lost cause.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: But but that's that's probably more typical of what people wanted to read during the depression, but what uh was being written as far as the literary critics were noting, the highbrow literature of the time did tend to come from this lost generation.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: I I guess I should note that it's not uniformly depressing because for most of your podcast listeners, the most famous writer of this period by far that they would know, a product of the Lost Generation, was another Lewis, born in 1898, C.S.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, who of course served in World War I, went through an atheist stage, uh struggled with a lot of the same things that these writers struggled with, and yet in the end came out with a strong and ever-deepening faith.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't have to end the way that it did for St.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Clair Lewis.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good point.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like we're looking at the tale of two Lewises.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like you could be one or you could be the other.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into the novel itself.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we don't want to spoil the ending for readers who might want to pick it up, but let's set up the basic story.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like, where are we?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: When are we, and what is happening?
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this novel was written over the summer of 1935, and it begins at the very moment that Sinclair Lewis was writing this piece.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: And for readers who are encountering this work for the first time, what they'll probably notice is that within the first 50 pages, they are hit with an unusually long barrage of names that belong to real people.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, there are fictional characters right from the beginning, but there are references to a lot of real political figures.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: It almost reads like a newspaper from the summer of 1935.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a reason for that, because this novel is very much about America.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: All of Sinclair Lewis's novels, to a certain extent, were about America, but most of the time he told that story through through the lens of particular characters uh like Babbitt or or others who were fictional, who were prototypes, who represented something.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Doromus, uh Jessup is very much one of those type of characters, someone who represents some typical values, a particular ethos of a particular region.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: But unlike Lewis's other novels, even though Jessop is the protagonist, he's not necessarily given the central focus that you might expect for a Sinclair Lewis novel.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, what this novel is really about is about the American democracy and why it is more fragile than people think.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so, right from the beginning, the leading characters in the democracy of Sinclair Lewis's day appear in the novel, not so much as fully fleshed-out characters, but as reference points.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: So Franklin D.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: Roosevelt is mentioned several times.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Other characters of the time that might be less well known to people today are mentioned.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the one person who was alive in the summer of 1935 that probably affected Sinclair Lewis the most was Huey Long.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: Huey Long was a senator and former governor from Louisiana.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: He had essentially created a Louisiana political machine that operated through patronage, and he had become a populist hero, someone who had won a national following on the basis of his plan to redistribute the wealth.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Lewis was writing this novel while Huey Long was alive and while he was preparing a third-party candidacy for the presidency that Franklin Roosevelt feared.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: He feared that that Long would get enough votes to throw this election into the House of Representatives.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: That is, it would he would describe, he would uh prevent FDR from winning an outright majority.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so there was a lot of concern uh on the part of Roosevelt's advisors and campaign as to what uh Huey Long would likely do because he did have a widespread national following.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: He had the endorsement of the most popular radio broadcaster of the time, uh Charles Coughlin, uh, who was a uh a Catholic political broadcaster, and in turn, that's represented in the in the book by a a Methodist broadcaster who's described as almost exactly like Father Coughlin.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So the lead character in this book, uh Buzz Windrop, is very closely patterned after Huey Long.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it happened after Lewis had wrapped up most of his writing that Huey Long was assassinated in on September 10th, 1935.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the book then went into print in October.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it did not go into print before uh Sinclair Lewis made this last-minute change.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: He he said uh that he mentioned Huey Long and mentioned that that he was now dead.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that uh allowed, I think, for something that would have been a little awkward if Huey Long had still been alive.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is, how do you have Buzz Windrop emerging?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, now that you have Long being assassinated, you have in this novel Buzz Windrop emerging as the new Huey Long.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so for people like Sinclair Lewis, they had worried about Huey Long, and now they worried about the state of American democracy.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_01: And in Sinclair Lewis's view, the problem was not so much Huey Long per se.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: The problem was more deeply rooted in the American people, that Americans did not love democracy as much as they said.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: They loved to talk about democracy, they loved to talk about freedom, but they were just as vulnerable to uh a fascist or authoritarian takeover as any European country was.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so in 1935, Hitler had been in power in Germany for two years.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: He had already begun uh taking steps to limit the rights of Jews, and in 1935, he was rebuilding uh Germany's Air Force illegally.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Mussolini had been in power in Italy for the previous decade or more, and in 1935, Italy was invading Ethiopia.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: And those things do appear in the novel as references.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: As this authoritarianism was sweeping Europe, there were signs that alarmed some people in the United States that Americans could be vulnerable to the same thing.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: There were American fascist organizations.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: There were the brown shirts and the silver shirts, sometimes they would even hold uh rallies and parades.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: Beyond that, there were there were authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning populist figures like Huey Long that were very popular.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Charles Coglin seemed to have little regard for American democracy per se.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: He was very interested in populist economic proposals, uh, but prone to anti-Semitism and was turning against the New Deal as not radical enough.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so Sinclair Lewis was seeing all of these things happening in the summer of 1935.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so this novel is in some ways about whether the American democracy can survive, whether the traditional liberal order can survive.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like he's sympathetic to Franklin Roosevelt.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: Franklin Roosevelt is always portrayed positively in the novel, but without much explanation, Franklin Roosevelt is also viewed as very weak.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: And there's there's hardly any explanation as to why he didn't get the Democratic Party nomination again in 1936, but it's described that he did not.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: That instead Americans were gravitating toward a more populist, uh, authoritarian-minded figure.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the central question of it can't happen here is can fascism or authoritarianism happen in the United States?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: And if so, how would it happen and what would it look like?
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's striking.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, you're a historian who keeps telling people, you know, religion is an integral part from uh of politics and how we talk about politics.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems like this novel is very much taking that uh approach as well.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_00: So it is a political novel, but religion is part of the story.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: So can you talk a little bit?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: About this.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: What is the role of religion here?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think its role is as a weak force that means well but but cannot protect the United States.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: So Sinclair Lewis, as I said, was an atheist, uh, someone who had been through a brief religious phase in his youth, but but uh no longer believed that there was anything supernatural.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: One might expect an atheist to take a very dim view of religion, but that's actually not what comes through in this novel.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: So Sinclair Lewis had already written a novel, Elmer Gantry, in 1927 about religious hypocrisy and the excesses of fundamentalism, as well as the excesses of the antecedents of what we might call the prosperity gospel of the time called New Thought and satirizing religious figures, ranging from the fundamentalists uh of the Scopes trial to uh the charismatic revivals of Amy Simple McPherson, all of that was packaged in Elmer Gantry.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: In this novel, by contrast, there's there's no sign of fundamentalism.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the religion that's portrayed is generally portrayed respectfully.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there are two ministers or or religious leaders who have some uh degree of importance in the novel.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there's Father uh Perfis, who is a French-Canadian Catholic priest, who is a friend of the main character uh Doromus uh Jessop, and who is also engaged in this resistance to authoritarianism, a resistance to the regime of Buzz Windrup.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then there's also the Episcopal Minister, Reverend Falk, who actually suffers for his stance uh of resistance.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: But even though they're portrayed sympathetically, there's there seems to be the subtext that religion is not going to save America from totalitarianism.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: I I think that Sinclair Lewis was being true to the religion that he observed and knew in Vermont.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: So even though I imagine he probably wasn't going to church services as an unbeliever, he would have been familiar with the historic role that churches had played in New England.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he he was also observing the Protestant establishment of the time that was predominantly almost exclusively liberal in its theology uh and moderately liberal in its politics.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the protagonist in this story, the hero in this story, Dormas Jessup, is, as you read at the beginning, the son of this universalist minister.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: The universalists were a small denomination, but one that had their central presence in New England and especially in Vermont.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh in the early 1960s, the Universalists would merge with the Unitarians, and so today it's it's not a separate denomination.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time it was a very liberal denomination that strongly believed uh in equality, that believed in reason, believed in learning, but had traditionally been associated less with the upper crust than Unitarianism had.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: It had had some working class roots, and tended to be the sort of religion that might uh appeal to uh a small D Democrat uh like Doromus Jessup, this this Vermont, uh born-bred Vermonter who's who's the small town newspaper editor and and believes in the common person, believes in liberal democratic values.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yet when he goes to the Universalist Church, which he hasn't really been doing that much lately, but he he attends and he finds that he's just not inspired by what's there.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: He's not really moved by the sermons, and so he tries some other churches, he tries uh the Episcopal Church, and even though he likes the the pastor, Reverend Falk, he finds the the high church liturgy off-putting.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: The people are too uh pretentious and there's too much uh wealth uh in the congregation, he decides he doesn't really feel at home there either.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so in the end, he just stays home.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: He just gives gives up on religion altogether.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that that early scene in the novel of Jessup going to different church services and finding them lacking, I think shows us Sinclair Lewis's view of mainline Protestantism in New England at the time.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: It meant well, but it wasn't really going to help people.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it at its best, it could inspire people with platitudes, with the idea of forgiving others, forgiving one's enemy.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: But in the real struggle, those things were useless.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps religion is portrayed in its most tragic manner when the Reverend Falk is being tortured, and he issue he, as a martyr, issues this prayer and says that he will not pray for the forgiveness of his enemies.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, he prays that God will curse his enemies.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now, he could have, Sinclair Lewis could have gotten that from the imprecatory psalms or other parts of the Bible, but he did not.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: And instead, what he has is Reverend Falk trying to quote the words of Jesus and then reversing them, which I think is a sign not necessarily that he was turning to a more vindictive form of religion, but that he was seeing the weakness of religion altogether, that it simply was not adequate for this moment.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so when the when the ministers are portrayed sympathetically as people who are challenging the authoritarianism of the Windrop regime and engaging in the resistance, they're doing so as good people, but not doing so on a theological basis.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's nothing in their faith that compels them to take this stance.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: They're not Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrestling with questions of conscience and ultimately concluding that this is what God has called them to do.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, they're simply people who seem to move beyond their religion rather effortlessly.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: And perhaps that's a sad commentary on what many people would say perhaps is an accurate portrayal of New England mainline Protestantism, that after the 1930s it would suffer a continuous generational decline.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: And while it certainly still exists, it's far weaker in societal influence and political influence than what it than the influence that it might have had 90 years ago.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's um that's really striking.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um so to what extent would you say, and you're kind of starting to touch on this already, to what extent did um these views in this novel represent mainstream America at the time, whether like political fears that Sinclair Lewis presents here, but also religious views?
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because we think usually of the mid-century is a very religious time, but of course we're before that.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_00: We're in the 30s.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it it accurately portrays a lot of things that were going on in the 1930s that that religion was experiencing a decline, especially mainline uh Protestant religion did seem to be uh at a low ebb in in the 1930s.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of people who were talking about the crisis that America was going through.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that explains why the book did receive uh widespread popular acclaim.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: It sold 300,000 copies within uh just a few years of its release, and it was also made into a play, which a lot of more people saw was produced by theater companies around the United States.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's how a lot of people encountered the ideas, not only by reading the novel, but also by watching the play.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: The critics of the time were mixed in their reviews.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think critics said then, and and they've continued to say since then, that that the novel is not a literary literary masterpiece, that it does not conform to sort of the expectations that they had of what what a novel would provide, and what Sinclair Lewis's earlier work had.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: As I said, it it much of it seems to come straight from a newspaper that people at the time call it more social commentary than fiction.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: There there is, of course, fictional storyline, but it's often buried in this larger political commentary.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you take away the political commentary, there's no book.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's a that that is what the book is about.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's about uh political commentary through through the form of thinly disguised, thinly veiled uh fiction.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And for some people that works, and for others it doesn't.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, in my view, that is what has given this novel enduring power.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: It raises some important political questions, questions about who we are as Americans.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe the greatest surprise uh in this novel, when uh when I read it after reading about it for a number of years, actually reading it, the the greatest surprise to me of this book is that the Great Depression is not front and center.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: The country was going through this economic crisis.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: The unemployment rate had been 25% in 1933, it was probably still close to 20% in 1935.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: Even two years of the New Deal had not gotten America out of this economic crisis.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Huey Long's appeal is widely viewed as economic.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: But what's interesting is that even though Sinclair Lewis had become a socialist in in 1911, and even though he was an atheist, and and you might argue that an atheistic socialist is prone to a materialistic explanation of human ills, instead, this novel does not suggest that if people just had enough money, that they would embrace the liberal principles of democracy.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: Rather, this novel suggests that there's what one might call a spiritual crisis.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Sinclair Lewis, of course, doesn't use that term.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: He's not talking about uh spiritual themes in the way that a Christian would.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, when he describes the appeal of authoritarianism, he opens not with the breadlines, not with people demanding jobs, but instead with a patriotic rally in a small town in Vermont, something that seems to satirize a daughters of American Revolution meeting.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: He suggests that there's something within American patriotism itself that inclines us toward authoritarianism.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that I think is the most interesting part of this, and it's something that I think a lot of critics have not necessarily picked up on in the way that they should.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is not commonly discussed when people discuss this novel, but I think it should be, because it's it's that quality that gives this novel transcendent power.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that people would call this a literary masterpiece, and therefore it would not be a classic on literary grounds alone, but I think on grounds of political philosophy and asking the deep questions that we need to be asking about who we are as a country and what, if anything, can protect our democracy and what might incline us to authoritarianism that's rooted within the American psyche itself.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: This novel, I think, has power that none of the other dystopian political novels that I've seen have had.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's asking questions that I think we need to grapple with today, just as people did in 1935.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: That is a really uncomfortable proposition.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that patriotism, American patriotism, could incline us to authoritarianism.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: I will um I will push back on um Sinclair Lewis's literary merits.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, as even the passage I read at the beginning of this podcast shows, he really had a way with words.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like he's a really um witty um stylist.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I mean he he was a master wordsmith, I think.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: And there's there is a lot of of subtle uh wit as well as satire in this this novel.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh at times it seems to be very much in the tradition of Mark Twain, for example, of uh poking fun in some creative ways and provocative ways, but ultimately, I think productive ways uh at the the people and and trends that he was seeing in his own time.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And vocabulary.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: I was struck reading this novel, just how rich his vocabulary is, much more so than we would see in any novels today, but even just for classic novels, words like ichthyologically.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: That's yes.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's true.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: And uh Sinclair Lewis was beloved by the literary critics.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is not uh what might be called a dime store novel.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is this was written for people who appreciated more sophisticated literature, and and that was always Sinclair Lewis's audience, that he he was not writing popular pieces in in the dime store novel sense, but uh he was he was writing pieces that that I think were well respected in the 1920s by the the literary critics of the time.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: So the literary critics liked it, and it sold reasonably well.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: So, what did readers actually say about this novel when it was published and kind of in the immediate um decade or so?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as I said, the literary reviews were mixed.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: So and a number of uh major literary magazines of the time, like North American Literary Review, panned it, uh, but others others liked it.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was it was not quite like his other pieces.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think it it relates to themes that he looked at in his earlier work, but it's written in a different style.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: It it's written in a way that that tends to be much more focused on current events, less so on a detailed psychological development of a character.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_01: So Doromus Jessup does have depth.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: He is developed as a character, but he's not quite the focus of the novel in the way that that maybe you would find in in other uh Sinclair Lewis novels, where the whole book is really about a character who's fully fleshed out and deeply developed.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the the degree to which people like this book tended to be closely related to whether they agreed with the message.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: So those who thought that this was alarmist, that there was really no crisis in America, thought that uh the novel was rather weak, that maybe uh, as one literary critic said, that it had been written in a white hot heat, which was not a complimentary phrase.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was basically like uh people who were I I I think critics reacted in the way that that some people did right after, especially right after 2016, right after Trump's first election, when we began to see a number of pieces that that expressed dismay, that were very uh alarmist, and and for people who thought that this was the potential end of American democracy, they might have welcomed those pieces, but for others, they might have thought, well, there is more heat than light here.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's not really helping us to just spread alarm.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was the case for some of the some critics.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: On the other hand, there were uh people who who thought that it was very prescient, that it did accurately describe the situation.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that uh I think Lewis is genius in describing exactly how American democracy could be subverted from within.
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: That is, there's not an importation of Nazi German ideology.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, while ostensibly rejecting all of these ideas and becoming more and more hyper-American, the democracy is actually overthrown from within without the overthrow ever being acknowledged.
• 39:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and that that I think is what those who liked this work could tell about it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: That it was it more than any other novel published, it showed how fascism or authoritarianism could happen in the United States, how it could grow from within.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so even though it's a disturbing picture, it's a picture that people couldn't turn away from, that they found fascinating.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's why it was made into a play and why for a while the play was widely performed.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm curious.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, historians, I mean, uh counterfactual is not really like what we deal with.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm curious, do you think Huey Long really had the power to do what um there were fears that he might had he lived?
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: Probably not, because there have been numerous third-party figures who have uh started strong.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is this is just the general trend of third-party candidacies uh in the United States, third party presidential candidates.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: They they usually start off much stronger than they finish.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: So they'll get a lot of early headlines, and then toward the end, the the major parties start closing the gap.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so there are there are very strong institutional pressures that tend to mitigate against third parties.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure that that he could have done that sort of damage.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in the book, Buzz Windrop is not a third-party candidate.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: He manages to get the uh to get the presidential nomination by convincing the the convention delegates at the Democratic National Convention to vote for him.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: And had Dewey Long done that, of course, things might have been very different.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think he would have likely been able to do that, though, and and he himself did not think that he could have.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, that was not really his his strategy.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: But uh that, of course, is more or less what what we have seen today.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, for people who, of course, today reading this book, I think the book has had a bit of a revival as people say, okay, are we are we living through at least some measure of this with our contemporary political situation uh with Donald Trump?
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: And regardless of what one thinks about Trump, it it's true that Trump is a very different sort of candidate than than the parties have ever nominated before.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: That is, they've there's before Trump there was never a candidate who had no previous elected office or military experience.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the way that that uh Trump was elected was not through a third-party candidacy, which most people would have expected would have been the natural uh way that a third party, that a an outsider candidate like Trump would have tried to challenge the system.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Instead, he managed to win enough primaries to get the nomination, and then he was elected uh as the um uh as the president.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: So that idea of working through a major party, which actually appeared in this book, I think showed perhaps Sinclair Lewis's knowledge of the of the political system.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: Uh one of the remarkable features of this book, I think, is that it does tend to be very realistic in its details, that Sinclair Lewis was certainly a close, close student of current events, that he had been reading the newspapers carefully, and in some ways he understood American politics better than some of the political pundits and strategists.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's striking.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_00: So this podcast is called Christians Reading Classics.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to ask you, how do we read this novel in 2025 as Christians specifically?
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like you talked already about how we might read it as Americans living in the age of Trump, but I want us uh to think like how do we read this as Christians?
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think that the realization that the attacks on American democracy from within are symptoms of a spiritual crisis and not just a material situation, I think is is something that we should take to heart.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think that as Christians we can reflect on why uh America's democratic system is worth preserving.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: Is it compatible with Christian values?
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think we can take warnings.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: About from this novel about the weakness of the Christian churches at the time in preventing this rise of authoritarianism.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think if St.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Clair Lewis were writing the novel today, the religious aspect of it would look quite different.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: So instead of having churches mildly protest but essentially be completely weak in the force in the face of this attack, I think he would instead uh portray a significant component of American Christianity as actually aiding in the rise of an authoritarian figure.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in some ways, a novel written by someone of Sinclair Lewis's views today, that is, someone whose political views are left of center and someone who is an atheist, would likely be, almost certainly be, much more critical of American Christianity than what St.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Clair Louis actually was in this novel.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: And if that's a case, if that's the case, that's a warning, I think, for American Christians that in some ways are witness to the world, to people who care about American democracy, may actually be worse today than it was in the 1930s, even though in the 1930s the church didn't look uh particularly heroic either in the face of this threat.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: At least it seemed to have its heart in the right place uh in this novel, which is you know not what I think a figure like Sinclair Lewis would say about much of American uh conservative Christianity uh in 2025.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: But I think beyond that, we can ask the question well, what is it that inclines people toward looking for more radical solutions?
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: What was the appeal in this novel of the uh Minutemen, these forces who who essentially acted as higher goons for the government to beat people up and arrest people who were who were considered political dissidents?
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: There were a lot of young people in this novel who were joining that group, just as there were Nazi Germany who were who were joining the Hitler youth.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh we can ask the question what is what is the attraction?
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for Sinclair Lewis, what he was suggesting in this novel is that we do have the attraction to an ideology that gives us importance and allows us to beat up our enemies, whether literally or metaphorically.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: So uh when we were last when we were talking about this before, we were talking about the spiritual crisis and the attraction to uh authoritarian movements.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I said that Sinclair Lewis's novel suggests that we're attracted to anti-democratic authoritarianism because of our desire to take revenge on our enemies, as uh this Chad Legru figure does in taking delight in perhaps uh acting against Doramus Jessup.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's that attraction toward violence, even and toward punishment of political enemies.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's also in this novel, I think, uh a strong critique of hyperpatriotism, because the novel suggests in multiple places, including right in the introductory chapter, that we can mouth the slogans of historic American democracy while embracing people who use those slogans for the exact opposite.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so one of the things that that Sinclair Lewis always was was a critic.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: And while that three could perhaps be taken to an extreme, C.S.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis was famous, of course, for saying that the the man who sees through everything sees nothing.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, nevertheless, you can get pretty far, I think, by seeing through the superficiality around you.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: And Christians need to learn that, that I think so much of the weakness of Christianity, the faults of Christianity in its American form today come from that failure to be self-critical, to be critical of our own sinful tendencies, to be critical of our own traditions, blind spots.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so Sinclair Lewis is not suggesting that there's no value in the United States.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, quite the opposite.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that I think comes through in this is that the characters love America.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: They're reluctant to leave.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: They have the opportunity to go to Canada and some of them delay, some of them never end up going.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: And those who end up going then come back because there's something about America that they love.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: But they also recognize that the things about America that they they love and should love are not going to be preserved by simply jingoistically, mindlessly echoing the slogans of patriotism, that we have to have a critical patriotism that's balanced with uh a larger set of values.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: And in my view, Sinclair Lewis doesn't really give us those set that set of values.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he knew that he didn't have a solution to this.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: The novel does not tell us how to preserve American democracy.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: It shows us that the institutions that we depend on and the general sentiment that we depend on to preserve American democracy will not be strong enough to hold it.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: But the question then is, well, if so, if if that's the case, then what will preserve American democracy?
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: Is there anything that we can look to to say uh yes, this uh Yes, there's there's something you can look at.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, there's there's uh something that will will keep us from descending into totalitarianism.
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the things that I have uh said, I it's not original to me, but I uh I I've said it over the last few years, is that I I'm persuaded by the argument that in order to preserve American democracy, we have to value something larger than our own self-interest.
• 50:39
  SPEAKER_01: We have to believe genuinely in the in the necessity of seeking others' well-being.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so far in American history, I think there has been a large contingent of people who have been willing to do that, who've who believe that there's value in the system uh that is so great that it's worth accepting their own loss, accepting the possibility that they might not necessarily get what they want.
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_01: And as Christians, I think we can hold on to that.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: We can even say, I think, that that success in the United States is is due in part to the influence of Christian values.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I would like for us as Christians to be known for trying to preserve those values, trying to seek the good of our neighbor, and in doing so, I think, contributing to the bulwarks against authoritarianism rather than embracing those authoritarianism.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is encouraging.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, as we conclude, I have a final question for you.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: What classic book, whether fiction or nonfiction, do you wish you had written and why?
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as I I guess uh the books I've written have all been nonfiction, and so I I think sometimes when we think of classic books, the the first uh books that come to mind are are the titles of novels, the titles of other uh fictional works.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so I probably would would not select a a fictional work saying, you know, I wish I had written that.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I the books that I I think are either classics or becoming classics that have have influenced me a great deal have been works of history that that took the beliefs of a particular group seriously and and interpreted that on its own terms, not uncritically, but sympathetically.
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: And so a book that had tremendous influence on me as a as a graduate student and that I wish I had written if I were to write a book uh that was written in the past would be George Mariston's Fundamentalism in American Culture, which I would argue is a classic now in our our field.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: It was published in 1980, it's now been through uh three editions.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh the it has, I think, arguably had greater staying power than the vast majority of uh books in American history published.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: And and what gave that work uh its enduring quality, I think, is that Marsden spent the time to really get to know his subjects.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's an earlier work that I think Marsden may have inspired Marsden, and that I also might say wish I had written.
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's Perry Miller's book, The New England Mind, published in 1939.
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: So actually not far removed from this.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: The New England Mind is a study of 17th century Puritanism.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: And Perry Miller reconstructed the mindset of the Puritans in ways that gave his own generation uh of educated historians, and he was a Harvard professor, and so he was very much part of that generation that Sinclair Lewis was part of.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: But he said rather than dismiss the Puritans as most people were of his time, it was really important to reconstruct their worldview, their values, and that once you understood that, then so much else that the Puritans did made sense within that particular context.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was Perry Miller that really rehabilitated uh the American Puritans as intellectuals in their own right.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And to this day, that book is still cited, that people still talk about Perry Miller and how he transformed the historical field.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I would choose a book like that and would say I want I would have liked to have written a book that took the values, the views of a particular group of historical people, and gave people this in depth understanding of that uh that view.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Dan, thank you so much.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_01: Well, thank you.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.