I haven’t read Philip Roth’s latest novel, THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, yet, because I realized I wanted to read a couple of its American literary precursors first — Jack London’s THE IRON HEEL, published in 1907, and Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE, published in 1935. A few months back, I got re-enthused about Jack London after rereading one of my favorite stories of his, “The Scarlet Plague.” (The story is said to be a major inspiration for George R. Stewart’s brilliant novel EARTH ABIDES.) This new enthusiasm for London led me inevitably to THE IRON HEEL, London’s novel about the beginnings of a fascist takeover in America and around the world. The book’s point of view, like London himself, is unabashedly socialist, and also a bit preachy, but that doesn’t prevent it from being fully imagined. Even the apparent contradictions of socialism — e.g., if socialism arises from the natural laws of history, why do you ever need to indoctrinate anyone in favor of it? — are shown, albeit only implicitly. One of the best things about THE IRON HEEL is its footnotes, presented as having been added by scholars centuries later, after a true socialist revolution has overthrown the capitalist/fascist “Iron Heel” government. To the extent that the footnotes relate history from London’s own era, they appear to be factually accurate.

Where London’s novel is pro-socialist, Sinclair Lewis’s IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE is more simply anti-fascist, but it is also a lot funnier, since Lewis can’t help being a bit of a satirist. The book does function as a kind of social satire of the 1930s, when the upper classes had a whole lot of free-floating anxiety and hostility about FDR and the Roosevelt administration’s social programs. (In that respect it may remind one of the present day, when FDR’s legacies still enrage conservatives.)

One thing I didn’t know when I bought IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE that there was a connection between Lewis and London — according to Perry Meisel’s introduction to the older Signet Classics edition of Lewis’s book, the younger author apparently sold short-story and novel plots to London.

I’m not sure one can really read a novel online, but IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE is available in an online HTML version here, and THE IRON HEEL is available online in several places, including here.

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