It Can't Happen Here {By Sinclair Lewis, 1935}
[This is link is to a online PDF file of this book]

...The features of this night among the, Rotarians were nothing funny, at least not funny, for they were the
patriotic addresses of Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who dealt angrily with the
topic Peace through Defense-Millions for Arms but Not One Cent for Tribute, and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr
Gimmitch she who was no more renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919
than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the American soldiers entirely out of French caf�s by
the clever trick of sending them ten thousand sets of dominoes.
Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat unappreciated effort to maintain
the purity of the American Home by barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or directors
or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born in any foreign county except Great Britain,
since Mrs. Gimitch thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined take an oath to revere the Flag, the
Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly American istitutions....

...'They were all listening, agape. General Edgeways was completing his manly yet mystical rhapsody on
nationalism:
. . . for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have no desire for foreign conqust. Our
highest ambition is to be darned well let alone! Our only genuine relationship to Europe is in our arduous
task of having to try and educate the crass and igorant masses that Europe has wished onto us up to
something like a semblance of American culture ad good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must be
prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of international racketeers that call themselves
governments' and that with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our towering
forests, our titaic and luxurious cities, our fair and far-flung fields."

For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming itself more and more, not for conquest-
not for jealousy-not for war-but for peace! Pray God it may never be necessary but if foreign nations
don't sharply heed our warning, there will, as when the proverbial dragon's teeth were sowed, spring up
anarmed and fearless warrior upon every square foot of these United States, so arduously cultivated
and defended by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girded images we must be ... or we shall perish!"...

..."I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech were kind of a little bit obvious and what
we used to call old hat when my brigade was quartered in England. About the United States only wanting
peace, and freedom from all foreign entanglements. No! What I�d really like us to do would be to come out
and tell the whole world: Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have the power, and
power is its own exuse!...

..."I don't altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have done, but you've got to hand it to 'em,
they've been honest enough and realistic enough to say to the other nations, Just tend to your own
business,will you? We've got strength and will, and for whomever has those divine qualities it's not only
a right, it's a duty, to use 'em Nobody in God's world ever loved a weakling, including that weakling
himself!.

And I've got good news for you! This gospel of clean and aggressive strength is spreading
everywhere in this country among the finest type of youth. Why today, in 1936, there's less than 7 per
cent of collegiate institutions that do not have military-training units under discipline as rigorous as the
Nazis, and where once it was forced upon them by the authorities, now it is the strong young men ad
women who themselves demand the right to be trained in warlike virtues ad skill for, mark you, the girls,
with their instruction in nursing and the manufacture of gas masks and the like, are becoming every whit
as zealous as their brothers. And all the really thinking type of professors are right with 'em!

Why, here, as recently as three years ago, a sickeningly big percentage of students were blatant
pacifists, wanting to knife their own native land in the dark. But now, when the shameless fools and the
advocates of Communism try to hold pacifist meetings, why, my friends, in the past five months, since
January first, no less than seventt-six such exhibitionistic orgies have been raided by their fellow students,
and no less than fifty-nine disloyal Red students have received their just deserts by being beaten up so
severely that never again will they raise in this free countrv the bloodstained banner of anarchism That, my
friends, is NEWS!"...
{By Sinclair Lewis, 1935]