Word: windrip
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...depressing resemblance to the opening ones of a 1936 novel on dictatorship in America by Singular Lewis. Entitled It Can't Happen Here, Lewis' work tells how it could happen here. His hero, Doremus Jesseup, is a newspaperman not unlike Wechsler, and his dictator is a politician named Berzelius Windrip. In Wechsler's age of suspicion, an embryonic Windrip is incubating; only a cessation of panic and a new faith in freedom, the editor of the Post warns us, will prevent the age of suspicion from becoming the age of suppression...
Hayden burgeons, but he still has a lot more to learn about the wide world. Some of it he learns with pain and dismay from Professor Lorenzo Lundsgard, lately of Hollywood. A new, if feebler, edition of that pious fraud, Elmer Gantry, with a touch of Berzelius Windrip, the magnificent Lorenzo plans a Technicolored crusade to convert America to the gospels of Culture and Leadership, meanwhile scooting across Europe and sweeping up historical tidbits as with a vacuum cleaner. Lorenzo also sweeps up Olivia. Hayden falls into the eager arms of Roxy Eldritch, a freckled, redheaded home-town girl with...
Most of Lewis' novels are variations of Babbitt. Sam Dodsworth (who seems to improve with age) is an upper-class Babbitt with more dignity and deeper insights ("he sometimes enjoyed Beethoven"). Elmer Gantry is a Babbitt with a clerical collar and the courage of his disbelief; "Buzz" Windrip (the American dictator in It Can't Happen Here) is Babbitt running amuck with a submachine...
...shoot him, will you?", and of the Jessups' lazy, loud mouthed hired man who embraces Corpoism early because he wants 1) to show his kindly employers that he is as good a man as they; 2) a gaudy uniform; 3) the glittering income promised by President Berzelius ("Buzz") Windrip to every man & woman in the U. S. In the novel, Jessup's daughter avenges her husband's murder by crashing her sport plane into Effingham Swan's transport plane. When the play's last curtain falls she is in a Corpo office on the Canadian...
Except for Parson Prang, the political characterizations are weak. The none too obvious but nevertheless pertinent implications about the present administration have, of course, been totally disregarded, much to the detriment of the story. And then, too, the dramatic presentation makes overmuch of a buffoon of "Buzz" Windrip...