Word: windrip
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...