The story takes place in 1936 during the depression and Hitler’s rise to power. There are the problems of high unemployment, mass and unwanted immigration, loss of morals, welfare cheats (“freeloaders”), liberals, a lack of religion, and crime. Sound familiar? It gets better. A demagogue named Buzz Windrip from the Democratic party comes to dump Roosevelt.
He appeals to the masses and gets nominated for President. He forms his own militia called the Minute Men, or M.M. (Nazi S.S.) for short, to whip up support and deal with any despondents. Windup wins, neutralizes the Congress and the Supreme Court, and establishes a dictatorship. Concentration camps are set up with torture, censorship, and the system of states are abolished, replacing them with eight provinces, and terror ensues. Ethnic groups such as the Jews and the Negroes are “put in their place,” and women are confined to the home, as housewives, nothing more. Major institutions such as the banks and oil fields are nationalized.
The story itself takes place in Fort Beulah, Vermont, with one professional journalist, Dormeus Jessup and his family who observe all this, yet write articles and editorials condemning this. Naturally, the regime catches on and starts to terrorize Dormeus and his family. A resistance is formed, and one of their major operations is smuggling refugees to Canada, where they carry out their planning and operations.
This book was written in 1935 during the Depression and the rise of Hitler and the author got his plot from observing the rise of Nazi Germany. A close friend of his was even in Nazi Germany and provided Lewis with information about the Hitler regime, becoming the basis for this book. The story takes place in 1936 but don’t be misled. This is NOT alternate history. It’s of a tyrannical regime that can rise here in the United States, and this book can be right at home in 1936, 2016, or 2036 equally, and bears parallels with what is happening today in 2016, especially during the presidential election.
An irony here is that this fictitious regime was spawn from the Democratic party rather than the Republican party, as we would see it today. Don’t forget, most racist politicians up until the 1960s were Democrats.
You will see the same problems then as today being the cause of America’s transition to a tyranny, and you will see that things really weren’t all that different back then. Only the names have changed. For example, the immigration problem back in the 1930s were the Jews, Italians, and the Chinese as opposed to the Mexicans, Syrians, and Africans of today. We are still racist, and we still have the same economic problems with the same institutions, with people making the same proposals in dealing with them.
You will see interesting parallels to Nazi Germany: President Windrip’s book “Zero Hour” as opposed to Hilter’s “Mein Kampf”; the Minute Men or M.M. as opposed to the S.S.; the Corpos as opposed to the Nazis; censorship, extreme brutality, confiscation of property, concentration camps, mass slaughters, racial persecutions, and the list goes on.
I think the main point of the book shows how fragile democracy really is and how we need to remain vigilant in order to protect it. We need to watch our government, our institutions, and our businesses, especially big business, to make sure they never get beyond our control (as if they haven’t already, but people in this institutions still go to jail if caught at certain crimes, although it’s becoming rare). If we slack off in our vigilance and actions, we just may end up like the regime depicted in this book.
Ironically, I found copies of this book at a coffee shop, left by someone eager to “get the word out” about what is going on today, and I see the point of that person who left them. Note the title. Many have said in the book, and in real life today, that what happened in Nazi Germany, the swaying of the masses and them giving a country over to a tyrant could never happen here in the U.S.
It can. This book is timeless and serves as a warning to us all, even now. Especially now.
