It Can't Happen Here - Smithsonian

[maxrandb]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fascism-threatened-europe-play-warned-americans-federal-theater-project-180983051/

Although Adolf Hitler usually avoided one-on-one interviews, Thompson, who spoke German fluently, had managed to obtain one several years earlier, before he took office. She found “a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure … the very prototype of the Little Man.” His eyes had “the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics and hysterics.”

Meanwhile, some Ku Klux Klansmen in Georgia, imitating followers of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, began calling themselves the Blackshirts. Admirers of Hitler would soon form themselves into the German American Bund, whose brown-shirted followers drilled beneath the Nazi flag at a network of summer camps. Occultist William Dudley Pelley started a paramilitary militia known as the Silver Shirts. Pelley told a congressional committee that “Mr. Hitler had done an excellent job in Germany,” and that America could address the “Jewish question” by gathering all Jews into one city in each state.


Actors continued to perform It Can’t Happen Here after its Federal Theater Project run. In one Massachusetts summer stock production, Sinclair Lewis himself appeared onstage, playing the role of the heroic journalist who helps defeat the fascist militia. This allowed him to declaim such lines as “This isn’t any one-horse European country that a dictator could get hold of. No sir! … It can’t happen here!”
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Great article. So much more at the link. Seems the more things change, the more they become the same, or as Bob Dylan once sang; "aw, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now".

[Joinfortmill]

1. Yeah, back to the future. VOTE

[keithbvadu2]

2. "by gathering all Jews into one city in each state"... ghettos

It's been done before. Trumpsters would be happy with it.

[Boomerproud]

3. I never heard about this in history class. Frightening.

[maxrandb]

4. Article is worth reading, just for this description of Hitler

it sounds like she's describing someone who is currently the titular head of one of our major political parties.

She found “a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure … the very prototype of the Little Man.”