Some perverted version of that impulse is fulfilled in “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagines the improbable election of an authoritarian named Buzz Windrip over Roosevelt to the Presidency of the United States. The people wanted “safety and conservatism again.” The_ _ Times, that November, reported on a meeting of the New Jersey Bankers Association, whose president offered a blunt assessment of the national mood: “America is tired of adventure and anxious,” the man of industry said. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, but the promise of the New Deal remained unfulfilled for many. Things at home weren’t much better: a race riot in Harlem, dust storms in the Midwest. Sinclair Lewis published the novel as Adolf Hitler was making Germany great again, violating the Treaty of Versailles by establishing the Wehrmacht. “It Can’t Happen Here,” which came out in 1935, was a frightening book written for frightening times. Photograph Courtesy Kevin Berne / Berkeley Repertory Theatre Theatre merges with the theatricality of the current election in a new stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagines the election of an authoritarian President.
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