Snopes = Did Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis say that when fascism comes to America it will be 'wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross'?
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951), the American novelist hailed for such 20th-century classics as Main Street, Elmer Gantry, Dodsworth, and Babbit, also literally wrote the book on the fascist takeover of America, it turns out.
The premise of It Can’t Happen Here, published at a time (1935) when authoritarian regimes were flexing their muscles all across Europe and Americans had great difficulty imagining a Hitler or Mussolini coming to power in the land of the free, was that it can happen here. Lewis painted a vivid counterfactual portrait of a United States of America sliding into dictatorship, one that is still cited as a cautionary tale to this day:
The main character, Buzz Windrip, appeals to voters with a mix of crass language and nativist ideology. Once elected, he solidifies his power by energizing his base against immigrants, people on welfare, and the liberal press. The novel has been called “frighteningly contemporary” in the wake of the Trump campaign and election.
As Time magazine noted on 16 November 2016, It Can’t Happen Here was completely sold out on Amazon.com and Books-A-Million within a week of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The election’s aftermath also saw the recirculation of a famous quote attributed to Sinclair Lewis, a line often said to have come directly from the novel: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
Although that statement sounds like a sentiment Lewis would have agreed with, there’s no record of his actually writing or saying it, according to the web site of the Sinclair Lewis Society:
Here’s our most asked question:
Q: Did Sinclair Lewis say, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross”?
A: This quote sounds like something Sinclair Lewis might have said or written, but we’ve never been able to find this exact quote. Here are passages from two novels Lewis wrote that are similar to the quote attributed to him.
From It Can’t Happen Here: “But he saw too that in America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned the word ‘Fascism’ and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty.”
From Gideon Planish: “I just wish people wouldn’t quote Lincoln or the Bible, or hang out the flag or the cross, to cover up something that belongs more to the bank-book and the three golden balls.”
There was also a play called Strangers in the late 1970s which had a similar quote, but no one, including one of Lewis’s biographers, Richard Lingeman, has ever been able to locate the original citation
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