A tale of two strong conservative women: Yep, it can happen here

A famous 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, titled “It Can’t Happen Here,” envisioned the arrival of a fascist regime in America in the guise of a voluble, charismatic president named Buzz Windrip.

It was supposedly written as a warning against Huey Long, the Louisiana populist who was gaining a national following for his “share the wealth” politics, but was widely acknowledged to be a conniving, back-stabbing demagogue. 

Curiously, Long was assassinated just before the book was released, but it remained as relevant as ever because President Franklin Roosevelt was himself just as glib, just as charismatic, and just as authoritarian as either Huey Long or Buzz Windrip. And did not FDR — just like President Windrip in the novel — promise quick, easy solutions to the Depression that involved consolidating power in the executive branch, reshaping the Constitution, and creating a cult of personality around the heroic president himself?

I can’t say for sure whether Sinclair Lewis ever recognized the similarities between Windrip and Roosevelt, but I am confident that his wife Dorothy Thompson did.

You’ve probably never heard of Thompson, one more of those women warriors who have a huge influence on public policy and public discourse, but are ultimately dismissed as irrelevant. An example in modern times, of course, is Sarah Palin. Her ability to crystallize opposition to Democratic and left-wing policies in a few words is best noted, perhaps, in her use of the phrase “death panel” to describe the inevitable necessity of providing nationalized health-care under a triage system that will ensure that taxpayers’ money is not being “wasted” on the old and infirm.

Palin was blasted for her “incendiary” rhetoric in that case, although upon closer scrutiny her analysis turned out to be essentially accurate. Obamacare did include a plan for panels that would determine which kind of medical care was appropriate for which kinds of patients. Those with a low survival rate need not apply.

As everyone knows, Palin is one of the most popular women in modern public life, yet she is marginalized, minimized and micro-analyzed at every step of the way. Thompson, too, underwent something of a similar process in the 1930s, especially after she started writing a column of political commentary in 1936.

She wrote extensively about the dangers of Stalinism, Nazism and Fascism, both inside and outside America, and thus was known as “something between a Cassandra and a Joan of Arc.” Indeed, she was one of the first people to recognize the danger of Hitler’s political philosophy and urged action against him years before World War II. Indeed, way back in 1931, before Hitler had even ascended to power, Thompson did a lengthy interview with him that resulted in a book called “I Saw Hitler.” Although she thought that Germany would reject Hitler because of his personal weaknesses, she was fully cognizant of the danger of his agenda, and tried to warn the world.

In addition, throughout the 1930s, she was one of the loudest voices warning America not just of the dangers in Europe, but of the dangers in our own political system. In 1937, as President Roosevelt was attempting to push his leftist agenda through Congress, Thompson wrote that what FDR was after was “a tremendously centralized government, with a power and authority vested in the president, not far from equal to the power and authority vested in Mussolini and Stalin.”

In that same column, she noted that FDR’s program was “profoundly revolutionary,” yet the mainstream media and the “powers that be” were silent about what was under way. It seemed to her that “We are going to be cajoled into revolution, with the pretense that it is all innocuous, and really not at all important.”

It is eerily similar to the movement under way today by the Obama administration to “fundamentally transform” America. While the press pretends nothing unusual is happening, it has been people like Sarah Palin who have been asking the obvious question — “Fundamentally transform it into WHAT?”

Of course, Palin is dismissed by the mainstream media and much of the political establishment as some kind of a weird throwback to the days when America was a proud Christian nation, grounded in moral principles and honor. To that, Palin pleads guilty — or, as she says, “We don’t need to fundamentally transform America. We need to restore America.”

Thompson, raised by a Methodist minister and his wife, would certainly have understood Palin. They were cut largely from the same cloth, although Thompson couldn’t so easily be dismissed as a simple-headed conservative woman by the intelligentsia and academia — she did after all have the imprimatur of being Sinclair Lewis’s wife, so she had to be taken seriously by the left. Nonetheless, she had so many traits in common with Sarah Palin that it is probably no mere coincidence.

She called herself a “liberal conservative,” which sort of stands as a bookend to Sarah Palin’s self-avowed role as a “conservative feminist.” In both cases, they take the best of both worlds, and act as lightning rods of criticism from all angles.

Thompson was declared by Time Magazine in a cover story in 1939 to be, along with Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the two “most influential women in the U.S.” In Palin’s case, she probably shares the stage somewhat uncomfortably with Michelle Obama, but in truth I think Palin is actually a bit more powerful than this First Lady.

But even with their acknowledgment of Thompson’s role as a significant opinion-molder, it should be noted that Time Magazine then, like Time Magazine today, was not above injecting some “spin” into the article to make readers less likely to take Thompson seriously.

Indeed, the cover story bore the dismissive title “Cartwheel Girl” in reference to a story of how Thompson had once done immodest cartwheels in front of her mother’s Methodist lady friends when she was about 10 years old. The article also referred to her “plump pair of legs,” noted that “for a woman she seemed surprisingly intelligent,” and then concluded by reminding us that she is a “plump, pretty woman of 45, bursting with health, energy and sex appeal.”

Time magazine also found it helpful to mention that Thompson had flunked her teachers’ examination in English grammar and noted that “Mrs. Lewis still has to correct her speech.” Goodness gracious, could the sabotage be any more self-evident? Almost the same as the attack on Sarah Palin because she speaks with a folksy dialect that has been identified as having a Northern Minnesota origin. It just doesn’t pay to be a powerful political woman, whether it’s in the 1930s or the 2010s. You may be speaking the truth, but heaven help you if you do it with an accent or a misplaced modifier.

But at least one bit of analysis from that Time Magazine article did capture the essence of Dorothy Thompson, and explain her popularity:

“Liberals have regretfully come to the conclusion that she is a conservative, a fact which she freely admits. Conservatives do not altogether trust her... Radicals hate & fear her, think she is a potential Fascist herself. But to those Americans who live in the smaller cities and towns and especially to the women, Dorothy Thompson is infallible — not so much because of what she thinks as because of what she is. To these women she is the embodiment of an ideal, the typical modern American woman they think they would like to be: emancipated, articulate and successful, living in the thick of one of the most exciting periods of history and interpreting it to millions.”

The same description, almost word for word, could be applied to Sarah Palin.

The lesson: Strong conservative women have been part of the American political fabric for decades. They’ve also been subject to the same misogynistic attacks that in essence are intended to put a woman “in her place.”

Well, the place for women such as Dorothy Thompson and Sarah Palin in American politics is still up for debate. So far, they have not risen to the position of ultimate power such as happened in England with Margaret Thatcher or in Israel with Golda Meir, but you dismiss them at your own peril. Like Athena, they prefer to guide with wisdom — but when pressed, they are willing to go to war for their principles.

Don’t mess with the Mama Grizzlies.