At a Fort Beulah Rotary Club meeting, speakers advocate militarism and rolling back women's rights, disturbing Jessup.

Jessup predicts at Tasbrough's private party that Windrip will create a dictatorship if elected, but the other guests dismiss him.

Bishop Prang endorses Windrip on his massively popular radio broadcast, clearing Windrip's path to the Democratic presidential nomination.

Windrip wins the Democratic presidential nomination at the Cleveland convention after an all-night struggle against FDR.

Windrip is elected president after a charismatic campaign built on contradictory populist promises.

Windrip demands Congress surrender all legislative power; when refused, he declares martial law and has over one hundred congressmen arrested.

The Minute Men massacre protesters defending the imprisoned congressmen, and the remaining Congress passes a bill ending checks and balances.

Windrip disbands all political parties except his own and abolishes independent states, replacing them with eight government-controlled provinces.

After learning that cabinet member Macgoblin murdered a rabbi and a professor, Jessup writes a defiant anti-regime editorial.

Jessup is arrested, forced to watch his son-in-law summarily executed by the Minute Men, and his newspaper is seized by the regime.

Windrip announces the opening of concentration camps; the Trianon camp opens near Fort Beulah in a converted girls' school.

After the family's failed attempt to cross into Canada, Jessup joins the New Underground and publishes anti-regime papers from Buck Titus's basement.

The Minute Men arrest and torture Jessup; Judge Swan sentences him to at least seventeen years in the Trianon concentration camp.

Sarason deposes Windrip in a bloodless coup and exiles him to Paris; Colonel Haik then kills Sarason and seizes power.

Lorinda and Sissy arrange Jessup's escape from Trianon; he crosses into Canada and eventually returns undercover to Minnesota.

It Can't Happen Here follows Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup as he watches demagogue Buzz Windrip seize the presidency on a tide of populist promises. After winning the election, Windrip rapidly dismantles American democracy by arresting Congress, ending checks and balances, and deploying his private militia, the Minute Men, as an instrument of terror. When Jessup writes a defiant editorial, he is arrested and forced to watch his son-in-law executed before his newspaper is taken over by the state. After a failed attempt to flee to Canada, Jessup joins the resistance, only to be caught, tortured, and imprisoned in a concentration camp. The regime slowly collapses under its own contradictions as Sarason seizes power from Windrip and is in turn killed by Colonel Haik. Jessup ultimately escapes the camp and returns to fight the regime undercover in Minnesota.

The rise of Buzz Windrip and the fall of American democracy.

Jessup reads a letter from his former professor Loveland, who fears being fired for opposing the militarization of his university.

Jessup's son Philip shocks him by expressing anti-Semitic support for Windrip during a family picnic.

Windrip releases his 'Fifteen Points of Victory' manifesto, a document filled with contradictory and openly demagogic demands.

Jessup travels to New York and witnesses Minute Men brutally beat protesters and a Jewish girl outside Windrip's Madison Square Garden rally.

Jessup attends Windrip's rally and finds himself completely entranced by the speech, unable to recall a single thing said afterward.

Jessup is summoned by Commissioner Reek to a meeting where Shad Ledue is introduced as a Corpo subordinate and warns Jessup to behave.

Walt Trowbridge escapes to Canada during a Fourth of July distraction and begins publishing journalism exposing the regime's crimes.

Lorinda Pike loses her ownership stake in the tavern after she refuses Ledue's advances and talks back to the judge at her trial.

Mary Jessup has all her property and money seized after Ledue makes false claims about her murdered husband's political activities.

Dan Wilgus, the typesetter who helped Jessup print his editorial, commits suicide while in Minute Men custody.

Reverend Falck is beaten to death at Trianon after cursing his guards when they try to make him condemn Jessup.

An African-American professor, Dr. Adams, is placed in Jessup's prison cell as a punishment, but the two become close friends.

Shad Ledue arrives at Trianon after being arrested for graft; fellow prisoners burn him alive during an exercise hour.

Vice President Beecroft resigns, saying he can no longer tolerate the regime's killings, and flees to Canada.

Haik declares war on Mexico using staged attacks as a pretext, triggering a wide-ranging popular revolt across the Midwest.

These events trace the forces and individuals that shaped Windrip's rise and the lived realities of life under his regime. From early warning signs like university militarization and Windrip's contradictory manifesto, to the spectacle of his Madison Square Garden rally, the novel charts how ordinary people were swept into his movement. As the regime consolidates, key figures like Walt Trowbridge escape to form resistance from abroad, while others like Lorinda Pike suffer the casual cruelty of the new order. Inside the concentration camps, the human cost of the regime is laid bare through deaths, unexpected friendships, and acts of solidarity among prisoners. The regime's internal rot accelerates as its own men betray and destroy one another, and Haik's reckless declaration of war against Mexico becomes the spark that finally ignites a nationwide uprising.

The forces, figures, and daily realities behind the main story.

Banker RC Crowley announces at Tasbrough's party that he would welcome a Windrip dictatorship, believing the strongman would serve his financial interests.

Jessup finds a threatening note on his door after Windrip's election demanding he submit to the regime; he burns it and tells no one.

Jessup writes a post-election article condemning all utopian solutions including violent revolutions, arguing only incremental change is just.

Lorinda convinces a despairing Jessup not to flee to Canada, giving him the inner strength to stay and resist the regime.

Jessup fires Shad Ledue, who immediately reveals he has been quitting anyway to become a Minute Men secretary.

Sarason cuts off radio access and has Bishop Prang arrested; Prang is later declared insane and permanently disappears from public life.

Locked overnight in a courthouse cell, Jessup concludes that complacent middle-class intellectuals like himself are directly responsible for allowing fascism to take hold.

Jessup falls into writing passive 'Yow-Yow' editorials at the Corpo-controlled paper, deliberately arguing feebly against his own indictments of the regime.

Sissy drops out of high school rather than recite the mandatory loyalty oath to the Corpo state.

Lorinda announces she is leaving to start a new resistance cell elsewhere, shattering Jessup's romanticized notion of their revolutionary work together.

Julian joins the Minute Men as a double agent after staging a public falling-out with the Jessup family to avoid suspicion.

Dr. Olmsted visits Jessup at Trianon and reveals that despite his arrest, the New Underground cell has survived and is still gathering intelligence.

Sarason proposes staging false-flag attacks to justify invading Mexico; Windrip rejects the plan and Sarason storms out in fury.

Still imprisoned at Trianon, Jessup concludes the true struggle is not fascism against communism, but liberal tolerance against all forms of bigotry.

Living in Canadian exile, Jessup requests to be sent back to America as a spy, unable to accept safety while others fight.

This pool follows the private turning points and revelations that transform Doremus Jessup from a detached liberal observer into a committed resistance fighter. Beginning with the cynical acceptance of fascism among Fort Beulah's elite, the events trace how the arrival of the regime forces every character to make a defining moral choice. Jessup struggles with cowardice and complicity, writing hollow propaganda while his friends and family are threatened or killed around him. Key decisions—Lorinda's departure to start a new resistance cell, Julian's gamble as a double agent, Sissy's refusal to swear a loyalty oath—show how the regime forces ordinary people to submit or resist. The pool also reveals the regime's deepest instability, as Sarason's proposal for a false-flag war exposes the desperate, self-defeating logic at its core. By the end, Jessup has internalized the meaning of liberal resistance and cannot rest until he returns to fight on American soil.

The decisions, discoveries, and moral reckoning that define Jessup's resistance.