It's 1935 and the Great Depression has America by the throat. Across the Atlantic, Hitler and Mussolini are on the rise, and the world watches in horror. Novelist Sinclair Lewis, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature five years earlier, the first American to have won this award, is so alarmed by what he sees that he writes a 458-page novel in a white-hot fury, then immediately adapts it for the stage with screenwriter J.C. Moffitt.

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But here's what's interesting: Lewis wasn't just looking abroad. Right here at home, Louisiana Senator Huey Long was building his own populist movement—challenging New Deal reforms, championing traditional values, and demonstrating exactly the kind of charismatic authoritarianism Lewis feared. When Long was assassinated in 1935, just months before the play premiered, it did something curious: it proved Lewis's central anxiety and that of many Americans at the time. Democracy, it turned out, wasn't threatened by some distant ideology. It was vulnerable to the appeal of “strongmen” who promised simple answers to impossibly complex problems.

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The play opened on October 27, 1936, in 21 theaters across 17 states simultaneously—all sponsored by the Federal Theater Project. Think about what that meant: audiences from coast to coast, already shaken by economic collapse and watching totalitarianism spread across Europe, sat down at the same moment to watch a fascist takeover of the United States unfold on stage. The play asked a question that seemed almost absurd to contemplate, and yet impossible to ignore: Could it happen here?

Now, here we are, 90 years later, and that question hasn't gone away. As we navigate our own deeply divided political landscape in 2026, with authoritarian impulses testing the foundations of our democracy, Lewis's play feels less like a period piece and more like a mirror.

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"It Can't Happen Here" reminds us of something we can’t take for granted: our democracy, now 250 years old, is not invincible. It's fragile. And precious. And it demands our vigilance. 
Tonight, we invite you to engage with a living warning from history, one that asks each of us: What will we do to ensure our democracy survives another 250 years?