A little background about Twin Farms: Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here at his Vermont home in the summer of 1935. A satirical but serious novel, it’s the story of a populist candidate for president who defeats FDR by appealing to the fears and prejudices of the “Forgotten Men,” and then proceeds to impose his own brand of fascism.

(“Why are you so afraid of the word ‘Fascism,’ Doremus? Just a word — just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and yours — not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or Mussolini — like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days — and have ‘em really run the country and make it efficient and prosperous again.”)

The novel’s hero – a journalist in a small Vermont town named Doremus Jessup – was partly inspired by Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson.

The year before Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here, Dorothy Thompson was the first foreign journalist to be expelled from Germany by Adolph Hitler. She was the leading voice against fascism and Nazism in the American press, and a strong and vocal advocate for admitting European refugees into the Land of the Free – a minority opinion at the time, unfortunately.

In 1932 Thompson published the account of her interview with Hitler in which she described him as “…voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man. … There is in his face no trace of inner conflict or self-discipline. … The eyes alone are notable … they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics. … Mr. Hitler you may get, in the next elections, the fifteen million votes which you expect. But fifteen million Germans CAN be wrong.”

Hitler and Goebbels formed a “Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad” to monitor and respond to Thompson’s attacks, and eventually sent the Gestapo to her apartment in Berlin with orders to leave the country within 24 hours. When she arrived at the train station to depart for Paris, most of the international press corps had assembled to bid her farewell, carrying roses.

A years later, while Sinclair was creating It Can’t Happen Here at a frenzied pace, Dorothy wrote:

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument — the Incorporated National Will. … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say “Heil” to him, nor will they call him “Führer” or “Duce.” But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of “O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!”

Dorothy Thompson is buried in Barnard, and there is a small memorial park in her name behind the Barnard General Store.