One of the USAmerican Dictator's Top Men Is Assassinated

NOTE: The below is an excerpt from Sinclair Lewis' IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. Mary is the eldest daughter of the novel's hero, Doremus Jessup. Swan is the man who is responsible for ordering the murder of Mary's late husband. 

*****

At the field, as [Mary Greenhill] had been informed he would, District Commissioner Effingham Swan was boarding his big official cabin plane for a flight presumably into New England. He was tall; a distinguished, military-looking, polo-suggesting dignitary in masterfully simple blue-serge with just a light flying-helmet. A dozen yes-men buzzed about him—secretaries, bodyguards, a chauffeur, a couple of county commissioners, educational directors, labor directors—their hats in their hands, their smiles on their faces, their souls wriggling with gratitude to him for permitting them to exist. He snapped at them a good deal and bustled. As he mounted the steps to the cabin (Mary thought of “Casey Jones” and smiled), a messenger on a tremendous motorcycle blared up with the last telegrams. There seemed to be half a hundred of the yellow envelopes, Mary marveled. He tossed them to the secretary who was humbly creeping after him. The door of the viceregal coach closed on the Commissioner, the secretary, and two bodyguards lumpy with guns.

It was said that in his plane Swan had a desk that had belonged to Hitler, and before him to Marat.

To Mary, who had just lifted herself up into the cockpit, a mechanic cried, admiringly pointing after Swan’s plane as it lurched forward, “Gee, what a grand guy that is—Boss Swan. I hear where he’s flying down to Washington to chin with the Chief this morning—gee, think of it, with the Chief!”

“Wouldn’t it be awful if somebody took a shot at Mr. Swan and the Chief? Might change all history,” Mary shouted down.

“No chance of that! See those guards of his? Say, they could stand off a whole regiment—they could lick Walt Trowbridge and all the other Communists put together!”

“I guess that’s so. Nothing but God shooting down from heaven could reach Mr. Swan.”

“Ha, ha! That’s good! But couple days ago I heard where a fellow was saying he figured out God had gone to sleep.”

“Maybe it’s time for Him to wake up!” said Mary, and raised her hand.

Her plane had a top of two hundred and eighty-five miles an hour—Swan’s golden chariot had but two hundred and thirty. She was presently flying above and a little behind him. His cabin plane, which had seemed huge as the Queen Mary when she had looked up at its wingspread on the ground, now seemed small as a white dove, wavering above the patchy linoleum that was the ground.

She drew from the pockets of her flying-jacket the three Mills hand grenades she had managed to steal from the school yesterday afternoon. She had not been able to get away with any heavier bomb. As she looked at them, for the first time she shuddered; she became a thing of warmer blood than a mere attachment to the plane, mechanical as the engine.

“Better get it over before I go ladylike,” she sighed, and dived at the cabin plane.

No doubt her coming was unwelcome. Neither Death nor Mary Greenhill had made a formal engagement with Effingham Swan that morning; neither had telephoned, nor bargained with irritable Secretaries, nor been neatly typed down on the great lord’s schedule for his last day of life. In his dozen offices, in his marble home, in council hall “and royal reviewing-stand, his most precious excellence was guarded with steel. He could not be approached by vulgarians like Mary Greenhill—save in the air, where emperor and vulgarian alike are upheld only by toy wings and by the grace of God.

Three times Mary maneuvered above his plane and dropped a grenade. Each time it missed. The cabin plane was descending, to land, and the guards were shooting up at her.

“Oh well!” she said, and dived bluntly at a bright metal wing.

In her last ten seconds she thought how much the wing looked like the zinc washboard which, as a girl, she had seen used by Mrs. Candy’s predecessor—now what was her name?—Mamie or something. And she wished she had spent more time with David the last few months. And she noticed that the cabin plane seemed rather rushing up at her than she down at it.

The crash was appalling. It came just as she was patting her parachute and rising to leap out—too late. All she saw was an insane whirligig of smashed wings and huge engines that seemed to have been hurled up into her face.
[…]
After dinner, in Lorinda’s new tea room, in an aged house which was now empty of guests for the winter except for the constant infestation of whimpering refugees, Lorinda, knitting, made her first mention of the dead Mary.

“I suppose your sister did intend to kill Swan, eh?”

“I don’t know. The Corpos didn’t seem to think so. They gave her a big military funeral.”

“Well, of course, they don’t much care to have assassinations talked about and maybe sort of become a general habit. I agree with your father. I think that, in many cases, assassinations are really rather unfortunate—a mistake in tactics. No. Not good. Oh, by the way, Sissy, I think I’m going to get your father out of concentration camp.”

“What?”

Lorinda had none of the matrimonial moans of Emma; she was as business-like as ordering eggs.

“Yes. I tried everything. I went to see Tasbrough, and that educational fellow, Peaseley. Nothing doing. They want to keep Doremus in. But that rat, Aras Dilley, is at Trianon as guard now. I’m bribing him to help your father escape. We’ll have the man here for Christmas, only kind of late, and sneak him into Canada.”

“Oh!” said Sissy.

A few days afterward, reading a coded New Underground telegram which apparently dealt with the delivery of furniture, Lorinda shrieked, “Sissy! All you-know-what has busted loose! In Washington! Lee Sarason has deposed Buzz Windrip and grabbed the dictatorship!”

“Oh!” said Sissy.

*****

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Above: An infant in an iron lung.