Promising renewed prosperity, along with a return to patriotism and traditional values, he first defeats Franklin D Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination, then beats the Republican candidate in the 1936 presidential election.
Once in power, he outlaws dissent, interns enemies and unleashes a paramilitary force called the Minute Men, to which he recruits those disaffected with the existing order.
“They said you were no good because you were poor,” he tells them. “I tell you that you are ... the highest lords of the land – the aristocracy – the makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! ... Stand fast! Anyone that tries to block you – give the swine the point of your bayonet!”
Disillusioned Americans begin to flee the country, including, eventually, the vice-president. Meanwhile, Windrip’s promised prosperity fails to materialise, weakening his grip on power. Civil war follows.
As the novel puts it, with some contemporary resonance: “There were bubbles from an almost boiling rebellion in the Middle West and Northwest, especially in Minnesota …”
Lesser characters in Lewis’s book include the Windrip-supporting Reverend Paul Peter Prang, a Methodist bishop whose outspoken weekly radio addresses are heard by millions.
The novel tells us that Prang’s radio career was modelled on that of “Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit”, who had done for “political sermons on the Mount” what Heny Ford did for cars.
Prang merely refined the tactic, Lewis wrote, while bringing it to an even wider audience because: “His voice was more nasally native, and he was pure Middle West, with a New England, Protestant Scotch-English ancestry, where Coughlin was always a little suspect, in the Sears-Roebuck regions, as a Roman-Catholic with an agreeable Irish accent.”
But whereas Prang was one of Lewis’s fictional creations, Coughlin (1891 – 1979) was a real person, a charismatic radio preacher from the 1930s who in one poll, at the height of his popularity, was named the second most powerful man in America, after only the president.
Born in Canada of poor Irish emigrants, Fr Coughlin moved to Detroit in the early 1920s, first broadcasting sermons to counter the anti-Catholicism then rife in the US, where membership of the anti-immigrant Ku Klux Klan was at an all-time-high.
As his sermons became more political, however, typically championing the rights of the poor against a greedy elite, they also grew more popular.
He first supported FDR in the 1932 presidential election, endorsing his New Deal with the slogan “the New Deal is Christ’s Deal”. Then, when Roosevelt proved insufficiently radical in power, Coughlin turned against him, denouncing the president as a tool of Wall Street while blaming bankers and – increasingly – Jewish financiers for America’s woes.
His broadcasts were enormously successful. By the mid-1930s, it was estimated that one third of the US population listened, responding with 10,000 letters a day.
Coughlin made the cover of Time Magazine in 1934, although even former friends were growing wary of his influence. One of those, Joseph Kennedy Snr, had come to regard him as “a very dangerous proposition” and, as he wrote, “an out and out demagog (sic)”.
In the run-up to the 1936 elections, Coughlin campaigned against reelection of the man he now called Franklin “Doublecross” Roosevelt and threw his weight instead behind the third-party candidacy of populist Louisiana governor Huey Long.
It was Long who provided Lewis with the model for Windrip, but his campaign ended when he was apparently assassinated (there remains some doubt because the lone gunman died in hail of bullets from Long’s bodyguards, which, along with the absence of an autopsy, fed suspicions he was killed by “friendly fire”) in September 1935.
Roosevelt went on to win reelection in a landslide. Coughlin, meanwhile, grew ever more vehement in his anti-Semitism. By 1940, opposing US involvement in the second World War, his political allies included Charles Lindbergh, with whom he helped lead the America First Committee.
In the song Lindbergh, Woody Guthrie lampooned the great American aviator’s flirtation with fascism but included the lines: “Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearin’ the silver chain/Cash on his stomach and Hitler on the brain.”
At his peak, not even the Vatican could silence the “Radio Priest”, because he enjoyed the full backing of the Bishop of Detroit, Michael Gallagher (1856 – 1937).
Gallagher’s successor, Edward Mooney, was less tolerant. In 1942, after a series of disagreements, he ordered Coughlin to confine himself to pastoral duties and henceforth submit copies of any political speeches for advance screening. Already partly silenced by new broadcasting codes, the Radio Priest complied. He lived quietly for the rest of his life, dying in 1979 aged 88.