“I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech were kind of a little bit obvious and what we used to call ‘old hat’ …  About the United States only wanting peace and freedom from all foreign entanglements.  No!  What I’d really like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world:  ‘Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this.  We have power, and power is its own excuse.'”

  — Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here

 (Speech by General Edgeways at the Fort Beulah Rotary Club)