Philip Roth’s 2004 novel is an alternate history of the U.S. which imagines Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 — and changes the culture of the United States for the worse.
Since the U.S. presidential election of 2016, the country is experiencing a moment in time marked by chaos, racial hatred, and the dismantlement laws, norms, and processes that too many its citizens have taken for granted.
The paranoid right-wing in the country has seemingly always been a revolutionary lot. Motivated by opposing an ever-present specter of socialism a la the Russian Revolution, their paranoia expands to a variety of groups and individuals. From Jews who control banks and the media to undeserving minorities on government welfare, or immigrants “cutting some kind of invisible line” to enter the country and do nothing but live off of welfare, there’s always an “Other” to stoke tribalism, anger, and resentment. These are foundational elements that AM talk radio, Fox News, and a whole host of other media elites use to stoke the paranoid fears of those whose fury can be directed at whatever enemies are targeted for their socially constructed pillory. The paranoid style is so ingrained in a part of American culture that it raises its ugly head with greater frequency and for longer durations since Ronald Reagin came to power.
Philip Roth lived long enough to see a number of paranoid periods in history. Being a Jew born to second-generation Russian immigrants, he grew up in New Jersey and can easily be seen as a model for American assimilation and upward mobility. A successful novelist whose writing career brought him plaudits o’ plenty, and an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania where he taught comparative literature, he continued his writing career years after retiring from teaching in 1991 and stopped writing altogether in 2010 after publishing his final novel, Nemesis. He died eight years later at age 85 from a heart attack.
From that brief sketch, one could conclude that Roth had a pretty successful life. The passions he pursued can easily be held up as an example the aspirations of Americans writ large chasing their dreams with varying degrees of success — with Roth’s being one of those touted as proof that “anyone in America can make it by their own grit and determination.” Of course, Roth was no Horatio Alger. He understood the kind of invisible and visible barriers erected by society and individuals. That tension between community and individualism has been a constant and consistent theme in American culture, and in Roth’s hands, he often explores that tension in his work. In The Plot Against America, however, the tension isn’t so much between the community and the individual as it is between white Christians feeling aggrieved and Jews feeling a familiar wave of hostility toward them simply because they are Jews. The anti-Jewish sentiments Roth explores in the novel are all-too-familiar to anyone horrified by those marching in Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” in 2017.
The premise of the story Roth tells is of the Roth family — whose youngest song is Philip. Yes, Roth uses his real family names (as he’s done before), but this Roth family lives in an alternate timeline from the one we live in. Instead of FDR winning the 1940 election, he loses in a landslide to Charles Lindbergh — who ran on a peace platform with a simple slogan, “Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War.” If it were just an anti-war slogan, that would be one thing, but in Lindbergh’s mind, peace meant resisting the “The Jewish race…who have been pressing this country toward war.” His views were widely shared by America Firsters who embrace Lindbergh’s view that the Jews pose the “greatest dangers to the county…in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.” After a deadlocked Republican convention, the GOP nominated the bigoted Lindbergh, and he went on the defeat FDR who was painted as a warmonger for the Jewish race.
After the election, the ground is prepped for alliances between Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the U.S. in a non-aggression pact that keeps America out of Germany and Japan’s plans for world conquest. Americans think they will be spared the worst of it and can continue living in a bubble of prosperity that FDR helped build but got very little credit for because they have incredibly short memories. Well, as you can imagine, things get progressively worse for the Roths and their Jewish enclave in New Jersey. People start heading for Canada, there’s a Jewish assimilation program designed to separate Jews and dilute their voting power, and as Lindbergh’s administration gets its sea legs, they move with deliberate speed to condition Americans to love Hitler and hate the UK for giving in to whispering Jews who are trying to get nice, white Christians to die in the service of the Jewish race. Those are the macro changes that are occurring. On the family, level, the Roths are also experiencing rifts between them. The oldest son, Sandy, identifies with Lindbergh and his Jewish assimilation program. An aunt falls in love and marries a rabbi who is allied with Lindbergh and pushes for assimilation while ignoring the deep-seated anti-Jewish views among many in the Lindbergh administration — most notably, Henry Ford. A nephew runs to Canada to fight Nazi for the UK, only to get his leg blown off in the war, and return to the U.S. to face a hostile government who seeks to punish him for his actions.
The feeling of dread and foreboding abound in page after page in The Plot Against America. Reading this book in our current climate of fear, panic, paranoia, and ascending authoritarian power is not easy to endure, but Roth makes the journey worth the effort. His uncanny ability to craft powerful prose couched in a kind of simplicity is not an easy thing to do. In his hands, however, the message that it can indeed happen here is packed into a tense and thrilling historical novel that, in this day and age, doesn’t seem like alternate history all that much.
