Hometown Hitlers: The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

Review by Bruce Collier November 18, 2004 Issue


In 1940, the Republican presidential nominee, heroic aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, overwhelmingly defeats incumbent Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. As a result, America stays out of the war looming in Europe and Asia. The Lindbergh administration then begins a systematic persecution of American Jews, first by “voluntary” assimilation programs, then by outright pogroms. The effect of this on a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey is the story of The Plot Against America. The name of the family is Roth, and the narrator is an introspective seven year-old boy named Philip.

Alternative history or “what if?” fiction is a popular genre, one I have always found hard to resist. Frequently it involves reversed results of great battles—e.g. Lee wins at Gettysburg—or the non-occurrence of a great event, such as the Reformation. Such works often have a broad sweep. The Plot Against America, by contrast, chooses small over big, offering a wealth of everyday detail on how Roth’s father, mother, brother, aunt and uncle all meet the rise of American anti-Semitism.

The story moves back and forth from the general to the specific. Through newspaper, radio, and newsreels, the Roths and their neighbors learn of the progress of President Lindbergh’s “Office of American Absorption.” The OAA sends urban Jewish youths to spend their summers living and working in the country, where they learn “the traditional ways of heartland life.” Roth’s older brother Sandy returns from a summer on a Kentucky tobacco farm full of admiration for Lindbergh and contempt for the “ghetto Jews” of his neighborhood.

Next, the president, openly anti-Semitic in his pre-election speeches and writings, courts influential American Jews, flattering and rewarding them. In return, they help him to lull the growing unrest and fear among their fellow Jews. Young Philip’s flighty Aunt Evelyn succumbs, even dancing at a Washington ball with Nazi ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Not all of the Roths are lulled. Uncle Alvin, spoiling to fight the Nazis, heads north to join the Canadian military, losing a leg and returning embittered to Newark. Philip’s father and mother, along with various neighbors both Jew and Gentile, argue among themselves and with others, but come to the conclusion that what they fled in Europe has met them in America. Plans are made to flee to Canada where hundreds of American Jews have already gone. Philip’s childhood security of family and faith comes to an abrupt end just about the time the story takes an equally abrupt turn. How things turn out is for you to read, but it’s giving nothing away to observe that a certain venomous New York gossip columnist proves to be an unlikely, but credible hero.

Roth always has a point to make in any of his novels. His point here seems to be that the anti-Semite is a citizen of the world. This being so, Jews must be prepared to be the same. The pity of the story is that Roth’s parents and neighbors believed America to be the “last, best hope” for the Jews. Equally chilling is the relative ease with which American anti-Semitism moves from ignorant street corner invective to considered presidential policy. Even so, can all that history come down to one man? Is Roth saying that there but for the grace of FDR went we?

Probably not. Roth’s fictional world contains Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering, but it also contains Churchill, Stalin, FDR, and even Fiorello LaGuardia. All play their parts, and much of the history in The Plot Against America is recognizable. This is not one of those Crichtonesque works where the death of a butterfly in China leads inexorably to the melting of the polar ice cap, or some equally dramatic—and implausible—alternate historical scenario. Roth’s historical notes give some pretty strong evidence that things weren’t quite as inevitable as they might appear to have been. That may be the real point—it didn’t happen here, but it started to.

The Plot Against America, Houghton Mifflin, 391 pages and available at book retailers and local libraries.

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