Book Review: The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
391 pages. Houghton Mifflin, 2004 (US edition). $26
391 pages. Jonathan Cape, 2004 (UK edition). £17

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In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, a speculative novel on the possibility of a fascist overthrow of the United States. (Currently out of print, this book is soon to be republished in paperback.) This book is described as follows on Amazon.com:

During the presidential election of 1936, Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, observes with dismay that many of the people he knows support the candidacy of a fascist, Berzelius Windrip. When Windrip wins the election, he forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state. Jessup opposes him, is captured, and escapes to Canada.

Philip Roth, in his latest novel The Plot Against America, has created a very similar story, one which takes place a few years later, as the Depression is winding down. In this novel, Charles Lindbergh, famous aviator but also noted anti-Semite, defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election on what is essentially a single plank platform: he vows to keep America out of war. After coming to an “understanding” with Hitler, Lindbergh begins his slow but deliberate elimination of Jews in America.Told by a young boy named Philip Roth, who is 7 as the story begins, the narrative has a surreal aspect to it, as the voice changes from a first-person point of view describing the events that young Philip experiences, then seamlessly shifting to a more global third-person narrative. This has the effect of lulling the reader into accepting both the omniscient narrator’s historical tale and the young boy’s personal concerns (that a neighbor who reportedly committed suicide might be haunting the apartment building he lives in; or that his precious stamp collection may suddenly start sprouting swastikas) on equal footing, showing both the macro and micro effects of these chilling events.

The plot goes as expected, with increasing hostility toward Jews. Walter Winchell, the famous radio voice and columnist, is dismissed from his radio program and newspaper column for his anti-Lindeberghian diatribes, then announces candidacy for president in 1942. But when Winchell is murdered, and riots break out across the US, 122 Jews are killed. As Fiorello La Guardia later says, in this novel, “There’s a plot afoot all right, and I’ll gladly name the forces propelling it–hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.” These words sound almost prophetic, given the current political climate in the United States…

The theme of the book is clearly the anti-Semitism that is wrought by Lindbergh, but for me, the bubble burst on page 340, Roth, through the unspoken thoughts of his mother, uses a phrase that strikes cold: “when the goyim are killing Jews in the street.” For if the crux of the story is the anti-Jewish reaction, which certainly could have occurred given the context, the weakness, and even the insult to many Americans, is to suggest that no one would have stood up and fought; to suggest that all the goyim, the gentiles, would either kill Jews in the street or become mere bystanders. As difficult as it certainly was at the time for Jews, and as terrible as such an alternate history would have been, I cannot accept such a reductive premise that all the goyim would have allowed such horrors to continue.

Nevertheless, I can understand Roth’s premise and the thoughts of his characters; I can only criticize his judgment of the human nature of millions of Americans who would certainly not have stood for the pogrom he depicts. Roth is a masterful author, and this book reads like both a novel and a history book, a combination that can lead the reader to a variety of thoughts. In a way, it’s two books in one–an alternate history about a short period where things could have gone differently, but also a book about the climate at the time, and about some of the leaders and opinion-makers of the crucial years before the United States entered World War II.

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