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The Plot Against America
The Plot Against America AuthorPhilip RothCountryUnited StatesLanguageEnglishGenreAlternative historyPublisherHoughton MifflinSeptember 2004Pages400ISBN0-224-07453-9OCLC56804910
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee, and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel received praise for the realism of its world and its treatment of topics such as antisemitism, trauma, and the perception of history. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated. A miniseries adaptation of the novel aired on HBO in March 2020.
Plot
The novel is told from the point of view of Roth as a child growing up in Newark, New Jersey, as the younger son of Herman and Bess Roth. It begins with aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, who is already criticized for his praise of Hitler's government, joining the America First Party. As the party's spokesman, he speaks against US intervention in World War II and openly criticizes the "Jewish race" for trying to force US involvement. After making a surprise appearance on the last night of the 1940 Republican National Convention, he is nominated as the Republican Party's candidate for president.
Although criticized from the left and feared by most Jewish Americans, Lindbergh musters a strong tide of popular support from the South and the Midwest and is endorsed by Conservative Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark. Lindbergh wins the 1940 election over incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide under the slogan "Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war." Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler is Lindbergh's vice president, and Lindbergh nominates Henry Ford as Secretary of the Interior. With Lindbergh now in the White House, the Roth family begins to feel like outsiders in American society.
Lindbergh's first act is to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany and Hitler that promises that the United States will not interfere with German expansion in Europe, known as the "Iceland Understanding," and another with Imperial Japan that promises noninterference with Japanese expansion in Asia, known as the "Hawaii Understanding." The new presidency begins to take a toll on Philip's family. Philip's cousin Alvin joins the Canadian Army to fight in Europe. He loses his leg in combat and comes home with his ideals destroyed. He leaves the family and becomes a racketeer in Philadelphia. A new government program, the Office of American Absorption (OAA), begins to take Jewish boys to spend a period of time living with exchange families in the South and Midwest to "Americanize" them. Philip's older brother Sandy is one of the boys selected, and after spending time on a farm in Kentucky under the OAA's "Just Folks" scheme, he comes home showing contempt for his family, calling them "ghetto Jews."
Philip's aunt, Evelyn Finkel, marries Rabbi Bengelsdorf and becomes a frequent guest of the Lindbergh White House. Her attendance of a state dinner party for German Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop causes further strain in the family. A new version of the Homestead Act of 1862, called Homestead 42, is instituted to relocate entire Jewish families to the Western and Southern United States by mandating companies to relocate positions to those regions. Many of Philip's Newark neighbors move to Canada. Philip visits Evelyn, a senior OAA administrator, in order to try and prevent his family from having to leave Newark, but this results Philip's shy and innocent school friend, Seldon Wishnow, an only child, and his widowed mother, Selma, being moved to tiny Danville, Kentucky. Herman quits his job selling insurance and starts working for his brother in order for his family to avoid relocation.
In protest against the new act, the radio personality Walter Winchell openly criticizes the Lindbergh administration on his nationwide Sunday night broadcast from New York and is fired by his sponsor. Winchell then decides to run for president in 1942 and begins a speaking tour. His candidacy causes anger and anti-Semitic rioting in the South and the Midwest, and mobs begin targeting him. While addressing an open-air political rally in Louisville, Kentucky, on October 5, 1942, Winchell is shot to death. Winchell's funeral in New York City is presided over by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who praises Winchell for his opposition to fascism and pointedly criticizes Lindbergh for his silence over the riots and Winchell's assassination.
As he is returning from delivering a speech in Louisville on October 7, 1942, Lindbergh's plane goes missing. Ground searches turn up no results, and Vice President Wheeler assumes the presidency. German State Radio discloses "evidence" that Lindbergh's disappearance and the kidnapping of his son were part of a Jewish conspiracy to take control of the US government. The announcement incites further anti-Semitic rioting. Wheeler and Ford, acting on the Nazis' evidence, begin arresting prominent Jewish citizens, including Henry Morgenthau Jr., Herbert Lehman, and Bernard Baruch as well as Mayor La Guardia and Rabbi Bengelsdorf.
Seldon calls the Roths when his mother does not come home from work. They later discover that Seldon's mother was killed by Ku Klux Klan members who beat and robbed her before setting fire to her car with her in it. The Roths eventually call Sandy's exchange family in Kentucky and have them keep Seldon safe until Philip's father and brother drive there and bring him back to Newark. Months later, Seldon is taken in by his mother's sister. The rioting stops when First Lady Anne Morrow Lindbergh makes a statement that asks for the country to stop the violence and move forward. With the search for President Lindbergh called off, former President Roosevelt runs as an emergency presidential candidate in November 1942 and is re-elected. Months later, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, and the US enters the war.
Aunt Evelyn recounts a theory of Lindbergh's disappearance, the source for which is First Lady Lindbergh, who disclosed the details to Evelyn's husband, Rabbi Bengelsdorf, shortly before she was forcibly removed from the White House and held prisoner in the psychiatric ward at Walter Reed Army Hospital. According to Evelyn, after the Lindberghs' son, Charles, was kidnapped in 1932, his murder was faked, and he was then raised in Germany by the Nazis as a Hitler Youth member. The Nazis' price for the boy's life was Lindbergh's full co-operation with a Nazi-organized presidential campaign by which they hoped to bring the Final Solution to the US. When Lindbergh informed them that the US would never permit such a thing, he was kidnapped, and the Jewish conspiracy theory was put forward in hopes of turning the US further against its Jewish population. Philip admits that Evelyn's theory is the most far-fetched and "unbelievable" explanation for Lindbergh's disappearance, but “not necessarily the least convincing.
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