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saavedra77"The terror of the unforseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic." - Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth takes an uncharacteristic venture into alternate history--a genre in which the seemingly inevitable past turns out to be anything but guaranteed. The book's plot diverges from the actual course of mid-20th-century history in the summer of 1940, when in Roth’s version American aeronautical hero and isolationist Charles Lindbergh emerges onto the floor of a divided Republican National Convention. Firmly opposed to U.S. involvement in World War Two, Lindbergh has by this time repeatedly denounced President Roosevelt as a warmonger—a view shared by many in the then-weak and divided GOP. Debating into the early morning hours, the balkanized party reaches out to dashing Lindy—rather than their actual-historical choice, Wendell Wilkie—to rescue them from the dominant New Deal Democrats. And Lindbergh does just that: Buoyed by Lindbergh’s folksy charisma and the public's fear of war, the Republicans sweep into power, expelling FDR and many another New Dealer from Washington.
Lindbergh’s popularity and ultimate election are terrifying to Roth’s protagonists, a modest Newark Jewish family bearing the author’s name. In actual history as in the novel, Lindbergh and other isolationists had blamed Jews for pushing the country toward war; more disturbingly, Lindbergh had expressed admiration for Nazi Germany and in 1938 had accepted an honorary decoration from the German government. Once in power, Lindbergh reinforces Jewish fears—and reassures isolationists--by signing nonaggression pacts with Germany and Japan. The Roths and other Jews then find themselves the targets of a new, more open anti-Semitism, as Gentiles credit the new president with rescuing the country from the machinations of "loudmouthed Jews" and internationalist Democrats.
At home, the Roths’ fears seem realized when the Lindbergh administration proposes a program to "Americanize" ethnic minorities—notably Jews—by promoting the transfer of ghetto residents to new "homesteads" in what we would call "Red States." The Roths and others fear concentration camps, although it’s not clear that Lindbergh intends more than the dissolution of ethnic ghettos. However, the coercive atmosphere—along with a provocative White House visit by a Nazi dignitary—finally leads to fierce, vocal opposition. That opposition briefly coalesces around radio personality Walter Winchell, and then around maverick New York Republican Fiorello LaGuardia.
To this point, I found Roth’s alternate history plausible, interesting—I really wanted to see where this would go. What would be the legacy of Lindbergh's "Just Folks" assimilation scheme, his ambitious air defense and missile programs? Would LaGuardia and Lindbergh split the Republican party? Would the Democrats ever recover? Who would come out on top, by 1944? Surely not the ailing FDR himself, 4 years after a humiliating defeat & years out of the spotlight. Would it be a re-elected Lindbergh? Another powerful conservative like Robert Taft? Or a liberal-to-moderate Republican, like LaGuardia, Wilkie, or ambitious New York Governor Tom Dewey? A popular Democrat from the '30s, like former Roosevelt V.P. John Garner? Or even (for those inclining toward its ultimate historical inevitability) a certain plainspoken, bespectacled Missouri Senator?
And what kind of a world would the next president have confronted at the end of 4-year Lindbergh term? Would Germany still be fighting the Russians and British in 1944, or would one or more of these have collapsed? What, if anything, would the outside world know about the Holocaust? Would Imperial Japan consolidate its hold over China, Indonesia, and Indochina, during those years--perhaps even making inroads into India, Australia? Would any of the combatants have developed an atomic bomb? Finally, how would the victors and survivors of these disasters translate them into a meaningful past, into their own historical "epic"? Not necessarily in ways we'd like, I suspect.
Unfortunately, Roth doesn't seem prepared to follow any of these thoughts through to its conclusion. Instead, you can hear him creakily reeling the Lindbergh scenario back in, two-thirds of the way through the book. The story then returns, deus ex machina, to the 1940s epic that we already know--the "Greatest Generation" one--rendering the preceding chapters a terrifying but somehow inconsequential detour--and not all that plausibly, given how sharply Roth's scenario has already by then diverged from the 20th century as we knew it.
If The Plot Against America ultimately fails to satisfy many of the world-historical or political questions it raises, Roth's imagined Lindbergh presidency does reconnect in interesting ways with the events of 2000 - 2004: Like George W. Bush, Roth's Lindbergh has a manly, plainspoken style that inspires voters in the Heartland and South, even as his words and actions alienate many in the urban, coastal Northeast. Needless to say, neither President Bush nor his supporters could plausibly be accused of anti-Semitism. But the resemblances are more than geographic: Lindbergh's conservative supporters scorn foreign views and commitments, even if the hermispheric complacency of 1940 leads them toward isolationism instead of the unilateral assertion of U.S. power. Similarly, FDR's drive to combat Nazism ironically stems from the same liberal internationalism that will prompt his 21st-century descendents to favor collective security over unilateral adventures. On a more theatrical level, candidate Lindbergh anticipates Bush's 2003 "Mission Accomplished" appearance on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, striding onstage at the 1940 Republican Convention still in his flight gear. Two years further along Roth's alternate timeline, New York City reels from an act of shocking political violence, and liberal Republican Fiorello LaGuardia emerges Rudy-Giuliani-like to bind the city's wounds and denounce the attackers.
The parallels that Roth draws between post-9/11 and pre-Pearl Harbor America in The Plot Against America no doubt reflect the context in which he was writing. At the same time, they suggest a continuity between those worlds that's deeper than we expect: America First conservatives struggling with internationalist liberals, a pop culture addicted to familiar icons (the cowboy, the air ace), tabloid sensationalism (Walter Winchell, Matt Drudge), the country's schizophrenic attitudes toward immigration and assimilation. Perhaps this too is related to Roth's ultimate reaffirmation of history as we knew it: things had to work out the way they did, because we were always the way that we are. Sinclair Lewis notwithstanding, maybe it really "can't happen here"--not exactly, at least.
Still, I finished The Plot Against America wondering whether Roth might have written a more profound book, one in which the familiar 20th-century epic went unfulfilled, turning the world as we know it into a sort of a Byzantium, an al-Andalus, an Aztlan, a Yiddish Mitteleuropa--a lost world. For those on the losing side, after all, history's disasters are not so easily rewritten as epic.
In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth takes an uncharacteristic venture into alternate history--a genre in which the seemingly inevitable past turns out to be anything but guaranteed. The book's plot diverges from the actual course of mid-20th-century history in the summer of 1940, when in Roth’s version American aeronautical hero and isolationist Charles Lindbergh emerges onto the floor of a divided Republican National Convention. Firmly opposed to U.S. involvement in World War Two, Lindbergh has by this time repeatedly denounced President Roosevelt as a warmonger—a view shared by many in the then-weak and divided GOP. Debating into the early morning hours, the balkanized party reaches out to dashing Lindy—rather than their actual-historical choice, Wendell Wilkie—to rescue them from the dominant New Deal Democrats. And Lindbergh does just that: Buoyed by Lindbergh’s folksy charisma and the public's fear of war, the Republicans sweep into power, expelling FDR and many another New Dealer from Washington.
Lindbergh’s popularity and ultimate election are terrifying to Roth’s protagonists, a modest Newark Jewish family bearing the author’s name. In actual history as in the novel, Lindbergh and other isolationists had blamed Jews for pushing the country toward war; more disturbingly, Lindbergh had expressed admiration for Nazi Germany and in 1938 had accepted an honorary decoration from the German government. Once in power, Lindbergh reinforces Jewish fears—and reassures isolationists--by signing nonaggression pacts with Germany and Japan. The Roths and other Jews then find themselves the targets of a new, more open anti-Semitism, as Gentiles credit the new president with rescuing the country from the machinations of "loudmouthed Jews" and internationalist Democrats.
At home, the Roths’ fears seem realized when the Lindbergh administration proposes a program to "Americanize" ethnic minorities—notably Jews—by promoting the transfer of ghetto residents to new "homesteads" in what we would call "Red States." The Roths and others fear concentration camps, although it’s not clear that Lindbergh intends more than the dissolution of ethnic ghettos. However, the coercive atmosphere—along with a provocative White House visit by a Nazi dignitary—finally leads to fierce, vocal opposition. That opposition briefly coalesces around radio personality Walter Winchell, and then around maverick New York Republican Fiorello LaGuardia.
To this point, I found Roth’s alternate history plausible, interesting—I really wanted to see where this would go. What would be the legacy of Lindbergh's "Just Folks" assimilation scheme, his ambitious air defense and missile programs? Would LaGuardia and Lindbergh split the Republican party? Would the Democrats ever recover? Who would come out on top, by 1944? Surely not the ailing FDR himself, 4 years after a humiliating defeat & years out of the spotlight. Would it be a re-elected Lindbergh? Another powerful conservative like Robert Taft? Or a liberal-to-moderate Republican, like LaGuardia, Wilkie, or ambitious New York Governor Tom Dewey? A popular Democrat from the '30s, like former Roosevelt V.P. John Garner? Or even (for those inclining toward its ultimate historical inevitability) a certain plainspoken, bespectacled Missouri Senator?
And what kind of a world would the next president have confronted at the end of 4-year Lindbergh term? Would Germany still be fighting the Russians and British in 1944, or would one or more of these have collapsed? What, if anything, would the outside world know about the Holocaust? Would Imperial Japan consolidate its hold over China, Indonesia, and Indochina, during those years--perhaps even making inroads into India, Australia? Would any of the combatants have developed an atomic bomb? Finally, how would the victors and survivors of these disasters translate them into a meaningful past, into their own historical "epic"? Not necessarily in ways we'd like, I suspect.
Unfortunately, Roth doesn't seem prepared to follow any of these thoughts through to its conclusion. Instead, you can hear him creakily reeling the Lindbergh scenario back in, two-thirds of the way through the book. The story then returns, deus ex machina, to the 1940s epic that we already know--the "Greatest Generation" one--rendering the preceding chapters a terrifying but somehow inconsequential detour--and not all that plausibly, given how sharply Roth's scenario has already by then diverged from the 20th century as we knew it.
If The Plot Against America ultimately fails to satisfy many of the world-historical or political questions it raises, Roth's imagined Lindbergh presidency does reconnect in interesting ways with the events of 2000 - 2004: Like George W. Bush, Roth's Lindbergh has a manly, plainspoken style that inspires voters in the Heartland and South, even as his words and actions alienate many in the urban, coastal Northeast. Needless to say, neither President Bush nor his supporters could plausibly be accused of anti-Semitism. But the resemblances are more than geographic: Lindbergh's conservative supporters scorn foreign views and commitments, even if the hermispheric complacency of 1940 leads them toward isolationism instead of the unilateral assertion of U.S. power. Similarly, FDR's drive to combat Nazism ironically stems from the same liberal internationalism that will prompt his 21st-century descendents to favor collective security over unilateral adventures. On a more theatrical level, candidate Lindbergh anticipates Bush's 2003 "Mission Accomplished" appearance on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, striding onstage at the 1940 Republican Convention still in his flight gear. Two years further along Roth's alternate timeline, New York City reels from an act of shocking political violence, and liberal Republican Fiorello LaGuardia emerges Rudy-Giuliani-like to bind the city's wounds and denounce the attackers.
The parallels that Roth draws between post-9/11 and pre-Pearl Harbor America in The Plot Against America no doubt reflect the context in which he was writing. At the same time, they suggest a continuity between those worlds that's deeper than we expect: America First conservatives struggling with internationalist liberals, a pop culture addicted to familiar icons (the cowboy, the air ace), tabloid sensationalism (Walter Winchell, Matt Drudge), the country's schizophrenic attitudes toward immigration and assimilation. Perhaps this too is related to Roth's ultimate reaffirmation of history as we knew it: things had to work out the way they did, because we were always the way that we are. Sinclair Lewis notwithstanding, maybe it really "can't happen here"--not exactly, at least.
Still, I finished The Plot Against America wondering whether Roth might have written a more profound book, one in which the familiar 20th-century epic went unfulfilled, turning the world as we know it into a sort of a Byzantium, an al-Andalus, an Aztlan, a Yiddish Mitteleuropa--a lost world. For those on the losing side, after all, history's disasters are not so easily rewritten as epic.
