The Plot Against America

We knew things were bad," my father told the friends he immediately sat down to phone when we got home, "but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare. (Herman Roth upon returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. a few months into Charles Lindbergh’s presidency.) 

I didn’t watch the HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, so it’s hard for me to imagine how they managed to make Roth’s deceptive period drama about the Roth family in Weequahic, New Jersey in the years leading up to and during what should’ve been America’s entry into World War Two more convincing than Roth does. Because of its singular brilliance, Roth’s prose doesn’t translate well to the big or small screen. Published in 2004 to acclaim and commercial success, the novel presents to the reader a great yarn, but one to which the reader has to lend himself for it to be fully convincing. 

If you take the extreme view – which is a valid one – that the novel is the product of overactive Jewish paranoia, the TV series can’t have escaped such a charge as carefully as Roth does. The novel opens straightforwardly: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.” As anyone knows who has done a little reading, American history is certainly not without its moments of burlesque. Unfortunately, neither is American literature. 

The “story” of The Plot Against America is told by Philip Roth, about the years of his boyhood. His father, Herman, sells insurance. His mother, Bess, manages the household. Philip has an older brother, Sandy. Some of these details will sound familiar to anyone acquainted with some of Roth’s past novels. Roth is able, as always, to capture the dailiness of the life of a family that had settled in a district of Newark, New Jersey that was almost exclusively Jewish. This wasn’t a peculiar situation in Newark – there were almost exclusively Italian and exclusively black districts. Every large American city was laid out in such a way. In the years leading up to World War Two, however, and during the horrific twenty-eight months of war that America watched from the sidelines, American Jews were confronted with groups that opposed American intervention in the war because Hitler didn’t want it. The Republican Party’s nomination of Charles Lindbergh for president in the 1940 election, and Lindbergh’s landslide win, sets the story into a spin in conjectureland from which nobody emerges unscathed. 

The novel is so much more compelling when it concentrates on the domestic problems of the Roth family and their neighbors – all of the telling moments in which little Philip observes the world around him – that it’s a shame that the twilight zone America that Roth describes with sometimes chilling details (Herman's long drive through West Virginia by night is especially unnerving) fails to seem real. 

Roth is so often criticized for his honest depiction of Jews, with all of their deficiencies on display, that to read his long passage about what makes them Jews is an emotional peak in the novel: 

These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language—they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be "proud" of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of—what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences. 

Roth wants everyone to understand that he is a Jew but also, and with equal emphasis and pride, an American. Not a minor detail at a time – then as now – when some Americans, some white Christians, have the temerity to suggest that they, to the exclusion of everyone unlike them, are the only Americans, the first Americans. 

As soon as the alternate historical events enter the narrative, the novel becomes quite unwieldy. It isn’t because they’re unlikely – that the isolationism of Americans, whether in favor of Hitler or not, could reach such a hysterical pitch that, having already sat out more than two years of the war, it would simply remain seated while every nation in Europe and in Asia was invaded, bombed, and occupied, aroused my skepticism. And it certainly isn’t that I doubt Americans’ capacity for anti-Semitism or any other racial bias under the sun. Roth fails to make Charles Lindbergh much more than an enigma, despite the history of the man that we – barely – know. And I found it hard to believe that a sitting president would be permitted to exercise his fondness for flying by barnstorming daily – unaccompanied and unescorted – wherever his Spirit took him. As I mentioned earlier, these are too close to sheer burlesque. In fact, the novel itself could be called an Historical Burlesque on American history. 

Roth definitely did his homework researching historical figures. I didn’t know, for example, that New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was part Jewish. It’s too tempting to think that The Plot Against America should’ve been called The American Plot, that Roth’s sounding an alarm about the sinister forces of white supremacy in America is really just an exposé of the obvious, shining a bright light on aspects of American society that are hiding in plain sight. This is the opposite extreme from the argument made by one critic of the novel, Bill Kauffman, who forgot that he was reviewing a work of fiction and concluded that: 

This is a repellent novel, bigoted and libelous of the dead, dripping with hatred of rural America, of Catholics, of any Middle American who has ever dared stand against the war machine. All that is left, I suppose, is for the author to collect his Presidential Medal of Freedom. (1)

Kaufman evidently believes that there is one America, just as there is one American history. (Even if he stupidly, for the sake of his argument, gives legitimacy to the anti-war movement at a moment in history when it was completely untenable.) He doesn’t believe that, from the perspective of a Jewish kid in New Jersey, there could possibly be another America, just as he probably doesn’t recognize the enormous rift dividing the country today. 

Has surviving four years of Trump in the White House made The Plot Against America more prescient? HBO certainly thought so. What will always stay with me from my reading of the novel is Roth’s affectionate portrayal of what it was like to be a Jewish-American in the 20th Century, and what being an American fully means.

(1) "Heil to the Chief," The Ametican Conservative, September 27, 2004.