In this risky genre, Roth took chances that paid off. A few reviewers even call Plot Against America his most powerful novel to date. The best parts revolve around family emotion as Roth—older, sadder, and wiser—recounts how he, as a child, lost faith in his father’s power to right observed wrongs. The author is an impressive historian; fact and fiction merge as pogroms threaten Jews, conspiracies run amuck, a Walter-Winchell-for-President campaign launches, and the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. At times, this wealth of historical detail overwhelms the family’s dramas. Leaving the fabricated premise behind for just a moment, some events—including Lindbergh’s baby kidnapping—seem plain implausible. The author’s own politics, although less self-consciously present than in previous novels, can also interrupt the fictional Roth family’s challenges and contemplations. Others criticized a clever but abrupt finale, despite a bibliography, historical chronology, and short biographies of real-life figures. And, a few critics never quite bought into the “what if?” premise. Yet, as Roth suggests, history repeats itself, moving on without our permission and co-opting us in the process. In the end, Plot Against America is an “epic, unforeseen and unexpected” (San Francisco Chronicle)—just like history.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

In 1997 PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. 

Now, with the United States at unceasing risk of terrorist attack and with many Americans fearful that civil liberties are being compromised as the government attempts to fight terrorism, Roth gives new currency to the old phrase -- indeed, deliberately employs it as The Plot Against America approaches its climax. "It can't happen here?" a prominent American politician asks a large audience in New York City in October 1942. "My friends, it is happening here . . . ."

The Plot Against America brings the sum of Roth's books to more than two dozen. It may well be his best, and it may well arouse more controversy than all the rest combined. This is saying something, when one considers the storms of hilarity and outrage set off by Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Roth's masturbatory comedy; Our Gang (1971), his burlesque of the Nixon administration; and The Human Stain (2000), in which he ranted against the "enormous piety binge, a purity binge," when President Clinton's opponents seized upon the Monica Lewinsky affair to conduct a noisy crusade in which, in Roth's view, "the smallness of people was simply crushing."

It says a great deal about Roth that when he accepted an award from PEN, the international writers' organization, not long after the publication of The Human Stain, it was this provocative passage he chose to read to the assembled literati at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Roth is a defiant provocateur who gives whole new universes of meaning to the phrase "in your face." He simply cannot resist any opportunity to scratch an existing wound or cause a new one. At the Folger, as it happens, he was preaching to the choir, and the reception was warm. The response to The Plot Against America almost certainly will be something else altogether.

Leaving aside the novel's subtext, which gives every appearance of being an attack on George W. Bush and his administration, consider the premise upon which it is constructed: that in the presidential election of 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt is soundly defeated by the Republican nominee, Charles A. Lindbergh, who immediately signs nonaggression treaties with Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan, and then institutes a succession of programs "encouraging America's religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society" -- programs clearly intended "to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections." As events unfold, it becomes clear that the administration embraces, and intends to enforce, "the Nazi dogma of Aryan superiority," the "precept at the heart of Lindbergh's credo and of the huge American cult that worships the president."

Lindbergh is a venerated (though often misunderstood) American who, after the controversy aroused by his prewar isolationism and his September 1941 speech denouncing the Jewish "influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government," turned to less heated matters and became an elder statesman; the success enjoyed by A. Scott Berg's Lindbergh: A Biography (1998) is testimony to his continuing hold on the American imagination. So one hardly needs clairvoyance to predict that The Plot Against America will be greeted in many quarters with fury, not just by political conservatives but by ordinary people who still see Lindbergh, in Roth's words, as "normalcy raised to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an undistinguished voice who had resoundingly demonstrated to the entire planet the courage to take charge and the fortitude to shape history and, of course, the power to transcend personal tragedy."

Certainly it is understandable that some people will refuse to read The Plot Against America because its depiction of Lindbergh offends them, but the loss will be theirs. This is not a novel about Lindbergh (or Roosevelt, or Henry Ford, or Fiorello LaGuardia, or any of the other historical figures who appear in its pages) but a novel about America: the complex and often contentious mix of people who inhabit it, its sustaining strengths and its persistent vulnerabilities, its susceptibility to demagoguery and anti-democratic impulses. It is also a novel about living amid the turmoil and unpredictability of history, about people's powerlessness "to stop the unforeseen," or, as its narrator says: "Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as 'History,' harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic."

The man who says those words is named Philip Roth. He is an adult now -- age unspecified, presumably the same as that of the author, who turned 70 last year -- but the story he tells takes place when he was a boy between the ages of 7 and 9. As did the author himself, he lives in Newark with his mother, father and older brother, in a tightly knit lower-middle-class Jewish community where, by 1940, "Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs."

That Roth has chosen for the umpteenth time to write fiction as imagined autobiography will annoy some readers, as it annoys me. The fixation on self has always seemed to me the greatest weakness in his work, one that has kept him from fully realizing his amazing literary gifts because it personalizes and narrows everything it touches. But for once in his fiction, the self is less important than the world outside. The Plot Against America is far and away the most outward-looking, expansive, least narcissistic book Roth has written. The effects upon young Roth of the imagined events of 1940-42 obviously are of interest and importance to him, but the real core of the book is family, community and country, and the consequences for all these of America's flirtation with fascism.

It is useful for the reader in 2004 to bear in mind that America in the early 1940s was a very different place. It was a time of "unadvertised quotas to keep Jewish admissions to a minimum in colleges and professional schools and of unchallenged discrimination that denied Jews significant promotions in the big corporations and of rigid restrictions against Jewish membership in thousands of social organizations and communal institutions." Many "prominent Americans . . . hated Jews," most blatantly and influentially Henry Ford, Burton K. Wheeler (the senator from Montana who "becomes" Lindbergh's vice president) and Father Charles E. Coughlin, the bigoted, incendiary radio preacher. Many otherwise decent ordinary people saw Jews only in stereotypes and were deeply prejudiced against them.

So, in The Plot Against America, when Lindbergh gets 57 percent of the popular vote in 1940 and wins every state except New York and Maryland, the country's 4.5 million Jews are put on notice. Philip asks his father, Herman, what Lindbergh means when he talks about "an independent destiny for America," and the answer is chilling: "It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for." It means the Office of American Absorption and something called Just Folks -- "a volunteer work program for city youth in the traditional ways of heartland life" -- through which Philip's brother, Sandy, spends a summer on a farm in Kentucky owned by a man named Mawhinney:

"It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it -- generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to -- while my father, of course, was only a Jew."

A stereotype, to be sure, but Mawhinney, it turns out, doesn't quite fit the stereotype. Sandy positively adores him -- a source of deep bitterness between him and his suspicious, fretful, chip-on-the-shoulder father -- and in time he does the Roth family an act of surpassing generosity. Later still, singular heroism is committed by the person closer to the president than anyone else, his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, an act given expression by her in words of genuine nobility. Sometimes stereotypes contain truths about people, but people -- Jews, gentiles, whatever -- aren't stereotypes. If Lindbergh and his followers can't see beyond them, neither can Philip's loving, protective, energetic, irascible father. Nobody is immune to bias and misunderstanding.

One of the things the haters can't see is that Herman Roth and his friends in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark are Americans every bit as much as they are Jews, and that it's just as American to be a Jew as it is to be a Christian or a Muslim or an atheist or anything else. The point is made in a moving passage that deserves to be quoted at length, because it is the core of the novel:

"They raised their families, budgeted their money, attended to their elderly parents, and cared for their modest homes alike, on most every public issue thought alike, in political elections voted alike. . . . 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."

When Philip's mother, Bess, urges Herman to take the family to Canada, he shouts: "I am not running away! . . . This is our country!" She sadly replies, "No, not anymore. It's Lindbergh's. It's the goyim's." But the whole brunt of the novel is that he is right and she is wrong, however difficult and dispiriting may be the task of sustaining it. The "malicious indignities of Lindbergh's America" are very real and cannot be glossed over -- in a country with a nativist streak as wide and deep as our own, it really can happen here -- but after bringing the country to the edge of the abyss, Roth mercifully and properly allows it to step back.

That Roth has written The Plot Against America in some respects as a parable for our times seems to me inescapably and rather regrettably true. When the fictional Lindbergh flies around the country "to meet with the American people face-to-face and reassure them that every decision he made was designed solely to increase their security and guarantee their well-being," the post-9/11 rhetoric of George W. Bush is immediately called to mind, as is the image of Bush aboard the aircraft carrier when Roth describes the "young president in his famous aviator's windbreaker."

The ephemera of politics have never struck me as fit raw material for the art of literature, and nothing in this novel changes my mind on that count, but there's so much of greater value and importance in it that dwelling on Roth's attitudinizing is pointless. His politics are as reflexive and tiresome as those of most other artists, literary or otherwise, and the best thing to do is to shrug them off.

As to his treatment of Lindbergh, it is an imaginative leap that I find hard to make, but it isn't rooted completely in imagination. Lindbergh did make public statements that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic, and he was indeed chummy with some very high-ranking Nazis. It is curious, though, and not much credit to Roth, that his supplemental list of suggested reading for people "interested in tracking where historical fact ends and historical imagining begins" does not include Reeve Lindbergh's memoir of her parents, Under a Wing (1998), in which, after describing her own horror at reading the 1941 speech for the first time when she was in college in the 1960s, she reflects upon her father's stubbornness and insensitivity and finds him more innocent than guilty. I am inclined to think that she is right, and that Roth should have put a fictitious crypto-fascist in the White House rather than offering a somewhat cartoonish riff upon a famous but naive and excessively self-assured man who didn't always connect words and consequences. Choosing pure fiction over "historical imagining" would of course have been considerably less sensational than putting the revered Lindbergh in the driver's seat, and the possibility that Roth had shock value in mind cannot be dismissed. What he has done is, after all, in-your-face to the max.

Still, it's Roth's book and thus Roth's choice. Besides, in the end he softens the blow with an interesting rewrite of history that casts Lindbergh in a less unfavorable, more vulnerable light. Still, the real story in The Plot Against America is that of the Roth family, which the author gives to us as a genuinely American story, about a family that undergoes absolutely wrenching internal warfare and external perils, and that comes out in the end like one of those plug-ugly New Jersey boxers who occasionally make cameo appearances in Roth's work: battered and bruised, but still on two feet, still fighting.

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

June 1940–October 1940

Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War

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.

When the first shock came in June of 1940--the nomination for the presidency of Charles A. Lindbergh, America's international aviation hero, by the Republican Convention at Philadelphia--my father was thirty-nine, an insurance agent with a grade school education, earning a little under fifty dollars a week, enough for the basic bills to be paid on time but for little more. My mother--who'd wanted to go to teachers' college but couldn't because of the expense, who'd lived at home working as an office secretary after finishing high school, who'd kept us from feeling poor during the worst of the Depression by budgeting the earnings my father turned over to her each Friday as efficiently as she ran the household--was thirty-six. My brother, Sandy, a seventh-grader with a prodigy's talent for drawing, was twelve, and I, a third-grader a term ahead of himself--and an embryonic stamp collector inspired like millions of kids by the country's foremost philatelist, President Roosevelt--was seven.

We lived in the second-floor flat of a small two-and-a-half-family house on a tree-lined street of frame wooden houses with red-brick stoops, each stoop topped with a gable roof and fronted by a tiny yard boxed in with a low-cut hedge. The Weequahic neighborhood had been built on farm lots at the undeveloped southwest edge of Newark just after World War One, some half dozen of the streets named, imperially, for victorious naval commanders in the Spanish-American War and the local movie house called, after FDR's fifth cousin--and the country's twenty-sixth president--the Roosevelt. Our street, Summit Avenue, sat at the crest of the neighborhood hill, an elevation as high as any in a port city that rarely rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh to the city's north and east and the deep bay due east of the airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty and into the Atlantic. Looking west from our bedroom's rear window we could sometimes see inland as far as the dark treeline of the Watchungs, a low-lying mountain range fringed by great estates and affluent, sparsely populated suburbs, the extreme edge of the known world--and about eight miles from our house. A block to the south was the working-class town of Hillside, whose population was predominantly Gentile. The boundary with Hillside marked the beginning of Union County, another New Jersey entirely.

We were a happy family in 1940. My parents were outgoing, hospitable people, their friends culled from among my father's associates at the office and from the women who along with my mother had helped to organize the Parent-Teacher Association at newly built Chancellor Avenue School, where my brother and I were pupils. All were Jews. The neighborhood men either were in business for themselves--the owners of the local candy store, grocery store, jewelry store, dress shop, furniture shop, service station, and delicatessen, or the proprietors of tiny industrial job shops over by the Newark-Irvington line, or self-employed plumbers, electricians, housepainters, and boilermen--or were foot-soldier salesmen like my father, out every day in the city streets and in people's houses, peddling their wares on commission. The Jewish doctors and lawyers and the successful merchants who owned big stores downtown lived in one-family houses on streets branching off the eastern slope of the Chancellor Avenue hill, closer to grassy, wooded Weequahic Park, a landscaped three hundred acres whose boating lake, golf course, and harness-racing track separated the Weequahic section from the industrial plants and shipping terminals lining Route 27 and the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct east of that and the burgeoning airport east of that and the very edge of America east of that--the depots and docks of Newark Bay, where they unloaded cargo from around the world. At the western end of the neighborhood, the parkless end where we lived, there resided an occasional schoolteacher or pharmacist but otherwise few professionals were among our immediate neighbors and certainly none of the prosperous entrepreneurial or manufacturing families. The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family's books while simultaneously attending to their children's health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale. A few women labored alongside their husbands in the family-owned stores on the nearby shopping streets, assisted after school and on Saturdays by their older children, who delivered orders and tended stock and did the cleaning up.

It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outdoors or in the houses I routinely floated through with my boyhood friends. The adults were no longer observant in the outward, recognizable ways, if they were seriously observant at all, and aside from older shopkeepers like the tailor and the kosher butcher--and the ailing or decrepit grandparents living of necessity with their adult offspring--hardly anyone in the vicinity spoke with an accent. By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey's largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our Jewish counterparts in the five boroughs. Hebrew lettering was stenciled on the butcher shop window and engraved on the lintels of the small neighborhood synagogues, but nowhere else (other than at the cemetery) did one's eye chance to land on the alphabet of the prayer book rather than on the familiar letters of the native tongue employed all the time by practically everyone for every conceivable purpose, high or low. At the newsstand out front of the corner candy store, ten times more customers bought the Racing Form than the Yiddish daily, the Forvertz.

Israel didn't yet exist, six million European Jews hadn't yet ceased to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine (under British mandate since the 1918 dissolution by the victorious Allies of the last far-flung provinces of the defunct Ottoman Empire) was a mystery to me. When a stranger who did wear a beard and who never once was seen hatless appeared every few months after dark to ask in broken English for a contribution toward the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine, I, who wasn't an ignorant child, didn't quite know what he was doing on our landing. My parents would give me or Sandy a couple of coins to drop into his collection box, largess, I always thought, dispensed out of kindness so as not to hurt the feelings of a poor old man who, from one year to the next, seemed unable to get it through his head that we'd already had a homeland for three generations. I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school. I sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs. I eagerly observed its national holidays, and without giving a second thought to my affinity for the Fourth of July fireworks or the Thanksgiving turkey or the Decoration Day double-header. Our homeland was America.

Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.

For nearly a decade Lindbergh was as great a hero in our neighborhood as he was everywhere else. The completion of his thirty-three-and-a-half-hour nonstop solo flight from Long Island to Paris in the tiny monoplane the Spirit of St. Louis even happened to coincide with the day in the spring of 1927 that my mother discovered herself to be pregnant with my older brother. As a consequence, the young aviator whose daring had thrilled America and the world and whose achievement bespoke a future of unimaginable aeronautical progress came to occupy a special niche in the gallery of family anecdotes that generate a child's first cohesive mythology. The mystery of pregnancy and the heroism of Lindbergh combined to give a distinction bordering on the divine to my very own mother, for whom nothing less than a global annunciation had accompanied the incarnation of her first child. Sandy would later record this moment with a drawing illustrating the juxtaposition of those two splendid events. In the drawing--completed at the age of nine and smacking inadvertently of Soviet poster art--Sandy envisioned her miles from our house, amid a joyous crowd on the corner of Broad and Market. A slender young woman of twenty-three with dark hair and a smile that is all robust delight, she is surprisingly on her own and wearing her floral-patterned kitchen apron at the intersection of the city's two busiest thoroughfares, one hand spread wide across the front of the apron, where the span of her hips is still deceptively girlish, while with the other she alone in the crowd is pointing skyward to the Spirit of St. Louis, passing visibly above downtown Newark at precisely the moment she comes to realize that, in a feat no less triumphant for a mortal than Lindbergh's, she has conceived Sanford Roth.

Sandy was four and I, Philip, wasn't yet born when in March 1932, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh's own first child, a boy whose arrival twenty months earlier had been an occasion for national rejoicing, was kidnapped from his family's secluded new house in rural Hopewell, New Jersey. Some ten weeks later the decomposing body of the baby was discovered by chance in woods a few miles away. The baby had been either murdered or killed accidentally after being snatched from his crib and, in the dark, still in bedclothes, carried out a window of the second-story nursery and down a makeshift ladder to the ground while the nurse and mother were occupied in their ordinary evening activities in another part of the house. By the time the kidnapping and murder trial in Flemington, New Jersey, concluded in February 1935 with the conviction of Bruno Hauptmann--a German ex-con of thirty-five living in the Bronx with his German wife--the boldness of the world's first transatlantic solo pilot had been permeated with a pathos that transformed him into a martyred titan comparable to Lincoln.

Following the trial, the Lindberghs left America, hoping through a temporary expatriation to protect a new Lindbergh infant from harm and to recover some measure of the privacy they coveted. The family moved to a small village in England, and from there, as a private citizen, Lindbergh began taking the trips to Nazi Germany that would transform him into a villain for most American Jews. In the course of five visits, during which he was able to familiarize himself at first hand with the magnitude of the German war machine, he was ostentatiously entertained by Air Marshal Göring, he was ceremoniously decorated in the name of the Führer, and he expressed quite openly his high regard for Hitler, calling Germany the world's "most interesting nation" and its leader "a great man." And all this interest and admiration after Hitler's 1935 racial laws had denied Germany's Jews their civil, social, and property rights, nullified their citizenship, and forbidden intermarriage with Aryans.

By the time I began school in 1938, Lindbergh's was a name that provoked the same sort of indignation in our house as did the weekly Sunday radio broadcasts of Father Coughlin, the Detroit-area priest who edited a right-wing weekly called Social Justice and whose anti-Semitic virulence aroused the passions of a sizable audience during the country's hard times. It was in November 1938--the darkest, most ominous year for the Jews of Europe in eighteen centuries--that the worst pogrom in modern history, Kristallnacht, was instigated by the Nazis all across Germany: synagogues incinerated, the residences and businesses of Jews destroyed, and, throughout a night presaging the monstrous future, Jews by the thousands forcibly taken from their homes and transported to concentration camps. When it was suggested to Lindbergh that in response to this unprecedented savagery, perpetrated by a state on its own native-born, he might consider returning the gold cross decorated with four swastikas bestowed on him in behalf of the Führer by Air Marshal Göring, he declined on the grounds that for him to publicly surrender the Service Cross of the German Eagle would constitute "an unnecessary insult" to the Nazi leadership.

Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate--just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love--and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.