The Plot Against America / Philip Roth

The Plot Against America is a novel by acclaimed author, Philip Roth, is a fictinalized historical work. The novel takes place at the time of WWII in the United States and its theme is that american aviator Charles Lindberg decides to run for president in the 1940 election vs. Franklin Delano Rosevelt.

Lindberg, a national hero, as he was the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic ocean, receives the nomination of the Republican Party. Lindberg is also an antisemite and an isolationist, i.e., is against the idea the theUnited States should join WWII against Germany.

Here Roth mixes fiction an actual history in an anviable way. Lindberg was indeed a rabid antisemite and a staunch isolationist. He also received a medal by the Third Reich. The possibility of Lindberg running for president was indeed plausible in the 1930's and Roth gets the reader to think of what might had happened had he indeed decided to run.

Roth, a Jewish author, tells the story through the eyes of a Jewish boy of a poor family (he himself, for the boy's name is Phil). In it he depicts the horror of the Jews at the possibility of Lindberg's election and the way inch by inch they feel the way american society alienates them and threaten their community.

The novel makes plain the day to day fear of a minority which is afraid for its very life and the way dormant antisemitism can awaken. Lindberg does win the national elections and the Republicans assume power. Britain is left with fighting the Germans on its own, with Russia joining in 1941, but America stays out of it.

Tales of the massacre of Jews in Europe do little to sway the mind of Lindberg who even summons the German foreign minister to the White House, which the Jews take as a sign of the fascism that Lindberg is planning for America. National programs are decreed whose aim is to assist in the assimilation of the Jewish population in the overall american one. Jewish communities are broken up and Jews are resettled.

Roth shows how easy it can be to start the dehumanizing process of a religion and a minority while keeping a liberal and benevolent face. The novel shows how Phil's father loses his job as a result of his denomination and how his brother is indocrinated by the new educational programs of Lindberg's administration.

Without telling how the book ends, I will say that this is a must read for anyone who wants to see how awful rascism can become, how sophisticated a face it can assume, and how much the public needs to be on guard to thwart it.