Faculty Book Review--September 2005
Phillip Roth's
The Plot Against America
By Dr. John Van Atta
Since
it was now my turn to write the review for this web page, I had a
big idea: Why not simply check out from the Greenwich Library one
of its umpteen dozen copies of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against
America, the book I wanted to read, instead of trying to pry
open my exceedingly reluctant wallet for the whole $26.00 it would
cost to purchase a copy down at the Walden Bookstore. Yeah, right.
Not that it is the fault of the library; it owns ten copies of the
new Roth title, all checked out (of course), and there are twenty
“holds” on the first copy to be returned. Another big idea down the
tubes. Walden here I come: have wallet, will travel—with my wife’s
Walden discount card in hand. Obviously, this is a book in very
high demand these days.
So, I did get a chance to read this really riveting book during Christmas vacation, and it was worth the ordeal I experienced in trying to get hold of a copy for free. For people who like “What If?” scenarios—which should, by the way, include all of my B-block “What-Ifers” from first semester—here is an engrossing, partly autobiographical, alternative world of the early 1940s. The first and foremost “What If?” rule is that nothing in history is “inevitable,” nor does anything have to happen when or the way it does. Roth re-imagines his own childhood, and also the history of the United States, as it might have unfolded if Charles A. Lindbergh had somehow managed to defeat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1940. Unlike FDR, Lindbergh was in actual life an isolationist who saw the British and the Jews as scheming to force America into a foreign war against Nazi Germany. As the narrative unfolds, the Lindbergh administration becomes more and more anti-Semitic, promoting a public atmosphere of religious suspicion and hatred, courting Nazi diplomats (foreign minister von Rippentrop is cordially entertained at the White House), and enacting domestic policies designed to break-up Jewish communities and generally disrupt and finally ruin the lives of people like young Philip and the once-secure New Jersey family in which he grew up.
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In all of this there is probably some unfairness to the real-life Lindbergh, who in 1927 became a national hero not only because he was the first to fly across the Atlantic—all alone in The Spirit of St. Louis—but also because his personality and character embodied traditional American values of modesty, simplicity, individualism and self-reliance in an increasingly industrial society where such values seemed harder than ever to find. In 1940-1941, he got caught up the public debate between internationalists, who thought the national interest depended on coming to the aid of Great Britain against Nazi Germany, and isolationists, who believed President Roosevelt was drawing the United States into an unnecessary war. As a member of the so-called American First Committee (which also included former president Herbert Hoover, Senator William E. Borah, and a few other luminaries), Lindbergh as a private citizen took the second view, believing a Nazi victory would never really threaten American security. Though he had visited Germany a few times during the 1930s, admired what the Nazis had done in developing a superior air force, and did hold personal views that today would be regarded as inappropriately anti-Semitic, it is still a stretch to view him as pro-Nazi or one who would have tried to institute pogroms for American Jews if given half a chance. Nor was there any danger of his being nominated for president by the Republicans in 1940 over such party stalwarts as Robert A. Taft, Thomas E. Dewey, and Wendell L. Willkie. What, then, is the point of a book like this? To feel relieved that such horrors as a pro-Nazi, Semite-persecuting regime did not—and perhaps could not—emerge in America? To realize how easily such things could have happened here, with only a few twists of historical contingency that might have elevated Lindbergh along with a set of virulently anti-Jewish beliefs? To subtly warn that we might be, in fact, headed in a similarly dangerous direction now, having empowered (or re-empowered) certain people in Washington and elsewhere, and that little proto-Gestapos are operating in our lives already? At the risk of being accused of post-election sour grapes and whatever else, I choose the third interpretation. In our current obsession with national security, loyalty testing, patriotic rituals, and fears of foreign threats—whether real or, more likely, exaggerated for political purposes—The Plot Against America can be taken as a general guide to how insane our political culture could actually be, or is becoming. I know that Philip Roth has been accused of seeing anti-Semitic threats lurking in every nook and cranny and around every bend—and that is where this book goes overboard—but isn’t it usually better to exaggerate the extent of home-grown tyranny than to be oblivious of its presence and of its danger? |