Faust
10-30-2004, 02:58 AM
The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
"Portnoy's back! With a Nazi America
Forecast: The pre-publication blurbs from Amazon indicate a shallow and hysterical knock-off of Philip K. Dick's groundbreaking 1960s masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle. More curiously the same trite plot devices that bolstered the earlier Dick knock-off, Fatherland, is on hand here as well: A guest appearance by Henry Ford as world-class Jew-hater, for example, is now de riguer for these things; and there are other touches that will be familiar to fans of the Hitler Won genre.
As Roth is bolstering neocon fortunes with this boilerplate "pity the poor suffering Jews" novel, the forecast also calls for a solumn and respectful reception from the major media. Likely to be a NYT bestseller on publications, have your nosepins handy."
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
During his long career, Roth has shown himself a master at creating fictional doppelgängers. In this stunning novel, he creates a mesmerizing alternate world as well, in which Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election, and Philip, his parents and his brother weather the storm in Newark, N.J. Incorporating Lindbergh's actual radio address in which he accused the British and the Jews of trying to force America into a foreign war, Roth builds an eerily logical narrative that shows how isolationists in and out of government, emboldened by Lindbergh's blatant anti-Semitism (he invites von Rippentrop to the White House, etc.), enact new laws and create an atmosphere of religious hatred that culminates in nationwide pogroms.Historical figures such as Walter Winchell, Fiorello La Guardia and Henry Ford inhabit this chillingly plausible fiction, which is as suspenseful as the best thrillers and illustrates how easily people can be persuaded by self-interest to abandon morality. The novel is, in addition, a moving family drama, in which Philip's fiercely ethical father, Herman, finds himself unable to protect his loved ones, and a family schism develops between those who understand the eventual outcome of Lindbergh's policies and those who are co-opted into abetting their own potential destruction. Many episodes are touching and hilarious: young Philip experiences the usual fears and misapprehensions of a pre-adolescent; locks himself into a neighbor's bathroom; gets into dangerous mischief with a friend; watches his cousin masturbating with no comprehension of the act. In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations, and if the lollapalooza of an ending is bizarre with its revisionist theory about the motives behind Lindbergh's anti-Semitism, it's the subtext about what can happen when government limits religious liberties in the name of the national interest that gives the novel moral authority. Roth's writing has never been so direct and accessible while retaining its stylistic precision and acute insights into human foibles and follies.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In his new novel, Roth steps boldly into the difficult realm of alternate history. As he has it, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh is nominated for president in 1940 on a peace-with-Hitler platform and wins handily over FDR--the majority of the electorate fearing that Roosevelt intends to propel the country into the war currently raging in Europe. Of course, a large segment of American Jewry is frightened at the advent of Lindbergh into the White House; his friendship with the fuhrer could easily include acceptance or even adoption of the German dictator's anti-Semitic policies. Roth brings this provocative national situation down to a personal level by drawing the reader into the lives of the young narrator--called Philip Roth--and his Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. How the Lindbergh presidency divides the family, since each member must "determine the response sensible for a Jewish family to take," is the specific focus. In particular, Roth isolates young Philip's reaction when his immediate world is plunged into turmoil he both understands and doesn't quite understand. There are occasional breaches in the "what-if" conceit, from which escape faint whiffs of gimmick, but the overall effect of the novel is staggering. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertains to war--the central question always being, Do we protect humanity beyond our borders and see our soldiers come home in body bags? This magnificent novel is both appropriate to today's headlines and timeless for its undermining of the blind sentiment that "it can't happen here." Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0618509283/reviews/104-9064242-8715166
WSJ Opinion Journal
The Plot Against America
What if FDR lost re-election to a pro-German Lindbergh in 1940?
BY THOMAS FLEMING
Thursday, October 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Fact: The year is 1940. Britain stands alone against the military might of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. President Roosevelt is running for an unprecedented third term. Should America enter the war to rescue Britain? A majority, still deeply disillusioned with the U.S. experience in World War I, oppose sending a single soldier to Europe. The GOP candidate, Wendell Willkie, gains in the polls when he begins attacking FDR as an interventionist. A shaken Roosevelt promises the mothers of America that he will never send their boys to fight in a foreign war. He wins a narrow victory.
Fiction: In Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," the year is also 1940. Instead of Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate is the legendary Charles Lindbergh, a frequent spokesman for America First, the nation's leading antiwar group. In his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Lindbergh accuses American Jews, along with a British propaganda apparatus and the Roosevelt administration, of trying to push the U.S. into a war that most Americans do not want to fight.
In fact, Lindbergh made a similar speech in the fall of 1941. He was immediately assailed by liberals as an anti-Semite and covert supporter of Hitler, igniting a media firestorm. Similar accusations are hurled in "The Plot Against America." The narrator, a nine-year-old character named Philip Roth, is upset to discover that he now hates Lindbergh, formerly one of his heroes, for attacking FDR, whom his devoutly Democratic father, Herman Roth, has taught him to love. Young Phil is even more upset when Lindbergh wins in a landslide.
How plausible is the scenario of Mr. Roth's novel? Not very, although it cannot be entirely dismissed. There were certainly sentiments in American culture at the time--about Germany and Britain and about American Jews--that Lindbergh could have exploited had he chosen to. But Lindbergh's political views were far more antiwar than anti-Semitic.
Mr. Roth is attempting the kind of alternative history that has become popular among novelists and historians. It is not idle to ponder what would have happened if the antiwar impulse in the U.S. had triumphed before Pearl Harbor.
In the novel, one of President Lindbergh's first moves is a summit conference with Adolf Hitler to sign a nonagression pact with Germany. Ten days later, he signs a similar "understanding" with Japan. When Hitler invades Russia in June 1941, Lindbergh hails him as a crusader against the world's premier evil, communism. Meanwhile the president assures Americans that he will build a military force second to none, making them invulnerable to attack. Most Americans applaud.
If you accept the idea of a President Lindbergh, this America First solution to the world crisis is within the realm of the possible. Just what would have followed, in Britain and on the Continent, is another question, which Mr. Roth never explores.
For the novelist, a grand political narrative is less important than its intimate effects, and here, for a while, Mr. Roth captures our interest. Lindbergh's policy creates turmoil in the Roth family and most of their middle-class Jewish section of Newark, N.J. "All the Jews could do was worry," reports a frightened Phil, who tries to gain admission to a local orphanage to escape his Jewish identity.
Not all the Jews in the novel worry. Phil's stylish aunt becomes the wife of one of Newark's leading conservative rabbis, who hails Lindy as an American messiah for his program to advance the cause of assimilation. Soon the rabbi and his wife are working for a new federal bureau, The Office of American Absorption, which sends Jewish children to the Midwest and South to acquaint them with "heartland life." Herman Roth's employer, an insurance company, decides to transfer him and other Jewish workers to jobs in the heartland too, ostensibly to stir the melting pot. Suspecting a sinister motive, he declines and works as a laborer instead, adding to his son's anxiety.
At this point, alas, "The Plot Against America" moves from provocative conjecture to all-out fantasy and sacrifices whatever psychological subtlety it had. Walter Winchell, another Roth family hero, loses his newspaper column and radio show for his vituperative attacks on President Lindbergh and decides to run for president--in 1942. (Neither Phil nor anyone else wonders about this timing.) Wherever Winchell goes in his cross-country tour, his readiness to call people Nazis ignites anti-Semitic riots that leave Jewish shops and homes in ruins.
America seems to be teetering on civil war or a pogrom or both when Lindbergh flies to Louisville, Ky., and gives a speech reassuring everyone that the country will remain at peace. Whereupon he climbs into his plane and disappears forever. That's right--forever, leaving the field open to his vice president, former Montana Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, who attempts a sort of fascist coup d'etat. In a breathless page and a half, we are told that Wheeler is removed from office and Roosevelt reinstalled. Pearl Harbor happens, and we are back to "real" instead of alternative history, on a different timetable.
What does this all add up to? Less than one would have hoped. The gap between the larger world of President Lindbergh and young Phil's narration in Newark is simply too vast to bridge. And the spiraling implausibility of the plot breaks faith with the reader. Lindbergh's disappearance and Vice President Wheeler's meteoric rise and fall have a deus-ex-machina quality that is unworthy of a major novelist. The ultimate explanation for Lindbergh's pro-German behavior, a secret we learn at the end, strains credulity beyond the breaking point.
Could it have a happened here? Not this way.
Mr. Fleming is the author of "The New Dealers' War" and "The Illusion of Victory, America in World War I."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005722
In September 1941 Lindbergh increased his venom and started to blame "The British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration" for agitating for war. These three groups included the two mentioned by Neville Chamberlain plus the government of Britain which then was fighting Germany. The politically correct hyenas of that era howled over that speech. Fellow members of the America First movement led the way. John T. Flynn, head of the New York chapter, publicly rebuked Lindbergh. In a private letter to Lindbergh Flynn admitted to his distress. The anti-Semites of his chapter had been delighted. Later after a private conversation Lindbergh wrote in his private journal that Flynn thought as strongly as he that Jews were in the forefront of pushing the country to war. Flynn was agreeable to discussing the matter in small private conversations. But, Lindbergh surmised that Flynn would rather see the United States in war before bringing the matter to a public debate. Norman Thomas, the lion of American socialism, regarded most of what Lindbergh said to be largely true and much of the criticism of Lindbergh to be "insincere and hypocritical". Lindbergh had noted in his diary of a successful threat by Jewish advertising firms to withhold placements from a radio network unless a proposed program was withdrawn. The threat worked and the program was not run. Writing more than 20 years later, critic Edmund Wilson remarked on the motive of American Jews wanting to save their own people. They had stronger reasons than had their ancestors for fighting the Greeks and the Romans, and they were glad for the United States to fight Germany. However, the extermination of 6 million Jews was already far advanced before the United States took action. Wilson candidly admitted that Roosevelt lied and connived with the British.
Jews and wars are not to be discussed, most especially when truth is told. Jews are forever blameless.
Quote:
Writing about Lindbergh's speech in 1989, a Yale graduate and former editor of American Heritage publications regarded the subject of Jews and war as unmentionable. The country did not choose to debate pressure by Jews. Lindbergh had violated a sacred taboo. That sly old Quaker, Herbert Hoover, had advised that after a long time in politics one should learn not to say things just because they were true. The supreme act of a sovereign state that of going to war was to be subordinated to a principle that Jews must not be offended. This cowardly retreat has continued to this day and has marked the deference the United States gives to moneyed interests. Some fifty years later GOP tub-thumper, Pat Buchanan, was accusing the same three groups of leading the United States into an unnecessary war against Iraq. Both Lindbergh and Buchanan epitomized the American isolationist strain which survives in great numbers in much of America. These non-interventionists have had very little interest in the outside world and have believed American refusal to participate with foreigners evidenced moral superiority, especially when it came to bearing arms. Many cynical foreigners have attributed this unwillingness not to moral excellence, but to cowardice.
__________________
War, Money and American Memory: Myths of Virtue, Valor and Patriotism
http://richardearley.net/
by Philip Roth
"Portnoy's back! With a Nazi America
Forecast: The pre-publication blurbs from Amazon indicate a shallow and hysterical knock-off of Philip K. Dick's groundbreaking 1960s masterpiece, The Man in the High Castle. More curiously the same trite plot devices that bolstered the earlier Dick knock-off, Fatherland, is on hand here as well: A guest appearance by Henry Ford as world-class Jew-hater, for example, is now de riguer for these things; and there are other touches that will be familiar to fans of the Hitler Won genre.
As Roth is bolstering neocon fortunes with this boilerplate "pity the poor suffering Jews" novel, the forecast also calls for a solumn and respectful reception from the major media. Likely to be a NYT bestseller on publications, have your nosepins handy."
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
During his long career, Roth has shown himself a master at creating fictional doppelgängers. In this stunning novel, he creates a mesmerizing alternate world as well, in which Charles A. Lindbergh defeats FDR in the 1940 presidential election, and Philip, his parents and his brother weather the storm in Newark, N.J. Incorporating Lindbergh's actual radio address in which he accused the British and the Jews of trying to force America into a foreign war, Roth builds an eerily logical narrative that shows how isolationists in and out of government, emboldened by Lindbergh's blatant anti-Semitism (he invites von Rippentrop to the White House, etc.), enact new laws and create an atmosphere of religious hatred that culminates in nationwide pogroms.Historical figures such as Walter Winchell, Fiorello La Guardia and Henry Ford inhabit this chillingly plausible fiction, which is as suspenseful as the best thrillers and illustrates how easily people can be persuaded by self-interest to abandon morality. The novel is, in addition, a moving family drama, in which Philip's fiercely ethical father, Herman, finds himself unable to protect his loved ones, and a family schism develops between those who understand the eventual outcome of Lindbergh's policies and those who are co-opted into abetting their own potential destruction. Many episodes are touching and hilarious: young Philip experiences the usual fears and misapprehensions of a pre-adolescent; locks himself into a neighbor's bathroom; gets into dangerous mischief with a friend; watches his cousin masturbating with no comprehension of the act. In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations, and if the lollapalooza of an ending is bizarre with its revisionist theory about the motives behind Lindbergh's anti-Semitism, it's the subtext about what can happen when government limits religious liberties in the name of the national interest that gives the novel moral authority. Roth's writing has never been so direct and accessible while retaining its stylistic precision and acute insights into human foibles and follies.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* In his new novel, Roth steps boldly into the difficult realm of alternate history. As he has it, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh is nominated for president in 1940 on a peace-with-Hitler platform and wins handily over FDR--the majority of the electorate fearing that Roosevelt intends to propel the country into the war currently raging in Europe. Of course, a large segment of American Jewry is frightened at the advent of Lindbergh into the White House; his friendship with the fuhrer could easily include acceptance or even adoption of the German dictator's anti-Semitic policies. Roth brings this provocative national situation down to a personal level by drawing the reader into the lives of the young narrator--called Philip Roth--and his Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. How the Lindbergh presidency divides the family, since each member must "determine the response sensible for a Jewish family to take," is the specific focus. In particular, Roth isolates young Philip's reaction when his immediate world is plunged into turmoil he both understands and doesn't quite understand. There are occasional breaches in the "what-if" conceit, from which escape faint whiffs of gimmick, but the overall effect of the novel is staggering. Roth has constructed a brilliantly telling and disturbing historical prism by which to refract the American psyche as it pertains to war--the central question always being, Do we protect humanity beyond our borders and see our soldiers come home in body bags? This magnificent novel is both appropriate to today's headlines and timeless for its undermining of the blind sentiment that "it can't happen here." Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0618509283/reviews/104-9064242-8715166
WSJ Opinion Journal
The Plot Against America
What if FDR lost re-election to a pro-German Lindbergh in 1940?
BY THOMAS FLEMING
Thursday, October 7, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
Fact: The year is 1940. Britain stands alone against the military might of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. President Roosevelt is running for an unprecedented third term. Should America enter the war to rescue Britain? A majority, still deeply disillusioned with the U.S. experience in World War I, oppose sending a single soldier to Europe. The GOP candidate, Wendell Willkie, gains in the polls when he begins attacking FDR as an interventionist. A shaken Roosevelt promises the mothers of America that he will never send their boys to fight in a foreign war. He wins a narrow victory.
Fiction: In Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," the year is also 1940. Instead of Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate is the legendary Charles Lindbergh, a frequent spokesman for America First, the nation's leading antiwar group. In his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, Lindbergh accuses American Jews, along with a British propaganda apparatus and the Roosevelt administration, of trying to push the U.S. into a war that most Americans do not want to fight.
In fact, Lindbergh made a similar speech in the fall of 1941. He was immediately assailed by liberals as an anti-Semite and covert supporter of Hitler, igniting a media firestorm. Similar accusations are hurled in "The Plot Against America." The narrator, a nine-year-old character named Philip Roth, is upset to discover that he now hates Lindbergh, formerly one of his heroes, for attacking FDR, whom his devoutly Democratic father, Herman Roth, has taught him to love. Young Phil is even more upset when Lindbergh wins in a landslide.
How plausible is the scenario of Mr. Roth's novel? Not very, although it cannot be entirely dismissed. There were certainly sentiments in American culture at the time--about Germany and Britain and about American Jews--that Lindbergh could have exploited had he chosen to. But Lindbergh's political views were far more antiwar than anti-Semitic.
Mr. Roth is attempting the kind of alternative history that has become popular among novelists and historians. It is not idle to ponder what would have happened if the antiwar impulse in the U.S. had triumphed before Pearl Harbor.
In the novel, one of President Lindbergh's first moves is a summit conference with Adolf Hitler to sign a nonagression pact with Germany. Ten days later, he signs a similar "understanding" with Japan. When Hitler invades Russia in June 1941, Lindbergh hails him as a crusader against the world's premier evil, communism. Meanwhile the president assures Americans that he will build a military force second to none, making them invulnerable to attack. Most Americans applaud.
If you accept the idea of a President Lindbergh, this America First solution to the world crisis is within the realm of the possible. Just what would have followed, in Britain and on the Continent, is another question, which Mr. Roth never explores.
For the novelist, a grand political narrative is less important than its intimate effects, and here, for a while, Mr. Roth captures our interest. Lindbergh's policy creates turmoil in the Roth family and most of their middle-class Jewish section of Newark, N.J. "All the Jews could do was worry," reports a frightened Phil, who tries to gain admission to a local orphanage to escape his Jewish identity.
Not all the Jews in the novel worry. Phil's stylish aunt becomes the wife of one of Newark's leading conservative rabbis, who hails Lindy as an American messiah for his program to advance the cause of assimilation. Soon the rabbi and his wife are working for a new federal bureau, The Office of American Absorption, which sends Jewish children to the Midwest and South to acquaint them with "heartland life." Herman Roth's employer, an insurance company, decides to transfer him and other Jewish workers to jobs in the heartland too, ostensibly to stir the melting pot. Suspecting a sinister motive, he declines and works as a laborer instead, adding to his son's anxiety.
At this point, alas, "The Plot Against America" moves from provocative conjecture to all-out fantasy and sacrifices whatever psychological subtlety it had. Walter Winchell, another Roth family hero, loses his newspaper column and radio show for his vituperative attacks on President Lindbergh and decides to run for president--in 1942. (Neither Phil nor anyone else wonders about this timing.) Wherever Winchell goes in his cross-country tour, his readiness to call people Nazis ignites anti-Semitic riots that leave Jewish shops and homes in ruins.
America seems to be teetering on civil war or a pogrom or both when Lindbergh flies to Louisville, Ky., and gives a speech reassuring everyone that the country will remain at peace. Whereupon he climbs into his plane and disappears forever. That's right--forever, leaving the field open to his vice president, former Montana Sen. Burton K. Wheeler, who attempts a sort of fascist coup d'etat. In a breathless page and a half, we are told that Wheeler is removed from office and Roosevelt reinstalled. Pearl Harbor happens, and we are back to "real" instead of alternative history, on a different timetable.
What does this all add up to? Less than one would have hoped. The gap between the larger world of President Lindbergh and young Phil's narration in Newark is simply too vast to bridge. And the spiraling implausibility of the plot breaks faith with the reader. Lindbergh's disappearance and Vice President Wheeler's meteoric rise and fall have a deus-ex-machina quality that is unworthy of a major novelist. The ultimate explanation for Lindbergh's pro-German behavior, a secret we learn at the end, strains credulity beyond the breaking point.
Could it have a happened here? Not this way.
Mr. Fleming is the author of "The New Dealers' War" and "The Illusion of Victory, America in World War I."
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110005722
In September 1941 Lindbergh increased his venom and started to blame "The British, the Jews, and the Roosevelt administration" for agitating for war. These three groups included the two mentioned by Neville Chamberlain plus the government of Britain which then was fighting Germany. The politically correct hyenas of that era howled over that speech. Fellow members of the America First movement led the way. John T. Flynn, head of the New York chapter, publicly rebuked Lindbergh. In a private letter to Lindbergh Flynn admitted to his distress. The anti-Semites of his chapter had been delighted. Later after a private conversation Lindbergh wrote in his private journal that Flynn thought as strongly as he that Jews were in the forefront of pushing the country to war. Flynn was agreeable to discussing the matter in small private conversations. But, Lindbergh surmised that Flynn would rather see the United States in war before bringing the matter to a public debate. Norman Thomas, the lion of American socialism, regarded most of what Lindbergh said to be largely true and much of the criticism of Lindbergh to be "insincere and hypocritical". Lindbergh had noted in his diary of a successful threat by Jewish advertising firms to withhold placements from a radio network unless a proposed program was withdrawn. The threat worked and the program was not run. Writing more than 20 years later, critic Edmund Wilson remarked on the motive of American Jews wanting to save their own people. They had stronger reasons than had their ancestors for fighting the Greeks and the Romans, and they were glad for the United States to fight Germany. However, the extermination of 6 million Jews was already far advanced before the United States took action. Wilson candidly admitted that Roosevelt lied and connived with the British.
Jews and wars are not to be discussed, most especially when truth is told. Jews are forever blameless.
Quote:
Writing about Lindbergh's speech in 1989, a Yale graduate and former editor of American Heritage publications regarded the subject of Jews and war as unmentionable. The country did not choose to debate pressure by Jews. Lindbergh had violated a sacred taboo. That sly old Quaker, Herbert Hoover, had advised that after a long time in politics one should learn not to say things just because they were true. The supreme act of a sovereign state that of going to war was to be subordinated to a principle that Jews must not be offended. This cowardly retreat has continued to this day and has marked the deference the United States gives to moneyed interests. Some fifty years later GOP tub-thumper, Pat Buchanan, was accusing the same three groups of leading the United States into an unnecessary war against Iraq. Both Lindbergh and Buchanan epitomized the American isolationist strain which survives in great numbers in much of America. These non-interventionists have had very little interest in the outside world and have believed American refusal to participate with foreigners evidenced moral superiority, especially when it came to bearing arms. Many cynical foreigners have attributed this unwillingness not to moral excellence, but to cowardice.
__________________
War, Money and American Memory: Myths of Virtue, Valor and Patriotism
http://richardearley.net/