Novelist Roth wrote about ’40s but words ring true today
Philip Roth was writing about 1940s but his words ring eerily true today
On Oct. 5, 2004, a month before President George W. Bush was re-elected, Philip Roth published The Plot Against America. On the brown cover was a terrifying image: a one-cent U.S. postage stamp of majestic Yosemite postmarked with a swastika.
The novel was a sensation. Frank Rich, the literary critic, suggested then that the cover and the story — an alternative history placing Charles Lindberg at the head of isolationist, autocratic, pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic administration — hit a nerve. “Sometimes the public, acting on instinct, just picks up the scent of something it craves,” he wrote.
In this case, 14 years ago, the scent was political allegory. The United States of the early 1940s that Roth recreated evoked, to some, a contemporaneous America at war in Iraq three years after Sept. 11, riven with anti-Muslim sentiment and intimidated by the Patriot Act.
“Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear,” says the seven-year old narrator, a young Philip Roth, in the opening sentence of this fictional memoir. The story is about the election of Lindbergh, the heroic flyer, who has defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Lindbergh promises to keep America out of the war, signs a pact with Hitler and tries to resettle warmongering American Jews, soon targets of pogroms. Martial law follows. Roth uses historical figures such Walter Winchell, the anti-Lindberg columnist, New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin. The novel has an unsettling verisimilitude that is the point — up to a point.
In 2004, Rich was struck by “the sinking sense that the perpetual fear he (Roth) describes is in some way a cousin to the fear we live with now.” It was not a fear as stark as concentration camps in Nebraska, he says, “far less horrific but all the scarier for being plausible rather than over the top.”
Roth is saying that something different could have happened in that era — that Lindberg did admire Hitler and blamed the Jews for pushing the U.S. to war; that the Republicans did want Lindberg as their nominee, that FDR was vulnerable running for an unprecedented third term; that there was a vibrant anti- Semitism fed by Coughlin, Henry Ford and the isolationists of the America First Committee.
What is fascinating — staggering, actually — is the book as a mirror of modern America. Roth denied that it was “a roman à clef to the present moment in America.” That was in 2004. In 2018, Roth’s imagined world of 1942 is ominous, eerie and plausible.
Roth died in May, and Donald Trump has made him an unlikely prophet. Imagine if Roth had published The Plot Against America now instead of 2004? Who would have believed his denials?
Think about it. Trump is a celebrity, like Lindberg, embraced by Republicans in 2016 as a flamboyant outsider, an unconventional showman. He plays to anxiety and nostalgia, and celebrates greatness and America First. Trump’s stage was reality television; Lindberg ’s was aviation.
Trump is a nativist, a white nationalist, an isolationist and a protectionist, a demagogue who incites violence at his rallies. He is a threat to democracy — a strong man who attacks the media, plans a military parade, disparages judges, discredits the Justice Department, tolerates corruption in his administration, separates immigrant families at the border. “America is slouching toward autocracy,” screamed a headline over a Sunday column in The Washington Post.
Every autocracy has its collaborators; Trump’s are the Vichy Republicans, led by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. In exchange for conservative judges, tax cuts and deregulation, they remain silent.
Lindberg had a coterie of apologists. In Roth’s book, he makes common cause with a sycophantic rabbi from New Jersey, where Roth grew up. Trump has his own fawning acolytes, from Rudolf Giuliani to Conrad Black, all seeking presidential favour.
In 1942, President Lindbergh disappears mysteriously on a solo flight in the Midwest and is never found. FDR returns to office and the United States enters the war and saves democracy. It’s a happy ending that not even Roth would dare write about Donald Trump’s America.