Perpetual Fear and Ineffable Outrage

By Nicholas Desai | Wednesday, January 12, 2005

The Plot Against America
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 2004

"'Walter's vulgarity is something great, and Lindbergh's decorum is hideous.'" The context is unimportant; this quotation from Philip Roth's new novel, The Plot Against America, captures the feeling pervading that fictional memoir, which is something between Barry Goldwater declaring that "extremism is defense of liberty is no vice" and the notion that the country might honor every democratic and liberal convention and nevertheless slide into a nightmare despotism. Though "perpetual fear" is the phrase, I think, that Roth parades most obviously as a theme or key to his novel, let me suggest that his story concerns a more modern political sentiment: ineffable outrage.

Most follow politics intuitively and emotionally; the Everyman reads the morning paper and mercilessly evaluates the headlines in the spirit that has made everyone a breakfast-table crusader against tyranny. Yet if America's liberties have endowed the populace with such force, couldn't clever and relentless quislings capture this political arsenal and pervert it? This is the horror story of Roth's novel, and it is the horror of a lone voice who realizes that fascism depends on democracy, that the mob can be turned and hardened beyond the reach of rational persuasion. It's a dreadful feeling not because the many can't see the invisible conspirators pulling strings of government but because they see all (and maybe more than you) and don't care.

It's a horror story, and it's also a mystery about America. Fascism, communism, and theocracy never captured our government or general public even as these ideologies ravaged millions throughout history. Why? Dumb luck? Divine providence? The brilliance of our political system? The steadfastness of our people? If it's luck, then fascism, like a hurricane or a tsunami, reflects not a nation's character but instead some regrettable statistical inevitability. I wouldn't give away the answer to any riddle, suffice it to say that Roth navigates this question (and the fear that America might not really be different) with keen nuance, a respect for the country and recognition of its shortcomings.

To narrate this political drama, Roth chose an alternate universe in which Charles Lindbergh, aviator and public man, wins the nomination of the Republican Party in 1940 before unseating Roosevelt in a landslide victory. The historical Lindbergh first gained fame by piloting The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic and then by publicly enduring the kidnapping and murder of his eldest child. To his heroism and tragedy was added notoriety when he traveled to Nazi Germany to receive the Service Cross of the German Eagle from officials of the Third Reich. A strong isolationist involved with such organizations as America First, Lindbergh would warn the country against allowing itself to become embroiled in another world war because a small minority, the Jews, wished us to do so.

And so, in Roth's 1940, a man whose politics were at least isolationist and probably sympathetic to Nazism and who had rightly gained admiration and sympathy from the American people, suddenly came to occupy the highest American political office. He then negotiated an understanding with Hitler that maintained American neutrality. To Roth's credit, he does not explore the world of the Lindbergh presidency through some cheesily contrived character with his finger pressed on the pulse of current events. The protagonist is Roth's childhood alter-ego, also named Philip Roth, a child from a working Newark family, who hears news either second-hand from adults or through the radio.

Actually, little Philip is remarkably well-informed, partly because the memoir convention assumes that he writes in sage retrospect. His childishness luckily isn't a metaphor for the innocence of America; it means merely that Philip is never an ideologue, even during a century of ideology. His bottom line never hinges upon armies oceans away or abstract principle, but whether his childhood staples—his family, his idols, his stamp collection— persevere.

"A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," noted Stalin, and it is upon this principle that fascism and other brands of ideological tyranny have predicated themselves. In the voice of both the child and the historian, the fictional Roth details both personal tragedies and political statistics and links the two. It's in understanding how the statistical incrementally becomes the tragic that Roth's reader can appreciate the significance of America's escape from European totalitarianisms.

Philip's family, consciously composed of elements that are recognizably ordinary and Jewish, lives in admiration of Roosevelt, his New Deal, his erudite-sounding radio voice, and, for Philip, his personal stamp collection. His outspoken father Herman, follower of politics and family breadwinner, chooses to remain in their Jewish neighborhood even after receiving a tempting job offer elsewhere. His mother Bess, levelheaded and caring, and his precocious and artistic brother Sandy complete this wholesome foursome who interact with colorful neighborhood characters: the idealistic miscreant Alvin, his late-teenage cousin; his young and sexy Aunt Evelyn who's dating the coolest rabbi in town; and annoying kids.

Minus the political premise, it's reminiscent of Woody Allen's nostalgic film Radio Days, and even with the Lindbergh scenario, the novel veers nostalgic despite its quasi-dystopian flavor. It's as if the narrator Roth longs for a childhood that never came into fruition and for a sleeping giant that never awoke. "They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare," says Philip, "they" being gentiles. Despite the groups' divergent evaluations, they share a common sense of unnatural unreality. Such an America seems quietly demented.

Though the alleged fascist creep of the Lindbergh presidency is viewed through the eyes of a family that anticipates Nazism like the prick of a needle, Roth doesn't have Lindbergh inundate the country with obviously anti-Semitic policies. Kristallnacht doesn't come as expected. Herman Roth, having been expelled from his Washington hotel on nebulous grounds, immediately suspects anti-Semitism on the part of management and loudly proclaims his belief. Yet there is little overt reason to believe that merely because an isolationist occupies the White House that hotel managers would expel Jews from their rooms; thus Roth invites us to consider the Roth family's keen political sense as dubious and self-destructive paranoia.

What exactly does Lindbergh do? His federal programs, named Just Folks and the Office of American Absorption (OAA), are seemingly benevolent and try to introduce Jews living in cities to the lifestyle of the American farmer. He dines with Hitler and Von Ribbentrop, but also with prominent rabbis, one of whom, Lionel Bengelsdorf, is made head of the OAA. Ever laconic, Lindbergh emphasizes the peace of the nation more than its complicity to Nazi aggression. Sandy becomes enamored with Lindbergh after taking an OAA-sponsored trip to Kentucky. Philip's Aunt Evelyn happily marries Bengelsdorf in a ceremony well-attended by prominent American Jews. Yet, there are stronger, undeniable indications. Henry Ford, author of several articles about the Jewish Question, is made Secretary of Labor. Anti-Semitic riots loom. Radio personality and columnist Walter Winchell vociferously cries "fascism" to Lindbergh supporters and detractors alike.

And then suddenly speculation is no longer needed because an extraordinary and unprovoked event exposes the secret mechanics of the titular Plot. I'm sure that many will disapprove, calling the event contrived and hasty, based on the assumption that political and historical causes are transparent and predictable. I'm impressed by Roth's decision to rely on luck. In a novel about political forces on people, it's appropriate that an apparent fluke should arrive to temper fear or faith in such forces.

And then there's the Plot itself. Revealed in a roundabout way, it's clever and sort of humanizing. It's a missing puzzle piece in the historical aura of one of the previous century's most defining people, Charles Lindbergh. However, it's never really presented as true—just as a scintillating suggestion. But then again, the whole novel is itself a suggestion, so it doesn't seem any less legitimate.

Others will also be eager to draw parallels to the Bush Administration, which, they say, has steadily stripped away all of our liberties by appealing to our fears, as fascist demagogues are prone to do. Philip Roth is clearly a Democrat; he writes of that party with non-ironic pride. Yet there's irony elsewhere; Alvin moves to Canada to fight in a foreign war while America remains peaceful. The point is not that Roth tries to subliminally educate his readers by commenting on current politics. If that was his intent, he did a poor job, and, really, why read such novels when one has non-fiction books and op-eds?

The Plot Against America is about, above all, how to view history. This can probably excuse its most glaring flaw, the weird superimposition of his realist descriptions of everyday life with the half-satiric, half-serious political segments. In Roth's conception, History is the result of individual wills and sheer coincidences, ideas and inevitabilities. There's mourning for the millions who died and for those who were left behind—the "stumps," he calls them. There's also guarded optimism for America's future, the view that despite the machinations of the few or the delusions of the many, Americans have stumbled onto something beautiful and resilient. There's a manifestation of our wildly successful yet much belittled American hopefulness, as Herman Roth declares, "'It's the beginning of the end of fascism in America! No Mussolini here� no more Mussolini here!'"

Perpetual Fear and Ineffable Outrage

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