Chapter 30: The Plot Against America
A Story of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
The Plot Against America is the perfect title for a book to read now.1 This is a novel by the celebrated author Philip Roth (1933–2018), which was published in 2004 but which is so timely it could have been published today.
The novel reconstructs the life of a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, from 1940 to 1942. As history, it is remarkably accurate with one exception – a very big exception. Roth imagines what life would have been like if the Republican Party had nominated Charles A. Lindbergh (1902-1974) for the Presidency; and he had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) in his bid for a third term in 1940. In fact, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie (1882–1944); and he lost to Roosevelt.
The election of Lindbergh in 1940 did not happen. But it could have. It is not as implausible as the Trump story. What would his election have meant for the seven-year-old Philip Roth, to his family, to Jews in the United States, and to the nation as a whole?
Charles Lindbergh won immortality on May 20–21,1927, when he made the first non-stop flight from New York to Paris. He was alone in the cockpit of his plane – “The Spirit of St. Louis” (the people who backed this flight were from St. Louis) – for 33.5 hours. This daring feat vaulted Lindbergh to the front rank of global fame. Roth’s goal in this novel was “to alter historical reality by making Lindbergh America’s 33rd President while keeping everything else as close to factual truth as I could.”2
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Anti-Semitism was on the rise nationally and globally in the 1930s. Father Charles E. Coughlin (1891-1979), the “radio priest,” commanded a listening audience estimated at between 30 to 40 million people at its peak.3 The population of the United States in 1940 was just over 132 million. Coughlin was an anti-Semite and an apologist for Hitler.
Another rabid anti-Semite was Henry Ford (1863–1947), the most famous businessman in the first half of the 20th century. Ford was the man who put America on wheels. He spread numerous lies about Jews through his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.
Lindbergh was also an anti-Semite who had good things to say about Hitler. Handsome and articulate, Lindbergh was an isolationist, that is, he was passionately opposed to the United States involving itself in the European or East Asian wars in the years from 1939 until Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941. He was a prominent speaker at the rallies of the America First Committee, the leading isolationist organization in the United States.
These three men – Coughlin, Ford, and Lindbergh – attracted a great deal of attention. Had Lindbergh become president, Roth has him arriving at “understandings” with Germany and Japan which will keep the United States neutral. President Lindbergh invites the German foreign minister to a friendly state dinner at the White House. Relations with the Nazis are cozy.
In the novel, Roth speculates about how the members of his family “might have conducted themselves under the enormous pressure of a Jewish crisis such as they never really had to encounter as native-born New Jerseyans, living all their lives, luckily enough, without an Aryan white supremacist in the White House.”4
Seeing how the Roth family reacts is gripping. The family members deal with the situation differently. The older son, Sandy, who is in seventh grade in 1940, is seduced by right wing blandishments. The younger son, Philip Roth himself, who is in third grade, does not know how to de-code the situation. The mother, Bess, works diligently to keep the family together. The father, Herman, expresses unalloyed hostility and anger toward President Lindbergh and his administration. Herman finds himself attacked as a “loudmouth Jew” for his efforts.5 A cousin leaves the United States for Canada so he can fight Hitler as a member of the Canadian armed forces. An aunt marries a well-known rabbi who makes excuses for the Lindbergh regime. This couple are featured guests at the dinner President Lindbergh gives for the German foreign minister referred to above.
An extraordinarily effective aspect of the novel is the way in which an American anti-Semitic regime handles Jews. They are not rounded up and squeezed into ghettos. Nor are they shipped to concentration camps. Quite the opposite. The regime’s program is to kill Jews with kindness.
The Lindbergh administration creates an Office of American Absorption, the goal of which is to encourage “America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society.”6 Under the auspices of the Office of American Absorption, we find the “Just Folks” program, “a volunteer work program introducing city youth to the traditional ways of heartland life.”7
Sandy Roth decides to apply for Just Folks (a name recalling the endless Nazi invocations of the Volk). His father, Herman, is aghast. He sees Just Folks as a plan “to separate Jewish children from their parents [and] to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family.”8 Sandy applies and winds up spending what he views as a wonderful summer on a farm in Kentucky. Sandy develops a Just Folks recruitment presentation and, to the horror of his father, becomes a star attraction in publicizing it.
A similar program is created for adults. Thus, Herman is assigned through “Homestead 42” to leave Newark, where he is an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life, and relocate to the company’s new office in Danville, Kentucky. “[C]alamity, when it comes, comes in a rush.”9 Philip sees his father’s “defenselessness” and his mother’s “anguish”10 at the prospect of leaving a community in which they feel at home to sally out to parts unknown. Rather than leave, Herman quits his job and takes another, lower paying and less prestigious one. He is downwardly economically mobile.
The nation becomes restive because of the unwillingness of Jews to jump on the Lindbergh administration bandwagon. A prime target is Walter Winchell, the Jewish broadcaster and gossip columnist. As Roth said, “I wanted Lindbergh opposed not by a saint but by a gossip columnist, the most famous gossip columnist in the country, gross and cheap without apology, whose enemies considered him a loudmouth Jew. Winchell was to gossip what Lindbergh was to flight: the record-breaking pioneer.”11
By October of 1942, anti-Jewish riots break out. One hundred twenty two Jews are killed. “The fear was everywhere, the look was everywhere.”12
“It was far-fetched,” Roth said in an interview “for [George] Orwell [author of 1984] to imagine the world as he did, but he knew that. His book wasn’t a prophecy. It was a futuristic horror story containing . . . a political warning. Orwell imagined a huge change in the future with horrendous consequences for everyone; I tried to imagine a small change in the past with horrendous consequences for a relative few. He imagined a dystopia, I imagined a uchronia [a genre of fiction that re-centers the past around an event that did not occur].”13
In 1970, an economist named Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) published Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.14 To summarize a subtle argument briefly, if you find yourself in a situation you do not like as a citizen or as a consumer or in any other context, you have a choice. You can exit, simply abandon that situation. Two characters in Roth’s novel choose that route. They go to Canada. Others are considering it. Even Bess Roth, Philip’s mother, opens a bank account in Montréal “in case we have to flee and start from scratch in Canada.”15
Voice is represented by Herman Roth, Philip’s father. “I have just reached a different conclusion,” he says. The “anti-Semitic bastards want us to run away. They want to get the Jews so fed up with everything . . . that they leave for good, and then they will have this wonderful country all to themselves. Well, I have a better idea. Why don’t they leave? The whole bunch of them – why don’t they go live under the Fürhrer in Nazi Germany. Then we will have a wonderful country. . . . [W]e aren’t going anywhere. There is still a Supreme Court in this country. . . . They are there to uphold the law. There are still good men in this country. . . . There is still the ballot box and people can still vote without anybody telling them what to do.”16
Herman Roth insists on speaking up, on exercising his voice. This he does because he can not stand being pushed around and also because he is profoundly loyal to what the United States is. Or at least to what it was before the election of President Lindbergh and what, perhaps, it can be again.
Exercising voice because of loyalty exacts a price. It is difficult to know how to do it effectively rather than just ranting. It entails risk. “Loudmouth Jew.” Indeed, you could wind up among the 122 Jews who lose their lives in the anti-Semitic riot.
In 2017, Roth said, “It is easier to comprehend the election of an imaginary President like Charles Lindbergh than an actual President like Donald Trump. Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities, was a great aviation hero who had displayed tremendous physical courage and aeronautical genius in crossing the Atlantic in 1927. He had character and he had substance and, along with Henry Ford, was, worldwide, the most famous American of his day. Trump is just a con artist.”17
That con artist has the allegiance of half the country. Will exercising voice exact a price? It already has for a number of individuals and even for large corporations. Will it make a difference? Do we, today, have a supreme court dedicated to upholding the law? Will we still have the ballot box in 2026?
Some people are preparing to leave the United States. They are choosing exit, despite their loyalty to the country – or to what the country once was - because they do not feel that the voice they can exercise will make a difference.
What is the right choice?
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.
Philip Roth, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America,’” New York Times, September 19, 2004. He does make at least one historical error. He writes that Judah P. Benjamin was a senator from South Carolina. Roth, Plot, p. 104. Benjamin was a senator from Louisiana.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin; https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/personal-story/charles-coughlin
Roth, “Story.”
Roth, Plot, p. 65.
Roth, Plot, pp. 84-85.
Roth, Plot, p. 84.
Roth, Plot, p. 86.
Roth, Plot, p. 206.
Roth, Plot, p. 208.
Roth, “Story.”
Roth, Plot, p. 328.
Roth, “Story.”
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Roth, Plot, p. 112.
Roth, Plot, p. 197.
Judith Thurman, “The Story Behind The Plot Against America,” The New Yorker, January 22, 2017.