Playing with history

Roth imagines an America on the road to fascism

John Dicker, Special to the News

Published October 1, 2004 at midnight

Text size

More Books

The Canadian border has been sealed. The FBI has arrested members of the opposition, including union leaders, journalists, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, even former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With a bullet to the head, the administration's most strident critic, tabloid columnist Walter Winchell, has been forever silenced. All this in the wake of riots that have left 122 American Jews dead.

The year is 1942, and in the febrile imagination of novelist Philip Roth, America is under martial law, galloping toward fascism at a breathless clip. All because Charles Lindbergh, the national aviation hero and unabashed anti-Semite, defeated FDR in the election of 1940 under the slogan "Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War!"

The Plot Against America uses history as a springboard to explore the collision of politics and family. Roth's readers will recognize this as the familiar turf of his recent prize-garnering triptych of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain.

But whereas in these books the internal strife that drives his characters also drives his narratives, this time the internal takes a back seat to the historical. And because that setting, however fancied, is rendered so carefully, the imaginings hitched to the facts, it makes for the most intense book Roth has written to date. .

Roth parts with his narrative strategy of using his perennial foil, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, as a conduit through which epic stories of the fallen sons of Newark, N.J., are transformed into folklore. Instead, The Plot is told directly from the perspective of a prescient 9-year-old boy.

The book is set in the author's familiar Weequahic, a lower-middle-class Jewish enclave of Newark. Here fascism is not something murmuring in the hinterlands. Rather, it invades a family's psyche, pitting son against father, sister against sister and a young boy against a looming reality.

The family cast includes father Herman Roth, a grade-school-educated insurance salesman whose diatribes against Lindbergh and his minions serve little more than as a benchmark of his emasculation; Bess, Philip's mother, a woman possessed of a calming practicality who's the glue that holds the family together; and Alvin, Herman's hotheaded 22-year-old nephew, whom the family has taken under its wing since the death of his parents.

The most divisive wedge comes in the form of Philip's older brother Sandy. A talented artist, Sandy is conscripted into Lindbergh's fascist 4-Club, known as Just Folks, a federal initiative aimed at immersing urban (read "Jewish") youths with "heartland" families for a summer of agrarian toil.

After spending a summer with a family of Kentucky tobacco farmers, Sandy returns home with a drawl and quickly turns against his parents, convinced that their politics are the delusional paranoia of "Ghetto Jews."

Creepy as it sounds, Just Folks is only one of many projects from Lindbergh's even more sinisterly titled Office of American Absorption, headed by Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, the Uncle Tom of American Jewry. A Southern-bred rabbi, Bengelsdorf helps "kosher up the goyim" for Lindbergh by making speeches at campaign rallies and generally providing the Jewish imprimatur for his candidacy.

If Philip's father isn't rattled enough by the rabbi's willingness to stump for an anti-Semite, his anger boils over when Bess' supercilious sister becomes Bengelsdorf's wife. During a visit to the family home, the rabbi is even treated to Herman's designated armchair, thus making his political humiliation all the more personal.

Furthering this familial balkanization is Alvin, who junked a free college education to fight Hitler via the Canadian Army - only to have his idealism blown off with his leg. He returns crippled and committed, at least initially, to a life of itinerant delinquency. Unknown to him, his previous political activity makes the entire family a mark for FBI agents.

Embodied in his nephew are Herman's own deeply conflicting loyalties: to resist the encroaching fascism while advocating for a typically American road of self-improvement for his late brother's only son.

Roth catalogues the horrors of an often-subtle creep toward fascism as coldly as any Associated Press dispatch. The tension is compounded by the young Roth's slow, carefully rendered understanding that his parents and his community are incapable of protecting him.

History is a horror show in The Plot Against America, not merely in the names of foreboding federal programs but in quieter, everyday moments. In one passage, Philip and his father watch a newsreel of FDR addressing a rally against the White House visit of Nazi foreign-affairs minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop. Says FDR: "The only thing we have to fear is the obsequious yielding to his Nazi friends by Charles Lindbergh."

Writes Roth: "A good half of the movie audience booed and hissed while the rest, including my father, clapped as loudly as they could and I wondered if a war might not break out right there on Broad Street in the middle of the day and if, when we left the darkened theater, we'd find downtown Newark a rubble heap of smoking ruins and fires burning everywhere."

Historical fiction often falls flat because novelists can't integrate their research with their storytelling. They commonly end up with an exercise that lacks both the depth of a scholarly work and the transformative power of fiction. But because Roth's Weequahic is as fully realized as James Baldwin's Harlem or Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, one can practically hear the boot-stomping of the Garden State's Bund.

It's also worth noting that the book's historical deviations aren't pulled from the ether. Lindbergh was indeed a popular figure in the 1930s, and his presence at America First rallies was greeted with refrains of "Our next president" from his fellow travelers.

Ultimately, however, it's impossible to read The Plot without pondering it as allegory. Lindbergh's campaign slogan of "Vote for Lindbergh or Vote for War!" echoes a certain vice president's suggestion that a vote for the Democratic candidate is a vote for terrorist attacks down the road.

Linking the current administration with capital-F fascism is the stuff of a tweaked-out fringe, even in Boulder. Yet given the current political climate, where those who critique the administration are smeared as "America-haters," Roth's scenario doesn't seem so far-fetched.

In a recent New York Times Book Review piece, Roth cautions readers against mining for such comparisons. But it's to his credit that, by tinkering with "what might have been," he has created a world that resonates today.

John Dicker's book "The United States of Wal-Mart" is due out next year from Tarcher. He lives in Denver.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News