I recently read the bestselling The Plot Against America on long plane rides during my honeymoon. I’m a huge Philip Roth fan, but while the book is worth reading, it’s one of Roth’s weaker efforts. Usually, when I read a Roth novel, every several pages I feel compelled to interrupt my traveling companion, and read aloud some brilliant prose I’ve just come across. This happened not once with the The Plot Against America.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Plot Against America is what it says about the political sympathies and paranoias of many Jews of Roth’s generation. The basic plot of the book involves a gradual fascist takeover of the United States around 1940, with the looming threat of deportation of urban Jews to the American hinterlands.
The hero of the book is Franklin Roosevelt, still a tremendous icon to most Jews over sixty. Roth seems completely unaware of the irony that the presumed savior of the Jews (and democracy) is the only president who ever actually consigned an American ethnic group to concentration camps in the hinterlands; the Japanese are never mentioned in the book. And of course (with the collaboration of Congress), Roosevelt’s immigration/refugee policy was far worse than that of most nations generally thought of as far more anti-Semitic than the U.S. The refugees of the St. Louis, for example, eventually managed to find temporary asylum in Western European nations.
The heavies of the book are Charles Lindbergh, who becomes the Republican president in 1940, along with other “fascist” Republicans. I’ve blogged previously about irrational Jewish hatred of Republicans, and how it dates back to the Roosevelt era. It’s already been noted on this blog that Republicans were less anti-Semitic than Democrats in the late 1930s. Was it really the case that fascism was more likely to emerge from the Republican Party? Wasn’t Huey Long a Democrat? And Father Coughlin (who appears in the book only as a “right-winger,” even though he was a radical leftist), too?
I’ve heard that some readers of The Plot Against America see it as some sort of prescient warning about our current political situation. I guess this appeals to the Bush=Hitler crowd, but I honestly didn’t see any reasonable parallels between the plot of the book and America today, with one possible exception: just as the right-wing anti-interventionists of the late 1930s blamed the Jews for being warmongers to protect their own interests, left-wing anti-interventionists (along with the Pat Buchanan crowd, too) are doing the same today.
(UPDATE: A VC reader sent me a Weekly Standard review by Stephen Schwartz making the latter point: “Perhaps Roth intended–though probably he didn’t, for books do have a life of their own–that his book should shame all those who in the past two years have referred to “the neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon” as a respectable euphemism for Jews allegedly dedicated to warmongering.”)
Comments are closed.