c. 2004 Religion News Service
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s Senior Interreligious Adviser, is Distinguished Visiting Professor at Saint Leo University.)
(UNDATED) “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. …”
When Franklin D. Roosevelt took his presidential oath of office in March 1933, he electrified a nation reeling from four years of the Great Depression that began with the 1929 stock market crash. FDR’s 10 words removed the sense of fear from suffering Americans and replaced it with hope. The phrase quickly became a permanent part of the American lexicon.
Now seven decades later in the opening paragraph of his recently published historical novel “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth uses “fear” in a far different way than FDR: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear … yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.”
Roth’s book covers the period between 1940 and 1942 and is a frightening description of what might have happened in America if the aviator-hero Charles Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer and anti-Semite, had defeated Roosevelt and won the White House for the Republicans. The fictional scenario has authentic roots because some GOP leaders in 1940 suggested the 38-year-old Lindbergh as their presidential candidate even though he had accepted a Nazi medal of honor from Air Marshal Hermann Goering in Berlin two years earlier.
In real life, Wendell Willkie ran unsuccessfully against FDR. Also in real life Roosevelt despised Lindbergh especially after the world-famous pilot gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 11, 1941 (yes, that date!) attacking Jews for “ … their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” Roosevelt told a Cabinet member: “I am convinced Lindbergh is a Nazi.” In “The Plot Against America,” “Lucky Lindy” campaigns by donning a flight suit, helmet and goggles and piloting his own plane to airports around the country.
“Perpetual fear” is the somber theme for Roth’s autobiographical story of a 7-year-old Jewish boy living in Newark, N.J., with his parents and older brother. In “The Plot Against America,” the celebrated author of 25 books, including “Portnoy’s Complaint” and “Goodbye Columbus,” deftly mixes history with fiction.
The result is an alarming reminder that our political democracy is a fragile creation that can, under the right conditions, become an instrument of government-sanctioned religious bigotry, and even lethal violence directed against Jews or any other vulnerable group in American society.
The most fearsome aspect of Roth’s novel is its authentic texture; its perfect sense of time, place, religion and politics. As I read “The Plot Against America,” I sometimes forgot it was a work of fiction.
Roth portrays an America filled with “perpetual fear,” especially fear of possible involvement in a world war and fear of Jews who are not part of the white Christian majority culture.
Fulfilling his election promise to keep the United States out of the war raging in 1940, newly elected President Lindbergh quickly meets with Adolf Hitler and cedes control of Europe to the Nazis. Lindbergh also concedes Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean to the warlords of Imperial Japan.
Freed of involvement overseas, the isolationist Lindbergh administration turns its attention to the nation’s Jews who are accused of being “war mongers” and “aliens” in America, the land of their birth. “Just Folks,” a domestic rural work program, is established to move Jewish youngsters who live in urban areas away from their families. Jewish teenagers are assigned to live with white Christian farming families in an attempt to weaken the fabric of the Jewish community.
In a bitter twist, Roth has these Jewish relocation efforts directed by a prominent fictional Newark rabbi who is a loyal follower of Lindbergh and the administration’s “Americanization” policies.
Taking their cue from the White House, U.S. corporations order Jewish employees to move to new homes in rural America if they want to keep their jobs. Again Roth’s fiction is not far from real life.
Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration established relocation camps that forcibly but legally interned thousands of loyal American citizens of Japanese background who were suspected of being national security threats.
Actual historical figures mingle with Roth’s fictional characters in his brilliantly written book. Roth uses his own family to make the significant point that history is frequently played out within family kitchens and bedrooms. Lindbergh’s anti-Jewish policies force young Philip, his family and friends to confront and overcome extraordinary internal and external pressures. Their story is the core of this disturbing novel.
MO/JL END RNS
