The Plot Against America
Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee,[1] and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey.Although criticized from the left and feared by most Jewish Americans, Lindbergh musters a strong tide of popular support from the South and the Midwest and is endorsed by Conservative rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark.Philip's older brother Sandy is one of the boys selected, and after spending time on a farm in Kentucky under the OAA's "Just Folks" program, he comes home showing contempt for his family, calling them "ghetto Jews."In protest against the new act, the radio personality Walter Winchell openly criticizes the Lindbergh administration on his nationwide Sunday night broadcast from New York.Wheeler and Ford, acting on the Nazis' evidence, begin arresting prominent Jewish citizens, including Henry Morgenthau Jr., Herbert Lehman, and Bernard Baruch as well as Mayor La Guardia and Rabbi Bengelsdorf.The Nazis' price for the boy's life was Lindbergh's full co-operation with a Nazi-organized presidential campaign by which they hoped to bring the Final Solution to the US.[2] The real-life Lindbergh's 1941 Des Moines speech—in which he accused American Jews of manipulating the news media and government to make the country join World War II—appears reprinted in the novel's postscript."[9] Blake Morrison in The Guardian offered high praise: "The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond skepticism and with a quotidian attentiveness to sights and sounds, tastes and smells, surnames and nicknames and brandnames—an accumulation of petits faits vrais—that dissolves any residual disbelief.He critically noted that "the book's historical aspects can seem thin and preposterous" but praised it for its "the description of how history can encroach upon an ordinary family, and how simple survival becomes an instance of heroism".[19] The similarities between modern anti-Zionism in western countries and the antisemitic policy decisions of the 20th-century Lindbergh government in the novel are highlighted by Jewish writer Mike Berger.[20] From this implicit condoning of prejudice against Jewish communities, many antisemitic individuals and groups become emboldened to carry out acts of violence and discriminate against Jews, as seen in the novel.[20] English Professor T. Austin Graham argues that the gradual escalation of antisemitic government policy carries a lingering, dreadful possibility of full-scale holocaust across the novel.[21] He argues that the novel also shows how many Jewish families like the Roths are also severely affected by the major shift in the “collective American psyche” that leads to wide-scale rioting akin to the events of Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany.[23] He does this by depicting how the battle between two alleged plots—the Jewish and fascist plots to take over the United States—shapes the course of the nation's future and impacts the perspective and experience of different social groups in different ways.[23] Roth redefines historical truth as the multiplicity of experiences and narratives of all people, and cautions that American history “remains perpetually unwritten and myriad.