The Plot Against America

President Lindbergh

Charles A. Lindbergh — the aviator, the American hero, the man who crossed the Atlantic alone in 1927 — was also an antisemite and an isolationist who visited Nazi Germany in 1938 and received a medal from Hermann Göring. In Roth’s novel, he runs for president in 1940 on an America First platform, defeats Roosevelt, and signs non-aggression pacts with Germany and Japan.

The novel is narrated by young Philip Roth — seven years old when the novel opens, nine when it ends — from the kitchen of his Jewish family’s house in Newark’s Weequahic neighbourhood. His father Herman is a stubborn, principled opponent of what he sees happening; his mother Bess tries to keep the family functional; his older brother Sandy is seduced by a government programme that sends Jewish teenagers to live with rural Christian families; his cousin Alvin goes to Canada to fight the war America has refused.

The Domestic Terror

What Roth does that distinguishes The Plot Against America from most political alternative history is keep the scale domestic. The horror is not the Holocaust transplanted to America — it is the gradual accumulation of smaller humiliations, the relocation programmes, the social pressure, the sense of a country in which you have always believed choosing not to believe in you. The family’s arguments about whether to leave — for Canada, for Kentucky — are the arguments that Jewish families in Europe had in the 1930s, and the failure to leave is rendered with the same ordinary reasonableness that made those decisions fatal.

Reading Guides

• American Pastoral by Philip Roth — Full Review
• The Handmaid’s Tale — Full Review

Lindbergh’s Real History

The plausibility of Roth’s premise depends on how closely the fictional Lindbergh resembles the real one, and the answer is: very closely. Charles A. Lindbergh (1902–1974) was one of the most famous men in the world after his 1927 transatlantic flight, and his fame gave him a platform he used, in the late 1930s, to advocate for American neutrality and to make speeches that contained explicit antisemitic language. He visited Germany in 1938 and accepted a decoration from Hermann Göring. His most famous America First speech, delivered in Des Moines in September 1941, identified Jews as one of the groups “pressing this country toward war,” and the speech’s reception effectively ended his political influence — but it came first.

Roth’s novel takes the logic of Lindbergh’s actual politics and asks: what if his charisma had been sufficient to defeat Roosevelt in 1940? The answer is developed with historical scrupulousness. The neutrality pacts with Germany and Japan, the relocation programmes for Jewish Americans, the cabinet appointments — all of these extrapolate plausibly from the America First movement’s actual positions. The novel is frightening precisely because it is not fantastical.

The Child Narrator

The decision to narrate through young Philip Roth — the author as a child, seven years old at the novel’s opening — produces the book’s most sustained and effective formal achievement. A child’s understanding of political events is partial, often wrong about causes, accurate about effects. The child Philip knows his family is afraid; he does not fully understand what they are afraid of. He sees his father Herman’s stubborn resistance without understanding all that drives it. He watches his brother Sandy’s seduction by the government’s relocation programme without fully grasping the ideology behind it.

This limited perspective is not a weakness but the novel’s primary tool. Adult political fiction risks abstracting its human subjects into representatives of positions; the child narrator keeps everything concrete and domestic. The fear that Herman Roth’s family experiences is the fear that every Jewish family in the Weequahic neighbourhood experiences, measured in specific, small ways: the conversations that stop when adults think children can hear, the newspaper that Herman reads with an attention that frightens his wife, the cousin Alvin going to Canada to fight the war America has refused.

The HBO Adaptation

The Plot Against America was adapted for HBO as a six-part series in 2020, with Winona Ryder and Morgan Spector as Herman and Bess Roth. The adaptation, generally well received, arrived at a moment — the final year of the Trump administration — when the novel’s themes felt unusually immediate, and the series was widely read as political allegory. Roth, who died in 2018, did not see it. The timing of the novel’s publication in 2004 and its return as a television production in 2020 traces the arc of American political anxiety in the first two decades of the century.

The American Trilogy Context

The Plot Against America stands slightly outside the American Trilogy — American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain — which covers the 1950s through the 1990s. It is set earlier, in the early 1940s, and uses Roth himself as its narrator-protagonist rather than Nathan Zuckerman. But it shares the Trilogy’s central preoccupation: the vulnerability of Jewish-American security in America, the ways in which the country’s political life can turn against its Jewish citizens, and the specific texture of how political catastrophe is experienced in the home rather than on the stage of history.

Philip Roth (1933–2018) received the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Award (twice), and the Pulitzer Prize during his career, and he was repeatedly named as a likely Nobel laureate who never received the prize. The Plot Against America demonstrates, at full force, why those absences were the Nobel committee’s loss rather than his.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Roth’s most politically urgent novel: the American Jewish family as the unit through which fascism’s domestic texture is measured, rendered with the domestic precision of a childhood memoir and the historical accuracy of a political analysis.