The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

“The pompous son of a bitch knows everything—it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”

You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”

It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it—generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to—while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

I was down there with them, unable to let my brother out of my sight. He’d always known everything I didn’t know, and he’d come back from Kentucky knowing still more.

It was the first time I saw my father cry. A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.

Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

Bullies love to summarize. The redundant upbraiding summary—nothing to equal it outside the old-fashioned flogging.

nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.

Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences.

In that era, the common Jewish propensity was by and large nonviolent as well as nonalcoholic, a virtue whose shortcoming was the failure to educate the bulk of the young of my generation in the combative aggression that was the first law of other ethnic educations and indisputably of great practical value when you couldn’t negotiate your way out of violence or manage to run away.