The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

the raised statue of Lincoln in his capacious throne of thrones, the sculpted face looking to me like the most hallowed possible amalgamation—the face of God and the face of America all in one.

When we got back to the hotel, Mr. Taylor parked the car and accompanied us in as though he were not just our guide but our chaperone, and a good thing it was, because inside the lobby of the small hotel we discovered our four suitcases standing beside the front desk. The new man at the desk introduced himself as the manager. When my father asked what our bags were doing downstairs, the manager said, “Folks, I have to apologize. Had to pack these up for you. Our afternoon clerk made a mistake. The room he gave you was being held for another family. Here’s your deposit.” And he handed my father an envelope containing a ten-dollar bill. “But my wife wrote you people. You wrote us back. We had a reservation months ago. That’s why we sent the deposit. Bess, where’s the copies of the letters?”

“This is that goddamn Lindbergh!” my father said. “All you little fascists are in the saddle now!” “Shall I call the District police, sir, or will you take your bags and your family and leave immediately?” “Call the police,” my father replied. “You do that.” There were now five or six guests aside from us in the lobby. They’d entered while the argument was under way and they were lingering to find out what was going to come of it. It was then that Mr. Taylor stepped up to my father’s side and said, “Mr. Roth, you are perfectly in the right, but the police are the wrong solution.” “No, that is the right solution. Call the police,” my father repeated to the manager. “There are laws in this country against people like you.” The manager reached for the phone, and while he dialed, Mr. Taylor went over to our bags, swept up two in either hand, and carried them out of the hotel. My mother said, “Herman, it’s over. Mr. Taylor took the bags.”

whispered to my brother, “What happened?” “Anti-Semitism,” he whispered back.

“Dear, let’s just go,” she beseeched my father. “Mr. Taylor found us a room nearby.” “No!” my father cried, and he threw off the hand with which she had tried to snatch his arm. “This policeman knows why we were evicted. He knows, the manager knows, everybody in this lobby knows.” “I think you ought to listen to your wife,” the cop said. “I think you ought to do what she tells you, Roth. Leave the premises.” Jerking his head in the direction of the door, he said, “And before you wear out my patience.”

There was more resistance in my father, but there was still some sanity in him as well, and he was able to understand that his argument had run out of interest to anyone other than himself. We left the hotel with everybody watching

So our perfect outing was ruined—and not so much because a recreational flight piloted by one or another of the Lindberghs happened by chance to have passed over our heads for the second day in a row but because of what the stunt, as my father called it, had inspired in everyone except us. “We knew things were bad,” my father told the friends he immediately sat down to phone when we got home, “but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.” It was the most eloquent line I’d ever heard him speak, and arguably distinguished by more precision than any ever written by Lindbergh’s wife.

“If ever there was a case of a loudmouth Jew with too much power—” the stranger said. “That is enough!” Mr. Taylor cried and, jumping to his feet, placed himself—undersized as he was—between the large figure looming over us and my outraged father, pinned in below by all that ludicrous bulk.

Loudmouth Jew. And for the second time in less than forty-eight hours.

The announced purpose of the OAA was to implement programs “encouraging America’s religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society,” though by the spring of 1941 the only minority the OAA appeared to take a serious interest in encouraging was ours. It was the intention of Just Folks to remove hundreds of Jewish boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen from the cities where they lived and attended school and put them to work for eight weeks as field hands and day laborers with farm families hundreds of miles from their homes. Notices extolling the new summer program had been posted on bulletin boards at Chancellor and at Weequahic, the high school just next door, where the student population, like ours, was nearly one hundred percent Jewish. One day in April, a representative from the New Jersey OAA had come to talk to the boys twelve and over about the program’s mission, and that evening Sandy showed up at the dinner table with an application blank that required a parent’s signature. “Do you understand what this program is actually trying to do?” my father asked Sandy. “Do you understand why Lindbergh wants to separate boys like you from their families and ship them out to the sticks? Do you have any idea what’s behind all this?”

Their disagreement only grew more passionate during dinner, my father maintaining that Just Folks was the first step in a Lindbergh plan to separate Jewish children from their parents, to erode the solidarity of the Jewish family, and Aunt Evelyn intimating none too gently that the greatest fear of a Jew like her brother-in-law was that his children might escape winding up as narrow-minded and frightened as he was.

It would be several months before it occurred to my parents that Aunt Evelyn was the rabbi’s mistress and had been ever since he’d met her at a reception following his speech to the Newark Teachers Union on “The Classroom Development of American Ideals”—and they realized it only then because, on leaving the New Jersey OAA to assume the job of federal director at the national headquarters in Washington, Bengelsdorf announced to the Newark papers news of his engagement, at age sixty-three, to his thirty-one-year-old firebrand of an assistant.

Hitler’s goal is to conquer the world, and that includes the United States of America. And since everywhere he goes he shoots the Jews, when the time is right he will come and shoot the Jews here. And what will our president do then? Protect us? Defend us? Our president

will not lift a finger. That is the understanding that they reached at Iceland, and any adult who thinks otherwise is crazy.”

I am pleased to tell you that it took no more than two or three sessions alone with the president to get him to relinquish his misconceptions and to appreciate the manifold nature of Jewish life in America. This is not an evil man, not in any way. This is a man of enormous native intelligence and great probity who is rightly celebrated for his personal courage and who wants now to enlist my aid to help him raze those barriers of ignorance that continue to separate Christian from Jew and Jew from Christian.

Because there is ignorance as well among Jews, unfortunately, many of whom persist in thinking of President Lindbergh as an American Hitler when they know full well that he is not a dictator who attained power in a putsch but a democratic leader who came to office through a landslide victory in a fair and free election and who has exhibited not a single inclination toward authoritarian rule. He does not glorify the state at the expense of

the individual but, to the contrary, encourages entrepreneurial individualism and a free enterprise system unencumbered by inter...

What Hitler perpetrated on Germany’s Jews with the passage in 1935 of the Nuremberg Laws is the absolute antithesis of what President Lindbergh has undertaken to do for America’s Jews through the establishment of the Office of American Absorption. The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of their civil rights and did everything to exclude them from membership in their nation. What I have encouraged President Lindbergh to do is to initiate programs inviting Jews to enter as far into the national life as they like—a national life that I’m sure you would agree is no less ours to enjoy than anyone else’s.”

The following evening Aunt Evelyn phoned and bubblingly informed us that out of the one hundred New Jersey boys who’d gone west that summer under the sponsorship of Just Folks, Sandy had been selected as the statewide “recruiting officer” to speak as a veteran to eligible Jewish youngsters and their families about the OAA program’s many benefits and to encourage them to apply. Thus did the rabbi extract his revenge. Our father’s older son was now an honorary member of the new administration.

her real intention (known to no one other than her husband) was to deposit her paychecks by mail into a Montreal bank account in case we had to flee and start from scratch in Canada.

A new life began for me. I’d watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood.

And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything.

What I fell into with Earl was following people.

Earl Axman’s Peeping Jewism,

And night after night I went to sleep under the exciting spell of the great new aim I’d unearthed for my eight-year-old life: to escape it.

When at school I heard a bus through the open window climbing the Chancellor Avenue hill, all I could think about was being on board; the whole of the outside world had become a bus the way for a boy in South Dakota it was a pony—the pony that carries him to the limits of permissible flight.

My final trip with Earl occurred one afternoon a few days before our Christmas vacation when we boarded the Linden bus behind a man who was carrying in either hand a department

store shopping bag stuffed with gifts and decorated for the season in red and green; just ten days later Mrs. Axman would suffer a nervous breakdown and be taken away in an ambulance in the middle of the night, and soon after that, on New Year’s Day 1942, Earl would be whisked off by his father, stamp collection and all.

When I again looked at Earl to find out what to do, he was already on his way back to Newark. “Run for it,” he shouted at me over his shoulder, “beat it, Phil—it’s a fairy!”

Since what Uncle Monty said to him about Lindbergh was exactly what Rabbi Bengelsdorf had told him—and also what Sandy was secretly saying to me—I began to wonder if my father knew what he was talking about.

It was a matter not of hiding anything from Alvin or of lying to him but of protecting him from whatever could interfere with his recovery.

“Broken down” means that the end of the stump goes bad: it opens up, it cracks, it gets infected. There are boils, sores, edema, and you can’t walk on it with the prosthesis and so have to be without it and resort to crutches until it heals and can take the pressure without breaking down again.

Here’s how Alvin came to have it in for Sandy. Before leaving him alone on the morning of his first Monday back,

The maimed and suffering American pariah who had come to loom larger for me than any man I’d ever known, including my father, whose passionate struggles had become my own, whose future I fretted over when I should have been listening to the teacher in class, had begun to buddy up with the same good-for-nothings who’d helped turn him into a petty thief at sixteen. What he appeared to have lost in combat, along with his leg, was every decent habit inculcated in him when he was living as my parents’ ward. Nor did he display any interest in the fight against fascism, which, two years earlier, no one could restrain him from joining. In fact, why he went scooting out of the house on his artificial leg every night was, at the beginning anyway, largely to avoid having to sit in the living room while my father read the war news aloud from the paper.

There was no campaign against the Axis powers that my father didn’t agonize about,

“But why did you go,” my mother asked him, “when it was bound to upset you like this?” “I went,” he told her, “because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”

Dear Mr. Roth: In compliance with a request from Homestead 42, Office of American Absorption, U.S. Department of the Interior, our company is offering relocation opportunities to senior employees like yourself, deemed qualified for inclusion in the OAA’s bold new nationwide initiative.

opened my notebook to pretend to do my schoolwork, simultaneously hoping and dreading that I’d overhear them say something in Catholic.

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.

“No,” he replied, “not Canada again!” as though Canada were the name of the disease insidiously debilitating us all. “I don’t want to hear it. Canada,” he told her firmly, “is not a solution.” “It’s the only solution,” she pleaded. “I am not running away!” he shouted, startling everyone. “This is our country!” “No,” my mother said sadly, “not anymore. It’s Lindbergh’s. It’s the goyim’s. It’s their country,” she said, and her breaking voice and the shocking words and the nightmare immediacy of what was mercilessly real forced my father, in the prime of his manhood, fit, focused, and undiscourageable as any forty-one-year-old could possibly be, to see himself with mortifying clarity: a devoted father of titanic energy no more capable of protecting his family from harm than was Mr. Wishnow hanging dead in the closet.

wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan.

The day before I discovered that my stamps were gone, I’d learned of my father’s decision to quit his job. Only minutes after I got home from the hospital on Tuesday morning, he drove up to our house and into the alley in Uncle Monty’s truck with the slatted-wood sides and parked it there behind Mrs. Wishnow’s car, having just finished his first night of work at the Miller Street market.

A father remodeled, a brother restored, a mother recovered, eighteen black silk sutures stitched in my head and my greatest treasure irretrievably lost, and all with a wondrous fairy-tale swiftness. A family both declassed and rerooted overnight, facing neither exile nor expulsion but entrenched still on Summit Avenue, whereas in three short months, Seldon—to whom I was helplessly yoked now that he was going around the neighborhood reveling in having prevented me from bleeding to death while

disguised in his clothes—Seldon was shipping out. As of September 1, Seldon would be off living with his mother, the only Jewish kid in Danville, Kentucky.

My “sleepwalking” would likely have caused an even more humiliating scandal than it did in our immediate locale had not Walter Winchell been fired by Jergens Lotion only hours after coming off the air on the Sunday night that I’d run away. There was the truly shocking news that nob...

For Walter Winchell to characterize Homestead 42, a program designed to broaden and enrich the involvement of America’s proud Jewish citizens in the national life, as a fascistic strategy to isolate Jews and exclude them from the national life is the height of journalistic recklessness and an illustration of the Big Lie technique that is today the greatest threat to democratic freedom everywhere.” The letter was signed “Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, Director, Office of American Absorption, Department of the Interior, Washington, D.C.”

“The Lindbergh fascists”—so began the characteristically brazen, unregenerate Winchell column published just days after he’d lost his radio contract—“have openly begun their Nazi assault on freedom of expression. Today Winchell’s the enemy to be silenced . . . Winchell ‘the warmonger,’ ‘the liar,’ ‘the alarmist,’ ‘the Commie,’ ‘the kike.’ Today yours truly, tomorrow every newscaster and reporter who dares to tell the truth about the fascist plot to destroy American democracy. Honorary Aryans like the rabid rabbi Lyin’ Lionel B. and the snooty Park Avenue proprietors of the gutless New York Times aren’t the first ultracivilized Jewish Quislings to grovel before an anti-Semitic master because they’re just too, too refined to fight like Winchell . . . and they won’t be the last. The jerks at Jergens aren’t the first corporate

cowards to play ball with the dictatorial lying machine that is now ruining this country . . . and they won’t be the last, either.” And that column—which proceeded to list some fifteen more of his personal enemies who qualified as America’s leading fascist collaborators—was, in fact, to be his last.

once Walter Winchell became the first Democratic candidate to enter the race, and to do so almost thirty months in advance of the ’44 election, in advance even of the midterm congressional elections—and to do so immediately after the noisy fracas that resulted from his having been “purged” from his profession by “the strong-arm putsch tactics of the fascist gang in the White House” (as Winchell described his enemies and their methods in announcing his candidacy)—the one-time gossip columnist became the man to beat, the only Democrat with a name known to everyone and audacious enough to assault with ferocity an incumbent as beloved as Lindy.

And when I realized that my father, of all these men, was the most obstinate, helplessly bonded to his better instincts and their excessive demands. I only then understood that he had quit his job not merely because he was fearful of what awaited us down the line should we agree like the others to be relocated