The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

viaduct east of that and the burgeoning airport east of that and the

The men worked fifty, sixty, even seventy or more hours a week; the women worked all the time, with little assistance from labor-saving devices, washing laundry, ironing shirts, mending socks, turning collars, sewing on buttons, mothproofing woolens, polishing furniture, sweeping and washing floors, washing windows, cleaning sinks, tubs, toilets, and stoves, vacuuming rugs, nursing the sick, shopping for food, cooking meals, feeding relatives, tidying closets and drawers, overseeing paint jobs and household repairs, arranging for religious observances, paying bills and keeping the family’s books while simultaneously attending to their children’s health, clothing, cleanliness, schooling, nutrition, conduct, birthdays, discipline, and morale.

the young aviator whose daring had thrilled America and the world and whose achievement bespoke a future of unimaginable aeronautical progress came to occupy a special niche in the gallery of family anecdotes that generate a child’s first cohesive mythology. The mystery of pregnancy and the heroism of Lindbergh combined to give a distinction bordering on the divine to my very own mother, for whom nothing less than a global annunciation had accompanied the incarnation of her first child.

Lindbergh was the first famous living American whom I learned to hate—just as President Roosevelt was the first famous living American whom I was taught to love—and so his nomination by the Republicans to run against Roosevelt in 1940 assaulted, as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.

“Pride of ownership” was a favorite phrase of my father’s,

The intoxicant of anti-Semitism. That’s what I came to imagine them all so cheerfully drinking in their beer garden that day—like all the Nazis everywhere, downing pint after pint of anti-Semitism as though imbibing the universal remedy.

conclave

rather than truthfully acknowledging us to be a small minority of citizens vastly outnumbered by our Christian countrymen, by and large obstructed by religious prejudice from attaining public power,

and surely no less loyal to the principles of American democracy than an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

“No!” was the word that awakened us, “No!” being shouted in a man’s loud voice from every house on the block. It can’t be. No. No...

Meanwhile my cousin Alvin, able no longer to remain in his seat, set about pacing a room eighteen-by-twelve with a force in his gait befitting an avenger out searching the city to dispose of his nemesis.

kibbitzers

he knew full well that we were committed irrevocably to America—that though Ireland still mattered to the Irish and Poland to the Poles and Italy to the Italians, we retained no allegiance, sentimental or otherwise, to those Old World countries that we had never been welcome in and that we had no intention of ever returning to.

It was Winchell, after all, whose column had famously ushered in the three dots separating—and somehow magically validating—each hot news item ever so tenuously grounded in fact, and it was Winchell who’d more or less originated the idea of firing into the face of the credulous masses buckshot pellets of insinuating gossip—ruining reputations, compromising celebrities, bestowing fame, making and breaking showbiz careers.

the rapid-fire Winchell delivery and the pugnacious Winchell cynicism lending every scoop the sensational air of an exposé.

callow

He’d already labeled as “ratzis” the German-American Bund

mechanical pencil

He’d won the book in an Arbor Day poster contest for schoolkids that had coincided with a citywide tree-planting program administered by the Department of Parks and Public Property.

to provide the poster with a social content that implied a theme by no means common in 1940, not in poster art or anywhere else either, and that for reasons of “taste” might even have proved unacceptable to the judges.

The third child planting the tree was a Negro, and what encouraged my mother to suggest including him—aside from the desire to instill in her children the civic virtue of tolerance—was another stamp of mine,

each stamp featured a picture of a lamp that the U.S. Post Office Department identified as the “Lamp of Knowledge”

On the green one-cent stamp in the educators group, just above the picture of the Lamp of Knowledge, was Horace Mann; on the red two-cent, Mark Hopkins; on the purple three-cent, Charles W. Eliot; on the blue four-cent, Frances E. Willard; on the brown ten-cent was Booker T. Washington, the first Negro to appear on an American stamp.

I had asked her, “Do you think there’ll ever be a Jew on a stamp?” and she replied, “Probably—someday, yes. I hope so, anyway.” In fact, another twenty-six years had to pass, and it took Einstein to do it.

Sandy saved his weekly allowance of twenty-five cents—and what change he earned shoveling snow and raking leaves and washing the family car—until he had enough to bicycle to the stationery store on Clinton Avenue that carried art supplies and, over a period of months, to buy a charcoal pencil, then sandpaper blocks to sharpen the pencil, then charcoal paper, then the little tubular metal contraption he blew into to apply the fine fixative mist that prevented the charcoal from smudging. He had big bulldog clips, a masonite board, yellow Ticonderoga pencils, erasers, sketchpads, drawing paper—equipment that he

stored in a grocery carton at the bottom of our bedroom closet and that my mother, when she was cleaning...

His energetic meticulousness (passed on from our mother) and his breathtaking perseverance (passed on from our father) served only to magnify my awe of an older brother who everyone agreed was intended for great things, while most boys his age didn’t look as thou...

I was then the good child, obedient both at home and at school—the willfulness largely inactive and the attack set to go off at a later date—as yet altogether too young...

They were part of a series he was assembling of prominent Americans that concentrated primarily on those living eminences most revered by our parents, such as President and Mrs. Roosevelt, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis, and the novelist Pearl Buck, who’d won the Nobel Prize in 1938

“He’s going to be president,” Sandy told me. “Alvin says Lindbergh’s going to win.” He so confused and frightened me that I pretended he was making a joke and laughed. “Alvin’s going to go to Canada and join the Canadian army,” he said. “He’s going to fight for the British against Hitler.” “But nobody can beat Roosevelt,” I said. “Lindbergh’s going to. America’s going to go fascist.” Then we just stood there together under the intimidating spell of the three portraits. Never before had being seven felt like such a serious deficiency.

There was nobody more truthful than my brother. He wasn’t quiet because he was secretive and deceitful but because he never bothered to behave badly and so had nothing to hide. But now something external had transformed the meaning of these drawings, making them into what they were not, and so he’d told our parents that he’d destroyed them, making himself into what he was not.

the third-oldest U.S. postage stamp I owned—which I couldn’t possibly tear up and throw away—was a ten-cent airmail issued in 1927 to commemorate Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight. It was a blue stamp, about twice as long as it was high, whose central design, a picture of the Spirit of St. Louis flying eastward over the ocean, had provided Sandy with the model for the plane in the drawing celebrating his conception. Adjacent to the white border at the left of the stamp is the coastline of North America, with the words “New York” jutting out into the Atlantic, and adjacent to the border at the right the coastlines of Ireland, Great Britain, and France, with the word “Paris” at the end of a dotted arc that charts the flight path between the two cities. At the top of the stamp, directly beneath the white letters that boldly spell out UNITED STATES POSTAGE are the words LINDBERGH–AIR MAIL in slightly smaller type but large enough certainly to be read by a seven-year-old with perfect vision.

The stamp was already valued at twenty cents by Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, and what I immediately realized was that its worth would only continue increasing (and so rapidly as to become my single most valuable possession) if Alvin was right and the worst happened.

On the sidewalk during the long vacation months we played a new game called “I Declare War,” using a cheap rubber ball and a piece of chalk. With the chalk you drew a circle some five or six feet in diameter, partitioned it into as many pielike segments as there were players, and chalked into each the name of one of various foreign countries that had been in the news throughout the year. Next, each player picked “his” country and stood straddling the edge of the circle, one foot inside and one out,...

slowly, in an ominous cadence, “I—declare—war—on—” There was a suspenseful pause, and then the kid declaring war would slam the ball down, in the same instant shouting “Germany!” or “Japan!” or “Holland!” or “Italy!” or “Belgium!” or “England!” or “China!”—sometimes even shouting “America!”—and everybody would take off except the one on whom the surprise attack had been launched. His job was to catch the ball on the bounce as quickly as he could and call “Stop!” Everybody now allied against him would have to freeze in place, and the victim country would begin the counterattack, trying to eliminate one aggressor country at...

by 1940, commercial air service had been hauling transcontinental freight, passengers, and mail for more than a decade, and doing so largely as a result of the incentive of Lindbergh’s solo feat and his industrious efforts as a million-dollar-a-year consultant to

the newly organized airlines.

jodhpurs

“My intention in running for the presidency,” he told the raucous crowd, once they had stopped chanting his name, “is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war. Your choice is simple. It’s not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s between Lindbergh and war.”

fearless Lindy, at once youthful and gravely mature, the rugged individualist, the legendary American man’s man who gets the impossible done by relying solely on himself.

To prevent a war in Europe is now too late. But it is not too late to prevent America from taking part in that war. FDR is misleading the nation. America will be carried to war by a president who falsely promises peace. The choice is simple. Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war.

emendation

peripatetic

to be versed in

to never compromise on questions of principle; to never refer to notes at the lectern or on a lecture platform; to never be without a set of index cards pertaining to the topics most engaging him at the moment, to which he added new reflections and impressions every day.

In his sermons and talks calling “the development of American ideals” the first priority of Jews and “the Americanization of Americans” the best means to preserve our democracy against “Bolshevism, radicalism, and anarchism,” he frequently quoted from Theodore Roosevelt’s final message to the nation, in which the late president said, “There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.”

The war is the result of the worldly ambitions of the European peoples and their effort to reach the goals of military greatness, power, and wealth”—to

The nurseries are life gardens of human flowers in which each child is helped to grow in an atmosphere of joy and gladness”—to the evils of the industrial age—“We believe that the worth of the workingman is not to be computed by the material value of his production”—to

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

complicitious.