The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

Never had I seen her in such a fury, nor had I heard her utter a curse word. I didn’t even know she knew how to. “Why don’t you go to the von Ribbentrops’ to hide?” my mother said. “Why don’t you go to your friend Herr von Ribbentrop for protection? Stupid girl! What about my family? Don’t you think that we’re afraid too? Don’t you think that we’re in danger too? Selfish little bitch—we’re all afraid!”

Where too, she seemed to be asking, is that orderly existence once so full of purpose, where is the great, great enterprise of our being the four of us?

Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone. Yet she reproached herself for errors of judgment that were not only natural when there was no longer a logical explanation for anything but generated by emotions she had no reason to doubt. The worst of it was how convinced she was of her catastrophic blunder, though, had she gone against her instincts, she would have had no less reason to deplore what she’d done.

What it came down to for the child who was watching her being battered about by the most anguishing confusion (and who was himself quaking with fear) was the discovery that one could do nothing right without also doing something wrong, so wrong, in fact, that especially where chaos reigned and everything was at stake, one might be better off to wait and do nothing—except that to do nothing was also to do something . . .

Federalist “reign of witches,”

A sound truck had come by late in the afternoon asking everyone to spread word of the meeting among their neighbors.

Because under martial law the Army had commandeered the facilities of Bell Telephone for military use, the long-distance services still open to civilians were jammed, and forty-eight hours had passed since we’d last heard anything from my father.

on the night of October 15 I was able to alarm myself with a nightmarish vision of America’s anti-Semitic fury roaring eastward through the pipeline of 22 and surging from 22 into Liberty Avenue and pouring from Liberty Avenue straight into our Summit Avenue alleyway and on up our back stairs like the waters of a flood had it not been for the sturdy barrier presented by the gleaming bay haunches of the horses of the Newark police force,

a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who’d been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car’s windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.

I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that,

determined then and there to run away from both of them. I would run away before Seldon got here, I would run away before the anti-Semites got here, I would run away before Mrs. Wishnow’s body got here and there was a funeral that I had to go to. Under the protection of the mounted police, I would run away that very night from everything that was after me and everything that hated me and wanted to kill me. I would run away from everything I’d done and everything I hadn’t done, and start out fresh as a boy nobody knew.

my long-range plan would be to save enough of the money I earned at the pretzel factory to buy a one-way train ticket to Omaha, Nebraska, where Father Flanagan ran Boys Town. I knew about Boys Town and Father Flanagan—as did every boy in America—from the movie with Spencer Tracy, who won an Academy Award for playing the famous priest and then donated his Oscar to the real Boys Town.

Minutes later, descending the stairs with a flashlight, I was able to derive the strength to keep my legs from collapsing by realizing that this was the last occasion I’d ever have to go down into that cellar and confront the wringer or the alley cats or the drains or the dead. Or that dank, befouled wall facing the street on which one-legged Alvin had once spattered his grief.

in those circumstances, when suddenly there were no longer any predictable happenings,

I was enough of a child to almost believe—we

Forlornly she looked at the kitchen clock, remembering perhaps the time that it used to be at this hour: bedtime, when all that was required was for the children to wash their faces and brush their teeth for the day dense with fulfillable duties to be rounded off to the satisfaction of all. Now that was nine o’clock—or so we’d been led to believe by that wholly convincing, immutable lifelikeness that now turned out to have been a sham. And the day in, day out routine of school—was that a sham too, a cunning deception perpetrated to soften us up with rational expectations and foster nonsensical feelings of trust?

Bed—as though as a place of warmth and comfort, rather than an incubator for dread, bed still existed.

Seldon, sick to his stomach and feverish in the back seat, hallucinating about his mother and all but performing feats of magic to do what he could to bring her back.

The trip out had taken just over twenty-four hours, but the one back took three times as long because of the many times they had to stop for Seldon to vomit by the side of the road or to pull down his pants and squat in a ditch, and because, in just a twenty-mile radius of Charleston, West Virginia (where they went round in circles, hopelessly lost, instead of proceeding east and north toward Maryland), the car broke down on six separate occasions in little over a day: once in the midst of the railroad tracks, power lines, and massive conveyors of Alloy, a town of two hundred where enormous mounds of ore and silica surrounded the factory buildings of the Electro-Metallurgical Company plant; once in the nearby little town of Boomer, where flames from the coke ovens reached so high my father, standing after sundown in the middle of the unlighted street, could read (or misread) the road map by the incandescence; once in Belle, yet another of those tiny, hellish industrial hamlets, where the fumes from the Du Pont ammonia plant almost knocked them flat when they got out of the car to lift the hood and try to figure out what was wrong; again in South Charleston, the city that looked to Seldon like “a monster” because of the steam and the smoke wreathing the freight yards and the warehouses and the long dark roofs of the soot-blackened factories; and twice on the very outskirts of the state capital, Charleston. There, around midnight, in order to call a tow truck, my father had ...

an analogy could be made, even if one weren’t delirious, to the uninvited white settlers who first poured through the Appalachian barrier into the favorite hunting grounds of the Delaware and Algonquin tribes, except that instead of alien, strange-looking whites affronting the local inhabitants with their rapaciousness, these were alien, strange-looking Jews provocative merely by their presence. This time around, though, those violently defending their lands from usurpation and their way of life from destruction weren’t Indians led by the great Tecumseh but upright American Christians unleashed by the acting president of the United States.

My father was a rescuer and orphans were his specialty. A displacement even greater than having to move to Union or to leave for Kentucky was to lose one’s parents and be orphaned.

No one should be motherless and fatherless. Motherless and fatherless you are vulnerable to manipulation, to influences—you are rootless and you are vulnerable to everything.

NOVEMBER 1928.

As governor, Roosevelt strongly establishes himself as a progressive liberal, an advocate of government relief for Depression victims, including unemployment insurance, and a foe of Prohibition.

After landslide 1930 gubernatorial victory, becomes Democratic presidential front-runner.

defeats President Hoover with 57.4 percent of vote, and Democrats sweep both houses of Congress.

Quickly proposes New Deal recovery legislation for agriculture, industry, labor, and business, and relief programs for mortgage holders and the unemployed.

Begins brief national radio broadcasts from White House, known as fireside chats, and engages reporters in informative press conferences.

NOVEMBER 1933–DECEMBER 1934. Recognizes Soviet Union and soon starts rebuilding the U.S. fleet, in part owing to Japanese activities in Far East.

By ’34 black voters have shifted political loyalty from Lincoln’s Republican Party to Roosevelt’s Democratic Party in response to preside...

1935. Burst of reform initiatives, referred to as “second New Deal,” results in the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, as well as the WPA (Works Progress Administr...

NOVEMBER 1936. Defeats Kansas Republican governor Alfred M. Lan-don, winning every state except Maine and Vermont; Democrats enlarge congressional lead.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” By 1937, economic recovery well under way, but economic crisis follows and, along with labor unrest, leads to Republican congressional victories in 1938.

In November Roosevelt orders enormous increase in production of combat airplanes.

APRIL 1939. Asks Hitler and Mussolini to agree for a period of ten years to refrain from attacking weaker European nations; Hitler replies in a Reichstag speech by heaping scorn on Roosevelt and boasting of German military might.

AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1939. Telegrams Hitler asking him to negotiate settlement with Poland over territorial dispute; Hitler responds by invading Poland on September 1. England and Franc...

When Hitler invades Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France in first half of 1940, Roosevelt significantly increases U.S. arms production.

MAY 1940. Establishes Council of National Defense and, later, Office of Production Management, to prepare industry and armed forces for possible war.

SEPTEMBER...

Roosevelt’s urging, Congress passes first peacetime conscription bill in U.S. history, requiring all men between twenty-one and thirty-five to register for the draft and arranging for the induction into armed services of 800,000 draftees.

JANUARY–MARCH 1941. Inaugurated January 20. In March Congress passes his Lend-Lease Act, authorizing president to “sell, transfer, lend, lease” armaments, foodstuffs, and services to countries whose defense he deems vital to the defense of the U.S.

In April U.S. takes Greenland under protection;

extends Lend-Lease to Russia.

Atlantic Charter of “common principles,” containing eight-point declaration of peace aims.

1942. Directing the war effort occupies president almost entirely. In his annual message to Congress he stresses increased war production, declares that “our objectives are clear—smashing the militarism imposed by the warlords on their enslaved peoples.” Proposes record $58,927,000,000 budget to accommodate war expenses.

president assures France, Portugal, and Spain that Allies have no designs on their territories.

Asks Congress to expand draft to eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds.

When Idaho Republican senator William E. Borah encourages Lindbergh to run for president, Lindbergh says he prefers to take political positions as a private citizen.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh publishes third book, The Wave of the Future, a brief anti-interventionist tract subtitled “A Confession of Faith,” which arouses enormous controversy and immediately becomes top nonfiction bestseller despite denunciation by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes as “the Bible of every American Nazi.”

Secretary Ickes to call him “the No. 1 United States Nazi fellow traveler.”