The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history “Alternative history (fiction)”) in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the novel follows his coming of age, as well as American politics.
Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee,[1] and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel received praise for the realism of its world and its treatment of topics such as antisemitism, trauma, and the perception of history. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated. A miniseries adaptation “The Plot Against America (miniseries)”) of the novel aired on HBO in March 2020.
Source: The Plot Against America – Wikipedia
I came upon Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America via David Runciman’s article on whether Donald Trump is a fascist? I was left thinking so much about the unforseen.
A new life began for me. I’d watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne’s, the brother on call was now off after school working for Lindbergh, and the father who’d defiantly serenaded all those callow cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open—crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured—because he was powerless to stop the unforeseen. And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. 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.
Source: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Although the world described in the book around World War II feels different to the current situation with Donald Trump, it does capture the way in which the world can so easily change.
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