The Plot Against America - Novel About a Celebrity Nazi Sympathizer Winning Presidency in 1940
Can you imagine if in 1940, hero and celebrity Charles Lindbergh, who was sympathetic to the Nazis in Germany, ran and won the Presidency with assistance from the Nazis? Then, as a quid pro quo for such help, Lindbergh's first act is to sign a treaty with Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler promising that the United States will not interfere with German expansion in Europe (known as the 'Iceland Understanding' after the place it is signed), and with Imperial Japan, promising non-interference with Japanese expansion in Asia (known as the 'Hawaii Understanding'). In The Plot Against America, Phillip Roth imagined such an alternative history?
However, today, perhaps life imitates art, as Trump wins the Presidency with Russian assistance and a complicit Republican party that opposed efforts to address such interference, and Trump now going out of his way to praise and cooperate with Russia.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/america-first-reading-plot-against-america-age-trump/
THE FIRST BALLOT at the 1940 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia revealed a hopelessly splintered party. Ten candidates received a substantial amount of support, with only Thomas Dewey garnering more than a third of the overall total. Eventual nominee Wendell Willkie registered at only 10 percent on the first roll call; by the fourth ballot he had emerged as one of three front-runners, deadlocked with Dewey and Robert Taft. As Philip Roth reimagines this moment in The Plot Against America (2004), the balloting continues without resolution until 3:18 a.m., at which point Charles Lindbergh strides onto the convention floor and declares his candidacy. By 4:00 a.m., he is announced as the nominee.
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When I taught Roth’s novel in an undergraduate course this spring, my students immediately seized on the Trump/Lindbergh parallels, their shared xenophobia and explicitly racist rhetoric. Only Roth’s suggestion that Lindbergh was secretly working closely with Adolf Hitler felt less relevant to the current election. However, recent revelations about Russian intelligence’s attempts to manipulate the election, the watering-down of an anti-Russia provision in the GOP platform, and the manifold connections between Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort and Putin’s Ukrainian ally Viktor Yanukovych have made even these seemingly far-fetched plot elements feel disturbingly familiar. So what might The Plot Against America tell us about Trump’s rise? What can Roth offer us other than uncanny prescience?
While Roth’s young narrator is shocked at Lindbergh’s victory over Roosevelt, the national media immediately assumes a knowing posture: “What had happened, they explained, was that Americans had shown themselves unwilling to break the tradition of the two-term presidency that George Washington had instituted and that no president before Roosevelt had dared to challenge.” Other factors, according to these pundits, included Lindbergh’s youth, the wonder of aviation, and a hunger for normalcy. The prevalence of American anti-Semitism is, of course, edited out. Late in the novel, the increasingly fast-paced plot advances by means of newsreels, which reveal the extraordinary credulity and passivity of the fourth estate: “German state radio announces that the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh, thirty-third president of the United States and signatory to America’s historic Iceland Understanding with the Third Reich, has been discovered to have been perpetrated by a conspiracy of ‘Jewish interests.’” After dutifully quoting New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s criticism of this obvious Nazi propaganda, the newsreel intones: “both the mayor and the governor are said by informed sources to have been interviewed at length by agents of the FBI.”
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