The Plot Against America

Charles Lindbergh, running as an isolationist Republican, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election in Roth's alternate history, and the novel narrates what follows through the eyes of a boy named Philip Roth, living with his Jewish family in Newark exactly as Roth himself did as a child. Lindbergh's administration signs a nonaggression pact with Hitler and creates the Office of American Absorption, which relocates Jewish families out of their neighborhoods under the cover of assimilation programs; Philip's older brother Sandy is sent to a farm in Kentucky and comes home contemptuous of his own family's Jewishness, while a family friend's mother is murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during nationwide riots. Radio commentator Walter Winchell, campaigning against Lindbergh, is assassinated in 1942. Lindbergh's own plane then disappears without explanation, Vice President Burton Wheeler assumes the presidency, and martial law and mass arrests of prominent Jewish citizens follow before Roosevelt returns in an emergency election and history snaps back toward the war Americans actually fought. In the novel's final twist, Philip's Aunt Evelyn relays a theory passed to her through Rabbi Bengelsdorf that the Lindbergh baby, kidnapped and presumed dead in 1932 in real history, was in fact raised in Germany as a Nazi, and that Lindbergh himself vanished because he refused to keep cooperating with a plot larger than his own presidency.

Roth writes the entire national catastrophe from a child's kitchen table view, letting Philip's confusion and fear stand in for the reader's own, and the effect is deliberately domestic rather than epic. It reads as tense, plausible and eerily grounded rather than as pure fantasy, and the ordinariness of the family's slide into fear is exactly the argument the novel is making about how quickly a democracy's habits can bend.