On the Possibility of an American Holocaust: Philip Roth's The Plot Against America

The quaint conceit of imagining what would have happened if some important or unimportant event had settled itself differently has become so fashionable that I am encouraged to enter upon an absurd speculation.

Winston Churchill, If, or History Rewritten. (1931)

The plot against america, Philip Roth's "what if?" story of Charles A. Lindbergh's successful presidential campaign against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and America's subsequent alliance "in all but name" with the Axis powers, is primarily concerned with two questions, both of them vexing (55). The first is whether the Jewish population of the United States, under a set of changed historical circumstances, could have suffered a fate comparable to Europe's under Nazi rule. Simply put, could there have been an American Holocaust? Roth never answers this question definitively; he chooses instead to flirt with possibilities and drop hints throughout his narrative of life under Lindbergh, creating an often foreboding yet never entirely reliable sense that genocide or some other atrocity is waiting in the wings for his Jewish characters. But while the matter may remain unresolved, its open-endedness leads us to Roth's second, possibly more important question: how should we go about debating such a hypothetical issue, and why do so at all? The American Holocaust did not happen, at least not in the form that Roth suggests that it could have. Why and how, then, should we talk about something so counter-factual?

Regarding the first question, Roth is only one of many writers who have imagined America's ethnically diverse population facing genocide during the age of fascism. Nightmarish portraits of a Nazi-dominated America appeared even while the war was in progress, and when "alternate history" fully emerged as a genre in the 1960s it often questioned whether Hitler would or could have imposed his program of racial purification on the United States if presented with the opportunity.¹ There is much in Roth's novel that harks back to these mid-century, anti-historical experiments, to their apocalyptic international conflict and reassuringly stark sense that an American Holocaust could only have occurred under the orders of victorious Germans. When the Republican Party nominates Lindbergh, for example, his enemies attempt to cast the candidate as a Hitlerite stooge, citing his refusal to return an honorary medal awarded him by Nazi officials and the anti-Jewish rhetoric in his campaign speeches. After his inauguration, Lindbergh signs non-aggression pacts with Germany and Japan, leaving America's traditional allies in the cold and creating the sense that he is allowing or even helping a foreign threat to gather strength. And when his government encourages Jewish families to assimilate more fully into the broader American culture and in some cases relocates them from cities to more sparsely populated states, speculation about a brainwashed "fifth column" of Jewish turncoats spreads (192). Much of the novel's tension therefore lies in the mystery as to which country's interests Lindbergh is actually serving and whether he is leaving the door open for a German conquest of America, wittingly or not. Certainly this is the implication of the dust jacket for the novel's first edition, featuring a U.S. postage stamp of Yellowstone National Park with a gigantic swastika overlaying it.

The Plot Against America, however, belongs to a more recent class of alternate histories that ask whether Americans themselves might not have been vulnerable to the lure of fascism, needing only a push to turn against and repress their fellow-citizens. Roth's novel is most unnerving not when describing larger-than-life historical developments—its national and international incidents, after all, are demonstrably false—but rather when depicting the behavior of everyday, unexceptional people. Counterbalancing the political intrigue is the story of the Roth family, with a young boy named Philip—an alternate version of the author himself—attempting along with his parents and brother to make sense of the threatening changes that occur as a result of Lindbergh's election. The family sees America's Jews subjected to persecution...