The Plot Against America
From Libertarian Wiki
Philip Roth's 2004 Alternate History novel The Plot Against America is the disturbingly credible story of a family's struggle to deal with life in an America in which the isolationist and anti-semitic aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh wins the Presidency in 1940 as the nominee of the Republican Party by defeating Democratic Party nominee Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Thus the historical contingency or departure point is that Lindbergh becomes the 33rd President of the United States. While the United States of America does not become a fascist dictatorship - elections are still held and the press is not muzzled - journalists critical of the Lindbergh administration are intimidated or even assassinated by fascist extremists and Jews are forced to leave familar neighborhoods for dispersion by the Office of American Absorption. American political insularity permits Nazi Germany to dominate Europe.
On October 10, 1942, German State radio announces that President Lindbergh has been kidnapped by a Jewish consiracy consisting of FDR, former Treasury Secretary Hans Morganthau, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, etc. with the help of the Royal Canadian Air Force. The reality is that conservative Republican Vice President Wheeler has attempted a coup d'etat. Martial law is declared and it looks as if American democracy has fallen prey to fascist dictatorship.
Science fiction is a significant departure for Roth, a writer known for his popular fiction novel, Portnoy's Complaint. The Plot Against America reflects the anxiety of many intellectual Americans about the power of the extreme right wing in American politics and the threat it poses to civil liberties under the second Bush adminsitration. President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, was an important pre-war Wall Street financial consultant for the Nazi government of Adolph Hitler.
Historical Material
- Compare the plot with Sinclair Lewis's novel from that historical period, It Can't Happen Here. Signet Classics; Reissue edition. 1993.
- Max Wallace. 2003. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0312290225.
- Ben Aris. "How Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power". The Guardian. September 25, 2004. Guardian Article
- Bush Family Photo Album
- See also the references to Walter Winchell and J. Edgar Hoover in Michael Dobbs. 2004. Sabouteurs: The Nazi Raid on America. Vintage. ISBN 140030420, on pages 194 and 230.
Details
- Philip Roth. 2004. The Plot Against America. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0618509283.
