Philip Roth chose to set The Plot Against America in his hometown of Newark—and to use the real names and, to some extent, biographies of his family members as he drew the characters who would populate the novel, installing a younger version of himself as the book’s narrator and protagonist. In doing so, Roth examines an environment he knows intimately as he shows how the Roth family navigates a time of great social, political, and emotional turbulence. By investigating how the Roth family is placed under intense pressure by the uncertainty of wartime and the looming specter of anti-Semitism, Roth ultimately argues that “a family is both peace and war”—in other words, the members of a family unit can act as one another’s most important allies or most devastating enemies.
Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America consists of an alternate history not just of 1940s America, but of his own family. Roth uses the journeys of three major characters to show how members of a single family might grow to resent one another or even betray one another in times of intense uncertainty or under extreme duress. The first major character to struggle with betrayal and resentment of and toward his family is Alvin, the Roths’ “ward” and the orphaned son of Herman’s older brother. Alvin, an older teenager, flees to Canada shortly after Lindbergh’s election to fight for the British in Europe—but just a few months into his service, he loses a leg in battle and is sent home. Alvin is emaciated, broken, and alone in figuring out how to move through the world on his new prosthetic leg while contending with a stump that constantly “breaks down,” leaving him vulnerable to wounds and infections. As the months and years go by, Alvin becomes a gangster and moves to Philadelphia, which enrages Herman and leads to horrible emotional and physical fighting between them, even as they should come together in sorrow and solidarity as Lindbergh’s administration tightens its grip on the American Jews. Alvin’s journey is significant in many ways. The Roths are, at the start of the novel, a safe harbor for Alvin—they represent “peace” in the wake of his parents’ deaths, and though he resents his own losses, he more or less fits in. After defying Herman and running away to Canada only to return permanently disabled, Alvin resents Herman more directly and even claims that Herman is the one who pushed him into joining up with his endless rants against Lindbergh. Alvin seeks to defy his family and make “war” with them even in a turbulent time—he destroys the safe haven of home and chooses a series of difficult paths which alienate him from his family. His failures to make a difference in the war against Germany result in his waging war against his own family.
The second major character to betray his family’s love and values is Sandy, Philip’s older brother. Sandy’s early fascination with Lindbergh signals that he feels different from the rest of his family—rather than being repulsed by Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic speeches and coziness with Hitler himself, Sandy admires Lindbergh’s feats as an aviator and keeps secret drawings of him beneath his bed. Sandy enrolls in the Just Folks program and spends a summer living in Kentucky with a Gentile family—when he returns, he speaks with an accent and dreams of leaving his family behind and returning to the heartland of America. Sandy alienates himself not just from his family by referring to Jews as “you people” or “you Jews” and suggesting that he himself is not a Jew any longer. Sandy’s betrayal is rooted in an exhaustion with the burdens of being Jewish in America—and thus the burden of being considered the other in America. Sandy admires Lindbergh and dreams of a simpler life not marked by any difference from the rest of his country. He is lulled by the idea of simplicity and social ease—so much so that he seeks to turn his family upside down and go to “war” with his parents, just as Alvin does, over his identity, his choices, and his hopes for the future.
Evelyn, Bess’s sister and Sandy and Philip’s aunt, is the third major character who wages war against her family. When Evelyn becomes engaged—and later married—to the controversial Rabbi Bengelsdorf, Bess and Herman are perturbed but not angry. As Evelyn’s behavior continues to change, however, and as she accompanies her new husband to a state dinner hosting Hitler’s minister for foreign affairs, her family becomes incapable of supporting her choices any longer. Sandy and Philip remain drawn to Aunt Evelyn and her glamorous lifestyle—but by the end of the novel, after Lindbergh disappears and Bengelsdorf is taken into FBI custody, Evelyn is more alone and isolated from her family than ever before. She insists that Bengelsdorf knew of a Nazi conspiracy to install Lindbergh to the presidency as a puppet leader by blackmailing him with his stolen son, Charles Jr.—presumed dead in the 1930s but in fact alive and well, touted as a poster child of Aryan superiority in Nazi Germany. Evelyn is deemed crazy by most of her family, and the rifts she has created are impossible to mend. Evelyn essentially sells out her identity and her religion—and thus, by extension, her family and its values—for access to wealth and power. She fraternizes with Nazis, knowing all the while the truth of what is happening to America and the dark bargain Lindbergh has made. Evelyn resents her family’s ordinariness and longs for more, and she betrays them (and indeed herself) in pursuit of it. Roth shows how Evelyn wages war on her family much like Sandy does, by forgetting where she has come from and prioritizing an erasure of the otherness her Jewishness represents over the values in which she was raised.
By suggesting that a family can be either a source of peace or war, Roth argues that in complicated times, family members have only one another to cling to. By the same token, however, he also suggests that families can find that the influences of the outside world—especially a turbulent or dangerous one—often exacerbate and heighten the small, everyday “wars” that comprise life within a family unit, making harmony and togetherness in the face of danger all the more difficult.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family and Home ThemeTracker
Family and Home Quotes in The Plot Against America
“Alvin’s going to go to Canada and join the Canadian army,” he said. “He’s going to fight for the British against Hitler.”
“But nobody can beat Roosevelt,” I said.
“Lindbergh’s going to. America’s going to go fascist.”
Then we just stood there together under the intimidating spell of the three portraits [of Lindbergh.]
Harmless enough, and yet it drove some of the mothers crazy who had to hear us at it for hours on end through their open windows. “Can’t you kids do something else? Can’t you find another game to play?” But we couldn’t—declaring war was all we thought about too.
“All families go through a lot. A family is both peace and war. We’re going through a little war right now.”
We had driven right to the very heart of American history, and whether we knew it in so many words, it was American history, delineated in its most inspirational form, that we were counting on to protect us against Lindbergh.
“An independent destiny for America”—that was the phrase Lindbergh repeated some fifteen times in his State of the Union speech and again at the close of his address on the night of June 22. When I asked my father to explain what the words meant […] he frowned and said, “It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for.”
“Alvin can’t bear your president,” my father replied, “that’s why he went to Canada. Not so long ago you couldn’t bear the man either. But now this anti-Semite is your friend. The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why? Because we have Lindbergh’s peace instead of Roosevelt’s war.”
“Is it healed?” I asked him.
“Not yet.”
“How long will it take?”
“Forever,” he replied.
I was stunned. Then this is endless! I thought.
“Extremely frustrating,” Alvin said. “You get on the leg they make for you and the stump breaks down. You get on crutches and it starts to swell up. The stump goes bad whatever you do.”
My brother had discovered in himself the uncommon gift to be somebody, and so while making speeches praising President Lindbergh and while exhibiting his drawings of him and while publicly extolling (in words written by Aunt Evelyn) the enriching benefits of his eight weeks as a Jewish farm hand in the Gentile heartland—while doing, if the truth be known, what I wouldn’t have minded doing myself, by doing what was normal and patriotic all over America and aberrant and freakish only in his home—Sandy was having the time of his life.
“And who will I talk to?” she asked. “Who will I have there like the friends I’ve had my whole life?”
“There are women there, too.”
“Gentile women,” she said. […] “Good Christian women,” she said,” who will fall all over themselves to make me feel at home. They have no right to do this!” she proclaimed. […] “this is illegal. You cannot just take Jews because they’re Jews and force them to live where you want them to.”
“I am not running away!” he shouted, startling everyone. “This is our country!” “No, my mother said sadly, “not anymore. It’s Lindbergh’s. It’s the goyim’s. It’s their country,” she said, and her breaking voice and the shocking words and the nightmare immediacy of what was mercilessly real forced my father […] to see himself with mortifying clarity: a devoted father of titanic energy no more capable of protecting his family from harm than was Mr. Wishnow hanging dead in the closet.
“I lived in Kentucky! Kentucky is one of the forty-eight states! Human beings live there like they do everywhere else! It is not a concentration camp! This guy makes millions selling his shitty hand lotion—and you people believe him!”
“I already told you about the dirty words, and now I’m telling you about this ‘you people’ business. ‘You people’ one more time, son, and I am going to ask you to leave the house.”
“Well, like it or not, Lindbergh is teaching us what it is to be Jews.” Then she added, “We only think we’re Americans.” “Nonsense. No!” my father replied. “They think we only think we’re Americans. It is not up for discussion, Bess. It is not up for negotiation. These people are not understanding that I take this for granted, goddamnit! Others? He dares to call us others? He’s the other. The one who looks most American—and he’s the one who is least American!”
A previously unpublicized section of the homesteading plan called the Good Neighbor Project [was] designed to introduce a steadily increasing number of non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods and in this way “enrich” the “Americanness” of everyone involved. […] The underlying goal of the Good Neighbor Project like that of Just Folks, was to weaken the solidarity of the Jewish social structure as well as to diminish whatever electoral strength a Jewish community might have in local and congressional elections.
A family, my father liked to say, is both peace and war, but this was family war as I could never have imagined it. Spitting into my father’s face the way he’d spit into the face of that dead German soldier!
My father was a rescuer and orphans were his specialty. A displacement even greater than having to move to Union or to leave for Kentucky was to lose one’s parents and be orphaned. Witness, he would tell you, what had happened to Alvin. Witness what had happened to his sister-in-law after Grandma had died. No one should be motherless and fatherless. Motherless and fatherless you are vulnerable to manipulation, to influences—you are rootless and you are vulnerable to everything.
This was how Seldon came to live with us. After their safe return to Newark from Kentucky, Sandy moved into the sun parlor and Seldon took over where Alvin and Aunt Evelyn had left off—as the person in the twin bed next to mine shattered by the malicious indignities of Lindbergh’s America. There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.
