The Plot Against America

by

Philip Roth

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Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Jewish Identity vs. Assimilation Theme Icon
Isolationism vs. Solidarity Theme Icon
Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth Theme Icon
Family and Home Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Plot Against America, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth Theme Icon

Philip Roth himself has declared that he wanted to write The Plot Against America to explore a series of “what-ifs”—and to get to the bottom of what horrors could be possible in a version of America that became openly hostile to Jews at the modern pinnacle of Jewish suffering around the world. Roth creates an alternate history—one in which Charles Lindbergh, who may or may not be a puppet of the Third Reich, is elected president in November of 1940 and begins enacting isolationist, anti-Semitic policies in the United States. Though the historical record as readers know it and Roth’s alternate history are very different, he ultimately argues that the lived emotional truths of Jewish Americans, defined by ostracism and uncertainty, are very much the same in both timelines.

By imagining how American Jews might react to the encroachment of fascism or to more flagrant daily displays of anti-Semitism, Roth uses a heightened reality to shine a light on the worst possible timeline of American history. While the history Roth writes in The Plot Against America is false, he uses his reshuffle of the historical record to explore the deeper emotional truths of Jewish American lives—lives which have long been defined by the experience of being othered and the fear of being persecuted for that otherness. When Lindbergh is first elected to the presidency, the Roth family and their Jewish neighbors in Newark immediately know that things will soon take a turn for the worse. On the campaign trail, Lindbergh made disparaging remarks about Jewish people and went so far to suggest that Jewish people—an “other” kind of people—would “lead [America] to destruction” should they result in America’s joining the war through their enormous but underhanded “influence” on society. “All the Jews could do [after Lindbergh’s election] was worry,” Philip recalls—in the streets and in the schools, young and old members of the Jewish community in Newark begin whispering about what might happen to them in the months to come. Even as his parents, Herman and Bess, try to convince Philip and his brother Sandy that everything is still normal, young Philip begins dreaming of his beloved stamp collection defaced by swastikas, demonstrating the lingering fear in the back of his mind that has recently been activated and exacerbated by the swift shift in word events. Roth knows it isn’t hard to imagine what would happen in America’s small Jewish communities in the event of an anti-Semite being elected to the presidency—and as he unspools the Roths’ reactions, he shows that for many Jewish Americans, a lack of preparedness for disaster is simply not an option. By opening up a new timeline of American history, Roth demonstrates how Lindbergh’s election seems to somehow confirm what the Roths and countless families like them have always feared about life in America but have long attempted to ignore or suppress in order to simply carry on. Jewish people all across America know about the anti-Semitic underbelly of society—and when Lindbergh’s election allows that nefarious underbelly to surface, Roth acknowledges with both sadness and anger the truths about America that Jewish people living there have always known but have tried to ignore: that their acceptance in the United States is conditional and precarious.

As the novel continues on, Roth shows the Roth family reel as they personally fend off anti-Semitism. They’re the target of openly anti-Semitic remarks from strangers on a trip to Washington; they worry as they send Sandy off to an Office of American Absorption-helmed program called Just Folks, which relocates Jewish children to farms across America for several weeks; and they begin making plans to move to Canada should America fall to the Nazis—an idea that was once unthinkable just months prior to the start of the novel. With each new horror, the Roths wonder how their country could have become so unrecognizable in such a short span of time—yet at the same time, their swift preparedness and their networks of whispering and planning with friends and neighbors demonstrates that even before such a turn of events, their family unit and larger community has almost been expecting a new era of open prejudice, cruelty, and even violence against Jewish people. As the novel unfolds, Roth reveals a secret of mid-century (and, to some extent, contemporary) Jewish life in America to his readers: that even as Jewish families participate in their communities and form friendships and business alliances with Gentiles, there is always the threat of sudden emotional or physical exile from those communities. Roth suggests that the emotional truths the Roths and their neighbors must face as the events of The Plot Against America continue to play out are not very far from the emotional truths that ordinary Jewish families living in the real America harbor—and that the trauma of centuries of oppression, expulsion, and othering have left an indelible mark on the Jewish communities not just of the novel’s timeline, but of our own.

The Plot Against America is a bold novel, one which rewrites a major episode of American history in order to examine the failures of American solidarity, the vulnerability of Jewish families in a “homeland” that accepts them only conditionally, and the gifts (and pitfalls) of life in a family unit. By distorting historical facts, Roth counterintuitively gets at deeper emotional truths—he uses what did not happen to investigate what could happen any time. By introducing his readers to an alternate concept of American history, Roth illuminates not only the differences, but the intense and often unsettling similarities, between fact and fiction.

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Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth appears in each chapter of The Plot Against America. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth Quotes in The Plot Against America

Below you will find the important quotes in The Plot Against America related to the theme of Historical Fact vs. Emotional Truth.
Chapter 1 Quotes

“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.]

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth (speaker), Alvin Roth, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), Adolf Hitler
Page Number: 26
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker)
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

“I am here,” Rabbi Bengelsdorf [said,] “to crush all doubt of the unadulterated loyalty of the American Jews to the United States of America. […] America is our beloved homeland. America is our only homeland. Our religion is independent of any piece of land other than this great country, to which, now as always, we commit our total devotion and allegiance as the proudest of citizens. I want Charles Lindbergh to be my president not in spite of my being a Jew but because I am a Jew—an American Jew.”

Related Characters: Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (speaker), Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 35-36
Explanation and Analysis:

It was when I looked next at the album’s facing page to see what, if anything, had happened to my 1934 National Parks set of ten that I fell out of the bed and woke up on the floor, this time screaming. […] Across the face of each, […] across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth
Related Symbols: Philip’s Stamps
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth, Bess Roth, Sanford “Sandy” Roth, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:

It was from there that we heard him refer to my father as “a loudmouth Jew,” followed a moment later by the elderly lady declaring, “I’d give anything to slap his face.”

Mr. Taylor led us quickly away to a smaller hall just off the main chamber where there was a tablet inscribed with the Gettysburg Address and a mural whose theme was the Emancipation.

“To hear words like that in a place like this,” said my father, his choked voice quivering with indignation. “In a shrine to a man like this!”

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh, Mr. Taylor
Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:

“The Jews of America […] are unlike any other community of Jews in the history of the world. […] The Jews of America can participate fully in the national life of their country. They need no longer dwell apart, a pariah community separated from the rest.”

Related Characters: Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (speaker), Philip Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 106-107
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Alvin Roth (speaker), Uncle Monty (speaker), Philip Roth, Bess Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)
Page Number: 124
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.”

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Alvin Roth (speaker)
Related Symbols: Alvin’s Prosthesis
Page Number: 136-137
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Gone were the wall banners proclaiming “Wake up America—Smash Jewish Communists!” […] and the big white buttons with the black lettering that had been distributed to Bund members to stick into their lapels, the buttons that read:

KEEP AMERICA
OUT OF
THE JEWISH WAR

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker)
Page Number: 176-177
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“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.”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Bess Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Sanford “Sandy” Roth
Page Number: 208
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Bess Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Charles Lindbergh, Mr. Wishnow
Page Number: 226
Explanation and Analysis:

“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.”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Bess Roth, Walter Winchell
Page Number: 230
Explanation and Analysis:

“But who could have taken them? Where could they be? They’re mine! We’ve got to find them! They’re my stamps!

I was inconsolable. I envisioned a horde of orphans spotting the album in the woods and tearing it apart with their filthy hands. I saw them pulling out the stamps and eating them and stomping on them and flushing them by the handful down the toilet in their terrible bathroom. They hated the album because it wasn’t theirs—they hated the album because nothing was theirs.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker)
Related Symbols: Philip’s Stamps
Page Number: 236
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Of course, that no Jew could ever be elected to the presidency—least of all a Jew with a mouth as unstoppable as Winchell’s—even a kid as young as I was already accepted, as if the proscription were laid out in so many words in the U.S. Constitution. Yet not even that ironclad certainty could stop the adults from abandoning common sense and, for a night or two, imagining themselves and their children as native-born citizens of Paradise.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh, Walter Winchell
Page Number: 244-245
Explanation and Analysis:

“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!”

Related Characters: Herman Roth (speaker), Bess Roth (speaker), Philip Roth, Alvin Roth, Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 255-256
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Charles Lindbergh
Page Number: 280-281
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

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!

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth, Alvin Roth
Page Number: 297
Explanation and Analysis:

I wept all the way to school. Our incomparable American childhood was ended. Soon my homeland would be nothing more than my birthplace.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Herman Roth, Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf
Page Number: 301
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Philip Roth (speaker), Sanford “Sandy” Roth, Alvin Roth, Aunt Evelyn, Charles Lindbergh, Seldon Wishnow, Mrs. Wishnow
Related Symbols: Alvin’s Prosthesis
Page Number: 361-362
Explanation and Analysis: