1927 He had become the most famous man in the world overnight, this former airmail pilot who had flown solo and non-stop from Long Island to Paris. Now he was getting the city’s traditional welcome for conquering heroes. Fame had its dangers, though. In 1932 the Lindberghs’ infant son was kidnapped and never returned alive. The enormous publicity surrounding the crime and trial drove them to Europe.
While there, Lindbergh was asked by the US military to assess the strength of the Luftwaffe. He visited German aircraft factories and airfields, flew planes, met Göring, and generally concluded that the Nazis were well ahead of the US in both design and production. On Hitler’s orders, Göring presented him with the Service Cross of the German Eagle, a white cross adorned with four little swastikas.
Back in the States, Lindbergh, convinced that Jewish financiers and the Jewish media were tricking America into a European war, became a prominent spokesman for the America First movement. After Pearl Harbor he worked as a private citizen, advising aircraft manufacturers on design, and later flew over 50 combat missions in the Pacific.
This mixture of heroism and absurdity gave Philip Roth the idea for a stunning what if novel. What if Lindbergh had campaigned for the presidency, and won in 1940, instead of Roosevelt securing his third term? Above all, how would a Lindbergh government play in the predominantly Jewish Weequahic district of Newark, New Jersey, where Roth was brought up? The Plot Against America (2004) interweaves public events with the fortunes of the Roth family, and so manages to be a touching memoir of childhood as much as a political thriller.
At first the anti-Semitism is just petty and personal, however painful. The family visit Washington, where a local calls them ‘loud-mouth Jews’ for defending Roosevelt, and they are turned out of their hotel. Then the ‘Office of American Absorption’ revives the 1862 Homestead Act to disperse Jewish families from ‘ghettos’ like the Weequahic district to wholesome towns in Wyoming and Kentucky.
Things begin to hot up elsewhere, finally in Newark and the family home. The legendary anti-fascist radio commentator Walter Winchell decides to run for president. His speeches cause riots all over the country. Finally he is shot in the head by an American Nazi. But when Mayor Fiorella La Guardia speaks his eulogy at Temple Emanu-El, New York, the tide begins to turn. To tell how and why would spoil the suspense for the first-time reader. Let’s just say that however farfetched, the fiction is underpinned by Roth’s grasp on family memories and national history.