Topical Review
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. Vintage International, 2004.
Roth's novel demonstrates the resiliency of the American republic and the inherent decency of "average" Americans, Gentile and Jew alike. It also raises troubling questions for what "best for America" means on the global stage. This tension between pragmatism and ideals is shot through the novel but it is also found in the appended 9/11 (1941!) speech by Charles Lindbergh to an a gathering of America-Firsters. Lindbergh notes that the push for war is backed by three groups: "the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration" (Roth 386).
At the level of facticity, Lindbergh's claim was certainly true: all three favored military action by the U.S. against the fascists. But it also true that it was deeply naive to think that the USA could be a kind of super-Switzerland that could avoid worldly entanglements outside our borders and shores.
Were the world compartmentalizable to the degree that the America-Firsters envisioned, Lindbergh's splendid isolation could make some sense (political, if not moral). But here Lindbergh suffered from a kind of temporary blindness: his underestimation of the totalitarian threat and its voracious appetite. It is now unimaginable to think that the Axis Powers would have simply stopped at a certain point and "left well enough alone." But Lindbergh's blindness was temporary: after the attack on Pearl Harbor he fully supported the war effort and actively trained pilots and personally participated in combat operations in the South Pacific.
When push came to shove, we could all be Americans: Jew and Gentile, Democrat and Republican, Catholic and Protestant. Yet it is by a slender thread that we have remained one. "Could," not "always will." There is no guarantee in the future that our better angels will succeed. Roth's book illustrates this truth in ways winsome and evocative.
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