A charismatic celebrity who has never before held a political office decides to run for the presidency of the United States. He improbably wins the Republican nomination on a platform that includes drastically curtailing immigration and keeping America out of foreign wars and then in the general election defeats an experienced Democrat from a family that has already produced a president. Once elected, the new president openly proclaims his desire for better relations with a European country governed by an autocratic leader who dreams of restoring his country to its former status as a great power. Soon, anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. spike, and white nationalists are emboldened. The wave of anti-Semitism culminates in several particularly shocking incidents, leaving American Jews wondering if they can ever again feel safe in America.
This isn’t a description of the rise of President Trump but rather a plot summary of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a chilling alternate history of what might have happened if Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator and perhaps the most popular nonpolitical figure of his age, had sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1940. The real-life Lindbergh had allied himself with the America First Committee, which was dedicated to pressuring the government to stay out of World War II. Like Trump in the early 2010s, he seemed to signal a desire to seek political office. Unlike Trump, however, Lindbergh chose not to run, paving the way for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reelection in 1940 and America’s eventual intervention in World War II.
But what if Lindbergh had run for president in 1940? It would not be hard to imagine him defeating the unmemorable Wendell Willkie (the Jeb Bush of 1940) for the Republication nomination and riding a wave of anti-war sentiment to victory in the general election. Harder, or at least more unsettling, to imagine are the repercussions that the election of a pro-fascist isolationist such as Lindbergh would have had for European (and American) Jews. This is precisely what Roth set out to imagine in The Plot Against America.
Many of the events outlined in The Plot Against America have thankfully remained squarely within the realm of fiction. And of course, Hillary Clinton is not Roosevelt, Vladimir Putin is not Adolf Hitler, and Trump, whose daughter and son-in-law are Orthodox Jews, is not Lindbergh, who trafficked in anti-Semitic stereotypes and accepted an Order of the German Eagle with Star medal from Hitler’s air chief in 1938. Nonetheless, some of the surface similarities between The Plot Against America and our current political moment, including recent anti-Semitic attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway, Jersey City, Monsey, and elsewhere, have made Roth’s novel seem uncannily prophetic. The result is that HBO’s limited series based on Roth’s novel is one of the most culturally relevant adaptations in recent memory.
The six-episode HBO miniseries, whose first episode aired March 16, opens with archival black-and-white footage of Lindbergh and his aviation exploits and the adoring crowds that thronged to him when he returned from his history-making flights, set to an upbeat military-style song with lyrics proclaiming, “All the world’s on the way to a sunnier day.” It is hard to understand now just how popular the sunny, buoyant Lindbergh was to Americans who had been beaten down by the Great Depression in the 1930s: He was a kind of Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, and Neil Armstrong figure rolled into one. From its first moments, the series gives us a sense of Lindbergh’s fame and makes us feel that a Lindbergh presidency was far from unthinkable. Still playing the same upbeat, sunny song, the opening credits then cut to archival black-and-white footage of German warplanes, Nazi party rallies, book burnings, and synagogue destructions — cluing us in on the stakes of the 1940 election.
The scene then shifts to Newark, New Jersey, in June 1940, where 7-year-old Philip Levin (Azhy Robertson), a stand-in for Roth, is playing a war game with his friends. We’re quickly introduced to the rest of Philip’s family — his older brother Sandy (Caleb Malis), his mother Elizabeth (Zoe Kazan), and his father Herman (Morgan Spector). We meet the Levins as they, their relatives, and their friends (with a cast including John Turturro and Winona Ryder) deal with the growing menace of a fascist-leaning leader coming to power in their backyard.
The series overemphasizes the relationship between Philip’s aunt Evelyn (Ryder) and a married man and manufactures other scenes that are not in Roth’s novel, such as an anti-Semitic beating of Philip’s cousin Alvin, to lend the series more dramatic intensity. But the drama inherent in the story makes this unnecessary. Aside from these minor departures (as well as a more significant one in the series finale), the writers and directors of The Plot Against America get the tone of the story just right, interspersing the tranquil life of the Levins in New Jersey with news of the Germans’ march through Europe and the Japanese’s through Asia, all while the Levins slowly become aware of the catastrophe enveloping European Jewry. The effect is a sense of growing menace creeping up on the Levins from all corners of the globe, which soon extends to the U.S., where the Levins, like all American Jews, least expect it.
Outside of James Schamus’s Indignation (2016), adaptations of Roth novels have ranged from mediocre to dreadful. Yet HBO’s stylish and skillful miniseries stands out as a success where so many others have failed. The series also stands out for its potential to bring greater awareness to the issue of anti-Semitism in America. Although the incidents portrayed in The Plot Against America thankfully never took place, the problem of anti-Semitism in America, as reported in these pages in January by Philip Klein, Seth Mandel, and Eli Steinberg, is real and extremely troubling. In the past, antidotes for hatred came not only from facts but from fiction. Novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird were instrumental in waking Americans up to the horrors of slavery and racism, while across the Atlantic, Charles Dickens’s novels shined a light on the depredations faced by the poor. One can only hope that The Plot Against America will galvanize Americans to work on a cure for the virus of anti-Semitism before the contagion spreads any further.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer living in New York, where he is a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
