The Irony of ‘The Plot Against America’

The late Philip Roth is my favorite novelist, and his novel The Plot Against America, now a widely-praised HBO mini-series, is an excellent, disturbing book. The book posits an alternate history in which an isolationist, antisemitic Charles Lindbergh defeats FDR for the U.S. presidency in 1940, and proceeds to enact a series of increasingly draconian antisemitic measures. Among those measures are sending Jewish youths out to the country to live with Gentile families to become “real patriotic Americans,” away from the implied malevolent of their families, the Jewish community, Jewish culture, and Judaism.

The irony in the title of this post arises from the fact that while Lindbergh, while an isolationist not above antisemitic smears in his campaign to keep the U.S. out of World War II, never actually advocated anything remotely like the policies depicted in Roth’s book, FDR did.

As David Dalin relates in his review of Rafael Medoff’s new book The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust, when he was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1920, FDR has this to say about New York’s immigrant population, surely referring primarily to Jews:

They have crowded into one district and they have brought congestion and racial prejudices to our large cities. The result is that they do not easily conform to the manners and the customs and the requirements of their new home. Now, the remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country. If we had the greater part of the foreign population of the City of New York distributed to different localities upstate we should have a far better condition.

All these re-writing of history stories, looking back and posing hypotheticals, are so childish. I know it's entertainment and as such it can be anything the creator desires. But the anti-Semitic nightmare Roth envisioned ... that's pretty screwed up.

I would much prefer to see someone go back and portray FDR realistically... his treatment of the Japanese Americans, his turning away of Jewish refugees, his destruction of the economy resulting in The Depression deepening and lengthening.... That's what I would like to see.

Exactly—the propagandists don’t want to touch this simple fact about what happened with the Census data from 1940—it was used to track down Japanese Americans so they could be sent to prison camps:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

The Census Bureau has _never_ publicly admitted this fact.

Not one census employee or manager ever “leaked” the truth—over decades.

Meanwhile, for decades the Census Bureau lied and said that their data had always been confidential.

Then when they got caught they quietly omitted the historical reference.

What they should say is that data you give the Census Bureau is confidential—until there is a “national security emergency”, then all bets are off...

FDR pretty much loathed Jews. He made it look like he was buying the absurd argue that Ast. Sec State Breckenridge Long (a real Jew Hater) peddled that the US would be flooded with ‘Gestapo Agents’ disguised as refugees. Most if the Jews FDR had run into in NYC politics were from German Jewish families. For reasons never much explained FDR detested Germans from his youth. (One individual suggested that FDR , who was something of a prissy prick as an only child, and that he tried his usual St Grottlesex snob act on a couple of German Army officer cadets and they beat the crap out of him even though he was a pretty big fellow.)

Roth is a true smuck. Lindbergh was a jackass in some ways but he also put his money where his mouth was and was a aircraft ‘representative’ in the Pacific and shot down at least on Zero and maybe two more. Was has Roth ever done ? Also, in this miserable screed, he has the VP Burton K. Wheeler,as a Nazi stooge and anti-semite. Wheeler was a real man of principles and he thought the Constitution meant what it said. In 1917 , when he was US Attorney for Montana he refused to enforce the clearly unconstitutional sections of Wilson's sedition act. He was always a fearless defender of Constitutional liberties and civil rights. He hated dictatorships of all stripes and was head of America First because he believed Roosevelt was lying the US into war. Again, one Wheeler is equal to an auditorium full of Roth lovers.

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