[The Plot Against America—Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, as well as
David Simon and Ed Burns’s recent television adaptation—imagines
what might have transpired if the fascist tendency in the United
States had gained power.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

IT HAPPENED HERE  
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Alisa Solomon
July 9, 2020
Jewish Currents [[link removed]]

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_ The Plot Against America—Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, as well as
David Simon and Ed Burns’s recent television adaptation—imagines
what might have transpired if the fascist tendency in the United
States had gained power. _

, Photo: Michele K. Short, courtesy of HBO // Jewish Currents

 

IN FEBRUARY 1939, the pro-Hitler German American Bund drew more than
20,000 supporters to Madison Square Garden for a rally
[[link removed]] celebrating “Americanism” in
general and George Washington’s birthday in particular. There,
standing before a floor-to-ceiling portrait of the founding father,
amid billowing swastika flags, Bund leader Fritz Kuhn denounced
“Franklin D. Rosenfeld” for imposing a “Jew Deal” on the
country and urged the audience—“You, Aryan, Nordic and
Christians”—to “wake up” and “demand our government be
returned to the people who founded it.” Revving up the crowd before
Kuhn’s featured speech, Gerhard Wilhelm Kunze, the Bund’s
publicity director, extolled Jim Crow laws and the Chinese Exclusion
Act. “It has always been very much American to protect the Aryan
character of this nation,” he said.

That chilling spectacle provides the visual model for an early scene
in the HBO miniseries _The Plot Against America_,_ _but with a
crucial difference that makes the fictitious version even more
ominous: Here the crowd is cheering not for Hitler but for a
Republican presidential candidate. _The Plot Against
America_—Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, as well as David Simon and Ed
Burns’s recent television adaptation—imagines what might have
transpired if the fascist tendency in the United States had gained
power. Roth fictionalized his own Newark Jewish family and followed
them through an alternate version of the early 1940s, a time when
polls showed that only 39% of Americans
[[link removed]] thought
Jews in the US “should be treated in all ways exactly as any other
Americans,” eight in ten Americans opposed
[[link removed]] entering
the war, and one in six thought
[[link removed]] Hitler
was “doing the right thing.” Roth spins out his tale from the fact
that Republicans considered drafting the heroic—and
antisemitic—aviator Charles A. Lindbergh to run for president on an
isolationist platform against FDR. In _Plot_, Lindbergh runs—and
wins. What happens next is a disaster for American Jews. The president
makes Jew-hater Henry Ford his Secretary of the Interior. He hatches a
scheme to break up Jewish communities (and hence voting blocs) by
dispersing Jews from urban enclaves to “authentic” American
hinterlands. He signs “peaceful relations” pacts with Nazi Germany
and Japan, and hosts the Third Reich’s foreign minister Joachim von
Ribbentrop at a state dinner. By the end of the book, pogroms have
broken out across the country.

When Roth’s novel came out 16 years ago, commentators couldn’t
help
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parallels
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their current moment. The post-9/11 Patriot Act had curtailed civil
liberties, especially among Muslim Americans; the US was officially
committing torture; President George W. Bush, in a Lindbergh-like
flight suit, [[link removed]] had
alighted upon an aircraft carrier to deliver an address about combat
operations in Iraq under a banner proclaiming, “Mission
Accomplished.” Yet Roth rejected such comparisons, taking to the
pages of _The_ _New York Times_ to assert
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“Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman a clef
to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake.” Even as
he characterized Bush as “a man unfit to run a hardware store,” he
insisted, “I set out to do exactly what I’ve done: reconstruct the
years 1940-42 . . . I am not pretending to be interested in those two
years—I am interested in those two years.” 

Burns and Simon, on the other hand, are interested in 2020. Simon
has noted
[[link removed]] that
he turned down a chance to adapt _Plot _in 2013, shrugging it off as
an interesting “artifact.” Just a few years later, however, he
found the book’s allegorical power impossible to ignore: It captured
the barbed and deep-seated dread of a Trump-era America in which
democratic institutions are shredded, racist violence thrives openly,
and every outrage is quickly outstripped by another. Simon, generally
more interested in systems than psyches, is known for shows like _The
Wire _and _The Deuce _that reveal the workings of institutions, and
his version of _Plot_, likewise, is about the way fascism as a system
takes hold.

The HBO miniseries stays faithful to the book’s basic plotlines, but
not, thankfully, to its sensibility. Like the novel, it traces the
nation’s descent through the experience of a New Jersey Jewish
family: insurance salesman Herman Levin (Morgan Spector), his wife
Bess (a standout Zoe Kazan), and their sons Sandy and Philip. (In the
book, the family’s last name is Roth.) The Levins, New Deal
liberals, are flanked by relatives at opposite ends of the political
spectrum. Evelyn, Bess’s sister—an emotionally teetering Winona
Ryder—revels in her proximity to power through her marriage to
Lionel Bengelsdorf, an acquiescent court Jew of a rabbi played by a
perfectly smarmy John Turturro. Meanwhile, Herman’s nephew Alvin,
portrayed by a tightly coiled Anthony Boyle, is a bristling low-level
hoodlum turned militant; he joins the Canadian army to fight Hitler in
Europe, then returns to Newark, more alienated than ever, after losing
a leg in action.

But where Roth frames events through the eyes of schoolboy Philip,
shaping the novel as a coming-of-age story, Simon and Burns depict the
swift and confident ascent of America Firsters from a number of
perspectives; for them, the sprouting of local fascism is not the
backdrop to the dramatic action, but its essence. The sepia wash with
which Roth sentimentally paints the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark
becomes sinister on TV; the picture literally becomes darker as the
series progresses. Its meticulously designed early-’40s
scenes—apartments with printed wallpapers, oval Esso signs in their
plump font, bakery boxes fastened with string—seem to have the
color drained out of them as antisemitism escalates from restrictions
at hotels and epithets spewed by strangers to population transfers,
fatal Klan attacks, and store burnings. 

These shifts are related to the process of adapting fiction, with its
focus on internal experience, to the more external medium of TV—but
the changes are also political. By letting us experience different
characters’ varying responses to the upheaval, Simon and Burns
invite us to test—and test ourselves against—each approach. In the
novel, Herman’s belief in America’s core goodness, seen through
the misty memory of his child, seems unassailable. But in the series,
it becomes one of several standpoints held out for scrutiny at a
critical distance. 

This is the adaptation’s most significant shift. Like his
protagonist, Roth seemed to see the fascist eruption he conjured as a
bad blip, an aberration from the reliable workings of democracy.
Herman is his mouthpiece in _The Plot Against America_, righteously
railing against Lindberghism just as the heroes of the earlier novels
he called his “American Trilogy” ranted about McCarthyism’s
blacklist (_I Married a Communist_), Weather Underground-like violence
(_American Pastoral_), and so-called “political correctness” (_The
Human Stain_). In Roth’s worldview, these phenomena are all, despite
their differences, unwelcome affronts to liberal values—the best, if
necessarily imperfect, values we have. In his _Times _essay on _The
Plot Against America_, he makes explicit his conclusion to his thought
experiment about fascism: “The American triumph is . . . that it
didn’t happen here.” 

But of course, “it” _did _happen here—just not to Jews.
Invested as it is in a portrait of American innocence briefly
betrayed, Roth’s novel barely glances at the existence of Black
people, or any other racialized others besides Jews. This
parochialism—as in much of his work—makes for an impressive but
narcissistic enterprise. For Herman, and for Roth, white Ashkenazi
Jews are the quintessential Americans, veritable Pilgrims who escaped
religious persecution and remade themselves in the Land of the Free,
their bootstrap success an object lesson in the core national myth. An
early scene in the the series, taken directly from the book, drives
home the point that this family is just as American as anybody
else—indeed even more American because of their difference, which
seasons the great melting pot: The Levin family, sitting down to
Shabbos dinner, discusses Joe DiMaggio as they make motzi. Herman
constantly asserts his belonging when anyone—a belligerent fellow
customer at a cafeteria; Lindbergh on the radio—suggests otherwise.
“We’re American, you fascist sonofabitch,” he shouts at the
radio, an object that is practically a character in the series, the
camera fixing on it as it delivers more and more ominous news. 

Though Herman doesn’t change in the series, our relationship to him
does. “Every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be
happening in America?” he gripes in one of many similar outbursts.
“How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I
didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a
hallucination.” The sentiment, of course, is eerily familiar; Donald
Trump provokes such exclamations constantly. It is discomfiting, then,
to watch Herman articulate them as fascists upend the tolerant,
comfortable pieties that govern his worldview. His incredulity at the
failure of liberalism and the corrosion of the American project is
inextricably tethered to an ideological assertion: “We’re better
than this.” Simon and Burns prod the viewer to consider,
self-critically, that such abiding faith in American exceptionalism is
endemic today even among many who believe themselves to have unlearned
it. 

In the series, the Levins’ insular world remains the locus of the
story, but scenes of wider Newark, and beyond, show a multiracial
populace that includes the Black and brown people who are most subject
to brutal regulation. Meanwhile, by fleshing out characters thinly
drawn by Roth, Simon and Burns dramatize dynamics of complicity that
go largely unexplored in the novel. The series zeroes in on the arc of
Bengelsdorf and Evelyn’s collaboration with the fascist regime,
their Jared Kushner-like giddiness at being adjacent to power
eclipsing the rank white nationalism in its halls. The show captures
Bengelsdorf’s detached self-importance and Evelyn’s desperation
for security and success; in one unnerving scene, for instance, they
are snubbed by Lindbergh and insulted by Ford at the White House
dinner in honor of von Ribbentrop, but she still scores a waltz with
the Nazi emissary, the camera closing in on her ecstatic expression as
they dance. The consequences of the conniving couple’s actions
become harrowingly clear by the end of the series, when Evelyn’s
machinations lead to the death of the Levins’ neighbor, an innocent
woman with a young son. Elsewhere, Bess accuses Herman of putting
their family in harm’s way by refusing to flee the country; Alvin,
meanwhile, indicts him for insufficient militancy. In the final
episode, the two come to blows. “I lost my leg for the Jews,”
Alvin cries. “Did you get off your ass and fight or just sit on your
ass next to the radio? . . . When the fuck do you people ever act?”

That’s the question that lingers as America returns to the polls in
1942. Roth ends the novel by setting history back on its rails: FDR is
reelected, Pearl Harbor is bombed, and the US joins the war.
(Conveniently, the book stops there, before the real forced relocation
of Americans occurs: with Japanese internment camps.) The series,
however—in its biggest and most welcome departure from the book’s
action—denies this rushed and tidy resolution and instead ends with
the outcome of the election too close to call. Over images of
aggressive voter suppression—voters, some of them Black, being
turned away from polls as (presumably) Lindbergh’s thugs steal and
destroy ballots, the soundtrack ironically swells with Frank Sinatra
singing “That House I Live In (America to Me).” In the days after
the last episode aired, images of Wisconsin voters risking infection
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cast ballots and of signs like “Arbeit Macht Frei” and “The
Vaccine is in the Boxcar” at protests over shelter-in-place orders
fused in my nightmares with scenes from the show. 

There’s no organized left in _Plot—_not in the book or in the
show. In this world, it’s up to individuals to find their means of
appeasement or complacency, resistance or antifascist action—the
latter of which leaves militants broken and powerless to shape a
future. As I watched the show under quasi-quarantine in April, that
vision seemed dishearteningly bleak. Simon and Burns seem to
understand, as Roth did not, that white supremacy sits cozily at the
national core—but they do not go so far as to point toward a
different future, and thus the story they tell in some sense has
nowhere to go. The current uprising now offers a rousing rejoinder. As
activists topple monuments to racism, they not only reject the
American exceptionalism that immobilizes _Plot_’s Herman, but
imagine something new.

ALISA SOLOMON is the author of _Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural
History of Fiddler on the Roof, _and of _Re-Dressing the Canon:
Essays on Theater and Gender _and a professor at the Columbia School
of Journalism.

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