The plot against America

by Philip Roth

  If only he had been allowed to go along unrehabilitated, on his own stinking trajectory, but that hadn't happened, and so this was how the great menace undid us and the abomination of violence entered our house, and I saw how bitterness blinds a man and the defilement it spawns.

  And why, why did he go to fight in the first place? Why did he fight and why did he fall? Because there is a war going on, he chooses that way—the raging, rebellious instinct historically trapped! If only the times were different, if only he had been smarter. . .But he wants to fight. He's like the very fathers he wants to be rid of. That's the tyranny of the problem. Trying to be faithful to what he's trying to be rid of. Trying to be faithful and to get rid of what he's faithful to at the same time. And that's why he went to fight in the first place, as best I can figure it out.

  Later that night, after a pair of Alvin's buddies had pulled up in a Caddy with Pennsylvania plates (one of them to get Alvin and Minna over to Allie Stolz's doctor's office on Elizabeth Avenue, the other to drive their Buick back to Philly); after my father was home from the Beth Israel emergency room (where they'd plucked the glass out of his hands and stitched up his face and x-rayed his neck and taped his ribcage and, on his way out, handed him codeine tablets to take for the pain); after Mr. Cucuzza, who'd rushed my father to the hospital in his pickup, had returned him safely to the befouled and littered battlefield that was now our flat, the gunshots erupted on Chancellor Avenue. Shots, screaming, shouting, sirens—the pogrom had begun, and it was only seconds before Mr. Cucuzza charged back up the stairs he'd only just descended and banged once on our broken back door before rushing in.

  Desperate for sleep, I was dragged from bed by my brother, but when my legs wouldn't work and kept collapsing from uncontrollable fear, I had to be carried off in his arms by my father. My mother—who instead of going to bed and trying to sleep had donned her apron and a pair of rubber gloves and set about to purge the house of its filth with a bucket and a broom and a mop—my meticulous mother, weeping amid the wreckage of her living room, was guided to the door by Mr. Cucuzza, and the four of us were herded down the stairs and into the Wishnows' old flat to take cover there.

  This time when Mr. Cucuzza offered a pistol, my father accepted it. His poor human body was black-and-blue and bandaged just about everywhere, his mouth was full of broken teeth, and still he sat with us on the floor in the Cucuzzas' windowless back foyer, regarding the weapon in his hands with all his concentration, as though it were no longer just a weapon but the most serious thing entrusted to him since he'd first been given his infant babies to hold. My mother sat straight up between Sandy's self-conscious stoicism and my stupefied inertness, gripping us each by the arm closest to her and doing all she could to keep a thin layer of courage from revealing her terror to the children. Meanwhile the biggest man I'd ever seen moved with a pistol through the darkened flat, stealthily advancing from window to window to ascertain with the eagle-eyed thoroughness of the veteran night watchman whether anyone lurked anywhere nearby with an ax, a gun, a rope, or a can of kerosene.

  Joey, his mother, and his grandmother had been directed by Mr. Cucuzza to remain in their beds, though the old lady could not resist the magnetism of all that turbulence and the picture we four presented of sheer plight. Snarling in tiny bursts of raw Italian that could not have been complimentary to her guests, she peered out from the doorway of the dark kitchen—where she customarily slept in her clothes on a cot next to the stove—fixing us in the crosshairs of her madness (because mad she was) as if she were the patron saint of anti-Semitism whose silver crucifix had engendered it all.

  The firing went on for less than an hour but we didn't head back upstairs until dawn, and didn't learn, until after Mr. Cucuzza bravely ventured forth as a scout to where Chancellor Avenue was cordoned off, that the gun battle had been not between the city police and the anti-Semites but between the city police and the Jewish police. There'd been no pogrom in Newark that night, just a shootout, extraordinary for having occurred within earshot of our house but otherwise not much different from the disorder that could erupt in any large city after dark. And though three Jews had been killed—Duke Glick, Big Gerry, and Bullet himself—it wasn't necessarily because they were Jews ("though it didn't hurt," my Uncle Monty said) but because they were exactly the sort of thugs that the new mayor wanted off the streets, primarily to signal to Longy that he was no longer an honorary member of the city's Board of Commissioners (a position he was rumored—by Meyer Ellenstein's enemies—to have held under Murphy's Jewish predecessor). Nobody bothered taking the police commissioner too seriously when he explained to the Newark News that it was the "trigger-happy vigilantes" who, without provocation, had opened fire a little before midnight on two foot patrolmen walking their beat, nor, among our neighbors, was there any noticeable expression of grief because of how the three—dangerous people in their own right whose protection nobody decent would have dreamed of requesting—had been unceremoniously mowed down. Of course, it was awful that the blood of violent men should stain the pavement where the neighborhood children wended their way to school every day, but at least it wasn't blood shed in a clash with the Klan or the Silver Shirts or the Bund.

  No pogrom, and yet at seven that morning my father was on the phone long-distance to Winnipeg to admit to Shepsie Tirschwell that the Jews were so frightened and the anti-Semites so emboldened that it was no longer possible in Newark—where fortunately the prestige of Rabbi Prinz had continued to exert an influence over the powers that be and nothing worse than relocation had as yet been forced on a single Jewish family—to live as normal people. Whether outright government-sanctioned persecution was inevitable, nobody could say for sure, but the fear of persecution was such that not even a practical man grounded in his everyday tasks, a person who tried his best to contain the uncertainty and the anxiety and the anger and operate according to the dictates of reason, could hope to preserve his equilibrium any longer.

  Yes, my father admitted, he had been wrong all along and Bess and the Tirschwells had been right—and then, as best he could, he shook off his abashment over everything he'd mismanaged and badly misjudged, including the improbable violence that had smashed to bits, along with our coffee table, that lifelong barrier of rigid rectitude that had stood between his harsh upbringing and his mature ideals. "That's it," he told Shepsie Tirschwell, "I can't live any longer not knowing what will happen tomorrow," and their phone conversation moved on to emigration and the steps to be taken and the arrangements to be made, so that by the time Sandy and I left the house, there was no misunderstanding that, quite incredibly, we'd been overpowered by the forces arrayed against us and were about to flee and become foreigners. I wept all the way to school. Our incomparable American childhood was ended. Soon my homeland would be nothing more than my birthplace. Even Seldon in Kentucky was better off now.

  But then it was over. The nightmare was over. Lindbergh was gone and we were safe, though never would I be able to revive that unfazed sense of security first fostered in a little child by a big, protective republic and his ferociously responsible parents.

  Drawn from the Archives of Newark's Newsreel Theater

  Tuesday, October 6, 1942

  Thirty thousand mourners stream through the great hall of Pennsylvania Station to view Walter Winchell's flag-draped coffin. The turnout exceeds even the expectations of New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia, whose decision it was to transform the assassination into the occasion for a citywide day of mourning for "American victims of Nazi violence," culminating in a funeral oration to be delivered by FDR. Outside the station (as at numerous other locations throughout the city), silent men and women dressed in somber clothing distribute half-dollar-sized black buttons whose white lettering poses the question "Where is Lindbergh?" Just before noon, Mayor La Guardia arrives at the studio of the city radio station, where he removes his wide-brimmed black Stetson (a memento of his boyhood roots in the Arizona Territory as the son of a U.S. Army bandmast
er) to recite the Lord's Prayer; then he puts the hat back on to read aloud, in Hebrew, the Jewish prayer for the dead. At the stroke of noon, by decree of the City Council, a minute of silence is observed in the five boroughs. The New York police are in evidence everywhere, chiefly to oversee the protest demonstrations organized by the array of right-wing groups located in preponderantly German Yorkville—the Manhattan neighborhood north of the Upper East Side and south of Harlem that is the main headquarters for the American Nazi movement—and that militantly endorse the president and his policies. At one P.M. an honor guard of motorcycles manned by policemen wearing black armbands aligns itself with the funeral cortege forming outside Penn Station and, with the mayor leading the way from a motorcycle sidecar, escorts the cortege slowly northward up Eighth Avenue, eastward along 57th Street, northward again on Fifth Avenue to 65th Street and Temple Emanu-El. There, among the dignitaries summoned by La Guardia to fill the temple's every last seat, are the ten members of Roosevelt's 1940 cabinet, Roosevelt's four Supreme Court appointees, President Philip Murray of the CIO, President William Green of the AFL, President John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as past and current Democratic governors, senators, and congressmen from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut, among them the Democrats' defeated 1928 presidential aspirant, former New York governor Al Smith. Loudspeakers installed overnight by municipal laborers and wired to telephone poles and barber poles and door lintels throughout the city carry the memorial service to the New Yorkers who've assembled on the streets of every Manhattan neighborhood (except Yorkville) and to the thousands of out-of-towners who have congregated alongside them—all those Mr. and Mrs. Americas who'd been listening to Walter Winchell weekly since he first came on the air and who have journeyed to his hometown to pay their respects. And virtually every man, woman, and child among them wears that now ubiquitous badge of defiant solidarity, the black-and-white "Where is Lindbergh?" button.

  Fiorello H. La Guardia—the down-to-earth idol of the city's working people; the flamboyant ex-congressman who'd belligerently represented a congested East Harlem district of poor Italians and Jews for five terms, who as early as 1933 described Hitler as a "perverted maniac" and called for a boycott of German goods; the tenacious spokesman for the unions, the needy, and the unemployed who'd battled almost single-handedly against Hoover's do-nothing congressional Republicans during the first dark year of the Depression and, to the dismay of his own party, called for taxation to "soak the rich"; the liberal anti-Tammany reform Republican who has been the three-term Fusion mayor of the country's most populous city, the metropolis that is home to the largest concentration of Jews in the hemisphere—La Guardia is alone among the members of his party in displaying his contempt for Lindbergh and for the Nazi dogma of Aryan superiority that he (himself the son of an unobservant Jewish mother from Austrian Trieste and a freethinker Italian father who came to America as a ship's musician) has identified as the precept at the heart of Lindbergh's credo and of the huge American cult that worships the president.

  La Guardia stands beside the coffin and addresses the dignitaries with that same excitable, high-pitched voice in which he famously narrated the Sunday comic strips over the city's radio station to the city's children every Sunday morning during a New York newspaper strike, like the best of uncles proceeding patiently, panel by panel, balloon by balloon, from Dick Tracy to Little Orphan Annie and on through the rest of the serialized funnies.

  "We can dispense with the cant at the start," says the mayor. "Everybody knows that Walter was not a lovely human being. Walter was not the strong, silent type who hides everything but the muckraker who hates everything hidden. As anybody who ever turned up in his column can tell you, Walter was not always as accurate as he might have been. He was not shy, he was not modest, he was not decorous, discreet, kindly, et cetera. My friends, if I were to list for you everything lovely that W.W. was not, we'd be here till next Yom Kippur. I'm afraid that the late Walter Winchell was just one more doozy of a specimen of the imperfect man. In declaring himself a candidate for the presidency of the United States were his motives pure as Ivory soap? Walter Winchell's motives? Was his preposterous candidacy uncontaminated by a raving ego? My friends, only a Charles A. Lindbergh has motives pure as Ivory soap when he runs for the American presidency. Only a Charles A. Lindbergh is decorous, discreet, et cetera—oh, and accurate too, wholly accurate always when every few months he summons up the gregariousness to address his ten favorite platitudes to the nation. Only a Charles A. Lindbergh is a selfless ruler and a strong, silent saint. Walter, on the other hand, was Mr. Gossip Columnist. Walter, on the other hand, was Mr. Broadway: liked the ponies, liked the late hours, liked Sherman Billingsley—somebody once told me that he even liked the girls. And the repeal of that 'noble experiment,' as Mr. Herbert Hoover called it, the repeal of the hypocritical, expensive, stupid, unenforceable Eighteenth Amendment, was no more ignoble to Walter Winchell than it was to the rest of us here in New York. In short, Walter lacked every gleaming virtue demonstrated daily by the incorruptible test pilot ensconced in the White House.

  "Oh yes, several more differences that are perhaps worth noting between fallible Walter and infallible Lindy. Our president is a fascist sympathizer, more than likely an outright fascist—and Walter Winchell was the enemy of the fascist. Our president is no lover of Jews and more than likely a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite while Walter Winchell was a Jew and the unwavering, vociferous enemy of the anti-Semite. Our president is an admirer of Adolf Hitler and more than likely a Nazi himself—and Walter Winchell was Hitler's first American enemy and his worst American enemy. There's where our imperfect Walter was incorruptible—where it mattered. Walter is too loud, Walter talks too fast, Walter says too much, and yet, by comparison, Walter's vulgarity is something great, and Lindbergh's decorum is hideous. Walter Winchell, my friends, was the enemy of Nazis everywhere, not excluding the Dieses and the Bilbos and the Parnell Thomases who serve their Führer in the United States Congress, not excluding the Hitlerites who write for the New York Journal-American and the New York Daily News, not excluding those who royally fete Nazi murderers in our American White House at the taxpayer's expense. And it was because he was Hitler's enemy and it was because he was the Nazis' enemy that Walter Winchell was gunned down yesterday in the shadow of the statue of Thomas Jefferson in gracious old Louisville's most historic and beautiful public square. For speaking his mind in the state of Kentucky, W.W. was assassinated by the Nazis of America, who, thanks to the silence of our strong, silent, selfless president, today run rampant throughout this great land. It can't happen here? My friends, it is happening here—and where is Lindbergh? Where is Lindbergh?"

  Out in the streets, those listening together around the loudspeakers take up the mayor's cry, and soon their chant is cascading eerily across the entire city—"Where is Lind-bergh? Where is Lind-bergh?"—while inside the synagogue the mayor repeats and repeats his four irate syllables, angrily banging the pulpit not like an orator theatrically emphasizing a point but like an outraged citizen demanding the truth. "Where is Lindbergh?" This is the snarling peroration with which the red-faced La Guardia readies the assembled mourners for the climactic appearance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who stuns even his closest political cronies (Hopkins, Morgenthau, Farley, Berle, Baruch, all sitting behatted only feet from the coffin of the martyred candidate, whose brand of megalomania was never to the taste of the White House inner circle, however useful a mouthpiece he may have been to their boss) by ordaining as Winchell's successor the cunning, contemptuous, short-tempered, bullheaded, roly-poly politico standing five feet two inches tall and known affectionately to his devoted constituents as the Little Flower. From the pulpit of Temple Emanu-El, the nominal head of the Democratic Party pledges his support to New York's Republican mayor as a "national unity" candidate to oppose Lindbergh's quest for a second term in 1944.

  Wednesday, October 7, 19
42

  Piloted by President Lindbergh, the Spirit of St. Louis departs from Long Island in the morning, lifting off from the runway that served as the point of embarkation for the transatlantic solo flight of May 20, 1927. With no protective escort, the plane speeds through a cloudless autumn sky across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and down to Kentucky. Only an hour before he is to set down in the midday sunshine at the Louisville commercial airport is the White House notified by the president of his destination. His timing allows just enough notice for Louisville mayor Wilson Wyatt and the city and its citizens to prepare for the president's arrival. A mechanic is at the ready on the ground to check over the plane and tune and equip it for the return flight.

  Of Louisville's 320, 000 residents, the police estimate that at least a third have made the five-mile trek out from the city and are already packing the fields and the roads adjacent to Bowman Field when the president lands and smoothly taxies his plane to a platform where a microphone has been hooked up for him to address the vast crowd. When finally the great din of their greeting begins to diminish and his voice can be heard, the president makes no mention of Walter Winchell, does not allude to the assassination two days earlier or to the funeral the day before or to the speech made by Mayor La Guardia on the occasion of his anointment as Winchell's successor by Franklin Roosevelt in a New York synagogue. He does not have to. That La Guardia is, like Winchell before him, no more than a stalking horse for FDR in his dictatorial quest for an unprecedented third presidential term, and that those behind the "vicious La Guardia libel of our president" are the very same people who would have forced America to go to war in 1940, has already been colorfully explained to the nation by Vice President Wheeler in an impromptu Washington speech before the American Legion convention the previous evening.