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“America First”: Fear, Memory Activism, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth's

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“America First”: Fear, Memory Activism, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth's “America First”: Fear, Memory Activism, and Everyday Life in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America1 LIAO Pei-chen National Cheng Kung University Memory disturbs and frightens people. —Li Youcheng, Jiyi [Memory] Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. —Philip Roth, The Plot Against America Introduction Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an alternate-history novel, in which Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election and becomes the thirty-third American president. In Roth’s novel, the fictionalized Lindbergh echoes his historical counterpart, an aviation hero and a Nazi sympathizer, who was well-known for his speech, “Who Are the War Agitators?,” to the America First Committee in September, 1941. In the novel’s alternative world, the Lindbergh administration strikes a deal with Germany to keep the U.S. out of WWII and starts the widespread persecution of Jews on various levels. In the name of greater assimilation, the Office of American * This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology under Grant MOST 105- 2628-H-006-002-MY3. A Chinese article bearing a similar title has appeared in Xue yu tu er yin yu xin (Through Hearts and Minds) (ed. Wang Zhiming, Xiong Tinghui & Zhang Jinzhong [Taipei: Bookman, 2018]), but here I do more than simply translate that article into English. I restructure, substantially revise and expand it, add one new section, and sharpen the argument by incorporating alternate history and affect studies into this essay. This essay has benefitted a lot from the three anonymous reviewers’ comments and suggestions. Received: June 25, 2018／Accepted: December 17, 2018 Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities, no.46 (Jan. 2019): 59-77 60_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities Absorption draws up programs to forcibly relocate selected Jewish families from their urban neighborhood to towns across the South and Midwest. In 1942, President Lindbergh disappears mysteriously. Radio broadcasts from Nazi Germany start to circulate rumors which attribute Lindbergh’s disappearance to the Jews’ plot against America. Before long, angry mobs storm the streets, attack, kill, and humiliate Jews. In the end, Mrs. Lindbergh appeals to the public for peace and unity, and asks the police to end the search for President Lindbergh. In special elections held in November, former president Roosevelt is re-elected for a third presidential term. In December 1942, a year later than in actual history, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the U.S. enters the war, and history is back on track in Roth’s novel. Despite its being a tale of alternate history, Roth’s novel endeavors to be as faithful to historical reality as possible. As Roth explains in “The Story behind The Plot Against America,” “My every imaginative effort was directed toward making the effect of that reality as strong as I could, and not so as to illuminate the present through the past but to illuminate the past through the past.” At the political level, Lindbergh is not a fictional character. His isolationism and anti-Semitism, as depicted in the novel, is also “reflected unambiguously in his speeches, diaries and letters” (Roth 2004a). Roth even provides the full text of Lindbergh’s 1941 speech, as an appendix at the end of the book, for his readers’ reference. All these show that, except for making Lindbergh the thirty- third American president, “everything else” in the novel has been made, as Roth himself claims, “as close to factual truth as I could” (2004a). At the personal level, the Roth family in the novel resembles the author’s family so closely that the story reads almost like a family memoir. The family’s second son, who is also the first-person narrator of the story, bears the same name as the author, Philip Roth,1 rendering the novel the famously last volume of the “Roth books.”2 Roth explains that writing the novel “gave me an opportunity to bring my parents back from the grave and restore them to what they were at the height of their powers in their late 30’s” (2004a). He continues, “I’ve tried to portray them here as faithfully as I could—as though I were, in fact, writing nonfiction” (2004a). The Plot Against America is evidently Roth’s another attempt, in addition to his autobiography The Facts, at preserving personal memories and telling ordinary people’s stories. So far, however, the interpretations of The Plot Against America as either an allegory of the Bush administration or a prophecy of the Trump presidency have formed a predominant part of the existing scholarship on the novel. Although Roth asserts that the novel is not meant as a “roman à clef” of the Bush administration (2004a), in Roth’s 1. To avoid confusion, I will use “Roth” hereafter when I refer to the author of the novel, and “Philip” for the novel’s protagonist. 2. According to Michael Wood in his 2004 review of The Plot Against America, “In recent years, Philip Roth (or his publisher) has taken to grouping most of his novels according to their visible narrator.” There are, for example, “Kepesh books,” “Zuckerman books,” “Roth books,” and “other books.” In the “Roth books,” Roth uses his own name as the name of the protagonist within a fictional as well as a non-fictional work. There are five Roth books, which are The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), Deception: A Novel (1990), Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993), and The Plot Against America (2004). LIAO Pei-chen_“America First”_61 fictional Lindbergh, many readers see Bush, who was then the American president when the novel was published.3 “A reader opening the novel in September 2004,” Steven G. Kellman argues, for instance, “might well have thought that its narrator, ‘Philip Roth,’ was evoking the traumatized post-9/11 world, rather than the period 1940-1942 in which the events of the story take place” (113). It was partly because the novel was published at a time when the Bush administration declared the War on Terror and announced the policy in tandem with a concentration on homeland security that brought drastic changes to Muslim Americans’ lives. Unlike President Bush, who was an interventionist, current American President Donald Trump is as much an isolationist as Lindbergh. Noting especially the slogan “America First” that President Trump used in his presidential campaign and inaugural address, another group of readers finds comparisons between Trump and Lindbergh and compliments Roth, as Scott Galupo does, for having “predicted the presidency of Donald Trump.” The reception of the novel manifests, in the words of Catherine Gallagher, that “at any single moment numerous unrealized pasts are still alive within us” (24). Inviting its readers to imagine how much worse things might have been in the past, Roth’s novel appears, in effect, to have spurred readers’ concurrent thinking of how possible it is to have a racist national leader in the present day and what consequences it may induce. In this essay, I take into serious account Roth’s insistence on “illuminat[ing] the past through the past” and the possibilities of the alternate-history novel for providing critical comments on the present and shaping the future. Taking cues from critics of alternate history, everyday life history, and affect studies, I argue that embedding his personal memories of anti-Semitism in the 1940s within a fictional framework in which Lindbergh defeats Roosevelt, Roth in The Plot Against America enacts a similar yet different type of memory activism than he does in his autobiography. 4 Memory activism, as Yu-cheng Lee [Li Youcheng] elaborates, “aims at righting wrongs, seeking justice, and bringing both hope for the slandered and comfort for the humiliated, so as to rebuild human dignity and to restore history as faithfully as possible” (16).5 Yifat Gutman likewise maintains that memory can “serve as a tool for social and political change” and “a counter-hegemonic force in society” (16). Based on his personal memories of the anti- Semitism in the 1940s, Roth’s The Facts, like other Jewish or ethnic minority writers’ life stories, contributes to “‘counter-history,’ that is, history from below or off to the side” (Gallagher 12). Similarly, as my discussion below seeks to substantiate, The Plot Against America can be read as a literary counterfactual in support of “the historical reparations efforts” that began in the 1970s and 1980s (Gallagher 18), as it, first of all, relies as heavily on Roth’s memories as it does on his imagination. Secondly, it explores “how a historical revision would be registered on the level of commonplace individuals, through habits of thought, modes of speech, routines of daily life” (Gallagher 19). In terms of restoring part 3. For more details on a post-9/11 reading of the novel, see Shostak (2011b), p. 112; Shiffman (2009), pp. 61-62; Lewis (2008), p. 247; Cooper (2005), p. 252; and Kellman (2008), p. 113. 4. I am deeply indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this to my attention. 5. Lee’s Memory is written originally in Chinese. Unless otherwise indicated, all of the translations quoted in this essay are my own. 62_Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities of the 1940s anti-Semitic history through personal memories of both fictionalized and real Philp Roth in order to serve justice, The Plot Against America is as engaged on realistic representation of everyday life as The Facts. Yet, as an alternate-history novel, The Plot Against America does more than simply impel its readers to know and to try to understand the often neglected anti- Semitic past of the U.S.
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