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Points of View
"Alternative History Asks, 'What If?'Our serious historian's response, 'So what?'The Plot Against America. By Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin Co., 400 pp., $26). Charles A. Lindbergh was one of the most beloved Americans in the 20th century: The heroic aviator who accomplished the first solo crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Husband of the poet Anne Morrow Lindbergh who suffered the excruciating kidnapping and death of their first-born son in the spring of 1932. A champion of modern industry, saluted by the Nazis for praising German technology. The leading spokesman in 1941 for not intervening on the side of the Allies in World War II.He was the darling of America Firsters such as Col. Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Great War hero Eddie Rickenbacker, American Legion commander Hanford MacNider, dilettante activists (and actresses) Dorothy and Lilian Gish, industrialists J. Howard Pew and Henry Ford, U.S. Sens. Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye and Theodore Bilbo, Father Charles Coughlin (the radio priest), German-American Bund leader Fritz Kuhn, and 15 million other closet bigots who opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt's bid for a third term in 1940.How different the world would be had "Lucky Lindy" emerged from the woodwork to contest the presidency in 1940. How different the outcome if the American people had sufficient time to assess the nature of FDR's provocative policies.Seemingly innocuous measures in the fall of 1940 (the first peacetime conscription act in our history, a billion-dollar defense budget, Lend-Lease -- the swapping of U.S. destroyers for British bases in the Western Hemisphere -- a joint defense command with Canada) were followed by freezing the assets of the nations Germany conquered. When the British could not pay for war material, Washington passed the Lend-Lease Act that gave them the shells and aircraft (stamped obsolete as they rolled off the assembly line) they needed to prosecute the war. When the British could not pick up the equipment, the United States conveyed the contraband to Greenland, Iceland and Ireland, all of which magically became part of the Western Hemisphere. And when the Nazi U-Boats started attacking U.S. vessels in the spring of 1941, Roosevelt issued orders to strike against these "rattlesnakes of the sea." We wouldn't admit it, but we were at war long before Pearl Harbor.For 60 years, historians have been recounting the story of that fascinating era when Americans still enjoyed the luxury of peace as families from Greece to China died by the thousands in terror. The storytellers concluded how fortunate for civilization that Lindbergh was not a candidate for president in 1940 and that the events that so polarized American society did not occur for another year.Historians are not supposed to play in the land of make-believe. Novelists are under no such constraints. Hence, we have a remarkable book, The Plot Against America, by one of America's most celebrated authors, Philip Roth. It is part-childhood reminiscences of a Jewish family in Newark, N.J., part-fantasy based on Roth's telescoping of historical events and borrowing cinematic moments. Those who read this novel will be reminded of the movies Gentlemen's Agreement and Nashville.As is true with some of his earlier work, Roth is less successful when he is overly aware of his prose and overplays his hand in striving for effect. Agonizingly long sentences become page-length subplots. He does not merely mention two nuns waiting for a streetcar. He dissects every single piece of their apparel. How did Shakespeare ever manage to set a scene simply by writing, "A garden"?Roth is more effective when he shares moments that are/were real for those of us who grew up the 1940s. The importance of stamp collecting, learned from a bright kid named Earl, never to be fulfilled because the U.S. Post Office was always issuing more commemoratives. Hot, cramped bed-quarters at night shared with two or three siblings while radio voices identifying themselves as Gabriel Heatter or Lowell Thomas offered the news of the day.We saw our real heroes -- FDR, Fiorello LaGuardia, U.S. marines, sailors, pilots and GIs -- every Saturday in newsreels at the Liberty Theater. John Wayne and the Seabees, Robert Taylor and his water-cooled machine gun at Wake Island, Spencer Tracy who never lost.In The Plot Against America, Roth comes now to ask what if it had been different? What if an angry American public had elected Lindbergh over Roosevelt in 1940? What if Wheeler and Henry Ford had been granted important positions in the new administration? What if, all so subtly, the many insecure Jews living in cities in the East had been broken up by the government with programs, modelled after the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, called Just Folks, the Office of American Absorption or Homestead 42? What if Americans, many of whom harbored sympathies for the Ku Klux Klan or other anti-alien, anti-black, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic groups were encouraged to re-enact Kristallnacht (the night of broken glass) across the 48 states? And what if there had been a manipulative foreign hand (a variation on a hoary plot not disclosed by Roth until the final pages) in all of this?Ultimately, Roth's book succeeds or fails depending upon one's definition of history. What this means to Roth is unclear. Pitching to the common man, he offers, "History is everything that is printed in the Newark newspapers." Elsewhere, grasping for profundity, he likens history to a set of connecting blocks, each dependent upon the previous one and offering a path to progress.If a block is missing, then humanity must move laterally or retrogress, veering into an alternate universe that delays, but does not deter, the path divined for us. Thus, America, misled by the Lindbergh interregnum of 1940-42, returns to its familiar historical destiny -- alliance with Great Britain, victory in World War II, participation in the Cold War, assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy long after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which in Plot takes place in December 1942. But America could just as easily have diverged from its path if John F. Kennedy had thrown reinforcements into the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, or given the order to fire on Soviet tanks in Berlin that summer, or if both he and Khruschev had not flinched over Cuba in October 1962.Once you start ascribing extraordinary power to revolutionaries when they are still considered crackpots, or shifting causal factors from their legitimate place in history, there is no limit to what permutations the storyteller can come up with. "Alternative History" is a maddening concept that appeals to writers of science fiction and growers of hallucinogens."