Over the past two days, I watched HBO's television adaptation of Philip Roth's 2004 alternate history novel The Plot Against America. Not being formally trained in film criticism, my observations will doubtlessly seem haphazard and perfunctory to many. I did read the source novel several years ago but do not recall many of the individual details nor do I have a copy on hand to refer to thus there inevitably was some referral to Wikipedia and other websites for comparisons.
Normally, the primary thrust of a review of mine would be to analyze the alternate history in the show-looking at the course of changed events and offering remarks on their plausibility. The problem with the Plot Against America is that there is very little of alternate history. For the first five episodes, viewers see history changing primarily through brief snatches of radio and newsreels. The changed history can be summarized briefly as follows: famed aviator and later America First advocate Charles Lindbergh enters the Presidential election in 1940 in opposition to American involvement in World War II and becomes the Republican nominee for President, with Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-MT) as his running mate. Lindbergh defeats President Franklin D. Roosevelt in November and ends military aid to Britain upon taking office. To the dismay of many, President Lindbergh becomes uncomfortably cooperative with Nazi Germany even to the extent of signing an agreement in Iceland with Hitler and entertaining Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in the White House. Some fear America will degenerate into a fascist dictatorship, especially when the Lindbergh administration (where the anti-Semitic Henry Ford is Secretary of the Interior) institutes programs to "integrate" Jewish Americans such as Just Folks to give urban Jewish children a taste of country life and later Homestead 42 to relocate Jewish employees of major companies to branch offices in the nation's Heartland. Radio commentator and news columnist Walter Winchell launches a one man crusade against Lindbergh and even announces a run for President...
Yet the full possibilities of alternate history are not explored. Viewers do not learn why the significant divergences such as Lindbergh deciding to enter the political arena and then winning both the nomination and election happen. Nor does the war in Europe seem particularly affected by these changes by 1942, though there is a general paucity of detail on the course of the war abroad. Perhaps this is a good thing, given that viewers are spared implausibilities such as Operation Sea Lion found in many World War II alternate histories.
The substance of the story, which is about the daily life of a lower middle-class Jewish family in a suburban section of Newark, New Jersey could just as easily be set in the pre-Pearl Harbour America of 1940 and 1941 in OTL [1] through Episode 5. Even the plotline where one character joins the Canadian Army to fight the Germans reflects the reality that many Americans volunteered in OTL well before the country officially joined the war. The various plotlines we see explored through the various Levins and Finkles are alternately interesting, charming, and tedious. There are seemingly countless arguments between characters that become shouting matches and occasionally degenerate into physical violence, but the former at least should be familiar to viewers after five months of lockdowns. The observations are not meant to be criticisms, for I enjoy slice of life anime such as K-On! immensely and it was nice to see a picture of lower middle-class family life in a tightly knit urban community in the Forties, something increasingly impossible to find in age of gentrification and social atomization.
Unfortunately, here the story suffers from a tendency to tell rather than show. Viewers are even deprived of a combat sequence when Alvin lands in Norway to capture German radar only to lose his leg, learning of the results only in later conversation. When Sandy goes to Kentucky in the summer to participate in the Just Folks program, viewers do not see his seemingly idyllic summer where he gets to experience country life, though they see his drawings of it. This seems to be derived from an excessive faithfulness to the original novel which was written by Roth as a first-person account with his own family as characters and events being narrated through the eyes of a 8 to 10 year old Roth. The autobiographical framework is present in the adaptation and Philip Levin (renamed because the late Roth wished his actual family not to be used in an adaptation) plays a secondary role, though we see some of his amusing escapades.
As a result there are expanded roles for various characters, especially Rabbi Bengelsdorf who cooperates with the Lindbergh Administration despite drawing the ire of many fellow Jews. Bengelsdorf is very much a charismatic Southron and is given some of the most eloquent lines in the entire series. The adorable Zoe Kazan, who has a fine pair of doe-like blue eyes and one of the cutest noses, plays the protective and motherly Bess Levin (née Finkel) and some of the more emotionally moving scenes in the series owe much to her. Her husband Herman shows the greatest historical verisimilitude and is a classic loud-mouthed lower-middle class big city resident of the Forties. His opinionated harangues are amusing and it was refreshing to see a Debs-supporting socialist of the old school on the television (or laptop) screen. Among more briefly appearing characters, the British lass June (played by Leslie Fray) who may or may not work at Bletchley Park was quite charming and I regretted Alvin did not end up with her in the end.
To avoid providing spoilers to future viewers, I have avoided discussion of the events in the tumultuous last episode til here. Winchell's rallies rapidly become a magnet for neo-Nazi hoodlums to violently disrupt, which is generally ignored by the police. Eventually the radioman is assassinated in Louisville and anti-Semitic riots erupt across the country. Many beg Lindbergh to give a speech denouncing the violence but his speech in Kentucky instead totally ignores those events. The aviator turned President disappears while returning to Washington in a plane that he flies himself and acting President Wheeler declares martial law, with several Jews being arrested. Even more synagogues and Jewish owned businesses burn in cities across the nation, with some Jews being murdered by the KKK. Calm is only restored when Mrs. Lindbergh flees from the hospital and goes on the radio to call for peace and a new Presidential election in concurrence with the midterm races. The Republicans nominate Henry Ford and Robert Taft for this emergency election, opposed by a Democratic ticket of FDR and Truman. There are instances of election fraud, with many ballots being burned and the radio reports indicate uncertainty about the final results.
In the last episode, viewers are finally confronted with significant historical changes and some powerful moments but numerous plausibility issues arise. I will confine myself to discussing two of them, one minor and other much larger. Henry Ford would have been 79 years of age in November 1942, making it extremely unlikely he would have campaigned for President. Of course, the current presumptive Democratic nominee is 78 years old and there have been older candidates such as Peter Cooper but Ford was in ill health by this time.The bigger criticism is the characterization of Wheeler as an anti-Semite and authoritarian who proclaims martial law, being explicitly referred to by a character as worse than Lindbergh. This portrayal, present in the original novel as well, borders on libel of the dead when one considers Wheeler's actual political career. Senator Wheeler was a political progressive for most of his life and as United States Attorney during World War I refused to issue a single prosecution for sedition even against radical antiwar unionists in the IWW while opposing the martial law decrees of Montana's governor. True, Wheeler was an opponent of the war and it appears became more conservative late his career but this hardly makes him a would-be American Hitler or even Franco.
There can be little doubt that the Plot Against America is what future academics may call "Resistance Culture"-that corpus of books, movies, and TV shows that either directly or indirectly reflect the anxieties of the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Interestingly the source material of many of these dystopian adaptations such as Roth's novel and the more famous The Handmaid's Tale were written well before 2016. The Plot Against America becoming a Resistance icon is especially ironic when one considers that it was originally published in 2004 and originally seen as an allegory against the Bush administration despite his neoconservative foreign policy. Indeed, Bush administration apologists would regularly denounce any sceptics of the Iraq War as latter-day Neville Chamberlains and by extension America Firsters. Now, as during 1940, it is the liberals who once more denounce conservatives as isolationist "America Firsters" thanks to Donald Trump's nationalist turn (albeit one more observed more in rhetoric than in practice). Meanwhile, interventionists of the last decades like Bush the Lesser and Senator John McCain (an anti-Burton K Wheeler if there ever was one) are celebrated by upper class liberals as "good" conservatives. The permutations and reversals of History are quite strange indeed.
The faithfulness of the series to the novel is something of an asset here in that viewers do not have to cringe at Lindbergh spouting "Make America Great Again" and generally behaving like a loud-mouthed, obnoxious fool. Instead, Lindbergh is characterized as precisely the opposite-a dashing, young dignified hero rather than a tawdry, aging billionaire from the outer boroughs-and nearly all his statements are laconic platitudes. Ignoring his policies, one would see much more of Mr. Lindbergh in say Pete Buttigieg who sought the Presidency at the same age of 38. Perhaps Tulsi Gabbard is a latter-day Charles Lindberg-they even share a Hawaiian connection. The most Trump-like man in the show is instead a Jewish real-estate developer named Mr. Steinheim who appears briefly and is even noted to regularly defraud contractors.
I will avoid the presumption of commenting on the various issues of Jewish-American identity and belonging which are important themes in the novel and the show. Nor can the pervasive of anti-Semitism in Forties America be denied. The night time road trip by Herman and Sandy through Pennsylvania and West Virginia to rescue a young boy stranded in Kentucky after his mother was murdered by the Klan is a nightmare theme park ride through an America that was not but could have been. While there were no mass anti-Semitic riots in World War II America, there were several race riots in places such as Detroit (mentioned as a site of a wave of anti-Semitic violence) and Harlem resulting in dozens of deaths. Yet Bill Kauffman's criticism of Roth's novel for unfairly portraying the American Heartland as full of latent Nazis does occasionally come to mind. Particularly incongruent is some workers despairing of relocating to Kentucky or Montana and instead migrating to Canada. Yet, partially due to restrictive Canadian immigration laws perhaps, many of these refugees go not to Montreal or Toronto but rather to places such as Winnipeg. It is doubtful 1940s Prairie Provinces which had many demographic, cultural, and social similarities with the Plains States to their south would have been anymore philo-Semitic.
Costumes, backgrounds, and props generally seemed accurate to the period as was the music which included one of the more melodic versions of the "Horst Wessel Lied" that I've heard. The most notable song was doubtlessly the opening which was apparently an anthem for FDR's corporatist National Recovery Administration. It is truly a rare find and the entire short film is worth seeing:
Despite the deficiencies of the Plot Against America as an alternate history, it is still an engaging Forties period drama and I heartily recommend it to anyone with an interest in those areas.
[1] Our Timeline, alternate history fandom terminology for the real world and its history.
Some useful supplemental reading:
Philip Roth-The Story Behind "Plot Against America" Bill Kauffman-Heil to the Chief Alden Whitman-NY Times Obituary of Burton K. Wheeler
