Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

The Boston Herald interpreted Saltonstall's intervention as a political maneuver to gain him recognition as a courageous, honorable, fair-minded conservative who could serve his party as a dignified replacement in 1944 for the Democratic vice president, Burton K. Wheeler, who'd done the job required in the 1940 campaign but whose imprudence as an orator many Republicans now believed might compromise their president the second time around. In a hospital press conference where Winchell appeared before the photographers in his robe, with surgical dressings half covering his face and a heavily bandaged left foot, he welcomed Governor Saltonstall's offer but declined assistance in a message (cast, now that he was under assault, in language more statesmanlike than his standard feverish patter) that was distributed to the two dozen reporters from the radio and the press who had converged on his room. The statement began, "On the day when a candidate for the presidency of the United States requires a phalanx of armed police officers and National Guardsmen to protect his right to free speech, this great country will have passed over into fascist barbarism. I cannot accept that the religious intolerance emanating from the White House has already so corrupted the ordinary citizen that he has lost all respect for fellow Americans of a creed or faith different from his own. I cannot accept that the abhorrence for my religion shared by Adolf Hitler and Charles A. Lindbergh can already have corroded…"

From then on, anti-Semitic agitators hunted Winchell down at every crossing, though without success in Boston, where Saltonstall had ignored Winchell's grandstanding and directed his troops to impose order, employing force if need be, and to carry the violent off to jail, a command that they undertook to execute, however reluctantly. Meanwhile-using a cane to support himself because of his burned foot and with his jaw and forehead still bandaged-Winchell proceeded to draw an angry mob chanting "Kike go home!" in every single parish where he displayed his stigmata to the faithful, from Gate of Heaven Church in South Boston to St. Gabriel's Monastery in Brighton. Beyond Massachusetts, in communities in upper New York State, in Pennsylvania, and throughout the Midwest that were already notorious for their bigotry-and to which Winchell's explosive strategy inevitably pointed him-most of the local authorities did not share Saltonstall's unwillingness to tolerate civil unrest, and so, despite the doubling of his entourage of plainclothes bodyguards, the candidate came close to getting himself mauled each time he stepped onto the soapbox to denounce "the fascist in the White House" and to assign responsibility directly to the president's "religious hatred" for "fostering unheard-of Nazi barbarism in the American streets."

The worst and most widespread violence occurred in Detroit, the midwestern headquarters of the "Radio Priest" Father Coughlin and his Jew-hating Christian Front and of the crowd-pleasing minister known as "the dean of anti-Semites," Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who preached that "Christian character is the true basis of real Americanism." Detroit, of course, was also home to the American automobile industry and to Lindbergh's elderly secretary of the interior, Henry Ford, whose avowedly anti-Semitic newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, published in the 1920s, addressed itself to "an investigation of the Jewish Question" that Ford ultimately reprinted in four volumes, totaling nearly one thousand pages, entitled The International Jew, in which he directed that in the cleansing of America "the International Jew and his satellites, as the conscious enemies of all that Anglo-Saxons mean by civilization, are not spared."

It was to be expected that organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and eminent liberal journalists like John Gunther and Dorothy Thompson would be outraged by the Detroit riots and immediately make public their disgust, but so too were many conventional middle-class Americans, who, even if they found Walter Winchell and his rhetoric repugnant and understood him to be "asking for trouble," were also appalled by the eyewitness reports of how the rioting that had begun at Winchell's first stop in Hamtramck (the residential section inhabited chiefly by auto workers and their families and said to contain the world's largest Polish population outside Warsaw) had suspiciously spread within minutes to 12th Street, to Linwood and then to Dexter Boulevard. There, in the city's biggest Jewish neighborhoods, shops were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and beaten, and kerosene-soaked crosses were ignited on the lawns of the fancy houses along Chicago Boulevard and out front of the modest two-family dwellings of the housepainters, plumbers, butchers, bakers, junk dealers, and grocers who lived on Webb and Tuxedo and in the little dirt yards of the poorest Jews on Pingry and Euclid. In midafternoon, only moments before the school day ended, a firebomb was thrown into the front foyer of Winterhalter Elementary School, where half the students were Jewish, another into the foyer of Central High, whose student body was ninety-five percent Jewish, another through a window at the Sholem Aleichem Institute-a cultural organization Coughlin had ridiculously identified as Communist-and a fourth outside another of Couglin's "Communist" targets, the Jewish Workers' Alliance. Next came the attack on houses of worship. Not only were windows broken and walls defaced on some half of the city's thirty-odd Orthodox synagogues, but as evening services were scheduled to begin an explosion went off on the steps of the prestigious Chicago Boulevard temple Shaarey Zedek. The explosion there caused extensive damage to the exotic centerpiece of architect Albert Kahn's Moorish design-the three massive arched doorways that conspicuously exhibited to a working-class populace a distinctively un-American style. Five passersby, none of whom happened to be Jews, were injured by flying debris from the facade, but no casualties were otherwise reported.

By nightfall, several hundred of the city's thirty thousand Jews had fled and taken refuge across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, and American history had recorded its first large-scale pogrom, one clearly modeled on the "spontaneous demonstrations" against Germany's Jews known as Kristallnacht, "the Night of Broken Glass," whose atrocities had been planned and perpetrated by the Nazis four years earlier and which Father Coughlin in his weekly tabloid, Social Justice, had defended at the time as a reaction by the Germans against "Jewish-inspired Communism." Detroit's Kristallnacht was similarly justified on the editorial page of the Detroit Times as the unfortunate but inevitable and altogether understandable backlash to the activities of the troublemaking interloper the paper identified as "the Jewish demagogue whose aim from the outset had been to incite the rage of patriotic Americans with his treasonous rabble-rousing."

The week after the September assault on Detroit's Jews-which was addressed with dispatch by neither Michigan's governor nor the city's mayor-new violence was directed at homes, shops, and synagogues in Jewish neighborhoods in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and St. Louis, violence that Winchell's enemies attributed to his deliberately challenging appearances in those cities after the cataclysm that he'd instigated in Detroit, and that Winchell himself-who, in Indianapolis, barely escaped being crushed by a paving stone hurled from a rooftop that had broken the neck of the bodyguard stationed beside him-explained by the "climate of hate" emanating from the White House.

Our own street in Newark was many hundreds of miles from Dexter Boulevard in Detroit, nobody around had ever been to Detroit, and before September 1942 all that the boys on the block knew about Detroit was that organized baseball's only Jewish player was the Tigers' star first baseman, Hank Greenberg. But then came the Winchell riots, and suddenly even the children could recite the names of the Detroit neighborhoods that had been shaken by violence. Parroting what they heard from their parents, they would argue back and forth as to whether Walter Winchell was courageous or foolish, self-sacrificing or self-serving, and whether or not he was playing right into Lindbergh's hands by allowing the Gentiles to tell themselves that the Jews had brought their misery on themselves. They argued over whether it would be better if-before Winchell set off a nationwide pogrom-he desisted and allowed "normal" relations to be restored between the Jews and their fellow Americans or whether in the long run it would be better for him to continue to raise the alarm among the country's more complacent Jews-and to arouse the conscience of Christians-by exposing the menace of anti-Semitism from one end of America to the other. On the way to school, on the playground after school, between classes in the school corridors, you would see the smartest kids standing toe to toe, kids Sandy's age as well as a few no older than me, heatedly debating whether Walter Winchell's crisscrossing the country with his soapbox to flush into the open the German-American Bundists and the Coughlinites and the Ku Klux Klanners and the Silver Shirts and the America Firsters and the Black Legion and the American Nazi Party, whether getting these organized anti-Semites and their thousands of unseen sympathizers to reveal themselves for what they were-and to reveal the president for what he was, a chief executive and commander in chief who hadn't yet bothered to acknowledge that anything like a state of emergency existed, let alone called in federal troops to prevent further rioting-was good for the Jews or bad for the Jews.