Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

Tuesday, October 13, 1942

In a noontime radio address, Acting President Wheeler places responsibility for the riots on "the British government and their warmongering American supporters."

"Having falsely disseminated the vilest charges that could possibly be leveled against a patriot of the stature of Charles A. Lindbergh, just what did these people expect from a nation already grieving over the disappearance of a beloved leader? To advance their own economic and racial interests," says the acting president, "these people choose to try to the limit the conscience of a heartsick nation, and just what do they then expect will occur? I can report that order has been restored to our ravaged cities throughout the South and the Midwest, but at what cost to the equanimity of our nation?"

A statement from the president's wife is subsequently delivered by Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf. Once again the First Lady counsels her countrymen to ignore all unverifiable hypotheses about her husband's disappearance emanating from foreign capitals, and she requests of the U.S. government the immediate termination of the weeklong search for her husband's plane. The First Lady wishes the country to recall the tragic plight of Amelia Earhart, the greatest of woman aviators, who, following the lead of President Lindbergh, made her heralded solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932, only to disappear without a trace in 1937 while attempting a solo flight across the Pacific. "As an experienced aviator in her own right," Rabbi Bengelsdorf tells the press, "the First Lady has concluded that something very like what happened to Amelia Earhart appears now to have overtaken the president. Life is not without risk, and aviation, of course, is not without risk, particularly for those like Amelia Earhart and Charles A. Lindbergh, whose daring and courage as solo aviators launched the aeronautical age in which we now live."

Requests by reporters to meet with the First Lady are once again politely declined by her official spokesman, prompting Secretary Ford to demand the arrest of Rabbi Rasputin.

Wednesday, October 14, 1942

In the early evening Mayor La Guardia calls a press conference to point in particular to three manifestations of the "sheer derangement that is threatening the nation's sanity."

First, a front-page Chicago Tribune article, datelined Berlin, reports that the twelve-year-old son of President and Mrs. Lindbergh-the child believed to have been kidnapped and murdered in New Jersey in 1932-has been reunited with his father at Berchtesgaden after having been rescued by the Nazis from a dungeon in Kraków, Poland, where he had been held prisoner in the city's Jewish ghetto ever since his disappearance and where, each year, blood was drawn from the captive boy to be used in the ritual preparation of the community's Passover matzohs.

Second, House Republicans introduce a bill calling for a declaration of war against the Commonwealth of Canada should Prime Minister King fail to reveal the whereabouts of America's missing president within forty-eight hours.

Third, law enforcement agencies in the South and the Midwest report that the "so-called anti-Semitic riots" of October 12 were instigated by "local Jewish elements" working as part of "a far-reaching Jewish conspiracy intent on undermining the country's morale." Of the 122 killed in the rioting, 97 have already been identified as "Jewish provocateurs" seeking to deflect suspicion from the very group responsible for the disorder and plotting to take control of the federal government.

Mayor La Guardia says, "There's a plot afoot all right, and I'll gladly name the forces propelling it-hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear. What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off. Now we read in the Chicago Tribune that all these years clever Jewish bakers have been using the blood of the kidnapped Lindbergh child for making Passover matzohs in Poland-a story just as nutty today as when it was first concocted by anti-Semitic maniacs five hundred years ago. How it must please the Führer to be poisoning our country with this sinister nonsense. Jewish interests. Jewish elements. Jewish usurers. Jewish retaliation. Jewish conspiracies. A Jewish war against the world. To have enslaved America with this hocuspocus! To have captured the mind of the world's greatest nation without uttering a single word of truth! Oh, the pleasure we must be affording the most malevolent man on earth!"

Thursday, October 15, 1942

Just before dawn Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf is taken into custody by the FBI under suspicion of being "among the ringleaders of the Jewish conspiratorial plot against America." At the same time the First Lady, said to be suffering from "extreme nervous exhaustion," is transferred by ambulance from the White House to Walter Reed Army Hospital. Others arrested in the early-morning roundup include Governor Lehman, Bernard Baruch, Justice Frankfurter, Frankfurter protege and Roosevelt administrator David Lilienthal, New Deal advisers Adolf Berle and Sam Rosenman, labor leaders David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, economist Isador Lubin, leftist journalists I. F. Stone and James Wechsler, and socialist Louis Waldman. More arrests are said to be imminent, but the FBI has not disclosed whether the charge of conspiring to kidnap the president will be brought against any or all of the suspects.

Tank and infantry units of the U.S. Army enter New York to assist the National Guard in putting down sporadic antigovernment street violence. In Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston attempts to mount protest demonstrations against the FBI-demonstrations in violation of martial law-result only in minor injuries, though arrests numbering in the hundreds are reported by police.

In Congress, leading Republicans praise the FBI for thwarting the conspirators' plot. In New York, Mayor La Guardia is joined at a press conference by Eleanor Roosevelt and Roger Baldwin of the ACLU. They demand the immediate release of Governor Lehman along with his alleged co-conspirators. La Guardia is subsequently arrested at the mayor's mansion.

To address an emergency protest rally convened by a New York citizens' committee, former president Roosevelt travels from his home at Hyde Park to New York; "for his own protection" he is promptly taken into custody by the police. The U.S. Army shuts down all newspaper offices and radio stations in New York, where the after-dark martial-law curfew will be enforced round the clock until further notice. Tanks close off all bridges and tunnels into the city.

In Buffalo the mayor announces his intention to distribute gas masks to the city's citizens, and the mayor of nearby Rochester initiates a bomb shelter program "to protect our residents in the event of a surprise Canadian attack." An exchange of small-arms fire is reported by the Canadian Broadcasting Company on the border between Maine and the province of New Brunswick, not far from Roosevelt's summer home on Campobello Island in the Bay of Fundy. From London, Prime Minister Churchill warns of an imminent German invasion of Mexico, purportedly to protect America's southern flank while the United States sets about to wrest control of Canada from the British. "It is no longer a matter," says Churchill, "of the great American democracy taking military action to save us. The time has come for American citizens to take civil action to save themselves. There are not two isolated historical dramas, the American and the British, and there never were. There is only one ordeal, and now as in the past we face it in common."

Friday, October 16, 1942

Beginning at nine A.M., a radio transmitter secreted somewhere in the nation's capital broadcasts the voice of the First Lady, who, with the assistance of Lindbergh loyalists inside the Secret Service, has managed to escape from Walter Reed, where-alleged by authorities to be a mental patient in the care of Army psychiatrists-she has been straitjacketed and held prisoner for nearly twenty-four hours. The tone is appealingly gentle, the words uttered without a trace of harshness or righteous contempt-altogether the evenly paced voice of someone entirely respectable who is educated to face down sorrow and disappointment without ever losing her self-restraint. She is no cyclone, yet the undertaking is extraordinary and she shows no fear.