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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by King Wenclas, ULA
PHILIP ROTH'S PLOT AGAINST AMERICAN HISTORY:
A Fraudulent Novel. Or, the Cost of Being Anti-War.
We find today in book critics and lit-bloggers a lack of knowledge of the
subjects they discuss. They're unwilling to obtain such knowledge. They
show bovine credulity when faced with the work and reputation of a
well-known writer.
How else to explain the widespread applause given to Philip Roth's Plot
Against America-- the inability to denounce it as a fake?
The premise of the book is that in the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt is
defeated by Charles Lindbergh, who proceeds to turn the United States into
a fascist nation not unlike Nazi Germany. The idea underlying Roth's novel is
that FDR's re-election saved us from this fate.
The truth is that Roth borrowed for his story the worst lies used in 1941
against Lindbergh because he was a leading anti-war personality-- ideas part
of a hysterical p.r. campaign necessary to stampede the American public
into a war mentality.
The parallels to our own day are striking.
What's the evidence for Roth's unusual plotline? Was Lindbergh in any way
a fascist?
Historian Ross Gregory in America 1941:
"The featured isolationist performer in 1941 was no fascist or radical but
Charles A. Lindbergh, 'Lucky Lindy,' the shy folk hero now moved to lend
his considerable prestige to a cause thought more important than a
much-publicized penchant for privacy."
With conflict occurring in Europe, Lindbergh and FDR took opposing
stances based on their attitudes toward the first World War. Lindbergh, like
most Americans, thought WWI had been a senseless waste of life and a bad
experience for this country. His father had opposed it, and this formed his
thinking. (As did the Founding Fathers' warnings.) Roosevelt had been
Secretary of Navy during that war, and had pushed hard then for the
strengthening of the U.S. government and military. He'd also supported the
Espionage Act-- like our Patriot Act, only more extreme.
Lindbergh and the President had clashed previously in 1934, when FDR tried
to switch air mail from civilian to military carriers. Lindbergh won that battle.
FDR nursed a grievance. Nevertheless, in late 1939 Roosevelt offered
Lindbergh a cabinet position if he would refrain from speaking against the
administration. Lindbergh declined. Smithsonian curator Von Hardesty has
said in his book about Lindbergh: "He could not be bought with praise or
high office, as President Roosevelt would discover at the onset of World War
II . . . Now viewing Lindbergh as an implacable enemy, Roosevelt unleashed
a campaign to discredit him."
From 1939 on the two men engaged in a p.r. battle over intervention.
Lindbergh, naively or not, advocated a negotiated peace. He had inspected
the German air force in the 1930s, at the U.S. Army's request, and warned of
its effectiveness. This was now used to label him as "unpatriotic."
It's noteworthy that during his stay in Europe in the 30s, Lindbergh refused
to live in Berlin because of German anti-Semitism. Lindbergh biographer A.
Scott Berg: "The move to Paris, he explained, was for one basic reason: 'the
fact that I do not wish to make a move which would seem to support the
German action in regard to the Jews.'"
This is hardly the fascist of Roth's caricature of a novel who interns
American Jews in concentration camps!
Yet Lindbergh did make statements, in one of his many 1941 speeches, that
would be used to brand him as anti-Semitic. On September 11 he mentioned
groups pushing America toward war: "the British, the Jewish, and the
Roosevelt administration." Historian Geoffrey Perrett calls this "the gaffe of
gaffes." The statement was taken out of context to destroy Lindbergh's
credibility-- ignoring the rest of his speech: "It is not difficult to understand
why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution
they suffered in Germany would make bitter enemies of any race. No person
with a sense of dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the
Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on
their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers. . . ."
Ross Gregory: "Charles Lindbergh did not consider himself anti-Jewish, . ."
Scott Berg: He awoke the next morning to a Niagara of invective. Few men
in American history had ever been so reviled. One columnist stated that the
Lone Eagle had plummeted from 'Public Hero No. 1' to 'Public Enemy No. 1.'"
Geoffrey Perrett: "Far from being part of some vast Fascist effort to topple
the government, Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle, was in truth little more by now
than a Lone Voice. Isolation had been defeated. . . ."
Berg: "Charles Lindbergh was never associated with any pro-Nazi or
anti-Semitic organization; he never attacked any Bund meetings; and since
more than four months before the outbreak of war in Europe, he had never
consorted not consulted with anyone known to have any connections with
the Third Reich."
Several years prior Lindbergh had bitterly condemned the press for their
behavior during his son's kidnapping. They and others now attacked him
with glee.
Berg: "Libraries across America pulled his books from their shelves; in
Ottawa, Ontario, a group asked the Mayor to burn Lindbergh's books in a
public square." Etc.
When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor shortly thereafter, in December,
Lindbergh dropped his isolationism, but his opponents wouldn't forgive him.
His offer of service to the U.S. military was rejected. (He later saw combat in
the Pacific as a civilian advisor.) In full war climate, public attacks on
Lindbergh continued.
Perrett: "Liberal journals and politicians were themselves meanwhile
carrying on a noisy protest movement for the suppression of native Fascists
and former isolationists." "--in July a federal grand jury handed down
indictments (later dropped, presumably for lack of evidence) against
twenty-eight persons for undermining military morale. Liberals were furious
that Coughlin and Lindbergh were not included. If they could not be
prosecuted under existing laws, the New Republic fumed, then new laws
must be passed to secure their conviction."
Has anyone seen the hysterical war propaganda of that period? Seen any of
that time's war movies?
When one studies the history of the period, one realizes that the war
propaganda, the sense of hysteria, is from where Philip Roth created his
novel. Yet he's not mocking the hysteria. He fully believes it, as if he's living
in 1945 and not 60 years later.
Either he's regressed into childhood, or he's cynically using that hysteria to
justify his story. His use of Iceland in the plot as the place where Hitler and
Lindbergh reach their agreement is curious-- as FDR had the U.S. military
imperialistically seize Iceland in July, 1941. Lindbergh publicly criticized this.
Roth, 60 years later, is still fighting Roosevelt's p.r. campaign.
* * * * * * * * * * *
The key question about Roth's novel: Did FDR save America from the
anti-war, anti-imperialist Lindbergh's "fascism"?
The hugely popular, charismatic Roosevelt, for all his greatness, surely took
this country farther along the path to fascism than the politically-inept
Lindbergh could have, had he even desired to. Rightly or wrongly, FDR
massively strengthened the size and role of government in American life.
He introduced the identification and numbering of the American population.
He mobilized the U.S. people into a war frenzy. He encouraged the power
and intrusiveness of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and used it against his enemies.
Some historians believe Roosevelt intentionally provoked the Japanese
attack at Pearl Harbor. Regardless, he enthusiastically entered the war, for
which he'd been preparing.
That war resulted in the creation of the gigantic American military-industrial
complex-- the huge growth in our armanents industries; the merging of big
government and big business which is the hallmark of a fascist society; a
permanent war economy which we still live with today. The war culminated
in a barrage of xenophobic propaganda. It was Roosevelt who put an ethnic
group into internment camps (an action beyond Lindbergh's imagination).
Roosevelt's statements at Yalta reveal scant regard for human life. At the
time of his death he was eagerly pushing for the United States to be the
dominant military and economic power on the globe, displacing British and
French imperialism. FDR's vision became our reality.
Given these historical FACTS, to try to claim that isolationist Lindbergh was
the actual fascist is absurdity, a slander on a good man's name.
Philip Roth's novel is not credible or believable. It's imagined history
alright-- "imagined" having two levels of meaning. Or, a lie about a lie. With
all that, it's not even very well done! Just an ill-thought-out excuse for a
novel from an author in the last stages of artistic desperation.
The critics who praised it should be ashamed.
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