[Peace-discuss] He who controls the past, controls the future

[Morton K.Brussel]

Carl,

The "excellent" Bill Kaufman sounds like a basket case to me. Being 
anti-war may be a respected and right left position today, but in 
1939-1941 it was something quite different. The world was already at 
war. Kaufman seems to forget about Hitler and the German war machine. 
He forgets about fascism in Italy. he forgets about the Franco fascist 
war in Spain. No, I don't think he forgets, I think it is just not 
important to his highly perverted view of history. Remember Poland, the 
Rhineland, the Gestapo, the Blackshirts, the persecution of the Jews. 
I'm sure he knows about those things, but it's unimportant to him. 
There may have been principled opponents to America joining the war in 
Europe, but many Kaufman cites were not, for my money. they were 
Pro-fascist and pro-Nazi, against the Bolshies.

Yes, the American First Committee I remember was a front for fascism, 
not just anti war or isolationism. They liked what Hitler was doing. 
Antisemites rallied to them. Remember Lindberg's shaking hands with 
Hitler, accepting a medal (I think) from him. Brings to mind Rumsfeld. 
I lived in a town where those who were rabidly anti FDR, tended to be 
antisemites,  were proud to support Mussolini or Hitler (Remember the 
German American Bund?) and were, yes, against us entering the war (on 
the side of Britain or France). There was no mystery why they took that 
position.

As far as my admittedly faulty memory goes, almost everything Kaufman 
says in this review is wrong. I don't know Roth's present politics or 
mindset. Maybe I wouldn't like it if I knew. But what he seems to have 
said in his novel, as reported by Kaufman, has more truth to it than 
anything Kaufman says. Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye, et al and their 
followers morphed into the House Unamerican Activities Committee after 
the war. After all, it was the Commies and the Jews who got us into the 
war.

Maybe, Carl, you should ask Noam Chomsky about this scurrilous review.

Maybe, I'll now read his book. I did enjoy goodbye Columbus.

MKB

On Sep 23, 2004, at 8:14 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> [This is review of Philip Roth's new novel, The Plot Against America, 
> by
> the excellent Bill Kauffman.  I read Roth with interest when I (and he)
> was young (viz., Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go), but in recent 
> years he
> has written "political" novels attacking the great evils of the age --
> namely the New Left, the Old Left, and his ex-wife, Claire Bloom. It's
> remarkable how many people seem to take this self-promoting jingoist
> seriously -- and not just Americans; see
> <http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1300982,00.html>. His
> new book is another example of how political discussion in the US has
> migrated to books and films, given the fecklessness of the daily press.
> Kauffman does a wonderful job of skewering it and in the process 
> proposes
> a more just account of the anti-war movement of the 1930s. --CGE
>
>
> 	Heil to the Chief
> 	Philip Roth, "The Plot Against America"
> 	(Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages)
> 	By Bill Kauffman
>
> Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is the novel that a 
> neoconservative
> would write, if a neoconservative could write a novel.
>
> In 1940, as in 2004, voters faced a choiceless presidential election
> between pro-war interventionists, with a noble antiwar socialist 
> (Norman
> Thomas then, Ralph Nader now) the best man in the field.
>
> In Roth's what-if world, we the people have an actual choice in 1940.
> Instead of a third term for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, America
> Firster Charles Lindbergh is elected president, whereupon all hell 
> breaks
> loose-which is to say America is at peace, a condition never again to 
> be
> permitted, apparently, in the United States of Armaments. The horrific
> consequences of electing an antiwar Midwesterner are seen through the 
> eyes
> of young Philip Roth, son of an insurance agent, and his Jewish family 
> in
> Newark, New Jersey.
>
> In our world, Wall Street operatives steered the 1940 GOP nomination to
> the hawkish utilities executive Wendell Willkie, as Gore Vidal 
> describes
> with wit, artistry, and panache in The Golden Age (2000). That novel 
> also
> pivots on the 1940 election, although Vidal regards Lindbergh as "the 
> true
> white knight through and through," and "the best that we are ever apt 
> to
> produce in the hero line, American style."
>
> Vidal is a proprietary patriot, utterly comfortable with our history
> because it is his history. Roth is ill at ease in the American past; 
> his
> research seems to have consisted of a quick flip through the courtier
> histories of James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger. He bristles
> with contempt for the benighted denizens of "the working-class 
> heartland
> of isolationist America"-that is, mothers and fathers who would rather 
> not
> send their boys to die in foreign wars. Their parochial and pacific
> instincts point the way to a Middle American fascism.
>
> Roth writes in sodden cliches: for instance, FDR "inspired millions of
> ordinary families like ours to remain hopeful in the midst of 
> hardship."
> This is Time-Life prose. There is not a felicitous sentence in this 
> book;
> nor is there a spark of wit or a single subversive thought. The 
> literary
> critics of the Department of Homeland Security will pronounce it fit 
> for
> best-sellerdom.
>
> Charles A. Lindbergh was a classic product of Upper Midwest populism. 
> His
> congressman father, a fierce foe of U.S. involvement in World War I, 
> was
> dubbed the "Gopher Bolshevik" by the New York Times. Lindbergh is 
> easily
> understood in a Minnesota tradition that stretches from the Gopher
> Bolshevik and Sen. Henrik Shipstead through Bob Dylan and Eugene 
> McCarthy.
> He was no more a Nazi than FDR was.
>
> But not since the Spanish-American War have honorable Americans been
> permitted to criticize a war without being slandered as traitorous 
> lackeys
> for the enemy. Just as Eugene V. Debs was calumnied as a Kaiser-lover 
> and
> Martin Luther King Jr. as a communist, so must Charles Lindbergh be a
> crypto-Nazi. Given the current climate, Roth's book is especially 
> odious.
> Or perhaps The Plot Against America is meant to serve as the writing
> sample in Roth's application for a speechwriter job in the Bush
> administration.
>
> The Plot Against America is the sort of novel a bootlicking author 
> might
> write to curry favor with a totalitarian government. The author puts a
> fictive gloss over the officially sanctioned history. Thank God things
> happened as they did! The alternative to the regime was madness, chaos,
> murder. Dissenters must be demonized, so Roth saddles his America First
> villains with positions exactly opposite those they actually took.
>
> The America First Committee was the largest (800,000 members) antiwar
> organization in U.S. history. Its members ranged from patricians to
> populists, from Main Street Republicans to prairie socialists. John F.
> Kennedy was a donor; his future brother-in-law Sargent Shriver was a
> founder, as were Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart, and Kingman Brewster. 
> Many
> of the finest writers in America sympathized with (or joined) America
> First-Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Robinson Jeffers, e.e. cummings, 
> and
> William Saroyan-while the leading pro-war authors were such toadies as
> Archibald MacLeish (or macarchibald maclapdog macleish, as cummings 
> called
> him). Aviator Lindbergh was the AFC's most popular speaker, though he
> never formally joined the committee.
>
> The antiwar movement of 1940-41 was essentially libertarian: in favor 
> of
> peace and civil liberties, opposed to conscription. Rather than accept
> this complexity, Roth opts for inversion: his isolationists are the 
> party
> of repression and conscription, while his warhawks are the party of
> liberty. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery.
>
> And so Montana Senator Burton K. Wheeler, running mate of "Fighting 
> Bob"
> La Follette on the 1924 Progressive Party ticket and an early 
> supporter of
> the New Deal who went into opposition over FDR's attempt to pack the
> Supreme Court, emerges as Lindbergh's wicked vice president, a 
> despoiler
> of the Constitution and declarer of martial law. Never mind that the 
> real
> Burton K. Wheeler was an anti-draft, antiwar, anti-big business 
> defender
> of civil liberties: in Roth's world, this great American-a "brilliant,
> incorruptible, courageous man," in La Follette's glowing tribute-must 
> be
> depicted as pro-fascist. (The closest thing to a real live fascist in
> American politics in 1940 was FDR brain-truster Rexford G. Tugwell.) 
> Vice
> President Wheeler is portrayed as a "combative" snarler whose job is to
> "attack and revile" foes-a role actually played by Rothian hero Harold
> Ickes, the FDR hatchetman so memorably described by Clare Boothe Luce 
> as
> having "the soul of a meat axe and the mind of a commissar."
>
> Roth's Lindbergh is laconic to the point of simplemindedness. The real
> Lindy was a fine writer who composed his own speeches, but Roth 
> suggests
> that these were written in Germany. The Lindbergh of The Plot Against
> America declares, "My intention in running for the presidency is to
> preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in
> another world war. Your choice is simple. It's not between Charles A.
> Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It's between Lindbergh and 
> war."
> This is an eminently fair summation. But of course the American people
> were presented no such choice in 1940, nor really in any other 
> quadrennium
> since World War II except, perhaps, 1972.
>
> The Lindbergh nomination is engineered by North Dakota Sen. Gerald P. 
> Nye,
> whom Roth dismisses with the lazy adjective "right-wing." Oh really? In
> fact, Nye criticized the New Deal from the Left for its timorousness. 
> Nye
> had made his name as the scourge of the "merchants of death" who 
> profited
> from the disastrous U.S. entry into the First World War, and he always
> feared a replay.
>
> Campaigning in "the remotest rural counties," Lindbergh wins in a
> landslide, the Republicans take Congress, and the threat of peace, no
> conscription, and full enjoyment of the Bill of Rights darkens the 
> Rothian
> sky. To young Philip's parents, America is good only insofar as it 
> sends
> its sons to die in foreign lands. The family's favorite presidents are
> Wilson and FDR, who shipped more Americans to die overseas than any 
> other
> chief execs. Unwashed Americans, who live in places like North Dakota 
> or
> Minnesota or Montana, mean harm to the Roths; their reluctance to send
> their sons to transatlantic graves is presented as a particularly
> insidious symptom of anti-Semitism.
>
> In Roth's flip-flopped universe, President Lindbergh institutes a
> peacetime draft-which in fact FDR did, over the ardent objections of 
> the
> isolationists, who argued against conscription on libertarian grounds.
>
> President Lindbergh cozies up to the Nazis while pursuing a domestic
> policy that might be stamped "Made in Germany." He is wildly popular, 
> even
> with "the highly assimilated upper echelon of German Jewish society,"
> whose cultured members are depicted herein as craven social climbers.
>
> Among the turncoat Jews is Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf of Newark, a South
> Carolina native with a "courtly Southern accent"-always the tip-off to
> knavery when a mediocrity is at the typewriter. The Rabbi opposes 
> women's
> suffrage, not exactly a hot topic in 1940, but then Roth is limning
> character, don't you see? The scene in which Rabbi Bengelsdorf 
> vivisects
> FDR's Scottie Fala must have been excised by a wise editor.
>
> Lindbergh and Rabbi Bengelsdorf create an Office of American 
> Absorption,
> whose centerpiece is the "Just Folks" program, under which Jewish youth
> are shipped out to the "Gentile heartland" to become real Amerrykuns.
> Philip's brother spends the summer with a "Kentucky tobacco farmer." He
> returns with an accent, respect for farm life, a taste for ham and 
> bacon,
> and a dose of the fascist clap that Philip Roth imagines lurks 
> everywhere
> in that darksome forest of fear west of the Hudson. To Roth, a small 
> farm
> in Kentucky is the perfect training ground for a fascist. Tell it to
> Wendell Berry, Philip.
>
> "Just Folks" is yet another Roth reversal: FDR's Civilian Conservation
> Corps was the actual (if benign) means of rusticating urban boys in the
> 1930s. In the 1940s, it was urban politicians who tore rural boys from
> their native ground and sent them to war. The dislocating effects of
> militarism meant that 15 million Americans lived in a different county 
> in
> March 1945 than they had in December 1941-and that doesn't count the 12
> million-plus in uniform. A disproportionate number of the displaced, by
> the way, were from Kentucky. As an anti-hillbilly joke of the time 
> went,
> America lost three states in the early 1940s: Kentucky and Tennessee 
> had
> gone to Indiana, and Indiana had gone to hell. But to Roth, the Gentile
> heartland is hell.
>
> If The Plot Against America sounds like Roth's savage satire on Jewish
> paranoia, it is not. For the rural folk eventually run riot as a kind 
> of
> cornfed, baccy-smokin' Khmer Rouge.
>
> Under the Office of American Absorption, Metropolitan Life offers 
> Philip's
> father a transfer to Danville, Kentucky. He refuses, probably because
> novelist Roth has no idea how to describe life in a Klan-Nazi hotbed 
> like
> Kentucky, but it is in resisting relocation that the Roth family 
> attains a
> certain nobility. "A child of my background had a sixth sense in those
> days, the geographic sense, the sharp sense of where he lived and who 
> and
> what surrounded him," writes Roth. The faces, the voices, the 
> ejaculations
> (because, after all, this is Philip Roth): these people are Newark, 
> and we
> are made to understand the enormity of their unmooring. Dislocation 
> exacts
> a terrible human cost. A pity that Roth does not mind uprooting the 
> hicks
> he so obviously hates-for war is the most pitiless uprooter of all.
>
> In the real 1940-41, antiwar entertainers were blacklisted for daring 
> to
> speak their minds. (The case of Lillian Gish was notably disgusting.) 
> In
> Roth's world, the pro-war radio gossip Walter Winchell is fired by 
> Jergens
> Lotion when he denounces President Lindbergh. Winchell then declares 
> his
> candidacy for president and barnstorms the black heart of America. He 
> is
> baited and mocked in South Boston, Little Italy, and wherever papist
> brutes foregather. (In fact, it was America First speakers who were
> harassed in 1941, heckled by warhawks and denied permits in jingo 
> towns.)
>
> It is here that Roth's loathing of Catholicism, with its "witchy" nuns 
> and
> "creepily morticianlike priests," reaches a fever-swamp pitch. 
> Winchell's
> taunting of the antiwar wafer-eaters brings "the Lindbergh grotesquery 
> to
> the surface." He is assaulted in South Boston and greeted with chants 
> of
> "Kike Go Home!" in upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the Midwest-all 
> sewers
> "notorious for their bigotry."
>
> Working-class Catholics erupt in anti-Semitic riots in Detroit: "shops
> were looted and windows broken, Jews trapped outdoors were set upon and
> beaten, and kerosene-soaked crosses were ignited" on the lawns of 
> Jewish
> homeowners. Jewish schools are bombed and synagogues trashed in 
> America's
> first-ever pogrom. Anti-Jewish riots also break out in Cleveland,
> Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Scranton, 
> Akron,
> Syracuse-all across the hate-filled heartland, for the "menace of
> anti-Semitism" stretches "from one end of America to the other." Our
> heroes make a mad dash across "rural West Virginia," where "Ku Klux
> Klansmen had to be lying in wait for any Jew foolhardy enough to be
> driving through." Almost Heaven? Not in this book.
>
> Walter Winchell is killed in Kentucky by "an American Nazi Party 
> assassin
> working in collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan." Roth takes an especial
> scunner to poor Kentucky, his locus of American evil. A Jewish lady 
> from
> Newark, exiled to Danville, is set upon by a mob of Klansmen, which is 
> to
> say ordinary Kentuckians; she is beaten and burned to death in the 
> state
> that provides "a nightmarish vision of America's anti-Semitic fury." To
> add insult to fatal injury, her son, "the smartest kid in our class" in
> Newark, is "stunted" and mentally "stopped" by his exposure to the 
> aments
> of Kaintuck.
>
> Coincidentally, I slogged through Roth right after reading three 
> Kentucky
> novels: Berry's Watch With Me (1994), James Still's River of Earth 
> (1940),
> and The Time of Man (1926) by Elizabeth Madox Roberts. Each is set 
> within
> a decade or two of 1940. The characters are remarkably unlike Nazis,
> though perhaps Mr. Roth knows the true heart of Kentucky better than
> Kentuckians themselves.
>
> The Winchell funeral is the winch that turns the cranks out of office.
> Lindy disappears in flight, probably a victim of the Nazis who
> orchestrated the antiwar movement all along. (Just as Saddam Hussein's
> hidden bank accounts are enriching today's peace movement.) Acting
> President Wheeler declares martial law-quite a trick for a civil
> libertarian to pull off-anti-Semitic riots stain America red with the
> blood of Jewish martyrs, till FDR comes out of retirement ... oh, I 
> don't
> want to spoil the ending for you. Suffice to say that Roth, in his 
> dotage,
> displays all the imagination of an assistant censor in the Office of 
> War
> Information. Franklin D. retakes the White House and promptly gets us 
> into
> the world war, wherein all those louts from Kentucky either die as 
> fodder
> or walk tall as members of the Greatest Generation. All's well that 
> ends
> well.
>
> This is a repellent novel, bigoted and libelous of the dead, dripping 
> with
> hatred of rural America, of Catholics, of any Middle American who has 
> ever
> dared stand against the war machine. All that is left, I suppose, is 
> for
> the author to collect his Presidential Medal of Freedom.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
> Bill Kauffman's most recent book is Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette
> (Henry Holt/Picador). His earlier books include America First! Its
> History, Culture, and Politics and the novel Every Man a King.
>
>
>
>
>
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