New Deal era

The New Deal era is the novel’s political and domestic counterpoint to Lindbergh’s America: a period associated with public relief, labor reform, and the possibility that government might improve ordinary working people’s lives. Through Franklin D. Roosevelt’s rise and the Roth family’s recollection of his victories, it supplies a concrete measure of what the family later sees threatened—not only a political administration, but the promise of economic security and full citizenship.

Roosevelt’s Rise and Reform

Franklin D. Roosevelt established his national reputation first as governor of New York. Elected in 1928 and returned to office after a decisive victory in 1930, he presented himself as a progressive liberal who favored relief for people harmed by the Depression, including unemployment insurance, and opposed Prohibition. That record made him a leading Democratic presidential contender before the 1932 election.

The novel’s chronology makes the electoral change in 1932 a turning point: Roosevelt defeated the incumbent Herbert Hoover with 57.4 percent of the vote, while Democrats also won both houses of Congress. In March 1933, Roosevelt took office as the country remained paralyzed by the Depression. His administration quickly advanced recovery legislation for agriculture, industry, labor, and business, alongside relief for mortgage holders and unemployed people. The new government’s public-facing style mattered too: Roosevelt held informative press conferences and began brief radio addresses from the White House, the fireside chats.

Reform continued in 1935 in what became known as the second New Deal. Its measures included the Social Security Act and National Labor Relations Act, while the Works Progress Administration employed two million workers a month. The administration also adopted neutrality measures in response to the unsettled situation in Europe. The sequence is not presented as an unbroken triumph: economic recovery was well under way by 1937, but another economic crisis and labor unrest preceded Republican gains in Congress in 1938.

Electoral Memory in the Roth Household

The period survives in the story not only as public chronology but as a family’s account of voting. In 1942, when a new Italian neighbor offers Herman Roth a pistol for protection, Herman answers by recalling the elections he has voted in since he was old enough. He remembers opposing the winners in 1924 and 1928, then voting for Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. For Herman, the contrast is material: he credits Roosevelt with helping the country recover from the Depression and keeping promises to working people.

His recollection turns the 1940 election into a repudiation of that history. Herman describes the new administration as fascist and condemns its allies and its treatment of workers; his protest is sharpened by the neighbor’s offer of a weapon as protection from an anti-Semitic mob. The exchange binds electoral memory to immediate danger. The New Deal’s significance in the household is not abstract nostalgia: it is Herman’s standard for judging whether government serves working people and whether citizenship still affords protection.

Work, Security, and Government Power

The family’s earlier economic prospects give this political memory a domestic scale. During the Depression, Herman’s consistently strong sales as an agent for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company brought an offer of promotion to assistant manager. The position promised a higher income and the chance to buy a house in Union, fulfilling his long-held ambition to become a homeowner after growing up penniless in a Newark tenement. The opportunity also carried a social cost: the family expected that they would be the only Jews in their workplace, on their street, and at school. Security and vulnerability were already intertwined.

In 1942, the language of opportunity returns in a darker form. A letter from Metropolitan Life Insurance Company presents relocation through Homestead 42 as a government-funded chance for selected senior employees to settle in a new region and strengthen the country. It invokes the Homestead Act of 1862 and describes the scheme as an expansion of national opportunity. But the family understands the offer in the context of a government program directing Jewish households away from their communities. Herman quits his job rather than cooperate with the transfer; Bess leaves her position at Hahne's, and the savings she has set aside are intended to help the family reach Canada if flight becomes necessary. The contrast with the earlier promise of homeownership is stark: employment and mobility, once routes toward stability, have become instruments of pressure.

From Reform to an Alternative Political Order

The novel sets the remembered New Deal against a later political system that uses administrative procedure to reorganize communities. Under Just Folks, the Office of American Absorption sends Jewish boys from cities to work for eight weeks as farm laborers, presenting the program as volunteer work and an introduction to rural life. Homestead 42 similarly wraps relocation in corporate and governmental language about national opportunity. Herman’s earlier confidence in elections and public reform makes these initiatives legible to him as a betrayal, not a neutral continuation of government service.

The next stage of the political crisis makes the contrast constitutional as well as economic. After Franklin D. Roosevelt disappears, martial law is imposed across the country, borders are sealed, and Acting President Wheeler tells Congress that the president has been kidnapped. The FBI arrests political figures, including Lionel Bengelsdorf, on suspicion of involvement in a conspiracy, while troops enter New York and attempts to protest the arrests are suppressed. The First Lady, held at Walter Reed Army Hospital, escapes and broadcasts a demand that detainees be released, occupied media outlets reopened, and the acting president removed through the succession procedures established by the Presidential Succession Act of 1886. In this later emergency, the New Deal era serves as the remembered democratic order against which executive coercion and the denial of civil rights are measured.