United States

The United States in the novel is an alternate-history setting in which political decisions made at the national level reach into neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and family life. Its geography is more than a backdrop: city streets and state capitals become contested political spaces, while federal programs turn the movement and classification of people into instruments of policy. The contrast between official language about national unity and the unequal treatment of Jewish citizens gives the setting its defining tension.

National policy and contested belonging

Charles A. Lindbergh’s administration presents national independence and non-involvement in foreign wars as central aims. In his September 1941 address in Des Moines, delivered at an America First Committee rally, Lindbergh attributes pressure for American entry into the European war to the British, Jewish people, and the Roosevelt administration. His argument treats Jewish political interests as distinct from American interests, a claim that helps make anti-Jewish suspicion sound like a question of national loyalty. The speech’s distinction between supposedly self-interested leaders and ordinary citizens does not undo that effect: it places a minority group among the forces portrayed as threatening the country’s independence.

The administration’s domestic policies give that rhetoric practical form. Its Office of American Absorption describes Just Folks as a voluntary work program introducing city youth to rural life. In practice, the program is directed at Jewish boys between twelve and eighteen, removing them from city schools and sending them hundreds of miles away to work for eight weeks as farm laborers. Sandy Roth leaves for a Kentucky tobacco farm in June 1941 after support from Evelyn, who works for Lionel Bengelsdorf, the New Jersey director of the office. The program’s appeal to experience and national incorporation exists alongside the family’s concern that it singles out Jewish children and tests their place in the country.

The setting’s political geography also changes through Homestead 42. A May 1942 corporate letter frames government-funded relocation as a new opportunity, invoking the Homestead Act and promising families the chance to strengthen their national belonging. The program operates through cooperation between the Office of American Absorption and major employers, including Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which offers relocation opportunities to selected senior employees. Its polished language of opportunity contrasts with the pressure families experience when relocation is presented as an administrative decision already embedded in a nationwide plan.

Maps, neighborhoods, and engineered change

The machinery of relocation becomes visible in Evelyn’s office, where pins on a New Jersey map represent families selected to move and pins on a national map mark their assigned destinations. Evelyn explains that the assignments involve staff in the state and Washington headquarters, as well as cooperation from corporations and destination states; she also tells Philip that no single person makes the decision. The maps make a large and dispersed policy legible as a collection of individual households. Philip’s request that the Wishnows be moved in place of his own family meets this impersonal scale: Evelyn answers by pointing to the planning and to her belief that leaving the neighborhood could benefit him.

The companion Good Neighbor Project changes neighborhoods not by moving only Jewish families away, but also by bringing non-Jewish families into predominantly Jewish districts. On Summit Avenue, Italian families from the First Ward occupy flats vacated by families relocated under Homestead 42. Their government-arranged leases include a rent discount of fifteen percent—$6.37 off a monthly rent of $42.50—for five years, paid to the landlord by the Department of the Interior. The stated aim is to enrich the Americanness of the residents; residents and teachers, however, understand the policy as a way to weaken Jewish community solidarity and electoral influence. The two programs thus work on the same urban landscape from opposite directions: one disperses Jewish households, while the other alters the population of the neighborhoods they leave behind.

These changes are personal as well as demographic. Philip’s father, Herman, knows the newly arrived Cucuzza family from years of collecting insurance premiums in the First Ward. When the family moves downstairs, he goes to greet them, connecting the forced rearrangement of the neighborhood to older relationships built through work and local familiarity. The policy’s effects therefore unfold among people who are not simply anonymous entries on a government map, even as administrative plans treat them that way.

Streets, protest, and community defense

New York City becomes a stage for Walter Winchell’s campaign against Lindbergh’s political movement. Winchell begins with a speech from a soapbox at Broadway and 42nd Street, drawing a crowd that grows to nearly ten thousand. He then carries his campaign through the city’s boroughs and into industrial communities in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. The campaign links a national political argument to places where people work, travel, and gather; its street-corner format also makes the response to that argument immediate and public.

In Boston, the campaign meets organized hostility. At Perkins Square in South Boston, heckling gives way to a mob, and Winchell is taken to Carney Hospital after the attack. The episode exposes a danger that the campaign has brought into public view: anti-Jewish agitation is not confined to speeches or political organizations but can erupt locally around an exposed speaker. In the novel’s account, the Boston police do not respond promptly, intensifying the fear that public authorities may not protect Jewish residents from violence.

After disorder in Detroit, Jewish residents of Newark prepare for possible violence in their own city, where a large Jewish neighborhood lies beside working-class Irish, Italian, German, and Slavic communities. Rabbi Joachim Prinz and other prominent residents establish the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens and meet with city and state officials to plan for public safety. The committee’s work uses formal channels—meetings with police, fire, and public-safety officials, followed by talks with the governor, state police, and National Guard—while its request for federal involvement is redirected to local and state authorities.

A parallel effort develops outside the committee. Longy Zwillman assigns Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit local young men for the Provisional Jewish Police, a volunteer corps intended to protect the community if police and state authorities fail to act. The contrast between the committee’s civic negotiations and the corps’s preparation for street-level defense shows how uncertainty pushes people toward different forms of collective action. In a tense radio bulletin heard at the Roth home, Winchell’s killing at a political rally in Louisville is reported, carrying the violence of the campaign into a family’s kitchen and deepening the sense that events in distant cities may determine what happens at home.

National emergency and the reach of government

The crisis becomes national after Lindbergh disappears. On October 9, Acting President Burton K. Wheeler announces that the president has been kidnapped and imposes martial law throughout the continental United States and its territories and possessions. The borders with Canada and Mexico are sealed, airports and seaports closed, and the National Guard, local police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the armed forces are assigned roles in maintaining order. A missing president thus becomes the occasion for a sweeping expansion of emergency controls across the country.

The repression reaches political opponents in the following days. On October 15, the Federal Bureau of Investigation takes Lionel Bengelsdorf into custody on suspicion of participation in a supposed conspiracy against the country. Other prominent detainees include Governor Lehman, Bernard Baruch, Justice Frankfurter, and several political, labor, and journalistic figures. United States Army units enter New York City to assist the National Guard, while protests in several cities are restricted under martial law. Mayor La Guardia, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Roger Baldwin call for the release of those detained; La Guardia is subsequently arrested. The sequence places federal force, local government, and civil-liberties advocacy in direct conflict.

As a national setting, the United States is therefore rendered through successive scales of political action: a speech that defines alleged enemies, an office that organizes the movement of families, maps that assign destinations, streets where protest and violence meet, and institutions that impose emergency rule. The country’s local particularity remains visible throughout—from the farms of Kentucky to Newark’s changing blocks and the public spaces of New York City—while federal decisions bind those places into a shared, unstable crisis.