United States Department of the Interior

In the novel’s alternate history, the United States Department of the Interior is the federal department through which the Office of American Absorption administers programs directed at Jewish Americans. Its importance lies in the distance between its reassuring language of national opportunity and the pressure its programs exert on family life, work, and neighborhood ties: inclusion is presented as a benefit while government-backed administration rearranges the people and communities it claims to serve.

Institutional Role

The Department appears as the parent institution of the Office of American Absorption, the Lindbergh administration’s agency for promoting the incorporation of religious and national minorities into American society. In practice, the agency’s attention falls especially on Jewish Americans. Its programs operate not only through government announcements but through schools, state offices, and private employers, making federal policy part of ordinary decisions about children, jobs, and housing.

That reach is visible in the career of Evelyn, who becomes executive assistant to Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, the Office’s New Jersey director. The agency promotes Just Folks through notices at Chancellor Avenue School and Weequahic, then sends a representative to address boys aged twelve and older. Its formal description presents the scheme as voluntary work introducing city youth to traditional rural life. Its practical plan is to place hundreds of Jewish boys, aged twelve to eighteen, with farm families for eight weeks, hundreds of miles from their homes. Sandy’s application and departure for a tobacco farm in Kentucky bring the program’s national policy into the Roth family’s kitchen.

Homestead 42 and Corporate Cooperation

On May 22, 1942, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company writes to Herman Roth that, at the request of Homestead 42 in the Department of the Interior, it is offering relocation opportunities to senior employees deemed qualified for the initiative. The letter invokes the Homestead Act of 1862, recalling its grant of 160 acres to settlers willing to move west, and frames the new scheme as a comparable opportunity for families to expand their horizons and strengthen the country. Unlike the earlier law’s grant of land, Homestead 42 offers household relocation at government expense, with the promise that families will enrich their Americanness in a new region.

The program’s administrative machinery is made visible through maps and pins. Evelyn explains to Philip that pins on a New Jersey map represent families selected for relocation, while pins on a map of the country indicate their assigned destinations. She stresses that the assignments require cooperation among the Office, its Washington headquarters, the receiving states, and major corporations. Her account presents decisions as the outcome of an elaborate process rather than the choice of any one official. But its procedural complexity does not make the Roths’ loss of control less real: Herman ultimately quits his long-standing job at Metropolitan Life rather than participate in a transfer he understands as anti-Semitic pressure, and Bess leaves her job so the family can preserve savings for a possible flight to Canada.

Neighborhood Resettlement

The Department’s reach extends beyond the relocation of Jewish families. A previously unpublicized part of the plan, the Good Neighbor Project, brings non-Jewish residents into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods. On October 1, Italian families move into two Summit Avenue flats vacated by Jewish families under Homestead 42. Their residence is backed by a rent discount of fifteen percent—$6.37 off a monthly rent of $42.50—paid directly to the landlord by the Department of the Interior during the initial lease and part of its renewal. Government policy thus works through an ordinary transaction between tenants and landlords, with public money helping determine who can afford to live in the neighborhood.

At home, and sometimes at school, Philip hears the interpretation that the Good Neighbor Project is meant to weaken Jewish social solidarity and reduce Jewish electoral influence by increasing the number of Christian residents in Jewish neighborhoods. The feared outcome is a Christian majority in at least half of the country’s twenty most heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods early in Lindbergh’s second term. This is presented as a projected consequence of the agency’s timetable, not as an accomplished national result. The two projects nevertheless form a clear pattern in the novel: Jewish families are moved outward, while non-Jewish families are encouraged to move into the places they leave behind.

Administrative Language and Consequences

The Department’s role is sharpened by the contrast between official assurances and the family’s experience. The Homestead 42 letter borrows the history and patriotic vocabulary of the Homestead Act to depict government-directed relocation as a rare opportunity. Evelyn likewise describes assignments as careful work involving many offices and organizations, while urging Philip to see distance from home as potentially beneficial. Yet for the Roths, the program brings the prospect of losing their home and livelihood; for Sandy, Just Folks means a summer separated from his family; and for families who move, the promised opportunity comes within a system that targets Jewish communities for intervention.

The Department’s connection to the Office of American Absorption is also made public through Bengelsdorf’s defense of Homestead 42. In a letter published in The New York Times, he signs as the Office’s director in the Department of the Interior and describes the program as a way to broaden Jewish citizens’ involvement in national life. Walter Winchell, by contrast, identifies it as a fascistic strategy to isolate Jews and exclude them from that life. The novel does not collapse these competing accounts into neutral administrative procedure: it places the reassuring official explanation beside the concrete transfers, job decisions, and neighborhood changes that the policy produces. The Department thereby represents how an ostensibly benevolent federal program can make population management appear as opportunity while narrowing the choices available to the people it classifies and moves.