Blood libel

The blood libel in The Plot Against America is an old antisemitic accusation recast as breaking news in the novel’s imagined political crisis. A newspaper claims that Jewish captors used the missing Charles Lindbergh Jr.’s blood in preparing Passover matzoh; Fiorello La Guardia identifies the tale as a centuries-old fabrication. The episode shows how familiar prejudice can be made to sound newly plausible when public fear and political disorder have already weakened trust in truth.

The accusation in the political crisis

The claim appears in a front-page Chicago Tribune story dated from Berlin on October 14, 1942. It reports that Charles Lindbergh Jr., long believed kidnapped and murdered in New Jersey, has been reunited with his father at Berchtesgaden after Nazi forces rescued him from a dungeon in Kraków. The story further alleges that he had been held in the city’s Jewish ghetto and that blood was drawn from him each year for the ritual preparation of Passover matzohs. The accusation thus attaches the blood libel to a famous unresolved disappearance, presenting an old anti-Jewish myth as an explanation for events in the novel’s alternate history.

The newspaper report arrives amid a wider crisis of political violence and conspiracy claims. Law-enforcement agencies in the South and Midwest describe the recent anti-Semitic riots as the work of Jewish elements, and 97 of the 122 people killed are already being labeled Jewish provocateurs. In this climate, the blood libel is not an isolated falsehood: it belongs to a public narrative that casts Jews as both the cause of disorder and conspirators seeking control of the government.

La Guardia’s rebuttal

At a press conference, La Guardia condemns the blood accusation as a story concocted centuries earlier and rejects the claim that Jewish bakers used the kidnapped child’s blood in Poland. His response names hysteria, ignorance, malice, stupidity, hatred, and fear as forces endangering the country’s sanity. He also connects the newspaper’s account to propaganda that would please Hitler by poisoning American public life with falsehoods about Jewish interests, retaliation, and conspiracy.

The contrast is between the apparent authority of a front-page report and the historical familiarity of the lie it repeats. By recognizing the story as an old fabrication rather than treating it as new evidence, La Guardia exposes the way fabricated atrocity can be made to serve political accusation. The blood libel’s function in the scene is therefore not merely to defame Jews: it helps make a conspiracy narrative seem credible at the moment when the country is already being told to distrust its victims.

Fear, belonging, and public memory

The charge resonates against the Roth family’s earlier experience of the Lindbergh presidency. The narrator recalls a childhood governed by continual fear and wonders whether he would have been less frightened had Lindbergh not been president or had he not been born Jewish. As Jewish families face political pressure and the prospect of relocation, Bess Roth observes that Lindbergh is teaching them what it means to be Jews; Herman Roth rejects the implication that their American belonging can be negotiated away. The blood libel’s return gives that pressure an especially stark form: an accusation against Jews is presented as a story about national danger, while the people it targets are already treated as suspect.

The surrounding public record of the crisis also turns uncertainty into a spectacle. After Walter Winchell’s assassination, mourners gather at Pennsylvania Station, and black buttons bearing the question Where Is Lindbergh? circulate through New York. Two days after the blood-libel report, the narrator states that Lindbergh was never found or heard from again, while stories about his fate continued to circulate during the war and for years afterward. The novel places the blood libel within this unsettled world of missing people, political rumor, and contested accounts of violence, without presenting the newspaper’s allegation as truth.

Fiction and historical imagining

The book’s postscript explicitly identifies The Plot Against America as fiction and describes its documentation as a guide to where historical fact ends and historical imagining begins. That distinction matters here: the blood-libel report belongs to the novel’s invented political history, while the text presents the accusation itself as an old antisemitic fabrication. Its recurrence demonstrates how a society’s existing prejudices can be recruited to explain a crisis, assign blame to its victims, and make a false story sound like public knowledge.