Horses

Horses in The Plot Against America occupy two sharply contrasting places in Philip Roth’s recollection: the workhorse associated with an earlier childhood injury and the Newark police horses that become a source of reassurance during a night of political fear. The first is remembered through vulnerability; the mounted horses, by contrast, appear as powerful figures of civic order. Their presence connects an intimate family crisis to the larger danger Philip imagines approaching his neighborhood.

The Workhorse in Philip’s Earlier Memory

The orphanage plowhorse belongs to Philip’s memory of a childhood injury. Years later, while waiting at home during a night of unrest, he compares its build with that of the Newark police horses: the plowhorse’s limbs and torso seem less refined beside the mounted animals’ longer limbs, slimmer musculature, and elongated skulls. The comparison is part of Philip’s way of making sense of horses through remembered encounters; the account identifies the earlier injury without making the workhorse itself a continuing presence in the family’s life.

That memory also gives the later scene a personal undertow. The police horses are not merely unfamiliar animals passing through the neighborhood: Philip already associates a horse with danger to a child. Yet the contrast is not simply between a dangerous horse and safe ones. The plowhorse belongs to an episode of bodily vulnerability, while the mounted animals are encountered as trained partners in public service, watched at a distance and understood through their relationship with their riders.

Mounted Police on the Night of October 15

As the Newark–Hillside boundary ran only a few hundred yards south of the Roth home, Philip could hear police horses moving along the Keer Avenue hill, even with the windows closed. From his bedroom window he listened as they continued toward the point where Summit Avenue became Hillside’s Liberty Avenue. Their clattering movement gave him a measure of reassurance while his family waited amid the uncertainty of martial law and the danger of anti-Semitic violence.

The reassurance was bound up with Philip’s geography of fear. He imagined hostility moving west along Route 22, through Union and toward the Roth family’s alley and back stairs. In that nightmare, the horses’ physical strength seemed to form a barrier between the approaching danger and the home. This was Philip’s frightened imagining, not evidence that the animals literally confronted a crowd at the house. Their value in the scene lies in what their nearby presence allowed him to picture: a protective boundary when news from his father and brother was delayed and the family could not yet know they were safe.

A Familiar Newark Spectacle

The mounted patrol also draws on an earlier memory from Weequahic Park. One Sunday, Philip’s father took Philip and Sandy Roth to throw horseshoes at the public pitch. A mounted policeman then raced across the park in pursuit of someone who had stolen a woman’s purse. Philip remembered the incident as a thrilling display of gallantry, an impression that lasted for days. The recollection explains why the horses on the October night could calm him: he had already learned to associate mounted police with speed, skill, and dramatic intervention.

For children in Newark, mounted patrols were a public attraction as well as a form of policing. Families brought children downtown on Saturdays to see horses at the posts near Four Corners. Children could pet them and feed them sugar cubes, and they asked about the animals and their bodies. Philip recalls that a mounted officer was said to be worth four officers on foot. The horses were thus presented not just as picturesque companions but as an effective element of city patrol.

The animals and their riders were trained for a particular kind of work. Newark selected its most supple and athletic officers for mounted duty. Philip remembered seeing a policeman lean from the saddle to place a parking ticket beneath a car’s windshield wiper, a gesture that joined horsemanship to ordinary city administration. A horse could stand beside a busy street while its rider directed traffic; the mounted patrol was visible amid the movement of cars, trucks, and buses. But the same force could also be used against labor: Philip notes that his father resented mounted officers’ ability to charge into a strike crowd and scatter picketers. The horses therefore signify both civic competence and the capacity of police power to suppress protest.

Joey’s Fascination and the Horses’ Double Meaning

On the night the family waited, Joey Cucuzza repeatedly moved from window to window, hoping to see the horses and their officers. He compared them with the plowhorse Philip remembered, admiring the mounted animals’ different build and attending to the officers’ uniforms and equipment. His attention turned the street into a spectacle even as Philip experienced the same sounds as reassurance against danger. The two boys’ responses show how one scene could hold both childhood fascination and adult-scale political fear.

When Joey could no longer bear being away from the horses, he left the house despite his mother’s instruction that he stay with Philip. Later, Joey claimed to have seen a horse called Ned, reputed to chew tobacco, respond to numbers by tapping a hoof, and tolerate children swinging from its tail. Philip leaves open whether Joey really encountered the celebrated animal. The uncertainty preserves the story as part of the neighborhood’s lore rather than confirming every detail as fact. Joey’s departure, however, had a definite consequence: his father punished him when he returned to work the following morning.

Across these episodes, horses are at once remembered sources of injury, objects of children’s curiosity, instruments of police work, and emblems of a fragile sense of safety. Their meaning changes with the observer and the setting. For Philip, familiar memories of mounted patrol help steady his fear; for Joey, the animals’ extraordinary presence draws him out into the night. The contrast makes the horses more than scenery: they mark the uneasy boundary between ordinary city life and the violence that the family fears may reach its door.