World War Two

World War Two is the historical horizon that makes the novel’s domestic and political dangers converge. In this counterfactual United States, the approach of war does not simply divide interventionists from isolationists: it becomes entangled with antisemitism, economic pressure, and the question of who belongs in the country. The story moves from the 1940 presidential campaign through wartime crises, while its later documentation distinguishes historical references from the novel’s imagined events.

Historical and Narrative Frame

The family’s sense of security is already shaped by economic vulnerability when the political crisis begins. In 1939, Philip Roth’s father, Herman Roth, is offered a promotion with Metropolitan Life that could raise his weekly pay from just under fifty dollars to seventy-five dollars and eventually one hundred. The job would also let the family pursue his long-held ambition of home ownership in Union. But the town’s predominantly non-Jewish setting makes the apparent opportunity carry a social cost: Herman could be the only Jew in his office, while his wife and sons might be isolated in their neighborhood and school.

The novel places that earlier choice beside the later pressure of Homestead 42. In a May 1942 letter, Metropolitan Life presents the federal relocation initiative as an opportunity for qualified employees and their families to move at government expense. Its language invokes the Homestead Act of 1862 and promises that families can strengthen their Americanness in a new region. The comparison makes the program’s coercive political context legible through a familiar national story of settlement and opportunity. For the Roth family, a government policy arrives not as an abstract announcement but through an employer that controls work, income, and the terms of relocation.

The adult narrator frames these years through childhood memory, recalling a persistent fear intensified by both Charles A. Lindbergh’s presidency and the family’s Jewish identity. That retrospective perspective matters: national politics enters the account through the child’s experience of his parents’ decisions, neighborhood relationships, and exposed sense of belonging. The novel’s postscript explicitly identifies the book as fiction and describes its purpose as helping readers distinguish historical fact from historical imagining.

Isolationism and the Approach of War

Before American entry into the conflict, isolationism provides a powerful political language. In his 1941 Des Moines speech for the America First Committee, Charles A. Lindbergh describes the European war as a conflict into which foreign interests and a minority of Americans are trying to draw the country. The speech situates his position within a public argument about intervention, but the novel shows how that argument can coexist with, and help legitimize, hostility toward American Jews.

Henry Ford’s political associations sharpen that connection. During 1939–1940 he joins Lindbergh in supporting isolationism and the America First Committee. His anti-Semitic reputation prompts Lessing J. Rosenwald, a Jewish director of Sears, Roebuck and Company, to resign from the committee’s executive body. Ford also supports Gerald L. K. Smith’s radio broadcasts and living expenses and meets regularly with Charles E. Coughlin, whose nationwide broadcast and periodical spread anti-Semitic ideas. Coughlin’s publication is barred from the U.S. mail during the war under the Espionage Act and ceases publication in 1942. These details place wartime political conflict in a longer landscape of organized rhetoric, patronage, and public influence.

The novel’s chronology also gives the war an international dimension through Joachim von Ribbentrop. As Adolf Hitler’s foreign minister, he signs the 1939 non-aggression pact with Vyacheslav Molotov, including a secret arrangement to partition Poland; the pact opens the way for war. After Germany’s defeat, Ribbentrop is convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg and hanged on October 16, 1946, the first of the condemned Nazis to be executed. This documentary account provides a historical endpoint distinct from the novel’s American political plot.

Wartime Protest and Community Defense

By September 1942, Walter Winchell has lost his radio microphone and newspaper column but turns to a public campaign. He begins with a soapbox address at Broadway and 42nd Street, where a crowd grows from hundreds to nearly ten thousand. He then carries his denunciation of fascism through other boroughs and into New England, speaking outside factories and shipyards as he seeks to expose the forces he believes are concealed beneath Lindbergh’s reassuring public image.

In South Boston, the campaign becomes a flashpoint. Jeering anti-Semitic hecklers gather into a mob, and a person carrying a burning cross rushes toward Winchell as he tries to speak. His bodyguards get him out of the crowd and take him to Carney Hospital. The event marks an escalation from political argument to organized street intimidation. The novel then turns attention to Newark, where roughly fifty thousand Jews live in a city of more than half a million, beside large working-class communities. After violence elsewhere, residents fear that anti-Semitic agitation could ignite similar disorder at home.

Rabbi Joachim Prinz and five other prominent Newark Jews establish the Newark Committee of Concerned Jewish Citizens. The committee seeks contingency plans through meetings with city and state officials, including the police and fire chiefs, the state police superintendent, and the National Guard commander. David T. Wilentz attends a meeting and assures the committee that assaults on Newark’s Jews will be prosecuted. When the members seek a meeting with Lionel Bengelsdorf in Washington, he directs them back to local and state authorities, treating the danger as a local matter rather than a federal one.

Alongside this formal civic response, Longy Zwillman organizes a separate measure of protection. He assigns Bullet Apfelbaum to recruit neighborhood youths into the Provisional Jewish Police, a volunteer corps intended to supplement the committee’s work if public authorities fail to protect the community. The contrast is significant: Newark’s Jews pursue official cooperation while also preparing their own street-level defense. The latter response brings people who had been marginalized within the community into a new, urgent role, and places the prospect of violence in the routines of neighborhood life.

Death, Public Memory, and Wartime Production

A radio bulletin interrupts Herman Roth as he speaks about the need to protect his family and his citizenship. Walter Winchell has been killed at a political rally in Louisville by a suspected American Nazi Party assassin working with the Ku Klux Klan. The news turns the family’s political discussion into a public loss. In New York City, Fiorello La Guardia orders Winchell’s body brought to Pennsylvania Station, where it lies in state under police protection before a funeral at Temple Emanu-El. The novel’s newsreel account describes thirty thousand mourners passing the flag-draped coffin and black buttons asking, “Where Is Lindbergh?” La Guardia recites the Lord’s Prayer and then the Jewish prayer for the dead; a citywide minute of silence and the funeral procession make remembrance a public political act.

The wartime setting also changes industrial life. Ford’s company shifts toward defense production and manufactures B-24 Liberator bombers at its large Willow Run facility, where Lindbergh works as a consulting adviser. Ford, weakened by a second stroke, resigns from the company in 1945 and dies in April 1947. This production history stands in stark contrast to the earlier isolationist campaign: the same corporate world associated with political resistance to intervention becomes part of wartime manufacturing.

Burton K. Wheeler likewise changes position after Pearl Harbor, supporting the war effort while objecting to the alliance with the Soviet Union. In 1944, he argues against Montana’s Missouri Valley Authority plan by claiming Communists are behind it, aligning himself with Montana Power Company and Anaconda Copper Company against liberals. He subsequently loses the remaining support of Montana Democrats and is defeated in the 1946 Senate primary. His trajectory shows that the wartime political divisions persist beyond the decision to fight: the conflict continues to shape domestic debates over public power, political alliances, and the meaning of loyalty.