This is our homeland. Isn’t it?

The Plot against America, Episode 1.
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

The new HBO mini-series, The Plot Against America, has a refreshingly simple, though evocative, opening credits sequence that does a great job of setting what I hope will be the tone and methodology of the series as a work of alternate history:

The images are all, to my knowledge, real black and white footage from the ‘20s through the ‘40s. In quick succession we see aviator Charles Lindbergh’s fateful transatlantic flight, the jubilation of the roaring ‘20s, the dire poverty of the Great Depression, and the hope of the New Deal. After a bit of googling I found the jaunty song, “The Road is Open Again,” is an actual song of the period, written as boosterism for the National Recovery Act. However the images of an ascendent America become interspersed with the post-war rise of another nation...Nazi Germany: Hitler’s rise to power, persecution of the Jews, and the Blitzkrieg across Europe. Throw in snippets from American Nazi rallies and a last scene of goose-stepping troops and it instills a great deal of unease. Is the road now open for America, or for her enemies, foreign and domestic?

Contrast this with the opening credits for another recent series about fascism in America, The Man in the High Castle:

It contains so many clichés and tropes of the “What if the Nazis won?” school of alternate history. Starting with the “Map at the Beginning of the Book” convention of sci-fi/fantasy literature (not as on the nose as Game of Thrones, but it does establish the geography of this universe), and the somewhat off version of "Edelweiss," it is clear we are going to be dropped into a world where the Nazis have already defeated and occupied the US. Oh, and there's a zeppelin in the sky. Because zeppelins are to alternate history what dragons are to fantasy; in alternate history, expect to see at least one zeppelin in the sky.

I mention this up front because I think it is important to understand The Plot Against America is going for a very different kind of alternate history. This is not an alternate history where the characters are already living in a world that has become a drastic inverse of our own (In the Presence of Mine Enemies and Fatherland, to name a couple examples in addition to MITHC). Instead this is the story of characters living in a world that is very close to our own past and following the lives of the characters as their world changes around them. Furthermore, the point of divergence from history is seemingly played relatively straight at first. There are no Nazi wonder weapons or interference from time travelers and dimension hoppers. The historical figures are acting, so far, in character. The small change is simply that the American isolationist movement finds a champion in famed aviator Charles Lindbergh to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 bid for a third term, instead of the actual dark horse candidate, the interventionist Wendell Willkie. That even today Lindbergh is a household name while Willkie is an extra hard trivia answer speaks volumes about the strength of Lindbergh's celebrity and name recognition.

In keeping with the spirit of the novel, this is the story of the Jewish American family as they experience the run up to, and then life in an isolationist America under a Charles Lindbergh presidency. Unlike the novel, where the family is named Roth after author Philip Roth’s own family, here the family name has been changed to Levin. We meet them living in their little slice of post-Depression, pre-war America, the idyllic suburb of Newark NJ. The opening tableau plays out similar to stories my mother tells me about growing up on Staten Island, save that this is a Jewish neighborhood so the weekend begins with a Sabbath dinner. Before sundown a man comes to the door asking for donations to support the Jewish homeland, which family patriarch Herman Levin (Morgan Spector) happily agrees to. The youngest Levin boy, Philip (Azhy Robertson), asks isn’t America their homeland, to which the father replies that of course America is their homeland, it’s just that the Jews of Europe need to escape to Palestine. But by the end of the episode he and the audience will be wondering just how safe the Levins and the Jews of America really are.

Expanding from the scope of the novel, which was told just from the perspective of the author’s younger self, the series follows all the Levin family: father Herman, mother Bess (Zoe Kazan), aunt Evelyn (Winona Ryder), older brother Sandy (Caleb Malis), and cousin Alvin (Anthony Boyle) as point of view characters. While the Levins are on an upward trajectory, being Jewish they can’t help but keep a close eye the Nazi Blitzkrieg across Europe, the plight of the Jews left on the continent, and the ever-present background radiation of anti-Semitism at home.

Most of the through-line of the first episode concerns the Levins potentially moving out of their Jewish suburb to nearby Union, should Herman get a promotion at his insurance agency. I was impressed by the way the plot illustrates the different life experiences of Herman and Bess, how their ideals and fears overlap and differ. At first it is Bess who is hesitant about the move based on her experience growing up in the only Jewish family in a gentile neighborhood. As she puts it, it was not that her peers actively harassed her, it was that they actively ignored her. This also explains her insistence on trying to get her son Philip to be friends with the dweeby Seldon, as she probably relates to being the child that was always left out at the school yard. Meanwhile Herman, natural salesman that he is, is more confident that the family can strike out on their own and overcome a bit of social awkwardness among the gentiles. However he is very aware of overt anti-Semitism, anxiously watching the news reels from overseas, following the rise of Lindbergh, and he ultimately shuts down the planned move when he sees that the neighborhood bar is a kitschy German beer hall with members of the German American Bund openly carousing and doing everything short of staging their own un-ironic production of Springtime for Hitler.

There are tertiary plot lines involving the cousin and the aunt. Alvin (who I do not recall from the book) is a bright young man who is unfortunately taking some bad turns in life under the influence of his wanna-be gangster friend “Shush.” The aunt’s story line seems rather innocuous at first as her heart is broken by a lover when it becomes apparent he intends to keep her as a mistress instead of taking her as a wife. By episode's end her prospects are looking a tad better when she is introduced to the influential Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro). As I said, a rather innocuous subplot but considering the actors that they’ve cast, not to mention what’s in the trailers, their relationship is going to play a big part in events as the series unfolds.

Now to address the elephant in the room.

As Nerds who Read Senior Editor Michael Isenberg pointed out in his review of the original novel, this story about a Republican celebrity with no prior political experience winning the presidency using dog whistles to bigots and allegedly to aid the ambitions of a foreign despot, was published in 2004, and any resemblance to the Trump Administration is clearly coincidental. As for the intentions of the creators of the HBO series, I can only report on what made it to the screen. In the first episode, from what we see and hear from Charles Lindbergh he is a lucid, charming, and well-dressed man. So therefore I can honestly say he does not read as a caricature of President Trump at all 😉.

Seriously, though, there are no attempts to drop in anachronistic slogans or gestures to make him appear more “Trumpy.” His speech on the radio about the FDR Democrats, the English, and the Jews trying to pull America into another world war is based on an actual speech Lindbergh gave at an America First event in September of 1941, and follows his accent and rhetorical style closely. (Here’s an excerpt from the real thing.)

Where any parallels to modern politics/culture really lie are in the regular people of the story. Of course there are no smart phones or Facebook, but as presented here, mass media still plays a crucial role in the characters’ lives. They don’t have newsfeeds on their phones but they have newsies belting out the headlines and selling papers on the streets. They have newsreels before every movie (and the subjects of the newsreels even rate space on the theater marquee). And off course the media that ruled the day, radio, is in the Levin's home and car. After listening to their favorite news pundit, people rush to the “comments section,” i.e., the sidewalk, to talk and debate with their neighbors about the events of the day. Even with people speaking face-to-face, there is still the echo chamber, so familiar to us in 2020; after all, everybody on the Levins’ street is Jewish and from the tri-state area.

After a scathing editorial from Walter Winchell berating Lindbergh for his isolationism, defeatism, and possible Nazi sympathies (again using turns of phrase used by the actual Winchell against the actual Lindbergh), Herman’s spirits are briefly bolstered and he is sure Lindbergh’s campaign can’t sustain such ridicule. Sadly, he is about to learn that a dressing down from East Coast media personalities doesn’t necessarily “play in Peoria.” It may not even play under his own roof as his eldest son and budding artist Sandy is compelled to sketch his portraits of “The Lone Eagle” Lindbergh, based on newspaper clippings, in secret. If the Lindbergh cult of personality has worked its way into the Levin household, what is going on in the rest of the country?

I front loaded this review with a comparison to The Man in the High Castle and a mention of some alternate historical fiction tropes because I really feel it is important to stress how much this book, and so far theis series, have steered away from the science fiction and military fiction that have come to characterize the genre. What sprung to mind while watching the series were not Dieselpunk nightmares of Nazis with Jet Packs or extrapolation for armchair military historians about what would have happened if Rommel hadn’t been forced to choose early retirement by way of a Luger.

Instead, what came to mind were other stories of the Jewish American experience and anti-Semitism on the homefront, like The Chosen and Focus. So all and all, The Plot against America seems to be a work not so much exploring a drastically different historical outcome but, instead ruminating on just how close we came to taking that darker path.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham MA, currently scheduled for May 9, 2020. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Photo source(s): Google, EW