In his nearly forgotten 1923 play, The Vegetable: From Postman to President, F. Scott Fitzgerald burlesques the venality of American politics, portraying a chaotic, ludicrous presidency led by a man completely unfit for high office. Jerry Frost’s corrupt incompetence pushes the nation to the brink of bankruptcy and war, culminating in his impeachment and conviction by a decrepit Supreme Court justice as the country’s top jazz band plays. A commercial flop at the time and widely regarded as a literary failure today, The Vegetable has received very little scholarly consideration. While The Vegetable is doubtless weak – superficial, disjointed, and not very funny – it nonetheless showcases much more of Fitzgerald’s characteristic prescience about American culture than has previously been recognized, especially in its earlier abandoned drafts. Influenced by the political and cultural analysis of H. L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann in particular, The Vegetable lampoons the scandals of the Harding administration by taking the familiar bromide that America is a nation where the common man can become President and pushing it to its absurd extreme – by imagining an all-too-common man as President. It took the United States a century to catch up with – or live down to – Fitzgerald’s vision of the presidency gone deliriously wrong, but American political theater in the age of Donald Trump has considerably deepened the cultural resonances of The Vegetable.

Mencken’s scathing assessment of political buffoonery and Lippmann’s warnings about unqualified populism shaped Fitzgerald’s central point: the corruption of American society by its own naive faith in the common man. Both Mencken and Lippmann argued that populism too easily led to the rise of opportunistic, self-serving politicians who play to the crowd while putting their selfish interests above the country’s good. Fitzgerald’s depiction of American society in The Vegetable as a chaotic “four-ring circus” full of hucksters, crackpots, and crooks laid the groundwork for the composition of The Great Gatsby the following year, that profound reckoning with the blind pursuit of power and its corrosion of American ideals.Footnote ¹

It has long been recognized that Fitzgerald borrowed his play’s (unfortunate) final title from Mencken’s revised 1922 essay “On Being an American,” published in book form in his Prejudices: Third Series.Footnote ² Condemning the venality of American politics, Mencken observed,

In particular, Mencken targeted middle-class Republicans for their mindless support of laissez-faire government, regardless of its integrity or competence. Mocking their uncritical conformity, he added, “Here is a country in which it is an axiom that a business man shall be a member of a Chamber of Commerce, an admirer of Charles M. Schwab, a reader of the Saturday Evening Post, a golfer – in brief, a vegetable” (19). Fitzgerald reworked Mencken’s quotation into an epigraph for the book version of his play, published in May 1923, six months before The Vegetable was staged: “Any man who doesn’t want to get on in the world, to make a million dollars, and maybe even park his toothbrush in the White House, hasn’t got as much to him as a good dog has – he’s nothing more or less than a vegetable.”Footnote ³ In Fitzgerald’s satirical twist on Mencken’s comment, the axiom is taken at face value: in an early draft of the play, Jerry Frost’s wife reads the statement from a magazine that presents this comment to its readers in all seriousness, urging them to shape their ambitions around the presidency as the ultimate symbol of personal success.Footnote ⁴ In the finished version, Jerry enters the play calling for his copy of the Saturday Evening Post as he awaits the results of the Republican National Convention; Fitzgerald retains these vestigial details to signal the play’s connection to Mencken’s essay and, in doing so, allusively explain its title.

In fact, however, Fitzgerald took much more than his play’s title from Mencken’s essay. In the essay, Mencken describes American politics as sheer farce, emphasizing the hilarious effects of its absurdity throughout: “I hold that this elevation of politics to the plane of undiluted comedy is peculiarly American” (60). He calls the nation’s political culture a circus, with “clowns in constant practice,” punctuated by the “ribald combats of demagogues” and “exquisitely ingenious operations of master rogues,” and American politics the “greatest show on earth,” a Barnumesque display (58). “Human enterprises” that everywhere else “seem devoid of exhilarating amusement by their very nature – are here lifted to … vast heights of buffoonery” (58). It was all so funny, Mencken said, that he refused to leave the United States and join the expatriates who were rejecting the country’s crass philistinism; he would remain at home to enjoy the show.

What I’m suggesting, in other words, is that Fitzgerald may well have drawn on Mencken’s essay not only for his play’s title, and for its themes, but also for the donnée of an American political farce in the first place, seeing in Mencken’s depiction an irresistible premise for satire. Mencken published an early version of “On Being an American” in his syndicated Baltimore Sun column in October 1920, at a time when Fitzgerald, like most well-read Americans, avidly followed his writing. Mencken mockingly described the current presidential campaign, which Warren G. Harding would win, as

The presidential election in America, Mencken added, has been “purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance – and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such extravagant imbecilities, such uproarious farce that one comes to the end of it with one’s midriff in tatters. But feeling better for the laugh.”Footnote ⁵

Fitzgerald began drafting his play by the end of 1921, and from the start told its early readers, including his agent, that he believed it to be “the funniest ever written.”Footnote ⁶ In January 1922 he told his editor it was “awfully funny,” and in August that his play, then titled Gabriel’s Trombone, was “the best American comedy to date.”Footnote ⁷ In October 1922, even as Fitzgerald was hard at work writing the play, Mencken published a much-expanded version of “On Being an American” in his book Prejudices: Third Series. Here he elaborated on the farce, buffoonery, and imbecility of American life and politics, insisting again that it was the funniest show in town: “I like it because it amuses me to my taste. I never get tired of the show. It is worth every cent it costs” (63). It is in this expanded version that Mencken first describes the average American businessman as “in brief, a vegetable.” Two months later, Fitzgerald sent a finished draft of his play, now retitled The Vegetable: Or from President to Postman, to his editor, Max Perkins, who would publish it as a book in May 1923.

Fitzgerald’s conception of The Vegetable was ultimately built around literalizing Mencken’s central metaphor: American politics as an uproarious comedy, “a four-ring circus” that people would pay good money to watch. The play’s second act builds (mostly lame) jokes around the “vast heights of buffoonery” that ensue when a crass philistine enters the White House (59). Fitzgerald transformed Mencken’s “vegetable” metaphor into a comic symbol for the absurdity of striving for power without the competence to wield it. Jerry Frost’s failures and delusions of grandeur exemplify the hollowness of American political ambition, reflecting the superficiality, greed, and ineptitude that Mencken was attacking.

Both Fitzgerald and Mencken were reacting specifically to the incompetence of the Harding era in 1922. The Teapot Dome scandal, which began to unfold in April 1922 and remained front-page news throughout Fitzgerald’s work on The Vegetable, exposed pervasive corruption within the Harding administration, proving the accuracy of Mencken’s excoriating sketch from 1920. It turned out that Harding’s Secretary of the Interior had illegally leased federal oil reserves to private companies in exchange for loans and gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars; several high-ranking officials would eventually be imprisoned, and two others committed suicide. Although Harding had promised in his campaign to appoint the “best minds” to his cabinet, many Americans were scathing about his own. As a Pennsylvania editorial observed soon after Harding’s election,

Harding’s administration soon became infamous for cronyism and financial corruption. While most accounts acquit Harding of personal culpability (apart from appointing corrupt associates to high office), there is some evidence to suggest that he may have been aware of his cronies’ illicit dealings.Footnote ⁹ The stress of the scandal is widely believed to have contributed to Harding’s sudden death in August 1923, during a West Coast tour meant to distance him from the growing controversies. Four months later, Fitzgerald premiered The Vegetable, a farce about the chaos that erupts when there’s a clown in the White House.

Harding was widely said at the time to have been content as a small-town newspaper editor, acutely aware of his limitations, even pining for the comforts of his newsroom, but pushed into politics by an ambitious wife and grasping cronies – “the Ohio Gang” – who viewed him as their useful idiot.Footnote ¹⁰ Fitzgerald’s Jerry Frost dreams only of being a postman, but has been pressured by his nagging wife into taking a job as a railroad clerk, a position well beyond his limited abilities. Idly wondering as the play opens whom the Republicans will nominate for President, Jerry orders some bootleg gin that sends him into a delirium, during which, in the play’s fantasy second act, Jerry becomes an incompetent, corrupt, nepotistic President, whose impeachment is already being demanded as the act begins. Mencken had lamented that “there is no longer any question of statesmanship, in any real sense, in our politics” (29) a sentiment embodied by Jerry’s farcical rise to power. Jerry announces, “I just made up my mind to be President, and then I went ahead and did it. I’ve always been a very ambitious sort of – sort of domineerer” (66). Fitzgerald is here burlesquing Emile Coué’s hugely popular self-help mantra, “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better,” which exploded across the United States in 1922. Coué’s philosophy promised that by repeating positive affirmations and believing in them with enough conviction, anyone could will their own success. Part of Fitzgerald’s joke is the idea that becoming President is just a personal goal like any other, no different from losing weight or getting a pay raise: the ultimate sign of American success is purely self-serving, rather than a call to public service.

Blatantly nepotistic because he’s too stupid to come up with other ideas, Jerry appoints as Secretary of the Treasury his elderly, senile father, Dada, who proceeds to empty it. “Of course, a lot of people objected when he appointed his father Secretary of the Treasury,” Jerry’s sister-in-law remarks, because of “his father’s being so old” (fifty-eight), as if age were the objection, rather than nepotism. It is one of many lines in The Vegetable that uncannily anticipate American politics a century later: during the 2024 presidential campaign an obsessive focus on age similarly eclipsed more pressing matters like corruption and fitness for high office. In fact, Dada’s presence in the administration is only one symptom of its broader dysfunction.

As his administration descends into chaos, Jerry faces mounting problems, including the state of Idaho demanding his impeachment. In desperation, Jerry concocts a plan to trade Idaho to the nation of Irish-Poland in exchange for the Buzzard Islands – a pointed reference to Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, an outspoken critic of Harding’s administration and a key figure in pushing for accountability during the Teapot Dome investigation. Jerry demands that the Treasury hand him five million dollars for the sale, as he tries to avoid the consequences of his incompetence by strong-arming foreign nations into helping him stay in the White House, or threatening them with war. Despite his crude efforts to save himself, Jerry is impeached and put on trial by a doddering Supreme Court justice, Judge Fossile, symbol of a feeble gerontocracy. In fact, Jerry’s administration is riddled with blatantly unconstitutional acts: a Supreme Court justice conducts an impeachment, a general declares war, and Jerry tries to sell an American state to a foreign nation. Jerry’s ignorance of the American constitutional order is central to Fitzgerald’s satire: Jerry’s wild fantasy reveals just how little he understands about the very system he’s meant to lead. While it’s easy to idealize the notion that any man can become President, Fitzgerald exposes the less-than-ideal results of granting power to someone with total ignorance of governance, law, and the Constitution.

Jerry’s impeachment is repeatedly interrupted by a jazz band, further symbolizing the chaotic debasement of American politics. Associated with social disorder, jazz carried a strong sense of racialized transgression in 1923 for mainstream white America. Although much of the play steers clear of the casual racism prevalent in the United States at the time, the appearance of the jazz band introduces crude racial imagery, including their name, the Orang-Outang Band. This group, performing “high-class jazz” – a contradiction in the eyes of white bourgeois America in 1923 – symbolizes the cheapening of political discourse into a vaudeville spectacle, complete with the African American minstrel performers who were synonymous with comedy for mainstream white audiences. When a group of Senators awkwardly stand in respect for a jazzed-up version of Stephen Foster’s familiar minstrel song “Way Down upon the Suwanee River,” mistaking it for the national anthem, their confusion reinforces this descent into disorder, with its racialized implications of misrule, the presidency turned into a minstrel show.Footnote ¹¹

The importance of 1920s popular evangelicalism to the original conception of The Vegetable is often overlooked, not least because Fitzgerald cut so much of it during revision. But, in early drafts, Fitzgerald satirized the cultural power of evangelical preachers in the figure of Jerry’s Bible-quoting father, who predicts an apocalypse that does not arrive.Footnote ¹² The play’s original title, Gabriel’s Trombone, further underscores the centrality of American evangelicalism to Fitzgerald’s initial vision. A religious zealot, Dada Frost believes that bankrupting the United States will save its soul. “The United States was the wealthiest country in all the world,” Dada declares. “It’s easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a wealthy man to enter heaven. So all the money in the Treasury I have had destroyed by fire, or dumped into the deep sea. We are all saved” (95).

Fitzgerald intuited the growing political force of evangelicalism at a time when many of his peers saw it as marginal, failing to grasp its deeper hold on American life. Those who persuaded him to excise most of the play’s religious satire may have dismissed it as the purview of charlatans and crackpots, but from the vantage of the twenty-first century, it’s clear that Fitzgerald was, as usual, guessing right about America. In fact, some of the sections Fitzgerald was persuaded to cut improve the play considerably – including an abandoned passage in which Jerry’s father predicts a Last Judgment in language that contemporary audiences would have recognized:

1. 1. dada:  The world is coming to an end. The last judgment is at hand. Gabriel’s Trump will blow one week from today just at this hour.

2. 2. fish:    What’s a trump?

3. 3. doris:  It’s something like a trombone, only not so good.Footnote ¹³

Charismatic and media-savvy evangelical preachers like Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday (whom Mencken scorned as “a huge force of lesser specialists in ecclesiastical mountebankery – tin-horn Loyolas, Savonarolas and Xaviers … full of grotesque and illimitable whimsicality” (59)) regularly infused their preaching and their politics alike with apocalyptic rhetoric. For example, Billy Sunday invoked the image of Gabriel’s trumpet when denouncing Woodrow Wilson’s plan for the League of Nations, declaring that politicians who supported the League would not “hear Gabriel’s Trumpet” on Judgment Day, effectively condemning them to damnation.Footnote ¹⁴ Aligning with their apocalyptic visions of the end times, conservative American fundamentalists framed the League of Nations as part of a broader secular agenda that threatened Christian principles, eroded national sovereignty, and paved the way for an authoritarian global government. The imagery of Gabriel’s Trumpet, deeply embedded in Christian eschatology as a harbinger of the Final Judgment, becomes a tool for Fitzgerald to satirize the language of reactionary paranoia, linking Jerry’s father’s vision of impending doom to the fevered anxieties that shaped American public discourse in the early 1920s. Fitzgerald mocks the trivializing “jazzification” of enduring religious symbols: Gabriel’s Trump is “something like a trombone, only not so good.” The once-divine is reduced to the absurd, as Fitzgerald ridicules the way modern America was profaning the sacred. In the published version, General Pushing sternly reminds Jerry, “Being President is a sacred trust,” to which Jerry can only reply with comically deflated language: “Well, I know it’s a sacred trust, don’t I? … I’m proud as a pecan” (71).

The loss of “elite” national leadership was a subject of much debate in the American 1920s. It was one of Mencken’s regular themes, and also preoccupied Walter Lippmann, another writer who influenced Fitzgerald, and who forcibly deplored the lack of “any visible leadership in the postwar decade.”Footnote ¹⁵ While the expression “the American Dream” was not yet idiomatic in 1923 (it would not be popularized until 1931), one of its first uses in influential political writing had earlier appeared in Lippmann’s 1917 Drift and Mastery. America’s exaltation of the “unsophisticated man” and his supposed ability to fix the nation’s problems without the need for experts led, according to Lippmann, to “a kind of mystical anarchism, in which the ‘natural’ humanity in each man is adored as the savior of society.”Footnote ¹⁶ Lippmann recalled someone telling him, “If only you let men alone, they’ll be good … He had the American dream, which may be summed up, I think, in the statement that the undisciplined man is the salt of the earth.”Footnote ¹⁷ Naive faith in the virtue of the common man is also the American dream that The Vegetable lampoons, as much as the idea that the presidency is the ultimate step in a journey of personal ambition. Jerry Frost is nothing if not an “undisciplined man,” while “mystical anarchism” perfectly sums up the hallucinatory chaos of his presidency.

Undisciplined men, mystical anarchism, clowns in constant practice, the ribald combats of demagogues, master rogues, ecclesiastical mountebankery, and trumps that are not so good: what Fitzgerald sketched as satire now reads as prophecy. The Vegetable lampoons not just the chaos of unqualified men in power but the fervent belief that they belong there, a faith bolstered by the intertwining of political ambition with evangelical zeal, where personal success is recast as divine destiny. The fusion of reactionary populism with religious zealotry is no longer a farce confined to the pages of history. What The Vegetable only begins to satirize the present has made grotesquely real: a political culture where the exaltation of the “unsophisticated man” masks a cynical machine of grift, where incompetence serves as both a spectacle and a shield for unchecked corruption, and where power is its own justification. The play itself may have been a failure, but in its early drafts and influences, it captures with eerie precision the impulses that would shape American politics a century later. Fitzgerald did not foresee every detail, but with the help of Mencken’s analysis he clearly recognized the larger arc: an America forever drawn to men who see their own ambition as divinely ordained, wield public office as private entitlement, and bankrupt the nation, all to the delight of an eager public – some convinced they are part of a righteous cause, the rest just happy to cheer so entertaining a show.

Before the “storm troops” and the “concentration camps,” before “no authentic news” is left and a “fear, nameless and omnipresent” sets in, before the purging of intellectuals who desperately try to “escape to Canada,” before the “state of martial law” gets imposed and the “popular rebellion” begins, before all these signs of a “burning world,” there was an election.Footnote ¹

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis became a best seller in 1935 by dramatizing how one presidential election, if seized upon by malignant actors, might be the only thing standing between Americans and a dictatorial dystopia. It sold some 320,000 copies and received much generous praise from reviewers, despite the clumsy prose Lewis had churned out in his frantic four-month writing period.Footnote ² During the 2016 US presidential election, this long-forgotten novel surged back into the national discourse when media platforms began comparing Donald Trump with Buzz Windrip, the buffoonish leader of the “Corpo Party” in Lewis’s tale.Footnote ³ These easy analogies – back in 2016 and again today – might seem irresistible. Windrip is “vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ideas almost idiotic,” but known for “bewitching large audiences” by channeling “every prejudice and aspiration” of the “Common Man,” and peppering his windy speeches with moments of a “celebrated humor” (71–72). He is carried into office by “white-collar workers,” by “suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on the electric washing machine,” and by some “remnants of the Kuklux Klan” (sic) who are entranced by his less-and-less veiled promises to displace the “Jew financiers” and “Negroes” and “change the whole Constitution” – promises that become all too real in the novel’s later chapters (78, 15, 30).

But Lewis’s tale, in the last analysis, has nothing to tell us about Trump or about fascism. There are too many glaring misalignments between the novel’s political landscape and our own moment for comparisons to be useful.Footnote ⁴ Windrip channels a folksy charm, schmoozes with locals, courts religious leaders, preaches “economic justice,” and pledges every family five thousand dollars in fixed income; he should, instead, be compared to his populist model, Huey Long, but not to any politician alive today. Moreover, unlike Lewis’s wife, Dorothy Thompson, whose incisive reporting on Hitler helped inspire the novel, Lewis’s political vision remains ideologically confused.Footnote ⁵ Even his contemporary critics saw that ICHH failed to offer a convincing portrait of any real or imagined fascist state; Alfred Kazin, for instance, wrote that Lewis “could only catch the surface terror, the surface violence” of an authoritarian regime, without explaining its motives or inner workings.Footnote ⁶

Lewis’s novel actually spends most of its four hundred pages focused not on the political happenings in Washington, DC, but on the way one small-town Vermont bookworm, Doremus Jessup, responds to this series of disastrous political events. Doremus is a “mild, rather indolent and somewhat sentimental Liberal,” someone who champions an increased income tax, and supports the local “union for recognition against the quarry company,” but has little ambition to political action otherwise (46–47). Doremus spends most of his time reading and writing; the “military drills and belching politicians” tend to “seem unimportant” once he has settled into his “worn brown leather chair” (25). And it is in this vision of political complacency, paradoxically, that we can find the novel’s one real political insight. In an early symbolic scene, Doremus takes his wife and children on a “real, old fashioned, family picnic,” looking over Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks from the heights of “Mount Terror” (35, 37). Doremus at first begins to “fret about ‘conditions’,” but the conversation soon takes on a “comfortable triviality,” bouncing between updates from the kids, to the family’s wintertime plans, to the delightful view (38). This moment captures, in microcosm, the affective experience of politics that structures Lewis’s novel: a desperate attempt to cling to normalcy, to ignore political events that will not be ignored. Doremus stubbornly continues to believe that “It Can’t Happen Here” even as it is indeed happening.

Like many intellectuals, Doremus enjoys ranting about authoritarianism in arguments with no real stakes. He insists to one interlocutor that “there’s no country in the world that can get more hysterical – yes, or more obsequious! – than America” and tells another, “This country deserves what it’s going to get! … Maybe we need a Buzz Windrip!” (17, 40). Fascism is just a talking point for him, a rhetorical card to play in debates. When election time comes, Doremus coyly suggests that he will “indulge in the luxury of being independent” and vote for a minor, eccentric party (58). After the election, he “simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure,” and, as editor of a local paper, counsels his readers to “be patient, and wait and see” (143).

During the election, Doremus frankly admits that he cannot understand what makes Windrip compelling for so many Americans. In a striking scene, Doremus discovers his own hired hand, Shad Ledue, speaking at a Windrip rally. “I don’t pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff,” exclaims Ledue, “but there’s forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. The swell folks tell you to not be selfish!” Ledue concludes. “Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that’s willing to give you something … and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get!” Doremus can only respond by thinking, “Oh, my Shad! And you’re doing most of this on my time!” (89). Ledue may be wrong about Windrip’s loyalty to him and his class, but what really matters here is the way that Doremus can only see his hired man as his hired man, bound by labor time – and this despite Ledue’s speech to other subsistence workers during the Great Depression. He teases Ledue for dreaming about raising chickens one day, and fails to grasp why Alfred Tizra, a truck driver and another local Windrip supporter, wants to open his own roadhouses. For an editor who reads the New Republic and Robert Frost, neither the stalled dreams of these would-be small businessmen nor the anger at seeing their “kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub” registers any political significance (109).

Lewis, in other words, depicts a potentially terminal election in America as the result of smug and settled liberals only being able to view the other side as stupid. Indeed, the reader is also meant to believe that these villains are really just fools: Windrip’s followers recite variations on Yankee Doodle, bungle their statistics, and even choose as their symbol a five-pointed star, which accidentally looks like the stars of the reviled Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Doremus will petulantly insist that “I, and I alone,” know

Doremus cannot understand why such a statement might upset those impoverished masses. “Kind people, industrious people,” in his mind, are only “facile material for any rabble-rouser,” not subjects with desires and fears of their own (97).

What makes this novel such a singular reading experience is that this glaring political blindness is not just channeled in Doremus Jessup; it is a blindness that Sinclair Lewis shared and could not finally punish in his protagonist. In one or two moments, Lewis seems to realize that Doremus might be an antihero: in one oft-quoted passage, our protagonist considers that “this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest,” all those “easy-going citizens like me [who] couldn’t be stirred up” but “felt ourselves superior” (186). But this self-shaming yields no change in behavior, and, many chapters later, Doremus can still naively insist that “the free, inquiring, critical spirit … is more important than any social system whatsoever,” as if the former did not depend on the latter for fostering its survival (359). Lewis later starred as Doremus in the wildly successful theatrical adaptation of ICHH, where he apparently gloated in the applause received for his protagonist’s monologues.Footnote ⁷ Like his character, Lewis could never quite let go of a smug sense of superiority from the commoners he saw as fools.

In a particularly smug authorial moment, Lewis’s narrator suggests that Buzz Windrip “might not have learned, perhaps could not have learned, much from sociologists Charles Beard and John Dewey, but they could have learned a great deal from Buzz” (76–77). Dewey, as it happens, knew a good deal about participatory democracy and the effort required to safeguard it against authoritarian forces – it was no accident that he was named commissioner of the 1937 Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials. Lewis could have learned a good deal from him. Or better still, he might have learned from Kenneth Burke, whose seminal 1939 essay “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’” opens by scolding American reviewers of Mein Kampf for offering only indignation and easy moralizing rather than understanding. It was essential, Burke believed, to do more than shame this book for being evil and wrong. While “nauseating,” Hitler’s ideas had managed to inspire millions of followers; it was a “crude magic, but effective.”Footnote ⁸ Only by identifying the rhetorical strategies of a political threat – Hitler’s efforts to turn the Jews into a unifying scapegoat, to assert an “inborn dignity” among the German people, and so on – could one learn to spot these “emotional trickeries” and stop “politicians of his kind in America.”Footnote ⁹

The vital political lesson provided by Lewis’s novel, then, is the one that neither author nor text can quite concede: when “the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” the best cannot “lack all conviction.”Footnote ¹⁰ Doremus admits he feels “the insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast” (104). But when the other side begins to marshal its symbols and songs, all he can do is mock them for their simplicity and false promises. Politics does not require a “solution,” as Doremus smugly seems to imagine that everyone but himself must believe. But politics does require what Burke once called an allegiance to symbols of authority.Footnote ¹¹ Those symbols will always be limited, fallible, and, in the end, disappointing, but to abandon the difficult work of forming allegiances leaves one vulnerable to those who are more comfortable gathering around a unifying symbol – a slogan, star, or fifteen-point program. Intellectuals like Doremus might smugly mock the singing of slogans, yet Burke reminds us that looking at “the vote” in America often “tells you nothing. The future,” he insists, “is really disclosed by finding out what people can sing about.”Footnote ¹²

As Donald Trump, the candidate who promised to become dictator on day one, takes office as US President, Philip Roth inevitably comes to mind. As much as Roth enjoyed public attention, even when negative, he never would have wanted his work to be used as the occasion for this roundtable. And as much as he prided himself on writing realist American fiction, this author of a 1971 satire of Richard Nixon would have despaired to think that he had written anything that addresses this year’s presidential election where many believe the US is sinking into fascism. That’s because he believed in the American ideal. For Roth, America didn’t need to be made great again. It already was great. He knew its greatness because he was a Jew. To express this wisdom he wrote his “uchronia,” the alternative history called The Plot against America where the US briefly falls under the sway of the Nazi-friendly fascism of President Charles Lindbergh.

“Fear presides over these memories,” the novel begins.Footnote ¹ This fear characterizes the Roth family who confront the possibility that their American existence will be eradicated because they are Jews. This fear is the most powerful and memorable element to the novel. Yet everything ends happily. Lindbergh is deposed, the Roth family survives, and the American ideal remains resilient. Nor does it take armies or assassins to stop the fascist threat. A sudden turn to tyranny is halted by a gossip columnist and a convenient plane wreck. What seemed unthinkable – an America where Hitler is an ally and Jews are rounded up into detention camps – turns out to be unthinkable. Roth indulges in the ancient device of deux ex machina so that Roosevelt takes his proper place as President and the US triumphs over the Axis powers. It turns out that the novelist didn’t believe in his narrative premise. In an essay published at the same time as the novel, Roth notes, “I frequently write about things that didn’t happen, but never about history that didn’t happen.”Footnote ² He rigs the plot because history requires it. Unlike the Sinclair Lewis novel it resembles, Roth’s Plot tells us it can’t happen here.

But what is it precisely that can’t happen here and why not? Ten years after Plot and four months from his death, Philip Roth told Charles McGrath he had taken to reading history, “mainly American history but also modern European history.”Footnote ³ Fiction as a practice and a pastime was used up for him. He wanted the facts, as contested as they are. Like a good Lincolnian American, he boned up on the original American sin, slavery, which strangely took him to Stephen Greenblatt’s books on Lucretius and Shakespeare, and then to Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run, before happening upon Steven Zipperstein’s Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History. Pogrom tells a story that in retrospect foreshadows the Holocaust – the sudden murder of forty-nine Jews by ordinary Russian citizens. The killers were inspired, Zipperstein writes, “by the darkest of medieval-like accusations – the so-called blood libel, which charges Jews with the use of Christian blood for ritual purposes.”Footnote ⁴ I can’t tell you what Roth thought as he read Springsteen, Greenblatt, or Edmund Morgan’s work on slavery, but I can reasonably assume what he made of Zipperstein’s account of the Russian pogrom that was a prelude to the Holocaust. It’s a story that never happened and never could happen in America. Hitler’s submarines did not conquer America and no in-grown cultural virus produced his equivalent.

In Plot, Jewish identity and history provide the prism through which American fascism is rendered. For all the fear of a living and plausible fascism that the novel successfully engenders, the Roth family, the principal focus of the book, get to live out their Jewish life as they please. The novel is of a piece with his other pseudo-Holocaust novel, The Ghost Writer, where Anne Frank survives the death camps and moves to America under another name, and the only meaningful conflict she faces is having written a best seller that is in fact untrue to her personal experience as a Jew who escapes Hitler. “The Jew That Got Away,” as it happens, is the title of the first chapter and refers to the character Emanuel Lonoff, but the phrase fits Roth too. He’s the Jew who got away from the Jewish history that led to the Holocaust – and to the reformation of Israel too. “If I’m not American, I’m nothing,” he once observed. “The American republic is 238 years old,” he explained in 2014. “My family has been here for 120 years or more than half of America’s existence. They arrived during the second term of President Grover Cleveland, only seventeen years after end of Reconstruction.”Footnote ⁵

Yet in Plot Roth writes less as an American confident in his skin or his history than as a Jew whose life may be destroyed by being insufficiently American. For the first part of the book, a pure (white) American history truly regnant is the enemy, and it is this dimension to the book that accounts for its continued relevance. Though the novel does not explicitly connect Lindbergh to a resurrected Jefferson Davis, one can hear the ghostly echo of a rebel yell. From the time of its publication, readers responded to its dark illumination of the American id – a chilling warning for how quickly the American experiment in democracy can turn into something dark and terrifying. In 2004, many read the novel as a commentary on the anti-democratic impulses of the George W. Bush administration. Four years ago, David Simon and Ed Burns turned it into a miniseries intended to highlight the fascist threat posed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Now, as the 2024 election becomes living history, Google searching The Plot against America suggests that Roth’s novel has been virtually canonized as a guidebook to the current political and cultural situation. Not only is the novel more present than it was when published eighteen years ago, but, depending on how the election turns, it may become the novel by which Roth is most remembered.

That’s because the novel does something deeper and more mysterious than Roth realizes. This novelist who reveled in mixing fiction with fact did tell a story of how it could happen here. And what is this “it”? Trump, MAGA, America First – it goes by many names but ultimately, it’s the repudiation of the Gettysburg Address. Roth’s novel remains relevant by posing the question, what if American history isn’t really an experiment concerning whether a nation dedicated, in Lincoln’s words, to the proposition that all men are created equal can endure? What if, instead of an ongoing experiment in democracy where seemingly unchangeable cultural prejudices (the legacy of slavery) give way to a gathering commitment to equality, American history is merely the trajectory of a white will to power bent on subjugating, imprisoning, and possibly exterminating all forms of cultural difference deemed threatening or inferior?

Until recently, the Civil War and later the civil rights movement were the best, most democratically humane answers American history had provided. For the imaginary years 1940–42, Roth gives a different answer – before erasing it. Those are the years in the novel that readers remember and relive. The camps Roth imagines where Jews are confined and taught how to be Americans are hardly more onerous than the real ones made for Japanese American citizens during that time. Then there is the fact of slavery and its horrifying Jim Crow aftermath. No wonder Roth spent his last days reading about slavery, one almost wants to remark. Very little in Plot overtly suggests that its existence continues to define American life – though in “The Story behind ‘The Plot against America’” Roth acknowledges the pain Americans suffer from being “humiliated” for being different.

In Plot, Jewish identity happens to be at stake, but here the Jews stand in for all Americans whose “Americanness” may be attacked. The Roth family is literally divided by Lindberg’s ascension. Philip’s cousin loses a leg fighting Hitler; his aunt is mistress to Lindbergh’s chief adviser, Rabbi Bengelsdorf; and his brother, Sandy, is inculcated into the “Just Folks” program where Jews learn to be Americans – not Jews. There Sandy meets what we might call the novel’s true enemy, Mr. Mahwinney. “It went without saying,” the narrator Roth writes, that he

The “American” Mahwinney occupies the historical and cultural position that Trump’s MAGA movement claims for itself. He represents one of those “unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it” (94). Under the Lindbergh regime, the Roth family must subsume themselves to this lineage.

In Plot, the enemy is not simply fascism, but a malignant force tied to a white Christian nationalism. If Rabbi Bengelsdorf being Lindbergh’s top adviser seems far-fetched, one might think of Trump’s own propaganda adviser, the Jewish Stephen Miller, recommending how best to encamp Mexican immigrants in order keep the American border “safe.” If the sudden, chaotic 1942 Democratic Party convention to nominate FDR for President seems implausible, one might think of the sudden, chaotic 2024 Democratic Party toppling of Joe Biden as presidential candidate when polls seemed to indicate that he could not win. The historian Timothy Snyder, while not criticizing this decision, suggests that it is consistent with a feeling of helpless fear that characterizes people afraid that they are slipping into a tyrannical government that their efforts cannot stop.Footnote ⁶ Just as Roth’s 1940 America was turned inside out overnight, so does this fear that Snyder identifies seem to be taking shape before our eyes. Thus, if Roth’s Mahwinney seems an overdetermined caricature of American history, then one might read the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, in which the Department of Education and the Department of Commerce, among other government agencies, would be eliminated in favor of departments dedicated to making America the Christian nation it supposedly was in the glorious olden days. Although, during the campaign, Trump distanced himself from the plan, the election confirmed his commitment to it. Russell Vought, the plan’s architect, has been nominated to lead the Office of Management and Budget. In other words, Roth’s fictional Just Folks program, created by the fictional “Office of American Absorption,” would become all too real. It does not promise the Holocaust, but, once unleashed, where does this sort of nationalism stop? Mr. Mahwinney is still out there, and he votes.

Roth lived to see Trump elected President once, but he disavowed any connection between him and his own Lindbergh. Somewhat bizarrely, Roth insisted that Lindbergh at least was a genuine American hero. His solo cross-Atlantic flight made him “a twentieth-century Leif Ericson, an aeronautical Magellan.”Footnote ⁷ Trump’s only achievement had been to escape bankruptcy and jail, like Houdini escaped watery coffins. When he said that he wrote about things that didn’t happen but never about history that didn’t happen, Roth arguably betrayed his own uneasiness with his novel’s premise. For him, the great fact of America was that it provided a haven for Jews to invent themselves on their own terms – religious or not. In writing about the novel, Roth insisted that the truth of American history was not fascist (“Story”).Footnote ⁸ Nearly twenty years later, as America seems poised on the brink of Christo-fascism, one wonders whether Roth was more prescient than he could admit to knowing.

Fear presides over the next four years – and beyond.