Ken Ficara

I just finished Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Plot Against America, and I have to say I was much less than impressed, especially given that I read it immediately following Five Days In Philadelphia: The Amazing “We Want Willkie” Convention Of 1940 and How It Freed FDR To Save the Western World, by Charles Peters.

The latter book is a nonfiction account of the 1940 Republican National Convention, at which Wendell Willkie won the presidential nomination in a showdown with Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey. The point of the book is that the latter two, like many right-wing Americans, wanted the U.S. to stay out of the war in Europe and instead reach an accommodation with Hitler. (To be fair, many on the left believed this as well; from the signing of the Hitler-Stalin friendship pact in 1939, most American Communists supported Hitler.) Willkie, however, hated Hitler and even as he campaigned against Roosevelt, supported him on instituting the draft and providing aid to Britain.

Peters makes a convincing argument that American opinion was so deeply divided that had FDR’s Republican opponent made participation in the European war a campaign issue, we would not have supported Britain through 1940 and 1941 and they would not have lasted till our already belated entry into the war. Remember that all during the Blitz, as London was being bombed halfway to rubble and Britons were saving ration coupons to buy jam, the U.S. was mostly oblivious, going on as if nothing were wrong. In his book about the 1939 World’s Fair, David Gelertner points out that in the second year of the fair (1940) many country’s pavilions were either missing (Czechoslovakia, Poland) or full of Nazi propaganda (Vichy France).

Spoilers under this cut