How did it feel to live in Nixonland?
Roth's American Pastoral and the making of the Silent Majority
In my last two posts, I explored how Nixon exploited the cultural fractures of the 1960s to reshape American politics. But beyond the speeches, elections, and political maneuvering, what did it actually feel like to live through this era? Philip Roth’s American Pastoral offers a devastating answer. The novel captures, on an intimate level, the generational and ideological divide that Nixon tapped into—parents who believed in the postwar American dream, children radicalized against it, and a society coming apart at the seams. The book focuses on the unraveling life of its protagonist, Swede Levov, but isn’t just a story about one family. It’s about the emotional wreckage left in the wake of the culture wars that Nixon harnessed.
What follows is an extremely spoiler heavy post. I’m pretty narrowly focused on the content of the book in this post, but before digging into that I want to briefly talk about the craft of this book. It’s a complete masterpiece.
Roth beautifully balances a Sweeping Allegory with Big Symbolism that still has messy, nuanced, human characters and fantastic prose. It’s a deep and serious book that’s also intermittently hilarious. And the story that I tell in a somewhat linear fashion below is told in an ambling, free-associative style that jumps across time and space. It feels almost haphazard as you read it, but he seamlessly creates plenty of suspense as you learn more and more about Swede Lavov, his family, and all of the other people in their lives.
I can’t recommend the book more highly and I worry that my book report-esque “what does this tell us about the 1960s” post undersells how great it is. But it also harmonizes quite well with Nixonland, so here we are!
Anyway, disclaimer over. Let’s get to the spoilers.
The American Dream? (plot summary, lots of spoilers)
Seymour “Swede” Lavov is the All-American Man. He’s a star high school athlete who inherits a family business (a glove factory) and has a lovely upper-middle class life in New Jersey. He’s an assimilated Jew who marries a beautiful Catholic named Dawn who used to be Miss New Jersey. The American Dream personified!
His high school-aged daughter Merry has for years become steadily radicalized by the Vietnam War. She mostly just seems like a classic rebellious teenager, but it’s created plenty of conflict, particularly between Merry and Dawn. Swede is annoyed, too, especially because his daughter always wants to vilify him as an evil capitalist, but he’s sympathetic to the anti-War sentiment, happy to humor Merry, and just wants to draw some reasonable boundaries as a parent, like “don’t stay out in New York City to hang with your Anti-War buddies without telling us.”
And then everything changes. In 1968, Merry bombs the local post office and general store, killing a beloved local community member, and then disappears, going underground.
American Pastoral is a winding exploration of the ways that this event destroys the life of Swede and his family. More broadly, it’s about the vast inter-generational gulf that rapidly opened in this period between people like Swede and people like his daughter Merry.
Roth rarely brings Presidential politics into the book. Nixon is mentioned a handful of times, largely as an object of hatred of Merry and of Swede’s father Lou, a classic liberal Jew who’s got strong ties to the Democratic Party.
But I think Swede and Dawn are a perfect example of nice liberal Democrats who were driven into the Silent Majority and likely voted for Nixon.
What did the middle class think they were a part of?
As I mentioned before, Roth is great at spinning these broad allegorical tales. I think he distills the essence of these cultural conflicts extremely well and represents all sides with empathy, so I’m going to liberally quote from a number of passages.
Before I get to Merry’s rebellion, what national and cultural project did the Levovs think they were a part of? The book opens with a stand-in for the author, who re-connects with Seymour’s brother at his high school reunion. He characterizes the Levovs as one of the “families full of tolerance and kindly, well-intentioned liberal goodwill,” even though “theirs were the kids who went on a rampage, or went to jail, or disappeared underground, or fled to Sweden or Canada.”
In 2025, we’re living in a cultural moment now where leftists have rejected assimilation and “melting pot” ideas as a form of toxic, white supremacy culture and implicit racism. Melting pot ideas are literally listed in one of the original Microaggressions academic papers from 2007:
But in that era, it was actually seen as progressive to see the prejudices of Old World Europe melt away. In fact, Swede and Dawn are rebels of their own era, marrying across religious and ethnic lines. Dawn even needs to subject herself to a harsh grilling by Swede’s dad about these exact questions before they’re allowed to marry. Dawn reflects on this when thinking about some initial discomfort she feels about moving to a Protestant-heavy part of New Jersey:
If she could marry a Jew, she could surely be a friendly neighbor to a Protestant—sure as hell could if her husband could. The Protestants are just another denomination. Maybe they were rare where she grew up—they were rare where he grew up too—but they happen not to be rare in America. Let’s face it, they are America. But if you do not assert the superiority of the Catholic way the way your mother does, and I do not assert the superiority of the Jewish way the way my father does, I’m sure we’ll find plenty of people out here who won’t assert the superiority of the Protestant way the way their fathers and mothers did. Nobody dominates anybody anymore. That’s what the war was about. Our parents are not attuned to the possibilities, to the realities of the postwar world, where people can live in harmony, all sorts of people side by side no matter what their origins. This is a new generation and there is no need for that resentment stuff from anybody, them or us. And the upper class is nothing to be frightened of either. You know what you’re going to find once you know them? That they are just other people who want to get along. Let’s be intelligent about all this.
Not only are they beyond religious bigotry, they see America as beyond class conflict!
People cynically dismiss this kind of thinking these days, of course ethnic divisions still exist! Of course the upper classes are mostly looking out for their own interests and are happy to screw the poor over.
And hey, they’re technically correct. But there’s a kind of beauty in the post-WWII utopianism, even if you think it’s naive. Here’s a reflection from Swede on what was lost when that utopianism slipped away:
We grew up in an era when it was a different place, when the feeling for community, home, family, parents, work... well, it was different. The changes are beyond conception. I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have ever been. I don’t know what to make of the end of so many things. The lack of feeling for individuals that a person sees in that movie, the lack of feeling for places like what is going on in Newark—how did this happen? You don’t have to revere your family, you don’t have to revere your country, you don’t have to revere where you live, but you have to know you have them, you have to know that you are part of them. Because if you don’t, you are just out there on your own and I feel for you.
Screaming at the Silent Majority
Suffice to say that, this is now how Merry Levov, leftist terrorist bomber, thinks of things.
Here’s one of her and Dawn’s fights. Note that the Levovs live on what’s essentially a hobby farm, hence the barn mention and the cow-related insult at the end. Merry also has a stutter:
But there was now no conversation she had with her daughter that did not drive Dawn, if not out of her mind, out of the house and into the barn. The Swede would overhear Merry fighting with her every time the two of them were alone together for two minutes. “Some people,” Dawn says, “would be perfectly happy to have parents who are contented middle-class people.” “I’m sorry I’m not brainwashed enough to be one of them,” Merry replies. “You’re a sixteen-year-old girl,” Dawn says, “and I can tell you what to do and I will tell you what to do.” “Just because I’m sixteen doesn’t make me a g-g-girl! I do what I w-w-want!” “You’re not antiwar,” Dawn says, “you’re anti everything.” “And what are you, Mom? You’re pro c-c-c-cow!”
After Merry goes into hiding, her compatriot Rita Cohen visits Swede a few times to extort him and gather personal items for Rita. To her, he’s “nothing but a shitty little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the n*****r-proof security gates of his mansion.” He’s running a “plantation” because he has one factory in Puerto Rico, even though Seymour takes pride in keeping his American factories open while his competitors are completely off-shored.
Here’s Swede’s internal monologue in response to this tirade:
The unreality of being in the hands of this child! This loathsome kid with a head full of fantasies about “the working class”! This tiny being who took up not even as much space in the car as the Levov sheepdog, pretending that she was striding on the world stage! This utterly insignificant pebble! What was the whole sick enterprise other than angry, infantile egoism thinly disguised as identification with the oppressed? Her weighty responsibility to the workers of the world! Egoistic pathology bristled out of her like the hair that nuttily proclaimed, “I go wherever I want, as far as I want—all that matters is what I want!” Yes, the nonsensical hair constituted half of their revolutionary ideology, about as sound a justification for her actions as the other half—the exaggerated jargon about changing the world. She was twenty-two years old, no more than five feet tall, and off on a reckless adventure with a very potent thing way beyond her comprehension called power. Not the least need of thought. Thought just paled away beside their ignorance. They were omniscient without even thinking.
Here’s one more train of thought from Swede that captures the divide:
Got to marry a beautiful girl named Dwyer [his Catholic wife, Dawn]. Got to run a business my father built, a man whose own father couldn’t speak English. Got to live in the prettiest spot in the world. Hate America? Why, he lived in America the way he lived inside his own skin. All the pleasures of his younger years were American pleasures, all that success and happiness had been American, and he need no longer keep his mouth shut about it just to defuse her ignorant hatred. The loneliness he would feel as a man without all his American feelings. The longing he would feel if he had to live in another country. Yes, everything that gave meaning to his accomplishments had been American. Everything he loved was here.
For her [Merry], being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could have let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she “hate” this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the “rotten system” that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her “capitalist” parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest of the low—now to her “capitalist dogs.” There wasn’t much difference, and she knew it, between hating America and hating them. He loved the America she hated and blamed for everything that was imperfect in life and wanted violently to overturn, he loved the “bourgeois values” she hated and ridiculed and wanted to subvert, he loved the mother she hated and had all but murdered by doing what she did. Ignorant little fucking bitch! The price they had paid!
Feelings vs. facts vs. feelings
A disclaimer is needed here. It’s not historically accurate to say “here’s the views of a left wing terrorist” on one side and “here’s the response of a nice middle class glove factory owner” on the other and pretend that those are equivalent.
But again, the goal here is not to accurately convey what percentage of the American Left were members of the Weather Underground. The goal is to convey how it felt to live through this period. What were the divides and anxieties that Nixon was able to play on?
Extremist beliefs get over-represented in the media and come to stand in for a large swathe of people, scaring the general population. This happens today, too. Part of the point of Nixonland is that Nixon was incredibly good at making people feel attacked and focusing on his least reasonable opponents. It’s hard for me to imagine that after all of this, Swede voted for Humphrey or McGovern.
I’ll close by saying that Roth has plenty of criticisms for Swede and the rosy 1950s post-War capitalist idealism that he represents. Some of these criticisms come from his brother Jerry. Swede is portrayed as completely oblivious to the harsh realities of America:
You think you know what this country is? You have no idea what this country is. You have a false image of everything. All you know is what a fucking glove is. This country is frightening.
Until Merry’s bomb explodes, he’s depicted as incredibly unreflective about the world. He’s myopically focused on capitalist success at the glove factory and checking off all the boxes: beautiful wife, beautiful kid, beautiful house with a white picket fence. He’s a rule follower par excellence.
“What are you? Do you know? What you are is you’re always trying to smooth everything over. What you are is always trying to be moderate. What you are is never telling the truth if you think it’s going to hurt somebody’s feelings. What you are is you’re always compromising. What you are is always complacent. What you are is always trying to find the bright side of things. The one with the manners. The one who abides everything patiently. The one with the ultimate decorum. The boy who never breaks the code. Whatever society dictates, you do. Decorum. Decorum is what you spit in the face of. Well, your daughter spit in it for you, didn’t she? Four people [killed by her bombs]? Quite a critique she has made of decorum.”
Read another way, Merry is a hero for finally making her father think critically about the world. But that jolt, that reflection also tears his psyche and his family apart.