“I Declare War”

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"I Declare War": A New Street Gameand New Grim Realities in Roth's The

Plot Against AmericaJohn J. St insona

aSt at e Universit y of New York-Fredonia

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To cite this article: John J. St inson (2009): "I Declar e War": A New St ree t Game and New GrimReali t ies in Rot h's The Plot Against America , ANQ: A Quart er ly Journal of Short Art icles, Not es

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42 ANQ

Time of Civil War.’” Irish University Review 13 (1983): 14–37.Yeats, W. B. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Albright 394–95.

———. “Easter, 1916.” Albright 228–30.———. “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Albright 60.———. “Lapis Lazuli.” Albright 341–42.———. “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” Albright 246–52.

“I Declare War”: A New Street Game and

New Grim Realities in Roth’s The Plot Against America

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004) begins in June 1940

with a first-person narrator named Philip Roth (in this novel of an

alternate United States and thus an alternate Roth family history) intro-

ducing the reader to a tightly knit Jewish community in the Weequahic

section of Newark, New Jersey. The warm embrace of the neighborhood

provides comfort and security for the then-seven-year-old Philip, as do

loving and dependable parents and Sandy, an older brother. Yet, as the

narrator tells us in the very first sentence of the novel, “Fear presidesover these memories” (1). Still, in these pre–Pearl Harbor days the

quotidian lives of Newark seven-year-olds go on much the same as they

had before the Nazi invasion of Poland during the previous September.

The boys’ armor of innocence is by no means impenetrable, however.

An ill-boding impingement of the real and brutal world outside occurs

as we are told that “on the sidewalk during the long vacation months [of

1940] a new game called ‘I Declare War,’ using a cheap rubber ball and

a piece of chalk” (27), makes its appearance and becomes something

of an obsession for Philip and his friends, much to the consternation of

neighborhood adults.The summer of 1940 gives way to the fall; November brings a genu-

ine shock that supplies the chief premise of Roth’s hypothetical history.

Charles A. Lindbergh, the renowned aviator and popular American hero,

comes out of the political blue to break a deadlock at the Republican

National Convention and run on the Republican ticket for president against

Franklin Roosevelt, vowing to keep America out of the raging European

war. He defeats Roosevelt in a landslide (52) and soon afterward signs an

entente cordiale with Hitler and Hirohito (53–54). Lindbergh has already

made some remarks about Jewish interest groups mongering for war (13),

and the general fearsomeness of the time is greatly amplified in the Jewishpopulation.

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Winter 2009, Vol. 22, No. 1 43

The Roth family tries to remain calm and keep its equilibrium as threats

to Jewish communities and their way of life begin to accumulate. Mean-

while, the war goes on in Europe and so too does the game of “I DeclareWar.” The narrator—Philip, at some later point in his life—goes on to

describe, in about two hundred words, how the game is played. The game

and its description are so economically useful in the establishment of mood

and multiform thematic implications that most readers probably infer that

the game (mentioned again by Philip as part of a frightening dream [43]) is

Roth’s cleverly invented metaphor. This, however, is not the case: the game

is real and predated Roth’s novel.

Arguably, the first mention of the “I Declare War” street game in print

appeared in the “Talk of the Town” section of the New Yorker on May 17,

1941. The magazine provides this abstract:

The children of Washington Heights have a new street game. They draw a bigchalk circle, divide it into segments, and letter each segment the name of aEuropean country. The child who is “it” stands in the centre of the circle witha rubber ball at his feet. He is Hitler. The other contestants stand around him,one to each part of the circle. Hitler says, “I declare war on Poland.” Polandruns, while Hitler stoops down, picks up the ball and without moving fromthe centre of the circle, tries to hit him with it. If Poland is hit, he’s capturedand retires from the game. It’s just a question of who can hold out the longestand as for Hitler, he can’t lose. (Maloney 11)

Washington Heights is the section of northern Manhattan that is just acrossthe George Washington Bridge from Fort Lee, New Jersey, only about fif-

teen miles from Newark, but the game is said to have arrived there almost

one year later than on Philip’s street. In the version described in the New

Yorker , Hitler is named, and because he is the one having all the sadistic

fun, there seems to be something even more unsettling about the relish

with which American boys play the game. The game described by Roth’s

narrator corresponds more closely to the version that became popular in the

New York City area after the war was over. In this adaptation, neither the

player who “declares war” nor the one who throws the ball (various players

in this version) is explicitly designated as Hitler.1 In fact, it is the playerrepresenting the country upon which war is declared who gets the sadistic

boon of throwing the ball. What Roth emphasizes, in any case, is the boys’

immersion in the playing out of aggressive warfare, including the infliction

of some quite real physical pain.2 Philip tells how the boy with the ball tries

to eliminate other players by “walloping each as hard as he could with the

ball, beginning by throwing at those closest to him and advancing his posi-

tion with each murderous thwack” (27).

Philip supposes that mothers and neighbors in general dislike the game

simply because of the noise it entails (27–28); he and the other Jewish chil-

dren remain unaware of how its unceasing play causes, in adults, a sinisterand eerie heightening of the tensions building all the time with news from


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Europe. Shouts of “I declare war on . . .” fill the air all day and evening.

Haunting, historically and ethnically conditioned memories of persecution

are awakened in all those no longer as innocent as the boys. Parents, too,must have found something almost atavistically savage in the gut-level

satisfaction that their children, raised with humane values, took in pelting

each other with a ball, albeit rubber, often at close range. Roth intends

readers to draw a thematic point from the emphasis he gives (a page in

length) to “I Declare War,” the only street game referenced in the book:3 we

all have a certain capacity to descend to the level of the worst Nazis.

No authoritative source on the game’s origin or early history seems to be

available, although it is often mentioned and sometimes described in detail

on Web sites given primarily to the nostalgic reminiscences of people who

had childhoods in the New York City area.4 Two books on children’s gamesconvincingly suggest that “I Declare War” evolved from an earlier street

game called (apparently for its suggestion of “Hot Potato”) “Spud” (Spa-

daccini 194–95; Wise 203). Whether the game as it evolved was actually

played by Jewish youngsters in Newark as early as 1940 is not pivotally

important because The Plot Against America is itself counterfactual or

alternative history, even if unnervingly plausible. That it was a real game

does, however, add a pungent irony: “I declare war on Jews” seemed, to

the adult Jewish population, to be what the new Lindbergh administration

was saying to them and to America. It takes the young Philip longer than

his elders to recognize this; but Elaine Safer, although she does not men-tion or allude to the game, is correct in pointing out that “the young boy

gradually realizes that because he and his family are Jews, they are treated

as aliens in their own country. It is as though the United States had declared

war on them” (150).

The connection between the game and a Hitler-friendly administration

under Lindbergh is also made early in the novel when the young Philip has

a nightmare in which he is walking to a friend’s house, carrying his much

cherished stamp album. Someone calls out his name, and Philip, fright-

ened, begins to run. He stumbles and drops “the album at the very spot on

the sidewalk where [they] regularly played ‘I Declare War’” (43). Whenhe inspects the album for possible damage shortly afterward, he sees that

the portraits of Washington on several stamps have been transformed into

portraits of Hitler; the depictions of American vistas and monuments on

his National Parks set are unchanged, but a black swastika is now superim-

posed on each one. Although Philip does not say so, most stamp collectors

know that his nightmare largely corresponds to what actually occurred

with regard to postage stamps in Nazi-occupied countries. Nightmare and

history are thus conjoined in a book that simultaneously interrogates how

history is made, demonstrating that the construction of fiction and his-

tory are far more similar than they were generally considered to be in the1940s.


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Winter 2009, Vol. 22, No. 1 45

The game of “Spud” metamorphoses into “I Declare War,” and the

lives of the Roth family and its acquaintances also undergo some surpris-

ing alterations. The central and most memorable ones occur in the fore-grounded family of Herman and Bess Roth and their two sons, Sandy and

Philip. Herman and Bess are opposed, both by philosophy and emotional

inclination, to the notion of ever hitting their sons, but the tensions and

contagion of the times cause both to do so. Bess deals Sandy two hard

slaps when he argues that his parents are suspicious of Lindbergh’s motives

and intentions because they are still just “ghetto Jews” (193), and Herman

slaps Philip smartly when it is discovered that the latter has forged a note

(203). More serious violence, and significant injury, occur when Herman

comes to blows with his nephew Alvin, a war-wounded amputee who had

enlisted in the Canadian armed forces as a commando to fight against Hit-ler. Alvin was originally an orphan kindly taken in by the Roths, but time,

the war, and changed circumstances have buried any kind feelings. The two

cover the Roth living-room rug with their blood: Alvin’s stump is “torn to

shreds” (296) and one of his wrists is broken, while Herman suffers two

broken ribs, three shattered teeth, a huge gash along his cheekbone, and a

“neck so badly wrenched that he had to go around in a high steel collar for

months afterward” (296). The violent and ominous street game “I Declare

War,” played incessantly, is revealed as both an accurate predictor and a

mirror: the Roth household embodies a microcosm of what is happening in

Jewish families across Lindbergh’s America.That American youngsters outside of the book absorbedly played the

street game—a game clearly devolved from Hitler’s assaults on other

nations and enjoyable to them because of the way it involved them in the

thrill of naked aggression and reenacted evil—at a time of national peril

and international catastrophe seems improbable, but it is true. However,

readers must consider that the children of Newark were also playing other

games at the time and giving attention to professional sports. They can

justifiably wonder why Roth does not allow some of these to find their way

into the novel, especially since sports have been given a fairly large degree

of attention in other Roth narratives.5Roth’s readers may also expect sports and games to garner some signifi-

cant space in The Plot because it tracks the lives of two healthy and active

boys, Sandy and Phil Roth. This, however, is not the case. We have only one

reference to any kind of ball game: a “Decoration Day major league baseball

doubleheader” (5). Other games include craps, played by Alvin (158), and

a sort of invented game that Phil and a friend named Earl Axman engage

in, one in which they follow people randomly for great distances, usually

entailing bus travel (114ff.). Pinball is mentioned twice (159, 287), but only

in connection with racketeers who distribute pinball machines for gambling

purposes. Phil alludes once to “some playground game” (161), but there is nohint as to what it is. Quite possibly, the relative paucity of allusion to games


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is designed to give still more weight to the symbolically freighted “I Declare

War.” It is also often remarked that sports and games have been, for Jewish

youngsters, an avenue of assimilation into mainstream American life. (RonPatimkin of “Goodbye, Columbus” provides a comically satiric stereotype of

the Jewish boy who has “succeeded” because of sports accomplishment.) In

The Plot , however, “I Declare War” is the only game given any real attention

(aside, perhaps, from the “following people” game), and it furnishes just the

opposite: a dark foreboding of the Jewish boys’ sense of separation from a

gentile America whose anti-Semitism, usually held in check, has alarmingly

been released, as if by a declaration of war.

If some readers today find the extent and degree of anti-Semitism in the

United States in 1940 represented in the novel improbable, Roth’s postscript

provides them with some necessary instruction, for example, by allowingLindbergh, Henry Ford (the car maker), Father Charles Coughlin (the “radio

priest”), and others to indict themselves by setting down their own words

from the real historical record. Roth shows that his novel is not dark histori-

cal fantasy conjured out of thin air and that it had at least a plausible gen-

esis in fact. The postscript does not mention “I Declare War,” even though

the presence of the game provides another interesting example of Roth’s

interfacing of fact and fiction. In ordinary light, the children’s game seems

mundane enough, and so too do most of Lindbergh’s speeches; but allow that

light to shift ever so slightly, and horrific possibilities become “exposed.”

However, the game is brought into the novel as a resonating metaphor forthe situation of the United States on the brink of its entry into World War II.

It also brings Lindbergh’s mostly fictional war against the Jews almost up to

the time of the real beginning of Hitler’s “final solution.” “[E]ach murderous

thwack” (27) of the “innocent” boys’ ball sinisterly augurs the approaching

genocide that will be carried out with mechanized efficiency, and the baser

attractions of the game encapsulate a provocative puzzle about the humanly

stained fascination with violence, cruelty, and aggression.

JOHN J. STINSON

State University of New York–FredoniaCopyright © 2009 Heldref Publications

NOTES

1. With so little published on the game, I might be allowed to add my own attes-tation: this is the version of the game I played on the streets of Brooklyn (Flatbushsection) in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

2. Of course, “I Declare War” is not the only game in which boys routinelymete out some physical pain to other boys. “Kingy” is (or was in 1969, at least)an “immensely popular” game in Britain, one in which a boy throws a ball, “with

considerable force,” at all of the others until all but one are hit and are thus “out”(Opie and Opie 95–96).


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Winter 2009, Vol. 22, No. 1 47

3. In view of the large number of coming-of-age books, both fiction and nonfic-tion, and the prevalence—and importance—of street games in the life of urban

youth, one would expect them to be the subject of some study in literary journals.However, this is not the case. I can locate only Alfred F. Boe’s “Street Games inJ. D. Salinger and Gerald Green.” Boe does not refer to any secondary sources,presumably because there are (quite curiously) none to be found.

4. Two useful Web sites for learning about “I Declare War” and other popularstreet games are Streetplay.com and Spaldeen Games and Rules. The descriptionsappear under the titles “War!” and “I Declare War,” respectively.

5. Three books on sports in American literature provide informed commentaryon Roth’s frequent use of materials from the world of sports (although nothingregarding street games). Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature is acollection of essays from seventeen critics, and the index contains multiple refer-ences to Roth. One chapter, by Derek Parker Royal, is devoted to a rereading of

Roth’s The Great American Novel. As he contextualizes his subject, Royal providesa neatly selective summary of Roth’s use of sports:

[S]ports references can be found throughout his fiction: the athletic Patimkinfamily and its “sports tree” in “Goodbye, Columbus”; Trick E. Dixon’s lockerroom “skull sessions” with his advisers in Our Gang; Jimmy “the Luftyid”Ben Joseph and his desires to bring baseball to the Promised Land in TheCounterlife; recollections of high school football games and their ethnicsignificance in The Facts; the all-around athlete, Seymour “Swede” Levoy, in American Pastoral; and the empowering nature of boxing that Coleman Silk experiences in The Human Stain. (158)

Royal also discusses Alexander Portnoy’s love of baseball (Portnoy’s Complaint ),

and he provides extensive commentary on Roth’s “baseball novel,” The Great American Novel, which uses baseball to expose American hypocrisies and falsemythologies (159–66).

Michael Oriard’s Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture makes reference to Roth only once (Portnoy’s Complaint ), butstates that when “Portnoy recalls the centerfield of his boyhood as an island of peace,” he enjoys (in Oriard’s words) the “most beatific vision” associated withsports in almost any novel (454).

Christian Messenger, in his Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary Ameri-can Fiction, devotes eleven pages to “Goodbye, Columbus” (229–39) and anothersix pages (353–58) to a section titled “Benign Myth and Demonic Reality: Roth’sThe Great American Novel.”

Although not a collection of essays on sports, Derek Parker Royal’s Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author contains an essay on sports by Anne Mar-garet Daniel that contains numerous references to sports, especially baseball.

WORKS CITED

Boe, Alfred F. “Street Games in J. D. Salinger and Gerald Green.” MFS 33 (1987):65–72.

Daniel, Anne Margaret. “Philip Roth, MVP: Our Gang, The Breast , and The Great American Novel.” Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author . Ed.Derek Parker Royal. Westport: Praeger, 2005. 59–74.

“I Declare War.” Spaldeen Games and Rules. 15 Feb 2008 <http://www.spaldeen.

com/ideclarewar.html>.Maloney, Russell. “‘The Talk of the Town’: Game.” The New Yorker 17 May 1941:


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11. 1 Mar. 2008 <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1941/05/17/1941_05_17_011_TNY_CARDS_000186225.html>.

Messenger, Christian. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary AmericanFiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1990.Opie, Iona, and Peter Opie. Children’s Games in Street and Playground . Oxford:

Clarendon, 1969.Oriard, Michael. Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American

Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.Roth, Philip. The Great American Novel. New York: Vintage, 1995.———. The Plot Against America. New York: Vintage, 2004.Royal, Derek Parker. “Fouling Out the American Pastoral: Rereading Philip

Roth’s The Great American Novel.” Upon Further Review: Sports in American Literature. Ed. Michael Cocchiarale and Scott D. Emmert. Westport: Greenwood-Praeger, 2004. 157–68.

Safer, Elaine. Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth. Albany: State Uof New York P, 2006.Spadaccini, Stephanie. The Big Book of Rules. New York: Plume, 2005.“War! aka [sic]‘I Declare War On . . .’” Discussion. Streetplay.com. <http://www.

streetplay.com/discuss/messages/21/1206.html>.Wise, Debra. Great Big Book of Children’s Games. New York: Grand Central,

2003.


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“I Declare War”

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