Lucky Lindy and Boxcar Burt

HELENA — It's another pivotal election year, and Americans make a monumental change in leaders in 1940. They oust Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his bid for a third term and replace him with famed aviator Charles Lindbergh, a Republican. Lindbergh's running mate and the new vice president is fellow isolationist Burton K. Wheeler, a Democratic U.S. senator from Montana.

This what-if scenario is the stuff of Philip Roth's new novel, ‘‘The Plot Against America.'' Roth's vision of what would have happened is a haunting nightmare.

However, a New York Times critic called Roth's imagined Lindbergh's pro-Hitler presidency ‘‘wildly extrapolated from historically documented accounts of the real Lindbergh's anti-Semitic statements'' and his role as a leading isolationist.

After Lindbergh's election, ‘‘fear invaded every Jewish household in America,'' the book says. ‘‘Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty.''

This is a backdrop to the book's story in which Roth tells what the Lindbergh presidency was like for young Philip Roth, his Jewish family in Newark and fellow U.S. Jews.

Wheeler is in the thick of the controversy in the book, just as he was in real life.

Roth has Vice President Wheeler denounce the deposed FDR for criticizing Lindbergh's foreign policy, calling the ex-president cynical and irresponsible. Another character describes Wheeler as ‘‘a fascist rabble-rouser.''

The novel says Wheeler ‘‘joined Lindbergh and the right-wing isolationists in helping found America First, attacking Roosevelt with such antiwar statements so extreme that they prompted the president to label his (Wheeler's) criticism ‘the most untruthful, dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has been said in public life in my generation.' '' (Those are FDR's actual words.)

Lindbergh tapped Wheeler as his running mate, the book says, ‘‘in part because his own political machine in Montana had helped to elect Republicans to Congress throughout the late '30s but mainly to persuade the American people of the strength of the bipartisan support for isolationism and to have on the ticket a combative, un-Lindbergh-like candidate whose job would be to attack and revile his own political party at every opportunity....''

Wheeler's actual life was even more interesting than Roth's fictional version.

‘‘Controversy has sparked my public life from start to finish,'' Wheeler wrote in the opening of his 1962 autobiography, ‘‘Yankee from the West." ‘‘My opponents have ranged from the giant Anaconda Copper Mining Co. to the leaders of both my own Democratic Party and the Republican Party. The names I have been called run the gamut from Communist to Fascist and include a great many other derogatory terms besides.''

Historian Don Spritzer of Missoula calls Wheeler ‘‘perhaps the most dynamic and colorful personality ever to cross Montana's political landscape.''

A New Englander who headed West after Michigan law school, Wheeler remained in Butte after losing his savings in a poker game there. He emerged as a lawyer defending Butte's radial labor leaders and, as Roth writes, was ‘‘the enemy of Anaconda Copper — the mining company that ran Montana pretty much like a company store.''

The Anaconda Co.'s press dubbed Wheeler ‘‘Bolshevik Burt'' as it turned its editorial guns against him and backed progressive Republican Joe Dixon in the 1920 governor's race, the most fascinating in state history. As Spritzer notes, Wheeler spent one night hiding in a railroad car in the campaign to avoid a Dillon lynch mob, acquiring the nickname, ‘‘Boxcar Burt.''

Wheeler lost the governor's race, but Montanans sent him to the U.S. Senate two years later where he remained for 24 years. Wheeler soon ascended into national prominence for exposing the corruption of President Warren Harding's attorney general.

‘‘Years later, a screenplay writer developed a script for a movie based upon Wheeler's success in exposing the graft,'' write state Auditor John Morrison and his wife, Catherine Wright Morrison, in their book, ‘‘Mavericks: The Lives and Battles of Montana's Political Legends.'' ‘‘The movie, tentatively entitled ‘The Man from Montana,' eventually appeared as the now-American classic, ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.' "

In 1924, Wheeler ran for vice president on Progressive Party ticket headed by Robert LaFollette.

An early FDR supporter, Wheeler parted ways with the president in 1937. The Montana Democrat led the fight to block Roosevelt's ‘‘court-packing effort'' to add new justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had struck down some New Deal initiatives. Wheeler became a leading isolationist voice in the country, criticizing Roosevelt's foreign policy.

At one time, Spritzer writes, the vaunted, bipartisan Wheeler political machine in Montana ‘‘had secured the election of two Republican congressmen and a Republican governor (old ally Sam Ford).'' However, Wheeler, through his relentless criticism of FDR and backing Republicans, finally wore out his welcome in his own Democratic Party here.

A young liberal lawyer, Leif Erickson, upset Wheeler in the 1946 Democratic primary but went on to lose to Republican Zales Ecton Jr. in the general election. Wheeler practiced law in Washington until his death in 1975.

A couple of side notes:

The Burton K. Wheeler Center has been established in Bozeman in honor of the former senator.

In 1970, I interviewed Wheeler in his Washington law office for my master's thesis. He was a gracious gentleman who answered each of my questions and then autographed my copy of his autobiography that I picked up in a used book store. The book's previous owner had jotted in the book, ‘‘Burt was a fair poker player and a rotten dresser.''

Lindbergh also had ties to Montana. Lindbergh Lake is named after him, and a son lives here. The elder Lindbergh, then living in Hawaii, addressed a packed gallery and delegates to the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention about the environment.

Charles Johnson is chief of the Lee Newspapers State Bureau in Helena. He can be reached at (800) 525-4920 or (406) 443-4920. His e-mail address is csjohnson@qwest.net.