SOURCE: Berman, Ronald. “Contexts.” In The Great Gatsby and Modern Times, pp. 15-37. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Berman discusses ideas current in America in the early part of the decade just before Gatsby's publication.]

In “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” written in the early thirties, with a flourish Fitzgerald identified the crucial year of the preceding decade: “May one offer in exhibit the year 1922!”¹ It is the turning-point year in which The Great Gatsby takes place. And in the novel he makes it a point to be specific about the dating of his story. In what particular ways does the novel use its moment? Let us look at certain ideas in circulation in the summer of 1922, and in the period around it: ideas that, like that of “civilization,” are referential in the text. For Tom Buchanan “civilization” is highly meaningful—and is opposed to his sense of “the modern world.” Does he echo a public debate? And, is his anxiety over ideas and social situations possibly derived?

One set of anxieties can probably be discarded. In a 1921 interview Fitzgerald stated that, “except for leaving its touch of destruction here and there, I do not think the war left any real lasting effect. Why, it is almost forgotten right now.”² Possibly to our surprise there was substantial agreement with this. Leading into the year The Great Gatsby takes place, on November 30, 1921, the New Republic states of “the new spirit” that worldwide, “improvement is spreading rapidly and is increasing in self-confidence and in positive achievement as well as in volume. It is clearly the expression of a temper radically different from that which prevailed during and after the war.” Throughout 1922, the Saturday Evening Post showed little interest in a war that had by now receded from the memory of its readers and was no longer good copy. The Post, in any case, had many other quarrels to engage in, and there are good reasons for it being a magazine of choice for Tom Buchanan. In 1923, the year of the first publication of Time, almost nothing was said in its weekly coverage about war disillusion. The archaeologist of news will find instead that Time covers war debts, war finances, and armament limitations without invoking war disillusion. In the early twenties Time covered fiction and theater in more detail than it now does, but very little of its critical attention was devoted to books or essays about the lasting, debilitating effect of our experience in the Great War. Much attention, however, was paid by Time, other magazines, and by Fitzgerald to certain resentments.

On July 5, 1922, a date to remember, the New Republic continued its campaign of national introspection or “interpretation” (the term is from the first sentence of the first issue in 1914) of public events. There was much to interpret, beginning with the industrial war in West Virginia in which coal miners had killed nineteen strike breakers. The editors thought that these unionized miners were identical in class outlook and behavior to those who had recently beaten and tortured black migrant workers in Springfield and East St. Louis. There were troubles enough abroad: the Marines were in Haiti; Ireland was habitually regressive in politics and in culture; and in Germany Walther Rathenau had just been assassinated.³ But, at least for the New Republic, foreign policy was not at this point the main issue: what mattered most in American life was the management of domestic change. There were many anxieties, and traditional kinds of explanation seemed no longer to hold. It seemed, for example, to be no longer useful to think about the relationship of Capital to Labor, or of Democrat to Republican. Politics was a waste of time. In 1922, the public duty was to reassess the aggregate of individual lives that constituted the nation and to bring to bear a new private and public sense of self. Perhaps nothing could be done about West Virginia until the values of a “Christian people” were asserted—and recognized. About other things much remained to be done, especially about the dual facts of too much money in circulation, and in too few hands. There was an uneasy sense of the swiftness of social change, and, even more, that it might be unmanageable. The issue of July 5 ended on an especially disquieting note, with a review of recent books on coming of age in America. Its last words were about a new cultural sense of self, about the child no longer “the subject of the parental regent, however wise.” In the coming decade, it was plain to see, personal identity would be achieved through “self-direction and self-determination.” The author reviewed is Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and his book Child Versus Parent is taken for a tract for the times. Undesired social change seems now to begin, literally, at home. Both author and reviewer believe that the growth of social character should indeed be ordered by “self-discipline” but they doubt that will happen. Fitzgerald would write in the early thirties that “the wildest of all generations” was that “which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War.”⁴ As for self-discipline, that had been stood on its head: the generation of children had “corrupted its elders.”

There is one other thing about this issue that is of special interest to novelists: a review of Ulysses by Edmund Wilson. Since reading it, “the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless.” Ulysses has invalidated traditional kinds of fiction, including, one supposes, books like This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned. New fiction will clearly have to be ironic in tone, modernist in technique. Fitzgerald dutifully read Ulysses and wrote to Wilson about its personal effect on him.⁵ There is more to the effect of modernism on Fitzgerald that needs to be said and I will try to amplify that in later chapters.

Other magazines will of course have other concerns but they too are focused on the overriding theme of change. There is Vanity Fair, a publication closer than the New Republic to the tactical issues of Fitzgerald's fiction. Vanity Fair means also to be interpretative—its motto has, from the first issue in 1913, been “a record of current achievements in all the arts and a mirror of the progress and promise of American life.” Its sense of “promise” resonates to Fitzgerald's themes. Vanity Fair was (before the advent of the New Yorker) the main source for the creation of social identity through high style. It assumed that self-determination operates through consumption. One of its great themes is the acquisition of identity by conscious choice. That choice is exerted through transaction within the marketplace. The primary assumption of the marketplace of style is that we can choose what we want to be without inhibition. A secondary assumption is that diligent consumption, as thoughtful and perhaps as arduous as that of a lifetime of good works, legitimatizes our efforts. When Myrtle Wilson shops at Pennsylvania Station she is by no means being simply materialistic—she displays the care and prudence once associated with the vocation of citizenship. She understands that purchases and styles are meant not to gratify but to display the character of choice—and the choice of character.

Vanity Fair is necessarily about commodities, and its advertisements are as important as any other instructions conveyed by commercial literature. I believe that Fitzgerald took quite seriously the techniques and even the claims of advertising—he did not differentiate it from the rest of “culture” and indeed he used it to enormous advantage in a novel about people whose energies are often bent toward consumption. There are no warnings in The Great Gatsby that when we leave love for advertising or for the description of commodities we are moving from a realm of higher to lower seriousness.

Vanity Fair has a powerfully affective sequence of advertisements (nearly all illustrated, with many taking up an expensive full page) of its principal commodities, automobiles. Here they are in order of appearance in the July 1922 issue: the life-changing designs of the Chalmers Six, Oldsmobile, Wills Sainte Claire, Haynes 75, Renault, Winton, Kimball, De lage, Talbot-Duracq, Marmon, D. A. C., Mercedes, Stanley, Elgin, Dusenberg, the three-wheeled Neracar (“a new type of automotive vehicle unlike either an automobile or a motorcycle”), Ford, Le Baron, Rumpler Raindrop, Studebaker, Durant, Stutz, Pierce-Arrow, Cadillac, Sunbeam, Ballot, Packard Twin-Six, Paige, Daniels, Derham, and La Fayette. The August issue will add the Maxwell, Locomobile, Essex, and the Rolls-Royce favored by Gatsby. In relation to all advertisements and text the automobile is by far the most important commodity in the issue. It is as important a symbolic object to Vanity Fair as it is to The Great Gatsby. Each car has a social character to confer. Some will grant middle-class reliability. Most, however, have more extensive ambitions. The products imply consumers who are themselves “leading,” “powerful,” and even “perfect.” These products confer “esteem,” “security,” “enjoyment” and, possibly more important, something not likely to be granted often by daily life, complete “satisfaction.” In The Great Gatsby one of these cars will even turn out to be “triumphant.”

Few of the cars on the pages of Vanity Fair are less elaborate than Gatsby's, which begins to seem representative rather than extreme. There are not only spare tires but cases for them; there are tools and gauges for mileage, gasoline, and oil; and logs for daily expenses. There are monograms in metal to prove ownership. There are traveling sundials. A special model of the Pierce-Arrow comes equipped with water tank and icebox for cocktail parties; with bottles, glasses, “knives, forks, plates and other picnic paraphernalia.” This model also has a Victrola and room for records to play on it. There is a built-in Kodak to memorialize its usage. The Stutz is itself interpretative, “owned and liked by men who have long since passed the Dollar Sign on the road to achievement.”

Gatsby seems less idiosyncratic when a magazine of 1922 is opened. The majority of other commodities in the July issue of Vanity Fair are clothes that make the man. Advertisements of the 1990s now praise natural impulse and promise individuality within the mass. Ads of the twenties are more socially instructive. They reflect realities, not impulses. We buy underwear because of “The Question of Health.” A watch is not an ornament or jeu d'esprit but “The Last Essential in Dress.” What matters is that which allows us to be “approved” and which turns us into “ladies” and “gentlemen.” B. V. D.s suggest neither sexuality nor privacy—they are what a man wears for the last perceivable stage of correctness in the club locker room. It is only natural that a considerable amount of anxiety should be generated because the marketplace is full of those who aspire to mobility but who cannot defend their origins. The marketplace of identity has to avoid the issue tackled by the great novels of social change that kept inner consciousness focused on the past. In the great line of narrative from Dickens to Lawrence and Joyce the problem is not that of achieving status but of reconciling it with one's former, inner—and true—identity. The ads of Vanity Fair promise a change of identity so complete that there will be no former self left to argue with.

The Vanity Fair Shopping Service undertakes “to leave the decision” about acquiring a new self through commodities “to Vanity Fair's judgment.” It is a judgment much less fallible in its sense of a social self than any individual's is liable to be. There are many ads like this one in magazines of the twenties, providing instructions for those on the margins of class. The marketplace had to formulate character as well as supply demand. Fitzgerald once wrote ad copy himself and was aware of the relationship between style and status: Gatsby leaves the decision about his shirts to a man in England who sends over a “selection” of things each season. Daisy understands not only the plenum of styles but the way they reach Gatsby and what they mean to him.

The ultimate promise about acquired identity is made in Vanity Fair by an ad for the La Fayette: “He Who Owns A La Fayette is envied by all who truly love fine things. Quiet, beautiful and strong, this car rules any road it travels.” It should be no surprise that after Daisy tells Gatsby indirectly that she loves him, she seeks for her own objective correlative: “You resemble the advertisement of the man. … You know the advertisement of the man—” (93). Probably not the man in the La Fayette ad, but the man whose face is drawn a thousand times a day in the art of commercial realism, a figure perfectly achieved.⁶

But even Vanity Fair has second thoughts about “progress and promise.” In the May 1922 issue, the omnipresent Hendrik Willem Van Loon had invoked “civilization” in a way that would reverberate throughout the decade.⁷ The term will come to mean a great deal to Tom Buchanan in the spring of 1922 and to those he represents. Van Loon writes that after the war, “America has suddenly been called upon to carry forward the work of civilization.” We must now provide what an exhausted Old World used to provide, “art and literature and science and music and all the other great accomplishments of the human race.” Or, as Tom confusedly puts it in his redaction of profundity, “oh, science and art and all that” (14). By “art” both mean aesthetics in the service of social stasis: realistic images with moral values. But there are some redefinitions also about “the human race.” Van Loon adds that civilization as we know it may well vanish, exactly as when “unknown hordes from unknown parts of Asia and Eastern Europe broke through the barriers of Rome and installed themselves amidst the ruins of the old Augustan cities.” The modern equivalent of these hordes is “the latest shipment of released Ellis Islanders” who will “make a new home among the neglected residences of your own grandfathers and uncles.” The issue was addressed from the other side of the aisle at exactly the same time (May 10, 1922) by the New Republic, which concluded that national identity would be changed no matter what people like Van Loon wanted. A “new” kind of “upstart half-breed Americans seem destined to rule the larger American cities for many years in spite of the discomfiture, the dismay and the ineffectual protests of the former ruling class.” It is a good description of the political-cultural dialectic—and also of Tom Buchanan and his fears.

Harper's Monthly Magazine in the early twenties had few advertisements and showed little interest in either domestic or national policy. It was very much in the genteel tradition, concerned with manners, the fiction of sensibility, various uses of Nature, the alternatives of city and country life, and the cultural responsibilities of the enlightened middle class. More than one piece in the July 1922 issue sought to be inspirational about America. But the theme so persistent in other texts finds expression here also: we were better off before times changed. The opening essay, “What Happens to Pioneers,” is about a country once untroubled by mass migrations from Europe to America—or from South to North. It insists that before the twentieth century, ownership and working of the land themselves constituted moral character. As for the settlement of the wilderness—that had been an act of national altruism. It is bad enough that the change in population from country to city-based has wrought a change in our national character—much worse is the effect of ideas about our past. A certain nameless reviewer for the New Republic (clearly infected by the spirit of Veblen and of Beard) is the villain of this piece in Harper's. That reviewer, obviously a modern materialist with no regard for the meaning of American history, has converted “The dreaming builders” of our union, who were entirely altruistic, into “real-estate speculators, usurers, merchants, brokers,” and pettifogging lawyers. The “mystic exaltation” of the Founding Fathers has been reduced to mere “pecuniary interest.” Their motive for developing the wilderness is now interpreted by moderns as being only the desire to profit from it. American history, according to such new, deracinated intellectuals, is an exact counterpart of contemporary history. There are two main sources of resentment in this piece: that the innocent past should be so distant from the corrupt present; and that it should be judged by “modern” ideas.

The July Harper's ends with the “Editor's Easy Chair” in which the reader is warned that “A man's most difficult antagonist is within himself, and the same is apt to be true of nations.” The specific issue is American national life perceived in terms (“anxieties,” loss of “confidence,” and of “balance”) that are clearly not political but moral-psychological. This kind of transference is one of the great modes of periodical literature and of the entire enterprise of social commentary. There are some good reasons for the public being addressed as if it were in a continual state of moral crisis. In an age of limited government there are necessarily limited expectations. It is rare for the editorialists of the early twenties to appeal to state or federal agencies. They sermonize instead. And they persist in understanding national issues as if they were moral issues. This is as true of Irving Babbitt as it is of Tom Buchanan. It is as if national character were perceived as an enlarged form of individual character. Within that tradition the editor of Harper's looks back at the nineteenth century, and says that “the old way” of doing things “has not worked well” for us. The truth may be that twentieth-century problems are not amenable to nineteenth-century solutions. There is an unbridgeable distance between our history and our selves.

If we are to judge from this limited sample, public debate on the subject of true Americanism was mournful and confused. As for American “civilization,” that debate was even angrier and uglier than Tom Buchanan's. The term “civilization” was everywhere in use for the expression of anxiety. It was often used as a code word meaning innocent American national character before mass immigration and Emancipation—and before the loathsome effects of modernity.

During a “polite” and “pleasant” dinner on East Egg Nick Carraway unconsciously engages a national dialectic: it takes no more than saying, “You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy” (13). Nick says that he “meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way” (14). From this point on Tom Buchanan is cued to debate “civilization,” and the text begins its refraction of ideas from print. As Tom says of his current favorite book, “everybody ought to read it” (14), and the implication is that ideas do in fact circulate from texts. Fitzgerald has gone to some trouble to indicate—in a very pointed communication from Nick to the reader—that an eruption has occurred that reveals underlying truths. Beneath the surface of a “pleasant” evening is resentment, even rage if we are to judge from what seems to be its displaced forms in Tom. We get from “art” and “science” to race very quickly. There is a strange parallel between this passage and another passage published a few years before, in 1919, which also moves volcanically from “art” to “civilization.” William Winter's life of David Belasco complacently views the state of Broadway productions and then suddenly precipitates national resentments about the visible evidences for historical change:

The spirit of our country is and long has been one of pagan Materialism, infecting all branches of thought, and of unscrupulous Commercialism, infecting all branches of action. Foreign elements, alien to our institutions and ideals as to our language and our thoughts,—seditious elements, ignorant, boisterous, treacherous, and dangerous—have been introduced into our population in immense quantities, interpenetrating and contaminating it in many ways: in the face of self-evident peril and of iterated warnings and protests, immigration into the United States has been permitted during the last twenty years of about 15,000,000 persons—including vast numbers of the most undesirable order. We call ourselves a civilized nation—but civility is conspicuous in our country chiefly by its absence. Gentleness is despised. Good manners are practically extinct. Public decorum is almost unknown. We are notoriously a law-contemning people. The murder rate—the unpunished murder rate—in our country has long been a world scandal. Mob outrage is an incident of weekly occurrence among us. Our methods of business, approved and practised, are not only unscrupulous but predatory. Every public conveyance and place of resort bears witness to the general uncouthness by innumerable signs enjoining the most elemental decency. … The tone of the public mind is to a woeful extent sordid, selfish, greedy. In our great cities life is largely a semi-delirious fever of vapid purpose and paltry strife, and in their public vehicles of transportation the populace—men, women, and young girls—are herded together without the remotest observance of common decency,—mauled and jammed and packed one upon another in a manner which would not be tolerated in shipment of the helpless steer or the long-suffering swine.⁸

The suddenness of transference from “art” to “civilization” says something about the way Tom Buchanan's mind works, or fails to work. Winter clearly feels that the movement from one kind of statement about the art of theater to another kind of statement about the nature of “civilization” is appropriate and that it makes sense.

Daisy and Jordan make fun of Tom but they do not seriously challenge his ideas about civilization. In fact, when Daisy reveals her own ideas she says something of their sources. She has many doubts, and they come from “the most advanced people” who think that “everything's terrible anyhow” (17). We are faced in the right direction, invited to agree with those who in 1922 argue that life is unsatisfactory. Daisy's sources are cultural pessimists—there is a word for it, Kulturpessimismus, or the belief that modernity is without soul or public morality, and that a return to the values of the past is the only possible solution. It was a position for those opposed to the effects of democracy, in America as well as Germany. Pessimism about “civilization” was often expressed in a language strikingly similar to Tom's. In 1920 George Santayana began Character and Opinion in the United States with this assertion: “Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. A flood of barbarism from below may soon level all the fair works of our Christian ancestors, as another flood two thousand years ago levelled those of the ancients.”⁹

Related issues were not confined to a lunatic fringe, and they were heavily publicized by magazines and newspapers. In 1923 the celebrated Study of American Intelligence by McDougall and Brigham appeared, stating that “the intellectual superiority of our Nordic groups over the Alpine, Mediterranean and negro groups has been demonstrated.”¹⁰ The New York Times and the American Museum of Natural History agreed. Tom Buchanan would not have been perceived as a crank in the period from 1921 to 1923. He would have compared favorably with some members of Congress. He would have been understood as being under the respectable wing of the amateur anthropologists Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, and of George Horace Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post. A modern historian observes that Grant, a notable racist, “inspired” other writers, and that he was the focus of “sympathetic comments in the editorials of such influential publications as the New York Times and the Saturday Evening Post.”¹¹ Grant Overton's American Nights Entertainment of 1923 has much to say about national figures whose ideas are assimilated by people like Tom:

Prophecy is a very old business. It has become our habit to think of ourselves as a people without prophets; and yet there was never a time when mankind had more seers or more interesting ones. What is H. G. Wells but a prophesier, and from whom do we receive counsel if not from Mr. Chesterton? Mr. Shaw is our Job's comforter, and George Horace Lorimer, on the editorial page of Saturday Evening Post, calls us to repentance. A few years ago I had the adventure of reading Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, an impassioned proclamation of the merits of the blond Nordic race, and a lamentation over its decay. At that time such a book was in the nature of a revelation whether you gave faith to its assertions and proofs or scoffed at them. The thing that struck me was the impossibility (as it seemed to me) of any reader remaining unmoved; I thought him bound to be carried to a high pitch of enthusiastic affirmation or else roused to fierce resentment and furious denial. And so, in the event, I believe it mainly turned out. At that time, although he was the author of several books, I had not heard of Lothrop Stoddard, unless as a special writer and correspondent for magazines. It was not until April 1920, that The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy was published. Even so, attention is not readily attracted to a book of this type. Many who have since read it with excitement knew nothing of the volume until, in a speech at Birmingham, Alabama, on 26 October, 1921, President Harding said: “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's book on The Rising Tide of Color … must realise that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.”¹²

According to the Saturday Evening Post, Stoddard's work attracted “an extraordinary amount of attention” and was recognized as “the first successful attempt to present a scientific explanation of the worldwide epidemic of unrest.”¹³ He was a household name, which is probably why he is encountered in Tom's household as “this man Goddard” (14) who has written “The Rise of the Coloured Empires.”

In 1924 there was much political discourse over American character in Congress, and much argument in print. In a volume at least as well known as Santayana's, Irving Babbitt's Democracy and Leadership, the following was stated: “We are assured, indeed, that the highly heterogeneous elements that enter into our population will, like various instruments in an orchestra, merely result in a richer harmony; they will, one may reply, provided that, like an orchestra, they be properly led. Otherwise the outcome may be an unexemplified cacophony. This question of leadership is not primarily biological, but moral.”¹⁴ One admires the qualification, but the thrust of argument remains the same: pessimism over those of us who are neither Nordic nor Christian. But Babbitt was infinitely better than most on this issue: in 1925 Reader's Digest carried a Madison Grant piece from an earlier issue of the Forum, which reads as if it were designed for a Tom Buchanan who had briefly flickered into consciousness over the immigration debate. Grant's essay, “America for the Americans,” argues not only against the admission into the United States of black or yellow peoples but also of Germans, inassimilable because of their guttural speech and mannerisms (the war was not adduced). During the early twenties it was widely thought that Germans were insufficiently Nordic. Grant uses the same kind of vocabulary as Tom: “our institutions are Anglo-Saxon and can be maintained by Anglo-Saxons and by other Nordic peoples in sympathy with our culture.”¹⁵

To return to the year of the novel's events: here are two passages that may indicate what we now call intertextuality. The first is from John Higham's history of immigration. It is about a series of articles that Kenneth Roberts wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in 1920 and that appeared in book form under the title Why Europe Leaves Home in 1922. Roberts cast his findings into the framework of the Nordic theory, concluding that a continuing flood of Alpine, Mediterranean, and Semitic immigrants would inevitably produce “a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.”¹⁶ The second passage, from The Great Gatsby, seems to be a mere interlude: “Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the ‘Saturday Evening Post’—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms” (17-18).

There is action and meaning at this moment, although it would seem to be a pause in the narrative. Fitzgerald's text reminds us of the existence of other texts. The enormous, imitative enterprise of mass literacy is perceptibly within the consciousness of characters in his own text. What Tom is hearing we will never know, but we can expect that the ideas of the moment are being read to him, and that they too are soothing and uninflected. More is involved than Norman Rockwell covers.

The relationship between race and religion and culture had its critics, among them Harold Stearns, who argued against it in Civilization in the United States (1922). According to Stearns, “whatever else American civilization is, it is not Anglo-Saxon … we shall never achieve any genuine nationalistic self-consciousness as long as we allow certain financial and social minorities to persuade us that we are still an English colony.”¹⁷ But it was, by 1922, too late to sort out distinctions—the political debate over immigration from eastern and southern Europe made them easy to cloud over. Even Civilization in the United States had to acknowledge the current theory and its vocabulary. Other contributions, for example Geroid Robinson's essay on race, admit that “the attitude of both Northerners and Southerners is somewhat coloured by the fear that the blacks will eventually overrun the country.”¹⁸ The essay of Louis Reid on small towns celebrates the “true American civilization,” that is, national life before the arrival of Catholics and Jews.¹⁹ Walter Pach, who was reasonably enlightened and has been praised as an art critic by E. H. Gombrich, found himself dependent on race and religion as determinants, arguing for an “art-instinct accumulated in a race for centuries.” In the case of literature, he said that instinct belonged to “the Anglo-Saxon race.”²⁰ Stating this was the only way he could conceive of the inherent ability of Americans to produce the cultural proofs of their existence.

The March 1, 1922, issue of the New Republic carried the introductory chapter of Walter Lippmann's forthcoming Public Opinion, and in this chapter he warned the audience “that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.” Fictions might be true (or false) scientific theories; they might even be “complete hallucinations”—but they were representations of the environment that determined our responses to it. Some fictions might be beneficial—useful without being accurate—but those abroad in 1922 were apt to be neither. In Public Opinion, Lippmann describes fictions corresponding to—identical to—the theories that Tom Buchanan raises in the first and seventh chapters of The Great Gatsby.²¹ Lippmann's list of current fictions in “news” (he took special pains to distinguish “news” from “truth”) are Tom's bugbears: ancestry and American history; race and nationality; and in particular the ideology of “Anglo-Saxons.” At the heart of the Lippmann thesis is the premise that these issues, important though they may be in themselves, have become demonized by their public discussion. In both Lippmann and Fitzgerald the conveyance of ideas by print results in an intellectual tragicomedy. It is useful to see Lippmann's reaction to what Fitzgerald was to call “stale” ideas: “The more untrained a mind, the more readily it works out a theory that two things which catch its attention at the same time are causally connected. … In hating one thing violently, we readily associate with it as cause or effect most of the other things we hate or fear violently. They may have no more connection than smallpox and alehouses, or Relativity and Bolshevism, but they are bound together in the same emotion … it all culminates in the fabrication of a system of all evil, and of another which is the system of all good. Then our love of the absolute shows itself.”²² It is wise, thought-provoking, and related to one of Fitzgerald's problems in the writing of The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was no political scientist but he did need to describe the effect of political ideas upon personality and the manifestations of personality. We infer not that Tom Buchanan is either a Democrat or Republican but that within him there really is a “love of the absolute” that wants to “show itself.” In essence, psychological necessity chooses belief.

H. L. Mencken agreed to a certain extent. His was eventually the most crushing rebuttal to the fiction of Anglo-Saxon civilization. Mencken's essay on the failure of Anglo-Saxon civilization (1923) was reprinted in Prejudices: Fourth Series (1924). But as early as 1917, in an essay on Howells, Mencken had identified what others thought was the problem of American democracy as its nature: our system worked not despite but because of “the essential conflict of forces among us.”²³ In this respect Mencken was more political than either Santayana or Babbitt—and very much more political than either Pound or Eliot. The point of the 1923 essay was not only that the country needed new immigrants but that (and his essay takes on the form of a narrative) the old ones, who now called themselves natives, had failed dismally to establish any kind of “civilization” of their own. Mencken writes about the proud, vainglorious and ignorant culture-hero, or would-be culture-hero, the anxiety-ridden Anglo-Saxon whose “defeat is so palpable that it has filled him with vast alarms, and reduced him to seeking succor in grotesque and extravagant devices. In the fine arts, in the sciences and even in the more complex sorts of business the children of the later immigrants are running away from the descendants of the early settlers. … Of the Americans who have come into notice during the past fifty years as poets, as novelists, as critics, as painters, as sculptors and in the minor arts, less than half bear Anglo-Saxon names. … So in the sciences.”²⁴ Mencken's Anglo-Saxon is constitutionally a bully, hence his many acts of aggression against social change are accompanied by “desperate efforts” of “denial and concealment.” The Anglo-Saxon's “political ideas are crude and shallow. He is almost wholly devoid of esthetic feeling. The most elementary facts about the visible universe alarm him, and incite him to put them down. Educate him, make a professor of him, teach him how to express his soul, and he still remains palpably third-rate. He fears ideas almost more cravenly than he fears men. His blood, I believe, is running thin; perhaps it was not much to boast of at the start.”

As Harry E. Barnes observed in the American Mercury in 1924, the issue was very much one of “ideas” and public opinion: Madison Grant's work on the superiority of Nordic “civilization” was itself “a literary rehash of Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.” And even Grant was “progressively debased” as his book became “widely disseminated,” and decanted into Lothrop Stoddard.²⁵ By the time such ideas reach Tom Buchanan they exist in the form in which he states them.

The Anglo-Saxon fears the loss of his “civilization” and that fear is easily confused with conscience. He continually justifies what he does by the illusion of keeping faith with history. Mencken has created a character in a historical drama who responds to the issues of the moment and reminds us of the issues in Fitzgerald's text. Tom seems not only to have read many texts but to originate in them. He is obsessed with acquired ideas. So much so that he expresses a great many of them in the quarrel at the Plaza at a moment when we expect other passions of body and mind. Tom is faced with his wife's lover, with the idea of love itself, but the argument over Daisy takes the form of a lecture on Kulturbolchewismus. Tom orates about house, home, and family; about nobodies from nowhere; and about the various abominations of “the modern world” (101). His ideas have traveled a long way from Irving Babbitt and Santayana, from Grant and Stoddard to their reification by mass media. He is so confused by ideas transmitted from mind to media that he can perceive Gatsby only as an epiphenomenon of “the modern world.”²⁶ As for Daisy, to her embarrassment she realizes that Tom sees her only as part of the “institutions” he defends.

As if following a script written by H. L. Mencken, Tom discourses in the first chapter about the arts and sciences and “civilization” itself. He later comes to view Gatsby as a kind of problem in modern institutions. Tom is, like Mencken's satirized Anglo-Saxon, enormously alarmed by the “elementary facts about the visible universe”: “pretty soon the earth's going to fall into the sun—or wait a minute—it's just the opposite—the sun's getting colder every year” (92). Fitzgerald has added to Mencken's text a kind of strategic entropy of both world and mind imagining it. When Tom begins his lecture on civilization in the first chapter the reader is tempted to write him off as a crank, which is probably the wrong thing to do. It seems logical because Tom cannot convince anyone with an independent mind of his views on history or national destiny. But there are no independent minds in his household. Daisy and Jordan do not openly disagree—in fact, they go along. They find him ridiculous but acceptable. As Jordan later says, settling differences at the Plaza, “We're all white here” (101). It would appear, by the simplest kind of extension, that there are few independent minds anywhere else.

Tom agonizes over adultery and divorce. He is alarmed into reflection over race and class. He is irrational about all those who would “throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white” (101). Even a moralist must have exceptional capacities for outrage to worry about all these things. Unless, of course, his whole concept of identity were involved.²⁷ Part of that identity has been provided by association: the text introduces him as “Tom Buchanan of Chicago,” which does more than mimic society-page seriousness. He is part of a place, and his opinions are approximations of Chicago opinions. His hometown (he and Daisy try “to settle down” (61) there after their marriage) was the most racially troubled and intolerant city in the North. Industry in the early twenties encouraged a migration of black workers from Georgia and Alabama to the factories of the Midwest. It was a cause of great concern because it raised the price of labor in the South. And, of course, the migrants ran up against a new phenomenon in American life, persecution from the side that won the Civil War. In so doing, they caused a tremendous revaluation in national life. The notorious Chicago riots were caused by confrontations over jobs, housing, and beachfront recreation. The consequence was the formation of national opinion largely in favor of racism. We recall that Tom worries in the first chapter of The Great Gatsby about the white race being “dominant” and keeping “control” of its civilization (both here and abroad). He was not much different from, say, the New York Times of July 23, 1919: “The majority of Negroes in Washington before the great war, were well-behaved … most of them admitted the superiority of the white race and troubles between the two races were unheard of.”²⁸

When Tom articulates his ideas we can see some of their likely sources and understand the allusions. But Fitzgerald's text is not a tract; it is concerned with motive as well as ideology. Idea is related to act. We recall Tom's grabbing Nick's arm, bruising Daisy, and breaking Myrtle's nose, as well as his general foaming at the mouth on the subject of marriage. Tom is three-dimensional and is equipped with a number of anxieties connected to his ideas, or to his need for ideas. For example, he seems fixated upon “I” and “we.” He fears “all kinds” (81), in itself a phrase of psychological interest. He talks about “people” (who are unidentified) “sneering” at things sacred to him (101). This too seems meaningful, because the matter has been turned into psychodrama. Max Scheler's classic study of Ressentiment, written in the decade before The Great Gatsby, suggests that Fitzgerald understood the connection of idea to personality. Scheler depicts the internal language of resentment, which says to itself, “I can forgive everything, but not that you are—that you are what you are—that I am not what you are.”²⁹ There is no textual connection, but there is a clear parallel between this mode of thought and Tom's litany about Nordic selves: “I am and you are and you are and—” (14). Tom speaks a language of absolute subjectivity. He has invested his needs in ideas, which is to say in allowable aggressions. If he is in fact a representative figure then he says much for Fitzgerald's view of the cultural moment.

We enter the narrative of The Great Gatsby to the description of universe, earth, hemisphere, and ocean. Throughout the story the skies will turn, with their silent commentary on the meanings we define as history. In the summer of 1922 we have been separated from the past. Given the anemic description of his family, Nick conveys that his own past has not much to recall. We gather that from the limit on his articulation of its values. He has been given the least useful of social virtues, a kind of passive toleration. It is as if all the moral energy of the nineteenth century had dwindled into good manners.

The novel begins with mention of two important events in national consciousness, the Civil War and the Great War of 1914-18. Neither holds Nick's attention for more than a moment. Hemingway was to make a career out of recollections of his war; Fitzgerald understands things differently. For him the war is a checkpoint in history, a barrier to the influence of the past. His imagination is sociological. Nick dreams neither of the past nor of the war but rather of the new agenda of the twenties—banking and credit and investment.

The postwar world is free of the past and of its institutions, but it is not free of its own false ideas. When Tom Buchanan informs Nick and the reader that “Civilization's going to pieces” (14), he has probably never said truer words. But he is of course displaying more than he describes. He echoes a vast national debate about immigration, race, science, and art. There is something seriously wrong in America—yet it may be Tom's own class and type that is responsible. He represents a group as idle and mindless as that excoriated by Carlyle in Past and Present. There is something wrong with the immoral pursuit of wealth by historical figures like James J. Hill—except that inherited possession seems no better. Fitzgerald's rich boys often pose as guardians of tradition and often adduce a false relationship to public values.

The more we hear about “civilization” in the text and the more we experience its style and morality the more we, like Nick Carraway, make our own withdrawal from the historical moment. History in The Great Gatsby can rarely be taken at face value—perhaps it is as suspect as biography. When Tom alludes to his favorite racial or geographical or class prejudices (and when Daisy plays to them) a public dialogue is refracted. The most interesting thing about that dialogue is that many of those “advanced” people who deplore civilization in America are considerably less attractive than Tom Buchanan. He only echoes their discourse. What matters is not the specific character (if there is any) to his ideas about “science” or “art” but his reflection of a historical moment in which their discussion is more poisonous than his own. In the summer of 1922 there will be very little use in his appealing to profound texts or Daisy appealing to the most advanced people or Nick appealing to the values of the past—or the reader appealing to a larger and more confidence-inspiring set of standards beyond those governing the action. The allusive context of the novel is meant to disturb and disorient. It is as if Fitzgerald had Balzac in mind, and, describing a milieu in which all things are permitted, made it impossible for protagonists or readers to bring to bear morals and other norms.

As for the issue of “Civilization,” that was not to be adjudicated by the defenders (and inventors) of the American past. In 1924, while Fitzgerald was thinking over the story that would become The Great Gatsby, the American Mercury (April 1924) had published a sardonic study of character acquired through consumption: It was richly attentive to certain kinds of ads that showed consumers “how to rise quickly” and “how to become” something other than they were.³⁰ It noted the increased use of phrases like “wonderful,” “astounding,” “amazing” and “miraculously” applied to personal change and betterment. In the marketplace of ideas personal identity was itself to become a commodity.

Notes

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack-Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 15.

2. Frederick James Smith, “Fitzgerald, Flappers and Fame,” in The Romantic Egoists, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974), p. 79.

3. The editors feared as a consequence the domination of western Europe by a “militaristic France.” Peter Gay writes in Weimar Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1970) that the murder of Walther Rathenau was part of the celebration of the youth culture of the twenties. According to one of Rathenau's assassins, Ernest-Walter Techow, “The younger generation” was “striving for something new, hardly dreamed of. They smelled the morning air. They gathered in themselves an energy charged with the myth of the Prussian-German past, the pressure of the present and the expectation of an unknown future” (p. 87).

4. Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” p. 15.

5. In a letter to Edmund Wilson the week before the review appeared Fitzgerald admitted that Joyce had caused him to think of his own family history: “I have Ullyses [sic] from the Brick Row Bookshop & am starting it. I wish it was layed in America—there is something about middle-class Ireland that depresses me inordinately—I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked” (The Crack-Up, p. 260). To use the terminology of James R. Mellow, an “invented” life might naturally proceed from these feelings, and a heightened perception of assumed identity in others.

6. “The Unspeakable Egg,” a Fitzgerald story that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post (July 12, 1924) has the line, “he reminded her of an advertisement for a new car.” Reprinted in Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 128.

7. For a sense of Van Loon's standing see the immensely favorable review of The Story of Mankind by Charles A. Beard in the December 21, 1921, issue of The New Republic. See also the full-page ad for Van Loon's book, with many blurbs, in the February 1, 1922, issue.

8. William Winter, The Life of David Belasco, 2 vols. (New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1918) 2:424-27. If there is a solution to Winter's problem that lies in converting art to the display of domestic virtue and history to anti-modernism:

   If true civilization is to develop and live in our country, such conditions, such a spirit, such ideals, manners, and customs as are widely prevalent among us to-day, must utterly pass and cease. The one rational hope that they will so disappear lies in disseminating Education. … For that education Society must look largely to the ministry of the arts and, in particular, to the rightly conducted Theatre. … Few managers have been able to take or to understand that view of the Stage. David Belasco was one of them. It is because his administration of his “great office” has been, in the main, conducted in the spirit of a zealous public servant; because for many years he maintained as a public resort a beautiful theatre, diffusive of the atmosphere of a pleasant, well-ordered home, placing before the public many fine plays, superbly acted, and set upon the stage in a perfection of environment never surpassed anywhere and equalled only by a few of an earlier race of managers, of which he was the last, that David Belasco has, directly and indirectly, exerted an immense influence for good and is entitled to appreciative recognition, enduring celebration, and ever grateful remembrance.

9. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States (New York: Doubleday, 1956), vi.

10. Cited by Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 79.

11. John Higham, Strangers in the Land, (New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 271.

12. Grant Overton, American Nights Entertainment (New York: D. Appleton Company, George Doran Company, Doubleday, Page & Co., Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923), pp. 380-81. I am grateful to James R. Mellow for pointing this book out to me and copying out the passage cited.

13. Overton, American Nights Entertainment, pp. 382-83.

14. Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924), p. 245. Henry Adams, Henry James, Santayana, Babbitt, Eliot, and Pound are like the Kulturpessimisten of Weimar. See the account of the battle against modernity in Walter Lacquer's Weimar (New York: Perigee, 1974), pp. 78f. For this side of the Atlantic there is good recent coverage in Eric Sigg's The American T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 110f. Here is Sigg's account of Henry James on civilization versus immigration: “For James, ethnic pluralism jeopardized social order and cultural achievement. He assumed that America should and could produce art equal to that of Europe. He further assumed that American high culture would arise from distinctively American elements in the country's tradition, from shared assumptions about education, morality, and manners, and most important, from a common language used and preserved self-consciously. Immigrants offer James another instance of an American incongruity that is at least bathetic indecorum and at worst surrealist horror” (p. 129).

    See also Samuel G. Blythe's lead article “Flux,” Saturday Evening Post, August 19, 1922, pp. 3f. On political leadership Blythe says that “Politics in this country is now guerrilla warfare. It is not even that. It may best be compared to operations by bodies of indignant and disgusted citizens, in various parts of the country, without communication or ordered plan, getting together from sense of protest and going out and shooting in the dark, hoping they may hit something: but shooting anyhow. There is nothing coherent about our politics. There is nothing much articulate about it in its present state. The prime motive in all our demonstrations is protest. The actuating spirit is change.” All things are relative: Blythe has a ferocious attack on “the increasing interference of government in private affairs.” Liberals distrusted government performance; conservatives like Blythe distrusted its powers, further reasons for the constant adjuration to Americans to be more moral and more Christian.

15. Madison Grant, “America for the Americans,” Reader's Digest (October 1925) 367-68.

16. Higham, Strangers in the Land, p. 273.

17. Harold E. Stearns, ed., Civilization in the United States (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), vii.

18. Ibid., p. 355.

19. Ibid., p. 295.

20. Ibid., p. 228.

21. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 317-65.

22. Ibid., pp. 154-56. See the powerful piece by Augustus Thomas, “The Print of My Remembrance, Saturday Evening Post, July 8, 1922, pp. 24f. Thomas apologizes for writing in a good part for a charitable Jewish physician in As A Man Thinks, a one-act play at the Lambs, “instead of having him ridiculed as he generally was in the theater.” Thomas attributes racial hatred to the Jewish willingness to work as perceived by the more neglectful and lazy “Anglo-Saxon temperament” (94). Even between liberals and conservatives—racism aside—the debate on cultural differences was framed in terms of the distinction between “Anglo-Saxon” and the rest.

23. H. L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 491.

24. Ibid., pp. 171-77.

25. See “The Drool Method in History,” American Mercury, January 1924, pp. 31f.

26. See Perrett, America in the Twenties, pp. 159-60: “In 1890 there had been one divorce for every seventeen marriages; by the late twenties there was one for every six … novels, plays, and works of social criticism steadily derided marriage as an outmoded institution, something the modern world could well do without. There were confident predictions that marriage would die out before the end of the century.”

27. I disagree with the view that American history is present in the text only to the extent that the “materialism” of “the modern American upper class” betrays our national origins. (See Kermit W. Moyer, “The Great Gatsby: Fitzgerald's Meditation on American History,” in Critical Essays on F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, ed. Scott Donaldson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), pp. 215f. Tom is said to have a “materialist orientation” and “Daisy represents the materialism of her class.” But Tom and Daisy are rarely seen evaluating things according to cost nor do they judge experience by material standards. Tom's mind is directed by texts and ideas that, far from having anything to do with materialism, are perfervid distortions of idealism.

28. Cited by Perrett in America in the Twenties, p. 88.

29. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (Glencoe: Free Press, 1961), p. 52. Das Ressentment appeared in 1915.

30. “American Boobology: A Survey of Current National Advertising Campaigns,” American Mercury, April 1924, pp. 457-58.