the great gatsby and the roaring 20s research paper

• Corpus ID: 166312271

The Great Gatsby as a Portrayal of American Society during the Roaring Twenties

• Christine Czechová
• Published 10 November 2017

20 References

The great gatsby., desire’s second act: “race” and the great gatsby’s cynical americanism, fitzgerald's brave new world, only yesterday : an informal history of the 1920's, f. scott fitzgerald's evolving american dream: the "pursuit of happiness" in gatsby, tender is the night, and the last tycoon, the nineteenth amendment and women's equality, the american people: creating a nation and a society, prohibition: thirteen years that changed america, making america: a history of the united states, prosperity's child: some thoughts on the flapper, related papers.

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American Dreaming: Really Reading The Great Gatsby

William e. cain.

Department of English, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02481 USA

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is one of the best known and most widely read and taught novels in American literature. It is so familiar that even those who have not read it believe that they have and take for granted that they know about its main character and theme of the American Dream. We need to approach The Great Gatsby as if it were new and really read it, paying close attention to Fitzgerald’s literary language. His novel gives us a vivid depiction of and insight into income inequality as it existed in the 1920s and, by extension, as it exists today, when the American Dream is even more limited to the fortunate few, not within reach of the many. When we really read The Great Gatsby , we perceive and understand the American dimension of the novel and appreciate, too, the global range and relevance that in it Fitzgerald has achieved. It is a great American book and a great book of world literature.

It is odd that we connect F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to the American Dream, for this dream is one of equal opportunity, and the celebration of material well-being and personal success, of contentment and happiness, whereas the novel concludes with the demise of its deluded protagonist, shot dead in a swimming pool by a deranged husband who believes that Gatsby killed his wife by smashing into her in his fancy car.

We honor and profess to believe in the American Dream, a dream that we say the nation’s history has shown to be a reality for many millions. Those born at the bottom, but who possess spirit, pluck, and determination, can rise to prosperity and personal fulfillment; immigrants, unable to speak English, can learn the language and acquire education, find employment, marry, buy a home, have children, lead decent lives in safe neighborhoods, vote in democratic elections, and enjoy a comfortable retirement. But the prime place accorded to The Great Gatsby in the literary canon suggests that Americans have known all along that the American Dream is largely myth, ideology, propaganda.

Reading The Great Gatsby is intended, it appears, as an indoctrination in reverse: we require young people to study Fitzgerald’s novel in high school and college courses so they realize, before embarking on their careers, that the American Dream they have heard about and will hear about, is beyond their reach. Even if they fulfill their dreams and gain their desires in material terms, they will not be happy.

When we think in this disenchanted way about The Great Gatsby , published in 1925, we might keep in mind that one of the most influential works of cultural history in this period was Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West , two volumes, 1918–1922. In a letter, June 6, 1940, Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, that he had read Spengler “the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby and I don’t think I ever quite recovered from him.”

This could not literally have been the case: Fitzgerald was unable to read German and an English translation only became available in 1926, the year after The Great Gatsby ’s publication. But in the early to mid-1920s, there were articles and essays in English about Spengler that Fitzgerald could have read, and soon thereafter he may have turned to the book itself.

Later in the decade, Time magazine declared: “When the first volume of The Decline of the West appeared in Germany a few years ago, thousands of copies were sold. Cultivated European discourse quickly became Spengler-saturated. Spenglerism spurted from the pens of countless disciples. It was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathize or revolt. It still remains so” (December 10, 1928). Retrospectively, Fitzgerald could have felt that he must have been reading Spengler in 1924–1925 because this German author’s theory of historical degeneration matched the mood that pervades The Great Gatsby .

The Decline of the West is a perplexing, lurid text, imposing in manner, epic in scale, intermittently provocative, tedious as a whole. It is impossible to know which of its many sections seized Fitzgerald, but the pages on “money” are a potent corollary to his inquiry into American wealth: we can imagine Fitzgerald being engaged by them.

Spengler comments on the growth and expansion of the town, the city, and the accumulation and centrality of money there:

As soon as the market has become the town, it is no longer a question of mere centers for streams of goods traversing a purely peasant landscape, but of a second world within the walls, for which the merely producing life “out there” is nothing but object and means, and out of which another stream begins to circle. The decisive point is this—the true urban man is not a producer in the prime terrene sense. He has not the inward linkage with soil or with the goods that pass through his hands. He does not live with these, but looks at them from outside and appraises them in relation to his own life-upkeep…. In place of thinking in goods, we have thinking in money . (Vol. 2, ch. 13; Spengler’s italics)

About the enthralling Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby says, “Her voice is full of money,” to which the narrator Nick Carraway responds, “That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it” (120; New York: Scribner trade paperback, 2004).

It is not charm alone that money supplies. It also engenders callous indifference; after Gatsby’s death, Nick says about Tom Buchanan and Daisy: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (179).

Wealth has hardened Tom and Daisy. They are careless, heedless, at a secure and indifferent distance from trouble, never facing the necessity to pay attention or minister to others. It is not that they are thoughtless but, rather, that they “think in money.”

About money, Spengler continues:

As the seat of this thinking, the city becomes the money-market, the center of values, and a stream of money-values begins to infuse, intellectualize, and command the stream of goods…. Only by attuning ourselves exactly to the spirit and economic outlook of the true townsman can we realize what they mean. He works not for needs, but for sales, for money. The business view gradually infuses itself into every kind of activity. At the beginning a man was wealthy because he was powerful—now he is powerful because he has money. (Vol. 2, ch. 14)

Tom does and does not fit Spengler’s discourse, for, though wealthy, he has inherited his money: he has no vocation or career and has not made anything. Tom and Daisy are profligate and irresponsible, leading lives that consist, in Nick’s phrase, of being “rich together” (6).

Tom is a formidable physical specimen, as Fitzgerald’s first description of him, through Nick, attests:

He was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. (7)

Tom inhabits a domineering body; his money is embedded in a proto-fascist mass of muscle. He vents a thuggish cruelty, as when he lashes out at his mistress Myrtle Wilson: “Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand” (37).

Fitzgerald was not a philosopher or cultural historian intent on composing encyclopedic arguments. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye, Whittaker Chambers, Henry Kissinger: these are among the figures, very different from Fitzgerald, whom Spengler influenced. But it is noteworthy that Fitzgerald sent his letter to Perkins, invoking Spengler, in June 1940. His career was faltering, and his effort to thrive as a Hollywood screenwriter was failing. The nation remained afflicted by the Great Depression’s tough times (unemployment was 15%), and the world was at war, with Hitler on the march across western Europe.

The Dunkirk evacuation was the first week of June. On June 10, the day of Fitzgerald’s letter to Perkins, Mussolini took Italy into the war as an ally of Germany. On this same day, the headline of the New York Times was: “Nazi Tanks Now Within 35 Miles of Paris.” The German army entered Paris on June 14, and France surrendered on June 22.

The literary critic Maureen Corrigan has stated: “ The Great Gatsby is the greatest … Our Greatest American Novel” ( So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures , 2014). Like others, she relates it to the American Dream, to American ideas and categories. Yet so reflexive has this line of response become that it tends to operate at a remove from Fitzgerald’s line-by-line writing. If we aim to understand the rich American resonance of The Great Gatsby , its Spengler-like dimension, and, ultimately, its universal range of reference, its impact on readers all across the globe, we must really read it.

That we should really read The Great Gatsby : this sounds obvious. But do we do it? The Great Gatsby is a book that we assume we already are familiar with, that (so we dimly recall) was assigned to us long ago in high school, that we tell ourselves we must have read. It is akin to Moby-Dick , Uncle Tom’s Cabin , Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , Catch-22, and other books that we know, or know about, even if we are not intimate with them or in fact have not actually read them. What we need to do, is to pause, take a breath, and approach Fitzgerald’s novel as if it were new to us.

For instance, on the first night that Nick attends one of Gatsby’s parties, he and his companion Jordan Baker intersect with “two girls in twin yellow dresses” who had met Jordan a month ago:

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. (43)

This passage has the playful exuberance that we associate with Dickens, but it is more concise, subtle, and fleeting in its surreal, fantastical quality. We are invited to imagine the moon emerging like a felicitous treat from one of the caterer’s baskets, and we watch the tray dawdle in the air as if on its own. This is Fitzgerald’s evocation of the magic, unreality, and impossibility of Gatsby’s project to reconnect with Daisy. He gives us a controlled rhythm of sentences that amusingly climaxes with the three-man Mr. Mumble.

After a date with Jordan, Nick returns to his modest house: “When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar” (81). Fitzgerald is presenting an ostentatious effect—a house seemingly on fire, the peninsula blazing, and another house lit up from top to bottom. Yet the word “unreal” exposes the illusory nature of the scene. It is amazing and not real, majestic and unnerving testimony to Gatsby’s imagination, to his yearning to journey backward in time so that he can rewrite the narrative of his and Daisy’s lives. Such a keen image: the light sparking “glints,” quick flashes, on the wires.

The next day is the date for the afternoon tea that Nick has arranged for Gatsby’s meeting with Daisy. As always, in Fitzgerald’s description and dialogue there are bewitching phrases and images: “The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist, through which occasional thin drops swam like dew” (84). Then, Daisy arrives:

“Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?” The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car. “Are you in love with me,” she said low in my ear. “Or why did I have to come alone?” (85)

Fitzgerald catches the coy theatricality in Daisy’s sense of herself. She knows how flirtatious she is, and she performs her attractiveness for Nick’s enjoyment. It is pleasing to him to observe the performance even as he is aware that Daisy knows (and knows that he knows) that he is not in love with her. At the same time, Daisy’s quickness at producing this impression intimates her fragility, vulnerability, aloneness. Who is Daisy when she is not on stage? Who is she really?

Gatsby, Nick, and Daisy enter and wander through Gatsby’s opulent mansion: “If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock” (92). Green is the color of life, renewal, nature, and energy; it is associated with growth, harmony, freshness, safety, fertility, and the environment. But green is also associated with money, finance, banking, ambition, greed, jealousy, and Wall Street. This duality makes green the appropriate color for the light that Gatsby has gazed at: it has become a symbol for him, at a distance yet clandestinely close, his secret. The mist implies more than Gatsby realizes. Now at last, he is with Daisy. But how clearly is he seeing her?

“Your home”: Gatsby does not register the implications of his words. Tom is a brute, but he is Daisy’s husband, and they have a child. Their luxurious, wasteful lifestyle, and Tom’s addiction to adultery: the cozy connotations of “home” do not flow from this family. But it is a family and they do have a home. This is the structure and history that Gatsby thinks he can blot out.

Fitzgerald’s next lines convey the depletion in Gatsby even as, at this moment, he has Daisy nearby and is making contact with her body:

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one. (92-93)

Is Gatsby feeling the self-questioning emotions that Nick attributes to him? “Possibly it had occurred to him”: this brooding reflection on Nick’s part may disclose more about him than it does about Gatsby. Fitzgerald is communicating to us Gatsby’s glamor and Nick’s ambivalent interpretation of it, his projection from himself into the American dreamer whom he scrutinizes with fascination and disapproval.

Then, as the chapter draws to a close, the peculiar Mr. Ewing Klipspringer plays the piano:

In the morning In the evening, Ain’t we got fun— Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air. One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer The rich get richer and the poor get—children . In the meantime, In between time— (95)

The tune accents the contrast between rich and poor, and combines the intonation of a loud wind and a counter-intuitive, faintly sounding thunder. Fitzgerald gives us once again the imagery of light and electricity, and we hear in Nick’s voice that he is being mesmerized by a romantic, wistful imagination of his own.

Nick then turns to Gatsby, who has on this fateful day reunited with Daisy at last:

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart. (95-96)

This sounds dead-on about Gatsby, including his magnitude as a dreamer—the word “colossal” appears a second time. Yet we should ask how much Nick’s response is the result of his own desires, hopes, and doubts. He is a reader as much as we are, a reader of Gatsby who is struggling to understand this fabulously rich man who is captivating and mysterious, at once intriguing and absurd.

Nick reports Gatsby’s thoughts and feelings. Is this perception or, again, is it projection? He sees bewilderment in the face and infers (“as though”) that it signifies Gatsby’s uncertainty. The exclamation “almost five years” tells us what Gatsby and Nick, both of them, are likely to be marveling at. “There must have been,” Nick surmises: this is his interpretation of, his insistence on, the meaning for Gatsby of the reunion with Daisy. Nick says that Gatsby’s dream about her and about himself and her as one, his “illusion,” was so immense that, surely, she must have fallen short of embodying it. “Tumbled” means to fall suddenly and helplessly; a sudden downfall, overthrow, or defeat. This is the verb that Fitzgerald ties to Daisy here, while he connects Gatsby to “thrown himself,” which implies someone who is passionate and, also, out of control, desperate.

“Every bright feather that drifted”—as if Gatsby were so transfixed that he creatively works with the merest wisps that flutter by. “No amount of fire or freshness…”: Fitzgerald could have done without this sentence. It could feel tacked on, a sudden shift from the focus on Gatsby himself. But Fitzgerald deploys the sentence to point to Nick as an interpreter who is stating the lesson that Gatsby’s dream illuminates for Nick himself: “As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed—that voice was a deathless song” (96).

Fitzgerald was an avid reader of poetry, especially Keats and Shelley and others of the Romantic and Victorian periods. Here, he may be alluding to the phrase “deathless song” as Rudyard Kipling uses it in “The Last of the Light Brigade” (1891), which is itself a response to and revision of Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854). Kipling’s poem describes the fate of the neglected survivors: “Though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.” Gatsby served in combat in World War I, carnage and death enveloping him, entranced by the dream of re-crossing the Atlantic to recover Daisy. Nick tells us what he sees as he looks at Gatsby and Daisy, but he cannot hear her words. Fitzgerald could have written, “The voice…,” but instead he writes, “I think that…,” again dramatizing the impact of this moment on Nick, the observer.

Fitzgerald brings the chapter to a close:

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together. (96)

Gatsby and Daisy are reunited; Nick is forgotten, isolated from them, the detail of the falling rain calling attention to his sense of forlorn separateness from them. “Intense life” is a compact expressive term for his perception of this couple’s exhilarating intimacy. It voices the feeling of being alive at the highest degree that dreamers long for, the dream for them becoming incredibly true. This intense life is not in Nick himself. It is in his realization of a vital presence, overwhelming (“a rush of emotion”), miraculous, perhaps too great to be sustained for long, in Gatsby and Daisy. He is on the outside.

When we read The Great Gatsby , we tend to highlight Gatsby and his pursuit of Daisy, and the conflict that arises between him and Tom Buchanan—two wealthy men, each determined to defeat his rival and claim exclusive ownership of the beautiful woman. But Fitzgerald chose a first-person narrator, and, in certain respects, Nick is the most interesting of the novel’s characters.

The action of the story that Nick is telling took place in June–August 1922, and it is now two years later. Much time has passed, and he is back home in the Midwest. We might consider how much we could recall of a stretch of incidents and persons, spanning three months, that occurred two years earlier. How trustworthy would our memory be? Would we be creating—not so much remembering as inventing—as we reached backward in time to recollect our own and others’ words and actions and relationships?

When we really read The Great Gatsby , we should devote attention to Nick, to his dreams (or their absence), and to his social and economic position. Nick, we learn, is a Yale graduate and a veteran of the war. At the outset, his tone is sometimes self-indulgently clever and sarcastic, irritating, even as all the while he—that is, the astute artist Fitzgerald—is revealing his own entitled background and fine fortune.

Nick is not from a very wealthy family, but he is not from a poor one, either:

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today. (3)

Nick says that the family tradition is that they descend from a line of Scottish peers, a detail that he mentions with irony but that, at the same time, he did not need to mention at all. He has pride in his origins, his status and distinction, which he downplays and is wry about, but which matters to him.

The Carraways were immigrants, generations ago; they are not newly arrived on East coast shores. This is more than a family; in an American context, with its more compressed time-frame, it is a clan, a line. The founder of this family-line must have achieved a measure of success, his American Dream, because when the Civil War threatened him, he had the money to buy an exemption from service in the Union army. He paid a substitute to risk mutilation or death in his place.

After the war, Nick was restless and, unlike the pioneers who journeyed westward, he moved in the opposite direction:

I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, ‘Why ye—es’ with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two. (3)

Nick is somewhat cavalier about turning to the bond business. He is not single-minded or ambitious, not motivated by a burning dream of his own. The fact that everybody he knew was in the bond business tells us about the types of people he and his supportive family are familiar with. Nick then headed East, with a propitious advantage not available to others: his father agreed to finance him for a year.

Periodically, Nick refers to the work he does, the people with whom he interacts, and his attitude toward them:

I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names and lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away. (56)

We hear Nick’s distaste as he reports that he consorted with clerks. He had a sexual affair; we do not know anything about it or even the girl’s name—she is only a “girl,” not a woman. Her brother suspected that Nick would take sexual advantage of his sister and then would dispense with her. Nick’s blithe tone of voice implies that indeed he would do something like this. To him, this young woman was merely a fling.

Nick adds that he “took dinner usually at the Yale Club,” an experience he says he did not enjoy. But, nonetheless, he is a member of this club. Further on, Nick says that Jay Gatsby, then James Gatz, had begun his studies at “the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota,” but had left it after just two weeks (99). It is not only the very wealthy Tom Buchanan who benefits from privilege, but so does the Ivy League graduate and Yale Club member Nick.

Later, Nick says: “The next April [1920] Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in Deauville and then they came back to Chicago to settle down” (77). Nick has the means to travel abroad and sojourn in resort towns on the French Riviera and in Normandy. He is among the fortunate few.

Nick’s family, then, is prominent and well-to-do. Tom’s family is hugely rich; Daisy’s family has social standing and money. As for Gatsby, born in North Dakota: “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all” (98). Perhaps this is the trait in Gatsby that for Fitzgerald defines him as an American Dreamer—imagination. It is imagination and tenacity, even ruthlessness, the willingness not only to move beyond one’s origins but also to deny them. The greatest American dreamers say Yes, but their power comes first from saying No.

This is the insight that Fitzgerald, writing during and about the 1920s, establishes and explores. The American Dreamer, as exemplified in the charismatic, crazy Gatsby, strives for success, for self-realization, rushing forward. But this Dream is propelled by the dreamer’s disavowal of his or her past, the refusal to be that person: I cannot accept these parents, this upbringing. Who I am, is intolerable to me, and I will not endure my existence in this paltry life: I will become someone else.

When Fitzgerald in the 1920s was describing Gatsby’s dream, what were the conditions of American life that he witnessed? What was happening all around him?

In the aftermath of the war, the U.S. economy in 1920–1921 had tumbled into a depression, especially in agriculture; the price of wheat plummeted by 50%, and cotton by 75%. The unemployment rate hit 11.7% in 1921. But, in a spectacular turnaround, it dropped to 6.7% by the following year and was down to 2.4% by 1923.

During the 1920s, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) increased by 40%; annual per capita income did also, rising by 30%. As the scholar Robert A. Divine has noted: “the American people by the 1920s enjoyed the highest standard of living of any nation on earth.” Propelled by commerce, industry, banking, and the stock market, the economy boomed from 1922 t0 1927 at a growth rate of 7% per year. The U.S. accounted for nearly 50% of the world’s industrial output.

Many Americans at last had discretionary income, and, from shrewd marketers, they were receiving nonstop guidance about how to spend it. The historians George B. Tindall & David E. Shi explain: “More people than ever before had the money and leisure to taste of the affluent society, and a growing advertising industry fueled its appetites. By the mid-1920s, advertising had become both a major enterprise with a volume of $3.5 billion [$51 billion today] and a major institution of social control.”

During the spending sprees of the 1920s, Americans could purchase cameras, wrist-watches, washing machines, and much else. From 1922 to 1929, the number of telephones doubled—the word “telephone” occurs nineteen times in The Great Gatsby ; the number of radios increased from 60,000 to 10 million.  By 1925, "50 million people a week went to the movies--the equivalent of half the nation's population" (Steven Mintz and Randy Roberts, Hollywood's America , 4th ed., 2010).  

Nick and Tom attended Yale. Gatsby spent some weeks at Oxford. Daisy, meanwhile: we hear nothing about her education (which may have been entirely at home, with tutors). She has no interests other than travel and conspicuous consumption and display. The action of the novel takes place in 1922; the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote, was ratified in August 1920. There is no indication that this means anything to Daisy.

During the 1920s,women began to benefit from greater freedom. Divorce, for example, became easier. In 1880, 1 in every 21 marriages ended in divorce; in 1924, it was 1 in 7. As the historian Irwin Unger has noted, in 1913 a typical woman’s outfit consumed 19.5 yards of cloth; in 1925, it required only seven yards. The ever-increasing popularity of movies and magazines also led to more attention to the right and best types of female behavior and appearance. As another historian, Jane Bailey, has said:

By 1920, hemlines were raised to below the knee; long curls gave way to short “bobbed” haircuts. Pleasure-seeking “flappers” (an English term once applied to prostitutes) drank, danced, and smoked their way through life. The heightened emphasis on female sexuality was not entirely emancipatory, however. As movies and magazines became more popular, standardized ideals of physical attractiveness took root. Sales of cosmetics increased from $17 million in 1914 to $141 million in 1925, as the goal of achieving perpetual youthfulness underwrote a cult of beauty and consumption. Flappers’ rejection of curves led to women binding their breasts and dieting to look boyish. The bathroom scale first appeared on the scene in the 1920s, and cigarette ads targeted women with such slogans as “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.”

Daisy is slender, and she smokes. She also drinks alcohol, though, it seems, not to excess. This is in contrast to Jordan Baker’s account of Daisy’s drunken state on the evening before her marriage to Tom. Too late, Gatsby notified her that he was returning to the United States; by then committed to Tom, she became “drunk as a monkey” (76).

This, in the story, was in June 1919. Prohibition went into effect in 1920: it was illegal to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the consumption of alcohol, overall, declined. But drinking was common, and fashionable, for the middle and upper classes; at the expensive Plaza Hotel, Tom takes out a bottle of whiskey, and Daisy offers to make him a mint julep (129). Robert A. Divine points out that “bootleggers annually took in nearly $2 billion [$29.4 billion today], about two percent of the gross national product.” Gatsby is a bootlegger, a criminal: that is how he has amassed his fortune, supplemented by shady financial dealings with the gambler and gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.

The 1920s also marked the boom of the automobile-industry. Henry Ford had said: “I am going to democratize the automobile. When I’m through everybody will be able to afford one, and just about everyone will have one.” When Ford’s Model T was introduced in the early 1900s, its cost was $1000; in 1927, the cost of the Model A, which replaced the Model T, was $300. By 1929, there were 25 million registered passenger vehicles.

Automobiles abound in Fitzgerald’s book, and Gatsby’s car is the aristocrat among them, a radiant vehicle known to all:

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town. (64)

Tom and Daisy have showy cars—and a chauffeur drives her to the tea at Nick’s where she meets Gatsby (85). Meanwhile, the ineffectual gas-station man George Wilson dreams that Tom will bestow on him a car that the wealthy Buchanans intend to get rid of; he appeals to Tom, reminds him, and in response Tom barks at him in annoyance.

A monument to 1920s’ opulence and excess, there is, furthermore, Gatsby’s prodigious house, to the right of Nick’s place: “The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden” (5). Nick also visits the Buchanan residence:

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch. (6)

Fitzgerald foregrounds Tom’s truculent, conquest-seeking sexuality. Later, we learn that he and Daisy left Chicago for this massive mansion in the East because of one of his sexual escapades (131).

The lifestyles of the rich and famous are maintained by innumerable workers—drivers, cooks, waiters, gardeners, servants. Fitzgerald makes this crucial point often, as here, about Gatsby’s elaborate parties: “Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulp- less halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb” (39–40). The butler, dehumanized, depersonalized, has been reduced to a thumb. Gatsby does not give him a thought. This mansion-owner with the Midas touch pays no more heed to his staff’s mind-numbing routines than do the Buchanans.

Fitzgerald perceived that the 1920s economy was making American a new gilded age. At the beginning of the decade, President Warren G. Harding’s principal cabinet member was Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon, who cut personal income taxes to a maximum rate of 20%, lowered the estate tax, and repealed the gift tax. He also implemented steep tariffs and slashed federal spending. Loyalists of big business were appointed to regulatory boards and agencies. Corporate profits and stock dividends soared, rising far more rapidly than did the wages of workers.

Speaking in 1928 during his presidential campaign, Herbert Hoover declared: “We in America today are nearer to the financial triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land. The poor man is vanishing from us. Under the Republican system, our industrial output has increased as never before, and our wages have grown steadily in buying power.”

Poor people were vanishing because no one was bothering to look for them. Workers were losing power, and labor unions—a force during the era of Eugene V. Debs and the Socialists and International Workers of the World—suffered a falling off in their ranks. The historians Tindall and Shi point out: “Prosperity, propaganda, welfare capitalism [i.e., bonuses, pensions, health and recreational activities in the workplace], and active hostility, combined to cause union membership to drop from about 5 million in 1920 to 3.5 million in 1929.”

Farmers had to deal with unstable prices, deep debts, foreclosures, and bankruptcies. Farm exports fell as agriculture in Europe was restored after the war; farm income in 1919 was 22 billion; in 1929, 13 billion.

What about African Americans? Nick refers to them several times, e.g., “As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry” (69). In 1920s New York City, few African Americans were being escorted in limousines with white men as their drivers. Most were sharecroppers in the South, under the sway of white landowners. Falling prices for crops hurt them badly, and for many the 1920s were harsh and unforgiving.

Hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and other workers lost their jobs during this decade. Many African-Americans in the South migrated northward to New York, Chicago, Detroit, and other cities. They found employment but of an uneven and inadequate kind. Much of the work they did was in the lowest-paying jobs; and they lived in segregated areas, in inferior-quality housing.

As for other groups:

A 1928 report on the condition of Native Americans found that half owned less than $500 and that 71 percent lived on less than $200 a year. Mexican Americans, too, had failed to share in the prosperity. During the 1920s, each year 25,000 Mexicans migrated to the United States. Most lived in conditions of extreme poverty. In Los Angeles the infant mortality rate was five times higher than the rate for Anglos, and most homes lacked toilets. A survey found that a substantial number of Mexican Americans had virtually no meat or fresh vegetables in their diet; 40 percent said that they could not afford to give their children milk. ( Digital American History, University of Houston)

By 1929, the top 1% of the population owned 19% of all personal wealth. The top 5 % owned 34%. Only the top 10 percent owned stocks. This was a decade of extreme income inequality, as Fitzgerald confirms. There are the old money Buchanans, the new money Gatsby, the bond-businessman Nick who is subsidized by his father; and then, on the other hand, there is the floundering, beaten-down George Wilson, and, among many others alongside or lower down from him, the “Finn” who works in Nick’s house as a maid—he never refers to her by name.

In 1929, economists concluded that a family of four needed $2000 per year [$29,000 today] for its basic necessities. Even during this prosperous period, approximately 50% of American families did not reach this level of income. “The top 0.1 percent of American families in 1929 had an aggregate income equal to that of the bottom 42 percent” (Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression , 1984).

Also in 1929, the stock market crashed, from 452 in September to 52 in July 1932. Banks failed; farmers lost their lands; factories and mines came to a stop. Investments and savings were wiped out. Farm income fell by 50%. Foreign trade fell by 66%. By 1932, personal income had declined by more than 50 %. Unemployment was 25%. In the automobile industry, production by 1932 fell to 25% of the 1929 total; the number of automobile workers fell to 40% of the 1929 total. By 1931–1932, the average family income had collapsed to $1350 per year. There was no safety net.

For much of the nation, financial prosperity and security were not achievable in the 1920s, and by the 1930s, except for the very fortunate, it had disappeared. So much for the American Dream.

But we should inquire into this American Dream even more, this term to which The Great Gatsby is always linked. For it was in circulation not only during the 1920s, but earlier as well. I have not been able to locate any book that has “American Dream” in its title in the date range 1800 to 1930. From 2000 to the present, by contrast, there are more than one hundred. Still, the phrase does appear in various texts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the implication is that people know what it means.

A notable example is in an editorial in the Montgomery Advertiser , February 1, 1916, urging the nation to be militantly ready and prepared for war: “If the American idea, the American hope, the American Dream, and the structures which Americans have erected, are not worth fighting for to maintain and protect, they were not worth fighting for to establish.”

Zelda Sayre was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1900; her father, Anthony Dickinson Sayre (1858–1931), a lawyer, jurist, and Democratic legislator, was appointed in 1909 to the State Supreme Court. I am sure that he read the Montgomery Advertiser ; possibly he perused this editorial on a day when his daughter was at the breakfast table or in the living room with him.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, commissioned as a second lieutenant, met Zelda in Montgomery in July 1918; this is altered slightly, but not significantly, in the novel—Gatsby meets Daisy in August 1917, in Louisville, Kentucky. Fitzgerald hence could feel the fervor of Gatsby’s dream because he had felt it strongly in himself. He craved success as a writer because through it he believed he could win Zelda. His first novel, This Side of Paradise , was published on March 26, 1920; one week later, he and Zelda were married. Age twenty-four, Fitzgerald had obtained the object that had enchanted him.

By the early 1950s, literary critics and scholars were regularly invoking “the American Dream” in relation to The Great Gatsby , as did, for instance, Marius Bewley: “Critics of Scott Fitzgerald tend to agree that The Great Gatsby is somehow a commentary on that elusive phrase, the American Dream. The assumption seems to be that Fitzgerald approved.” To the contrary, says Bewley: “ The Great Gatsby offers some of the severest and closest criticism of the American dream that our literature affords…. The theme of Gatsby is the withering of the American dream” (“Scott Fitzgerald’s Criticism of America,” Sewanee Review , Spring 1954).

The American Dream as aspiration and illusion had gained currency in the aftermath of World War II and from the surge in the economy that boosted consumption in the 1950s. The economy grew during this decade by 37%, and the median American family experienced an increase in purchasing power of 30%. Unemployment was low, inflation was low.

The critic Sarah Churchwell says: “It is not a coincidence that The Great Gatsby began to be widely hailed as a masterpiece in America during the 1950s, as the American dream took hold once more, and the nation was once again absorbed in chasing the green light of economic and material success” ( Careless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby , 2013). Yet Bewley refers to “withering,” implying that the Dream, as portrayed by Fitzgerald, had in some earlier era flowered and flourished but had now shriveled and wizened.

When was this era? The American Dream was not widespread in the 1920s, and it became even more restricted during the Great Depression decade. If there is a single main source for the term, it is James Truslow Adams’s The Epic of America , published in 1931, six years after The Great Gatsby, and two years into the Great Depression, the high times for the fortunate in the 1920s shattered.

Adams (1878–1949), born in Brooklyn, was an excellent student in high school and college, but he faltered in his graduate studies in philosophy and history and found little satisfaction in publishing and finance. While living in New York with his father and sister, Adams began to devote his time and energy to the writing of history, based in primary sources, rendered in an appealing, accessible style. Adams’s three-volume survey of the settlement of New England and its history to 1850 was a major success, and for this project and other books in the 1920s he was widely praised.

Adams based The Epic of America on his conviction that self-improvement and self-formation were the motive forces in American history. Adams maintains that there has always been:

… the American dream , that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to his ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper-classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. (Adams’s italics)

He continues: “It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.”

Adams states that the American Dream is more than money and materialism:

No, the American dream that has lured tens of millions of all nations to our shores in the past century has not been a dream of merely material plenty, though that has doubtless counted heavily. It has been much more than that. It has been a dream of being able to grow to fullest development as man and woman, unhampered by the barriers which had slowly been erected in older civilizations, unrepressed by social orders which had developed for the benefit of classes rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. And that dream has been realized more fully in actual life here than anywhere else, though very imperfectly even among ourselves.

It has been a magnificent epic and dream, Adams affirms. But he then asks, what about the American Dream at present and in the future?

If the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves. If we are to achieve a richer and fuller life for all, they have got to know what such an achievement implies. In a modern industrial State, an economic base is essential for all. We point with pride to our “national income,” but the nation is only an aggregate of individual men and women, and when we turn from the single figure of total income to the incomes of individuals, we find a very marked injustice in its distribution.

The concern that Adams expresses is about income inequality—he saw it in the 1920s, and again in the Great Depression decade. In this same year, 1931, looking backward, Fitzgerald wrote in an essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age”:

It ended two years ago, because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls. But the moralizing is easy now and it was pleasant to be in one’s twenties in such a certain and unworried time.

The upper tenth troubles Adams too, as he declares in a verdict that applies to the 1920s, the 1950s—and to where we are in the twenty-first century:

There is no reason why wealth, which is a social product, should not be more equitably controlled and distributed in the interests of society. A system that steadily increases the gulf between the ordinary man and the super-rich, that permits the resources of society to be gathered into personal fortunes that afford their owners millions of income a year, with only the chance that here and there a few may be moved to confer some of their surplus upon the public in ways chosen wholly by themselves, is assuredly a wasteful and unjust system. It is, perhaps, as inimical as anything could be to the American dream.

Nick says about the very rich American Dreamer Gatsby: “He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: ‘I never loved you’. After she had obliterated four years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken” (109). Gatsby wanted money, an immense amount of it, which he procures by lawless means, so that he can capture Daisy, who represents for him privilege and status. “Obliterate”: to remove utterly from recognition or memory; to remove from existence; to destroy utterly all trace, indication, or significance. It never occurs to Gatsby to consider whether Daisy, herself, wants to participate in his dream. He assumes that she does—and that she will immediately erase the fact that she has been and is married to Tom and is the mother of a child.

Gatsby is blinded by his dream, and by money and the potency he believes that it gives him. At one point, in front of Nick and Jordan Baker, Daisy “got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down, kissing him on the mouth.” She murmurs: “You know I love you” (116). But for Gatsby this will not suffice. He will not allow Daisy to say that she once loved Tom but now loves him. He commands her to negate the person she was, a person with a past and a memory of it. The money that Gatsby has, and the magnitude of his hyperbolic purchases, should prove to her, so Gatsby presumes, that he loves her and that she should join him in the story-line of their lives than he has constructed.

Gatsby does feel apprehension when Daisy seems not to be falling into exact conformity with his image of her, to which Nick replies:

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand. “I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.” (110)

Nick warns Gatsby about the impossibility of this ultimatum, this imposition on Daisy. But Nick does not formulate his point in quite the correct terms—and Gatsby does not discern the misleading nature of both Nick’s words and his own incredulous reply. Gatsby does not want to “repeat” the past. His intention is not that at all. It is through money and rhetoric to obliterate the past, to write a new history on a blank page, as though the one there before had never existed. Why not? If you have the money, you can do anything.

Fixing everything the way it was before: this links Gatsby to Meyer Wolfsheim, who “fixed the World Series” in 1919 (73). It is criminal to recreate another person in the coercive manner that Gatsby is committed to. Fitzgerald intends for us to recognize that for Gatsby “the way it was before” is not his dream. His dream is to make it the way it was not: he hates his past, and his money is his guarantee that he can dispense with the person he was and invite—that is, order—Daisy to do the same.

Nick breaks from this dialogue to reflect on Gatsby’s obsession: “He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...” (110; Fitzgerald’s ellipsis). Nick’s story is entwined with Gatsby’s. Often it is difficult to know when Nick is giving us an accurate impression of Gatsby and when he is speculating about him.

Nick next proceeds to stage and paint the scene of Gatsby’s remembered vision of his momentous time with Daisy:

…One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder. (110; Fitzgerald’s ellipsis)

Fitzgerald heightens Nick’s language, imbuing it with romance, melodrama, and phantasmagoric sublimity. This is far beyond anything that Gatsby could articulate. It is sumptuous and strained, lavish and ridiculous: Nick is appalled and seduced by the wealth-laden Gatsby’s effort to incarnate his Daisy-inspired imagination.

Fitzgerald returns to this scene when Nick once more tells the reader about Gatsby’s first experiences of Daisy. He says that Gatsby said: “She was the first ‘nice’ girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable” (148). An acute phrase: the “barbed wire” visible yet indiscernible, not to be seen. It is oracular for Gatsby, who would take part in the Argonne offensive in France (66), one of the deadliest battles in U.S. military history, where there were labyrinthine networks of barbed wire in the killing zones.

To pre-war Gatsby, Daisy is not only desirable but excitingly so: she arouses, stirs, stimulates him. She amplifies desire: “He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him—he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there—it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him” (148). There is more here about the house than about Daisy; it is not her, but the house to which Gatsby (according to Nick) attached the word “beautiful.”

This is where Daisy lives, but the antecedent for “it” is “house”—that is, while Daisy is special, it is the house itself that has “breathless intensity”: “There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered” (148). Nothing about Daisy’s appearance, not anything directly about her at all. The word “beautiful” reappears, but again not in reference to her but to the house.

Nick then returns to Daisy: “It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions’ (148). Later, Gatsby will insist that Daisy obliterate, wipe out (109, 132), her relationship with Tom. But at this initial stage, her value to Gatsby is increased because other young men have loved her. They confirm the rightness of Gatsby’s desire for her, intensifying it.

The next passage takes us to the climax of Gatsby’s pursuit:

But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously—eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand. (149)

Gatsby is pretending to Daisy to be someone he is not. In army uniform—another marvel, the cloak that is invisible—all of the officers are the same. Gatsby can represent himself to Daisy as better in status than he really is. Deceiving her, he is playing a role; he knows (she does not know) who he is—the offspring of shiftless, unsuccessful parents whom he has repudiated.

What makes the passage shocking is that, having deceived Daisy, Gatsby “takes” her sexually. He takes her, he took her; two lines later Fitzgerald repeats, “he had certainly taken her.” Nick’s account makes this sexual consummation not a loving one but an assault, a molestation, or worse. “Ravenously” implies extreme hunger, being famished, voracious like a beast, intensely eager for gratification or satisfaction. “Unscrupulously”: without scruples, without conscience, unprincipled. Is this love? If it is, it is expressed as if it were theft, a trespass, an act of resentment, of hate and self-hatred. Fitzgerald could have written the passage differently, or not included it at all. This is what he wanted.

When Gatsby, his “taking” done, separates from Daisy, “She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life leaving Gatsby—nothing. He felt married to her, that was all” (149). He feels married to her: it is hard to know what this means. For the main impression is one of coercion and grievance, of sexual violation. Gatsby desires Daisy. Or, should we say that he despises her?—despises the socially privileged and wealthy? Gatsby knows that Daisy does not know who he is and would rebuff him if she did. His interaction with her has left him feeling cancelled out, null and void.

“When they met again,” says Nick:

two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor. (149-150)

Gatsby, objectifying Daisy, values her silvery presence for its distance from futile poverty where dreams never come true. She is preserved in her wealth; she is imprisoned too, but the implication is that Gatsby, by uniting himself to her, will liberate her along with himself. This is an impossible dream, as somewhere in his mind Gatsby is aware. Daisy is captivating but sullied in his eyes: he has tainted her by taking her.

In a startling juxtaposition, Fitzgerald passes from Nick’s description to Gatsby’s own colloquial speech:

“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her.... Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” (150)

Gatsby is acknowledging that, for him, the American Dream is better talked about than experienced: he could have done great things but what is even better is the prospect of telling Daisy that he will do them in the future. It might be better for Gatsby never to do them, because if they were done, it would no longer be possible to talk about them, anticipate them, look forward to them. Gatsby may realize that if he did great things, these would not make him happy. Not doing them means not being disappointed.

In the screenplay for his film adaptation of The Great Gatsby , 2013, Baz Luhrmann revises the dialogue of this scene. Gatsby says: “I knew it was a great mistake for a man like me to fall in love. A great mistake. I’m only 32…. I might still be a great man if I could only forget that I once lost Daisy. But my life, old sport, my life has got to be like this… He draws a slanting line from the lawn to the stars. ” Luhrmann is bringing out, putting into words, an insight into Gatsby that Fitzgerald glances at. Gatsby reveals that he knows the mistake he made; in two senses, it is a “great” mistake. There is time for him to choose a different direction. Money is not everything and neither is Daisy, But Gatsby cannot make this choice: he cannot forget that he lost Daisy. Does he want to possess her because he desires her, or does he desire her because he lost her?

Fitzgerald’s exposition of, and inquiry into, the American Dream, undertaken in 1925, is psychologically complex, written in a suspenseful first-person form full of twists and turns, flash-forwards and flash-backs. Fitzgerald criticizes delusion and illusion, yet from first to final page, his craftsmanship, his adroit literary language, is subtle and sensitive. He pays tribute to the American Dream that he discredits, and we remain wedded to it.

On the campaign train in Iowa, 2007, Barack Obama celebrated the American Dream:

As I’ve traveled around Iowa and the rest of the country these last nine months, I haven’t been struck by our differences—I’ve been impressed by the values and hopes that we share. In big cities and small towns; among men and women; young and old; black, white, and brown—Americans share a faith in simple dreams. A job with wages that can support a family. Health care that we can count on and afford. A retirement that is dignified and secure. Education and opportunity for our kids. Common hopes. American dreams.

Obama said that he, his grandparents, and other family members had achieved this dream, but that many Americans were now finding their hopes for it to be unfulfilled: “While some have prospered beyond imagination in this global economy, middle-class Americans—as well as those working hard to become middle class—are seeing the American dream slip further and further away.”

“You know it from your own lives,” Obama continued: Americans are working harder for less and paying more for health care and college. For most folks, one income isn’t enough to raise a family and send your kids to college. Sometimes, two incomes aren’t enough. It’s harder to save. It’s harder to retire. You’re doing your part, you’re meeting your responsibilities, but it always seems like you’re treading water or falling behind. And as I see this every day on the campaign trail, I’m reminded of how unlikely it is that the dreams of my family could be realized today.

Obama told his audience—this was the basis for his campaign: “I don’t accept this future. We need to reclaim the American dream.” During his two terms, 2008–2016, how well did President Obama perform in his effort to restore and reanimate the American Dream?

In a study published in late 2014, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman concluded: “The share of wealth held by the top 0.1 percent of families is now almost as high as in the late 1920s, when The Great Gatsby defined an era that rested on the inherited fortunes of the robber barons of the Gilded Age.” They noted:

The flip side of these trends at the top of the wealth ladder is the erosion of wealth among the middle class and the poor…. The growing indebtedness of most Americans is the main reason behind the erosion of the wealth share of the bottom 90 percent of families. Many middle class families own homes and have pensions, but too many of these families also have much higher mortgages to repay and much higher consumer credit and student loans to service than before. (“Exploding Wealth Inequality in the United States,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth , October 20, 2014)

Preparing in 2014 for her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton said: “We have to do a better job of getting our economy growing again and producing results and renewing the American Dream so Americans feel they have a stake in the future and that the economy and political system is not stacked against them.” She had served as Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013; her promise to renew the American Dream thus amounted to a critique of the administration that she had been part of.

From 2000-01 to 2014–15, Hillary and Bill Clinton made more than $150 million in lecture fees; in total, during these fifteen years after he left the White House, they made $240 million. They led (and continue to lead) luxurious lives; they have a charitable foundation worth many millions; and their net worth (estimates vary) is somewhere in the $120 million range.

Money “has always been passed down in families”—as Fitzgerald shows through Tom Buchanan—“but today, across America, parents who can are helping their grown children in unprecedented ways” (Jen Doll, Harper’s Bazaar , February 12, 2019). Since 2001, the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea has served as a member of the corporate board of IAC/InteractiveCorp, a media and investment company: she has received $9 million in compensation. She has one qualification for this position: her parents. Her wedding in 2010 cost $2 million; for their New York City condo, she and her husband paid $10.5 million; they have a net worth in excess of $30 million.

Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016 to Donald Trump, net worth, $3.7 billion, who had launched his campaign in June 2015 with a speech that concluded:

Trump : Sadly, the American dream is dead. Audience member : Bring it back. Trump : But if I get elected president I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again.

During President Trump’s term, from 2016 forward, the numbers for growth, employment, and the stock market have been positive. Vice President Mike Pence said, April 10, 2019, that the American dream was “dying until President Donald Trump was inaugurated” in 2017. Trump’s policies are generating jobs “at the fastest pace of all,” Pence emphasized, and this “gives evidence of the fact that the American dream is coming back.” “Was the American dream in trouble? You bet,” Pence said in an interview: “I really do believe that’s why the American people chose a president whose family lived the American dream and was willing to go in and fight to make the American dream available for every American” ( CNBC , April 11, 2019).

Donald Trump Jr. has said: “For the last 50 years our biggest net export has been the American Dream, but because of Donald Trump we’ve brought that American Dream home, where it belongs” (June 25, 2019). Eric Trump, the second of the President’s sons, echoes this claim: “We have achieved something that was incredible and something that is so much bigger than what we are and it shows that the American dream is alive and under him I think the American dream is going to be stronger than it was ever before” ( FOX Business , September 30, 2019).

On the other hand: In late 2019, the Census Bureau reported: “The gap between the richest and the poorest U.S. households is now the largest it has been in the past 50 years.” “The most troubling thing about the new report,” states the economist William M. Rodgers III, is that it “clearly illustrates the inability of the current economic expansion, the longest on record, to lessen inequality” (Bill Chappell, “U.S. Income Inequality Worsens, Widening To A New Gap,” NPR , September 26, 2019).

As for the record-setting stock market: in 2008, 62% of Americans owned stock; in 2020, 55% do. This means that nearly half of the nation owns no stock—no mutual funds, no retirement funds. The top 10% of families with the highest income own, on average, $969,000 in stocks. Among low-income workers, 92% of them do not have a retirement account or cannot afford to contribute to one. (Allison Schrager, Quartz , September 5, 2019; Gallup News , September 13, 2019.)

The authors of a report published in 2019 conclude:

We live in an age of astonishing inequality. Income and wealth disparities in the United States have risen to heights not seen since the Gilded Age and are among the highest in the developed world. Median wages for U.S. workers have stagnated for nearly fifty years. Fewer and fewer younger Americans can expect to do better than their parents. Racial disparities in wealth and well-being remain stubbornly persistent. In 2017, life expectancy in the United States declined for the third year in a row, and the allocation of healthcare looks both inefficient and unfair. Advances in automation and digitization threaten even greater labor market disruptions in the years ahead. (“Forum on Economics After Neoliberalism,” Boston Review , February 15, 2019)

Nevertheless, we dream on. In Orlando, Florida, June 18, 2019, President Trump announced his bid for reelection:

Our country is now thriving, prospering and booming. And frankly, it’s soaring to incredible new heights. Our economy is the envy of the world, perhaps the greatest economy we’ve had in the history of our country. And as long as you keep this team in place, we have a tremendous way to go. Our future has never ever looked brighter or sharper. The fact is, the American Dream is back, it’s bigger and better, and stronger than ever, before.

In 2019, 25% of American workers made less than $10 per hour. This places their income for the year below the federal poverty level. Overall, “the number of people earning less than $30,000 accounts for 46.5 percent of the population.” During the next five years, the job most in-demand, which will rise 47%, is home health-aide. Its median salary is $23,210.

The reporter/journalist Jeanna Smialek observes that “unequal access to opportunities is now a global story. Barriers vary by country, but children are generally more likely to earn incomes similar to their parents’ in nations with higher income inequality.” She comments further: “the graph of this relationship is often called a Great Gatsby Curve , named after F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about social mobility and its costs.” The United States is “further toward the high-inequality, high-immobility end of the scale than other advanced economies.”

In the United States, says Smialek, “higher income-inequality goes hand in hand with lower upward-mobility,” and she cites research by the economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, and others. Hendren observes: “It just speaks to this kind of question: To what extent are we a country where kids have a notion of the American dream?” ( Bloomberg Business Week , March 20, 2019; see also John Jerrim and Lindsey Macmillan, “Income Inequality, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Great Gatsby Curve: Is Education the Key?,” Social Forces , December 2015).

Senator Bernie Sanders has spoken about the American Dream. In 2014, on the Senate floor, he asked, “What happened to the American Dream?”, and he replied, “we are now the most unequal society” among all of the industrial nations. In his campaign for the 2016 nomination, Sanders emphasized the crisis of income inequality, and he is emphasizing it even more. The son of Jewish immigrants, a member of a family that struggled to pay the bills, Sanders through hard work and education made it all the way to the U.S. Senate; he now is “attempting to identify his own personal story with the American Dream”, a dream that, he contends, fewer and fewer Americans can hope to achieve (Walter G. Moss, LA Progressive, March 30, 2019).

On his campaign www-site, Joe Biden also presents himself as an embodiment of and proponent for the American Dream:

During my adolescent and college years, men and women were changing the country—Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy—and I was swept up in their eloquence, their conviction, the sheer size of their improbable dreams…. America is an idea that goes back to our founding principle that all men are created equal. It’s an idea that’s stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator. It gives hope to the most desperate people on Earth. It instills in every single person in this country the belief that no matter where they start in life, there’s nothing they can’t achieve if they work at it.

So too does Senator Elizabeth Warren, and she has a proposal for reducing the inequality gap:

I’ve got plans to put the American Dream within reach for America’s families—and a plan to pay for it with a two-cent wealth tax. A two-cent tax on fortunes of more than $50 million – the wealthiest 0.1% -- can bring in the revenue we need to invest in universal child-care, public education, universal tuition-free public college and student debt cancellation for 95% of people who have it…. Education was my ticket to live my dreams, and it’s time we make that opportunity available to every family who wants it. ( Concord Monitor , November 13, 2019)

Those at the top, the wealthiest Americans: they are the most alarmed critics of the Sanders and Warren positions and proposals. Hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, for instance, wailed about Warren’s intention to set new rules for Wall Street: “This is the fucking American Dream she is shitting on” ( Politico , October 23, 2019). More temperately, he said: “Let’s elevate the dialogue and find ways to keep this a land of opportunity where hard work, talent, and luck are rewarded and everyone gets a fair shot at realizing the American Dream.” Cooperman’s net worth is $3.2 billion.

Critics of a tax increase on the very rich and of regulation that might lessen income inequality: these worried voices include Michael Bloomberg (net worth, $56.4 billion) and Jeff Bezos (net worth in 2010, $12.3 billion; in 2019, net worth, $116 billion—the remainder after his wife received $36 billion in their divorce settlement). The sports merchandise executive Michael Rubin (net worth, $2.9 billion) contends that boosting taxes on the super-rich “would have the exact opposite effect of what you want to happen…. What makes America great is that this is a true land for the entrepreneur…. What would happen is that people won’t start businesses here anymore” ( Yahoo Finance , January 9, 2020).

Mark Cuban (net worth, $4.1 billion) weighs in: “I love entrepreneurship because that’s what makes this country grow. And if I can help companies grow, I’m setting the foundation for future generations. It sends the message that the American dream is alive and well” ( CNBC , March 24, 2018). Cuban endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 as the best advocate of (his phrase) “the American Dream.” She says that she is in favor of an estate tax, but as for a tax increase aimed at the very wealthy (like herself), she asserts that this would be “incredibly disruptive” ( Daily Beast , July 31, 2016; Business Insider , November 7, 2019).

In 2019, the world’s 500 wealthiest people added $1.2 trillion to their fortunes, increasing their collective net worth 25%, to at least $5.9 trillion. The twenty-six people at the top possess greater wealth than the 3.8 billion people in the bottom half of the world’s population. In the United States, there are 600+ billionaires.

In a report, January 2020, Oxfam focused on this vast disparity and concluded: “Extreme wealth is a sign of a failing system. Governments must take steps to radically reduce the gap between the rich and the rest of society and prioritize the well-being of all citizens over unsustainable growth and profit.”

In the same month, many of the attendees at the World Economic Forum, “the most concentrated gathering of wealth and power on the planet,” at their meeting in Davos, Switzerland, expressed a similar concern. Kristalina Georgieva, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, said: “The beginning of this decade has been eerily reminiscent of the 1920s.” In a report that was prepared for this meeting, the United States is at #27 in the world’s social mobility index, behind, e.g., Germany, France, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom. One observer remarked: “Canadians have a better shot at the American Dream than Americans do.” (Chloe Taylor, CNBC , January 19, 2020; Heather Long,  Washington Post , January 20, 2020; Hanna Ziady, CNN Business , January 20, 2020.)

Among Americans, 61% say that there “is too much economic inequality.” For young people, ages 18 to 29, the figure rises to more than 70%. If there is a surprise in the polling, it is that only 40+ percent say that reversing income inequality should be a “top priority.” But the priorities they do emphasize, such as “creating affordable health care, fighting drug addiction, making college more affordable, fixing the federal budget deficit, and solving climate change”—all of these are connected to economic policy. People recognize this—which is why nearly 60% believe that the very wealthy should pay more in taxes ( CNBC , January 9, 2020; NPR , January 9, 2020).

Economists have demonstrated that inequality is higher today than it has been since the 1920s, the decade of The Great Gatsby. In Forbes magazine, for example, Jesse Colombo writes: “It’s not fashionable to wear flapper dresses and do the Charleston, but 1920s-style wealth inequality is definitely back in style. America’s ultra-rich haven’t held as much of the country’s wealth since the Jazz Age” (February 28, 2019). Here are the conclusions presented in recent studies of the American Dream:

Absolute mobility has declined sharply in America over the past half-century primarily because of the growth in inequality. Socio-economic outcomes reflect socio-economic origins to an extent that is difficult to reconcile with talk of opportunity. Your circumstances at birth—specifically, what your parents do for a living—are an even bigger factor in how far you get in life than we have previously realized. At least since the 1980s, American have worried that the United States is no longer the “land of opportunity” it once was. Data show a slow, steady decline in the probability of moving up…. Millennials might be the first American generation to experience as much downward mobility as upward mobility. (Kyle Kowalski, “Is the American Dream Waking Up? Sloww , May 2019; Michael Hout, “Social Mobility,” The Poverty and Inequality Report , Stanford University, 2019.)

If Fitzgerald were alive, he would see that the inequality he had depicted in The Great Gatsby has widened, that it is not a gap, but an abyss.

All of this is true and crucially pertinent to Fitzgerald’s novel as we read it now. But he is saying even more in it, and here we need to move through and beyond American themes and the statistics that bear witness to them. For there is in The Great Gatsby a vision that exceeds money, inequality, and the American Dream. I am referring in particular to the novel’s final pages, to the elegiac, plaintive paragraphs that are familiar to many of us but that perhaps we have not really read. In them, Fitzgerald is simultaneously American and global, national and international; he is transhistorical, universal.

“These concluding lines are so impassioned and impressive,” says the critic Richard Chase, “that we feel the whole book has been driving toward this moment of ecstatic contemplation, this final moment of transcendence” ( The American Novel and Its Tradition , 1957). In the completed first draft, these lines are not at the end but, rather, at the close of the first chapter. Fitzgerald made many revisions throughout his typed draft and page proofs. But he made very few changes in these paragraphs. What he did, was to relocate them. He wanted them to be the conclusion even as he knew that their melancholy intensity would be present in the mood and atmosphere of his story from the start.

The mansion is empty. Gatsby is dead and buried. Soon Nick will be leaving for the Midwest:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. (180)

These sentences are laden with loss and longing. But this is only one register of it, the tone of voice of the first-person narrator Nick. Fitzgerald’s perspective is here as well, and he is more tough-minded in his judgments.

The term “pandered” points us, ironically and critically, toward Nick, toward the role he played in fostering Gatsby’s quest for Daisy that culminated in the dreamer’s death. Nick’s imagination expands as he moves centuries backward in time to the moment when Long Island was dense with forests and when Dutch sailors first glimpsed it. For them, according to Nick, it might have been the breath-taking prospect of a new beginning, an Eden rediscovered, and he seems to share in this reverie. But Fitzgerald knows that history was more complicated then, and that much has transpired since.

In April 1609, Henry Hudson, an English sea captain hired by the Dutch East India Company, undertook a voyage of exploration to North America to locate a sea and trade route to Asia. By July, his eighty-foot ship with its crew of sixteen had reached Nova Scotia and shortly thereafter he arrived at present-day Staten and Long Islands, and then travelled up the river that now bears his name. Hudson grasped that here were lucrative possibilities for commerce, for money-making, for profit, especially in the fur trade. Settlers began to arrive in 1624–25; the first group consisted of thirty families. This Dutch territory included Manhattan, parts of Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey.

In 1626, Peter Minuit, director of the colony, with a payment of blankets, kettles, and knives, secured an alliance or treaty with the neighboring Native Americans. The Dutch settlement was small, some 270 people, in the midst of tribes that were sometimes in conflict with one another. Relations between settlers and Native Americans were, at the outset, peaceful for the most part, but there was an attack on a Dutch fort at Albany, named Fort Orange, as early as 1626.; Bloody conflicts broke out in the 1640s and into the 1650s. The New Netherland population was 2000, with 1500 in New Amsterdam at the southern tip of Manhattan.

Also in 1626, a Dutch ship unloaded eleven slaves in New Amsterdam, and others were brought up the coast from the Caribbean. New Amsterdam was built by slave labor, and by 1640, one-third of the population was African.

Nick imagines Dutch seamen looking from the outside in , but Fitzgerald wants us also to be cognizant of the view from the inside out —Nick himself is on the shore, looking outward. The enchantment, the awe, may have been thrilling for those on the outside who first experienced it, but in this novel filled with people of various races and ethnicities, Fitzgerald presents a history that these men aboard ship did not know, did not possess but would inaugurate and sustain through dispossession, enslavement, battle, and war. Fitzgerald calls attention to the deforestation of the land, the assault on it, the exploitation of it as it lay there ready to be taken.

Nick refers to the “fresh, green breast of the new world,” an image that Fitzgerald is connecting to the green light, beguiling and perilous, and to the terrible death of Myrtle Wilson, killed by Daisy driving the car with Gatsby next to her:

The “death car” as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn’t even sure of its color—he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust. Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long. (137)

Maxwell Perkins urged Fitzgerald to change the sickening detail about Myrtle’s breast. But in a letter of reply, January 24, 1925, Fitzgerald refused: “I want Myrtle’s breast ripped off—it’s exactly the thing.” This is the brutal end of the line for Myrtle, a dreamer whose "tremendous vitality" links her to Gatsby, possessed by the "colossal vitality" of the desire he stored so long for Daisy. 

The Great Gatsby brims with violence. We hear about the Civil War, the Great War, race-war (Tom Buchanan’s panic that “Nordics” soon will be overwhelmed by “the colored empires,” 12–13), Myrtle’s broken nose, the rumor that Gatsby’s “killed a man” (44, 49), car crashes, murder (a man who “strangled his wife,” 62), suicide (a man “who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square,” 63), a “dead man” in a hearse (68), a murder by a criminal mob (70), suspicious death (that of young Gatsby’s patron, Dan Cody, 100), child abuse (Gatsby’s father “beat him,” 173), and Wilson’s killing of Gatsby.

Nick then says:

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

He broods his way into a final affirmation and tragic prophecy:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning—— So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

When we read The Great Gatsby , we inevitably think (as Fitzgerald wants us to) about the American Dream—what it was and is, and whether, if we are losing this Dream, we might restore it in this twenty-first century riven by income inequality. But when we really read The Great Gatsby , we realize that Fitzgerald has written both a great American novel and a great novel for the world.

The Great Gatsby belongs with Melville’s Moby-Dick , Dreiser’s Sister Carrie , and Ellison’s Invisible Man —milestone American books that readers everywhere deeply respond to. Fitzgerald compels all of his readers to reflect on what it means to be human, bodies ensnared by time, consumed by desires destined never to be fulfilled. The Great Gatsby is rooted in a time and place and nation: it is American through and through, and it is an essential guide to and diagnosis of the way we live now. But it is, furthermore, a literary work with an all-inclusive address that speaks to societies and cultures outside its American context.

Fitzgerald has a message about life in America and a message about life itself. He believes that life for all persons is the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it. Most of us have faith in, we yearn for, a future of maximum well-being—not just a good life, but one so good that it overcomes and redeems, or seems to, the inexorability of death. This is the dream we cannot reach, a satisfaction that cannot be measured, a happiness that eludes us. If only, somehow, we could get to it, we would know immortality.

We tell ourselves that we need to try harder and desire more intensely. Then it will come. But it does not, and the “current” pulls us rearward, into oblivion. There is no religious comfort or consolation. We beat on, striving, not finding contentment. This is the only choice we have: amid a finite existence, we seek persons and objects that beckon to us, that we are convinced represent desires and dreams uniquely our own.

The Great Gatsby is superior by far to everything that Fitzgerald wrote before it, and nothing that he wrote after it, not Tender is the Night (1934) or The Love of the Last Tycoon , comes close to it. Everything that Fitzgerald had, everything that he was, is in this novel. His self-destructive behavior, alcoholism, financial pressures, and the mental illness of his wife Zelda denied him the luminous career that his astonishing talent seemed to promise. He died of a heart attack in December 1940, age forty-four.

In a letter in October 1940 to his daughter Scottie, Fitzgerald described to her “the wise and tragic sense of life”:

By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not “happiness and pleasure” but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.

The Great Gatsby dramatizes the myths and realities of this country and continent from the moment of the settlers’ arrival and then onward to the 1920s and to the present where we see the American Dream broken by income inequality. But what may be even more remarkable is that, translated into fifty languages worldwide , The Great Gatsby transcends its national origin and setting. Fitzgerald tells truths about the human condition, about desire, disappointment, and death. Really read, it is about the American Dream and much more.

June 2020 : The pandemic that struck the United States and the world earlier this year has caused widespread illness and death, damaged the national and international economies, and created agonized uncertainty about the future. Scholars and researchers are in agreement about one point at least: the pandemic has caused (and will continue to cause) the most harm among America’s most vulnerable—the elderly, minorities, and low-income workers and their families.

Many have painted a bleak picture. Alexis Crow, for example, an expert in economics and finance, has noted:

In the United States, the twinned health and economic crises resulting from coronavirus have laid bare several persistent issues in the socio-economic fabric of the country—and which also complicate the trajectory of sustainable growth for future generations. These issues include fiscal sustainability and ballooning deficits; income inequality and the vast disparity in livelihoods across the income distribution; the hollowing out of the Mittelstand (small and medium enterprises); and the future of work and employment. (Atlantic Council, May 15, 2020)

A report from the International Monetary Fund expresses a similar concern:

The pandemic will leave the poor further disadvantaged…. The inequality gap between rich and poor has widened after previous epidemics—and Covid-19 will be no different…. If past pandemics are any guide, the toll on poorer and vulnerable segments of society will be several times worse. Indeed, a recent poll of top economists found that the vast majority felt the Covid-19 pandemic will worsen inequality, in part through its disproportionate impact on low-skilled workers. (World Economic Forum, May 18, 2020)

The epidemiologist Sandro Galea, in his study of the national and international effects of coronavirus, has said:

Discussions about Covid-19 pandemic’s effects tend to focus either on public health or the economy, as if they were two separate matters. But they are linked, and not just by data about the disease’s disproportionate impact on poor and minority populations. The worldwide economic devastation from lockdown policies is sending millions into poverty — increasing their exposure to potential covid-19 infection as well as to the deadly threat that comes simply from being poor.

He continues:

A central determinant of health is money—the ability to afford such basic resources as nutritious food, access to good medical care, safe housing, quality education, and the simple peace of mind that comes with having the means to weather sudden shocks…. Less money generally means shorter, sicker lives, as reflected by the approximately 14-year gap in life expectancy between the richest and poorest Americans. ( Washington Post , May 26, 2020)

David N. Cicilline, a member of Congress from Rhode Island, links the sickness and mortality rates of Covid-19 to income inequality, and to the deterioration of the American Dream:

The global pandemic has laid bare the economic fragility of millions of American families. In the last few decades, the American middle class has been hollowed out. For millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, the American Dream—the ideal that in this country anything is possible, and everyone can achieve the security of a good life—is nearly unattainable. For decades, anyone taking a clear-eyed look into the economic well-being of our middle class would have seen the warning signs. But this public health crisis has uncovered an even deeper, more fundamental crisis for all to see. The United States is simply no longer the country of opportunity that we once were. ( Boston Globe , May 22, 2020)

In the midst of the pandemic, the nation also has been racked and torn apart by the death of George Floyd, an African-American killed by white police-officer Derek Chauvin (three of his fellow officers assisted in the arrest) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25th. Demonstrations and protests have taken place throughout the United States and abroad, with angry voices demanding action to bring an end to police brutality, systemic racism, poverty, income inequality, and the lack of equity in education and health care.

Many have spoken with extreme bitterness and indignation. Kari Winter, an American Studies scholar and Minneapolis-native, contends—and others have reiterated this indictment:

When Derek Chauvin pressed his knee on George Floyd’s neck, he committed a brutal, horrific murder. He had three immediate collaborators, but they are not alone in their guilt. Their behavior is enabled by the systemic rot of racism. Four hundred years of white supremacy have put the American dream of democracy on life support…. When black lives don’t matter, none of our lives matter. When black rights don’t matter, the American Constitution does not matter. Freedom of the press? Arrested. Cruel and unusual punishment? Celebrated. Right to be secure in your person and house against unreasonable search, seizure or murder? Smashed to smithereens. (University of Buffalo News Center, June 1, 2020; see also Robin Wright, “Fury at America and Its Values Spreads Globally,” The New Yorker , June 1, 2020)

In The Great Gatsby , with brilliant perception and understanding, Fitzgerald examines and exposes the limitations of the American Dream. It might crack and come apart in the years ahead  in ways that would shock but not surprise him. 

Senior Editor of Society , is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA. His publications include (as coeditor) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism  (3rd ed., 2018).

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Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The Reflection of the Era of the “Roaring Twenties“ in the F.S.Fitzgerald’s Novel «The Great Gatsby»

The article deals with the portraying “Roaring Twenties” which marked a legendary and unprecedented period in the history of American society. Though this era goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, it has never stopped arousing deep common interest because of its uniqueness. Having been abundantly reflected in numerous pieces of art and literature, “Roaring Twenties”, synonymously named “The Jazz Age”, go on provoking public discussion and reevaluation. If viewed in literary terms, this epoch is certainly linked with the name of Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) and with his best known novel “The Great Gatsby” filmed five times. The writer is considered to be one of the best chronicler of the American 1920s. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece had embodied many symbols and icons of America which travelled though one hundred years and still feature contemporary society. The articles attempts to outline extra-lingual information and data that shape the temporal and cultural background of the novel. It aims at providing the readers with sufficient additional information that may significantly enlarge on the novel context grasping. It proposes a detailed description and interpretation of symbols and markers of the American 1920s which typically feature “Roaring Twenties” and the ways they are projected onto Fitzgerald’s story. In particular, the focus is made on American Dream doctrine, New York of the 1920s, the conflict between “the old money” and “the new money”, feminism and fashion, alcohol and crime, music, cars. Some parallels between the author’s life story and his characters are also specified.

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Fitzgerald’s dominant theme in The Great Gatsby is the American Dream which has driven the people berserk leading to cleavages in the society.. This paper precisely focuses on 20th century corruption of original Idealistic American dreams. It deals with the American society dreams reflected as more of materialistic possessions than idealism and spiritual satisfaction. It takes up Gatsby’s struggle showing the seeds of future fructification. As a representative of fate, Gatsby strives to get his love and reach his career. The paper depicts his strong determination of reaching his goals. The materialism of this period of time in America corrupted the American dreams with much focus on gaining wealth and power. The so-called Jazz Age of 20’s   compelled the life of Fitzgerald to deal with social imbalances calling for urgent attention. Tanfer Emin tersely comments on Gatsby’s “ hidden violent nature. . . .Driving his instinctual self for possession.”   .   This paper also covers some facts like greatness of Gatsby which drove him to give his all to achieve his love. He reached the heights of riches just for his love. Gatsby’s death can be compared with death of Jesus. The way he spent his whole life struggling for career is a milestone.  When he finally meets his love , the surrender of  his life for love is another height he attains .

Rīgas humānistu motīvs Roalda Dobrovenska romānā „Magnus, dāņu princis”

The novel “Magnus, the Danish Prince” by the Russian diaspora in Latvia writer Roald Dobrovensky is seen as a specific example of a biographical and historical genre, which embodies the historical experience of different eras and nations in the confrontation of globalisation and national self-determination. At the heart of the novel are the Livonian War and the historical role and human destiny of Magnus (1540–1683) – the Danish prince of the Oldenburg dynasty, the first and the only king of Livonia. The motif of Riga’s humanists is seen both as one of the main ideological driving forces of the novel and as a marginal reflection in Magnus’s life story. Acknowledged historical sources have been used in the creation of the novel: Baltazar Rusov’s “Livonian Chronicle”; Nikolai Karamzin’s “History of the Russian State”; Alexander Janov’s “Russia: 1462–1584. The Beginning of the Tragedy. Notes of the Nature and Formation of Russian Statehood” etc. In connection with the concept of Riga humanists, another fictitious document created by the writer Dobrovensky himself is especially important, namely, the diary of Johann Birke – Magnus’s interpreter, a person with a double identity, “half-Latvian”, “half-German”. It is a message of an alternative to the well-known historical documents, which allows to turn the Livonian historical narrative in the direction of “letocentrism” and raises the issue of the ethnic identity of Riga’s humanists. Along with the deconstruction of the historically documented image of Livonian King Magnus, the thematic structure of the novel is dominated by identity aspects related to the Livonian historical narrative. Dobrovensky, with his novel, raises an important question – what does the medieval Livonia, Europe’s common intellectual heritage, mean for contemporary Latvia and the human society at large? Dobrovensky’s work is also a significant challenge in strengthening emotional ties with Livonia (which were weakened in the early stages of national historiography due to conflicts over the founding of nation-states).

A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers: 1880-1980

In 1980 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers celebrates the centenary of its founding. The occasion has provided an opportunity for the Society to look back and survey its accomplishments, its distinguished members, and its constant dialogue — among its members and with the American people — concerning the role of engineering in a technological society. The dynamic tensions within the ASME make a fascinating background to this centennial history. The central role of the Society’s headquarters in New York is examined the light of various movements for regional and professional sections within (and occasionally outside) the Society. The technical question of standards is shown to be a constant and creative problem for members — reflecting their attitudes towards their role in a political system often reluctant to enforce nation-wide standars in business and industry. From the Progressive Era, and its attempts to reform city government and check the power of private utilities, to the 1970s and its renewed concern with ecology and business ethnics, the Society has provided a microcosm of informed debate about technical engineering problems which — as this book makes clear — concerns us all.

Corpus stylistics and colour symbolism in The Great Gatsby and its Thai translations

The present study adopts a corpus stylistic approach to: (1) examine a relationship between textual patterns of colour words in The Great Gatsby and their symbolic interpretations and (2) investigate the ways those patterns are handled in Thai translations. Distribution and co-occurrence patterns were analysed for colour words that are key in the novel: white, grey, yellow and lavender. The density and frequent patterns of each word are argued to foreground an association between the colour word and particular concepts, pointing to symbolic meaning potentials related to the novel’s themes of socioeconomic inequality and destructive wealth. The textual patterns are compared with what occurs in three Thai translations of the novel. While most of the colour images are directly translated, non-equivalents tend to be applied to figurative uses of the colour terms. This results in some changes in textual patterns of the colour words in the translated texts, which can in turn affect readers’ interpretations of colour symbolism in the novel.

Introduction

In The Great Gatsby (1925), Nick Carraway gazes upon the New York City skyline: Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and beauty of the world....

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Lesson Plan The Great Gatsby: Primary Sources from the Roaring Twenties

In order to appreciate historical fiction, students need to understand the factual context and recognize how popular culture reflects the values, mores, and events of the time period. Since a newspaper records significant events and attitudes representative of a period, students create their own newspapers using primary source materials from the Library of Congress online collections.

Students will be able to:

• locate, analyze, and evaluate primary source images and text from Library of Congress online collections; and
• synthesize fictional events and primary source materials as they create parallel stories for a newspaper project.

Lesson Preparation

• Primary Source Analysis Tool
• Woman's Party Campaign for Equal Rights
• Careers for Women
• National Security League
• Suffrage campaign days in New Jersey
• Motion Picture News
• National Spelling Bee
• The Art of Automobile Mechanics
• National Thrift Week
• The story of a pantry shelf (p.38)
• The story of a pantry shelf (p.221)
• The Playground: selected articles from 1925
• Your car: a magazine of romance
• Teachers Guide to  Analyzing Photographs and Prints

Lesson Procedure

Part i using primary sources to interpret life during the 1920s.

History books tell the story of previous generations, but to really understand what people valued in the past, it is helpful to examine the objects that they left behind. These documents, advertisements, photographs, films, posters, and recordings tell a more vivid and personal story than paragraphs in a textbook. These objects, the remnants of every day life, offer rich insights into the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the people who produced them.

Students examine images of artifacts from the 1920s - the setting for Fitzgerald's  The Great Gatsby . Through careful observation, they construct an idea about life in the United States during the "Jazz Age."

• Have students select a partner.
• Assign each set of partners one or more artifacts from the list below.
• Partners analyze the photograph, recording their thoughts on the  Primary Source Analysis Tool . Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher’s guide  Analyzing Photographs and Prints  to focus and prompt analysis and discussion.
• Students or teachers may wish to print the artifacts in order to get a closer look.
• The story of a pantry shelf  (p.38)
• The story of a pantry shelf  (p.221)

Part II Primary Sources from the 1920s and  The Great Gatsby

Students explore Library of Congress online collections to locate primary sources that illustrate some ideas/events/details in  The Great Gatsby .

Searching for primary source materials related to  The Great Gatsby

• News  -  prohibition, women's suffrage, World War I, military, election, politics, trials
• Sports  -  golf, golf women, polo, world series New York, yachting
• Advertising  -  advertisement home, advertisement cleaning, advertisement appliances, advertisement music, advertisement film, advertisement photography, advertisement fashion, advertisement cars
• Lifestyles  -  fashion, education, parties, cars, automobiles, vacations, home decorations, telephone, bar, dance club, photography, clothing
• Entertainment  -  film, music jazz, dance jazz, restaurants, dining, movies, radio, yachting, musicians, records, phonograph, dance clubs
• Editorials  -  editorials
• Obituaries  -  obituaries, death
• Business  -  stock market, Wall Street, financial investment, business, manufacturing
• Have students conduct a "keyword" search by typing a term in the box at the top of the page.
• To locate primary sources, students may use the suggested keywords or try some of their own. Remind students that they are searching for primary sources which reflect ideas, events, or details featured in  The Great Gatsby .
• As students view each item, be sure that they note the time period. They are looking for items from around 1910-28.
• Have students keep a list of the items, including URL and caption, so they can locate them again.
• Once each team has located at least one primary source for each of the categories, they should analyze them using the  Primary Source Analysis tool . Before the students begin, select questions from the teacher’s guide  Analyzing Photographs and Prints  to focus and prompt analysis and discussion.
• Additional questions to connect the items to  The Great Gatsby  might include: Based on the evidence of this object or document, what were some of attitudes, values, and beliefs of Americans during the twenties? What event/idea/detail from  The Great Gatsby  does this object or document parallel? (include specific detail/quote and page number from the novel.)

Part III Creating a Literary Newspaper

Students use their familiarity with the Library of Congress online collections, prior knowledge of life during the 1920s, and the events of  The Great Gatsby  to create an eight-page literary newspaper of historically accurate events from the 1920s and parallel fictional stories based on  The Great Gatsby .

Each team locates one or more primary source documents/objects from each of the following areas (documents/objects from Part II may be used): Review  Newspaper Directions  with students, adapting as appropriate.

To help students understand the types of articles found in different sections of the newspaper, you may want to pass out copies of local newspapers to use as examples.

Lesson Evaluation

Assess students' searching and primary source analysis as well as the newspaper product according to criteria specified or developed with the class.

Margie Rohrbach and Janie Koszoru

Newspaper Directions

Your newspaper should be eight pages long - one page for each of the sections listed below.

You may assemble your newspaper using a computer program or you may create a mock up by cutting and pasting the typed articles and images to your newspaper pages.

Before you begin, examine the contemporary newspaper provided to evaluate the content and story types for each of the pages.

Required Sections

• Write at least one news story featuring a major historical event based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized news story based on details from  The Great Gatsby.
• Include all of the parts found on the front page of a newspaper including the "flag" (newspaper name) date, headlines, pictures and captions, etc. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.) Use images from the Library of Congress online collections.
• Write at least one editorial featuring a major historical controversy based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized editorial based on details from  The Great Gatsby.
• You should include several "letters to the editor" which concern both historical events as well as fictionalized events in  The Great Gatsby.
• Include all of the parts found the editorial page of a newspaper including the "masthead" (newspaper name and the names of editors) date, headlines, political cartoons, etc. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.)
• Write at least one lifestyle story featuring a major historical event based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized lifestyle story based on details from  The Great Gatsby .
• Include all of the parts found on the lifestyle page of a newspaper as well as headlines, pictures and captions, etc. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.) Use images from the Library of Congress online collections.
• Select historical advertisements from your search of the Library of Congress online collections and create your own fictionalized advertisements based on events described in  The Great Gatsby . Include a "classified" or "personals" section on your advertisement page.
• Write at least one entertainment story featuring a major historical event based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized entertainment story based on details from  The Great Gatsby.
• Include all of the parts found on the entertainment page of a newspaper as well as headlines, pictures and captions, etc. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.) Use images from the Library of Congress online collections.
• Write at least one full-length obituary featuring a prominent figure from the 1920s and based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized obituary based on details from  The Great Gatsby .
• Include all of the parts found on the obituary page of a newspaper including the abbreviated death notices. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.) Use images of "the deceased" from the Library of Congress online collections.
• Write at least one sports story featuring a major historical event based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized sports story based on details from  The Great Gatsby .
• Include all of the parts found on the sports page of a newspaper as well as headlines, pictures and captions, etc. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.) Use images from the Library of Congress online collections.
• Write at least one business story featuring a major historical event based on a document/object that you located from your search of the Library of Congress online collections. If the document does not contain enough information, you may need to complete additional research.
• Write at least one fictionalized business story based on details from  The Great Gatsby .
• Include all of the parts found on the business page of a newspaper including headlines, pictures and captions, etc. (Examine a current newspaper for examples.) Use images from the Library of Congress online collections.
• Cite any items used.
• Compile a bibliography of all of the sources that your team used to prepare your Literary Newspaper. See  citing primary sources  for examples of citation styles.

Literature Links: The Great Gatsby & Primary Sources from the Roaring Twenties

This three-part lesson from the Library of Congress* provides students with insight into the historical context of the 1920s and helps them recognize how popular culture reflects the values, mores, and events of the time period as they synthesize fictional events and primary sources. In a culminating project, students create a newspaper containing multiple types of content using both historical resources and content from the The Great Gatsby .

Lesson resources

• Part I: Using Primary Sources to Interpret Life during the 1920s
• Part II: Primary Sources from the 1920s and The Great Gatsby
• Part III: Creating a Literary Newspaper
• Student Newspaper Directions

Related resources

• The Great Gatsby: Establishing the Historical Context with Primary Sources Teaching with the Library of Congress March 26, 2015
• Books that shaped America: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Letters About Literature: Xinyue Ye writes to F. Scott Fitzgerald about  The Great Gatsby
• Today in History: F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Primary Source Spotlight: Jazz Music
• Primary sources & other resources from the 1920s

* Lesson credits: Margie Rohrbach and Janie Koszoru

Gatsby: Cultural Background

• Gatsby/1920s Resources
• Origins of Advertising
• Motion Pictures
• Income Inequality
• Racism, Migration, Segregation
• Creating Citations

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Gatsby Resources

• The Great Gatsby and the American dream [Guardian]
• The Great Gatsby Curve The Great Gatsby Curve represents inequality by showing that citizens in countries on the far right of the horizontal axis and high up on the vertical axis will have a more difficult time moving from a low economic class to a higher, wealthier economic class.
• 1920s [Gale U.S. History] Growth and excess marked the decade known as the Roaring Twenties (1920–1929). It was a time when people chased after the American Dream and society embraced bold and new things. But underneath this glamorous exterior were struggles and inequalities. Lines were frequently drawn between the young and the old, the established and the rebellious, the well-mannered and the hedonistic, the citizens and the outsiders.
• The United States in the 1920s [Oxford American History] Americans grappled with the implications of industrialization, technological progress, urbanization, and mass immigration with startling vigor and creativity in the 1920s even as wide numbers kept their eyes as much on the past as on the future.
• The 1920s [PopCulture Universe]

1920s Books

• Next: Origins of Advertising >>
• Last Updated: Feb 2, 2024 1:01 PM
• URL: https://libguides.peddie.org/gatsby

Gatsby and 1920s America

• The Albert Team
• Last Updated On: March 1, 2022

What We Review

The 1920s: Post World War I America

The first World War brought many opportunities to American citizens that were not previously available to all. Women took on roles during the war in a variety of different fields — roles that were previously only held for men. Additionally, African American men were allowed to enlist in the war and fight beside their white peers (Hindley and Christopher). However, the first World War also brought with it anti-foreigner — especially anti-German sentiments — which led to the passing of several influential policies. Suffragists gained momentum in their fight to secure women’s right to vote, arguing that the large numbers of dedicated, female, American voters would provide enormous support for the American Democracy. Similarly-minded Progressives also pushed for the prohibition of alcohol in order to lift up America as a moral country while simultaneously financially attacking German brewers in the states.

Culturally and economically, post-WW1 America entered an industrial age that saw more citizens living in urban areas than ever before. A bulk of these citizens were African Americans attempting to escape Jim Crow laws and governance in the South to pursue economic opportunity in Northern cities such as New York City. When the majority of these citizens were forced to live in Harlem after the passing of discriminatory housing laws, African American culture exploded into the Harlem Renaissance and laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement.

Racism and Anti-Semitism in The Great Gatsby and 1920s America

Both racism and antisemitism peaked in the 1920s with the resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan and racist attitudes intensifying following WW1. The KKK saw increased membership numbers during this decade by appealing to Americans who disapproved of the mass movement from rural living to urban industrialism (“The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s”). Anyone who participated in bootlegging, motion pictures, or simply didn’t fit the ideal rural agricultural member of society was targeted by the KKK, including but not limited to Catholics, Jews, African Americans, and foreigners. One of Fitzgerald’s characters, a Jewish bootlegger named Meyer Wolfsheim , one of Gatsby’s untrustworthy associates and described as a “flat-nosed Jew” with tiny eyes and tufts of hair coming out of his nose is heavily stereotyped throughout the novel, primarily through his appearance. Wolfsheim is based on Arnold Rothstein, a leading figure in the Jewish mob during the 1920s. (Fitzgerald 69).

In addition to antisemitism, Tom Buchanan states several times throughout the novel this idea of “looking out for the white race,” fearful of being “utterly submerged” by non-white Americans. (Fitzgerald 13). Tom’s supremacist fears are reminiscent of the intentions behind the Greenwood Massacre, which utterly devastated a large area of Tulsa, OK, in 1921, an area predominantly inhabited by successful African Americans. Many crimes against these people groups and others went unchecked during the 1920s. It has not been until very recently that these events have resurfaced in History classes to provide a more holistic view of American history.

Treatment of Women in The Great Gatsby and 1920s America

During the 1920s, women that had previously served in the war efforts found themselves anxious for equality with their male peers. One obvious freedom women did not have until the 1920s was the ability to vote. Using patriotic loyalty as a primary argument, suffragists such as Carrie Chapman Catt successfully won women’s right to vote in time for the 1920 presidential election. In Fitzgerald’s novel, Jordan Baker is a perfect example of an independent, self-made, “New Woman” of the 1920s. These “New Women” sought the same political and economic rights as their male counterparts as well as the freedom to exist in spaces previously dominated by men. Jordan is a professional golfer by her own right, husbandless, and financially independent. She is the total opposite of her best friend, Daisy Buchanan.

Much like Daisy’s family history of “old money”, Daisy’s mindset is very much the product of an old-fashioned way of thinking. Daisy cannot take a single step in any direction of her own volition. The primary reason she marries Tom is that she needed someone to decide her future for her. Daisy seems very much aware of her own helplessness, and she seemingly accepts a similar fate for her daughter by telling Nick she hopes that her daughter grows up to be a “pretty little fool.” Both Tom and Gatsby recognize Daisy’s helplessness and continually seek to take advantage of her by controlling her. Not once does either man allow Daisy to speak for herself; both men take it upon themselves to tell Daisy what she wants. Daisy, always wanting to please, will always agree, even if the statements that she agrees with contradict one another.

Even though Daisy and Jordan couldn’t be more different from one another, they both act in a manner similar to the “flapper” of the 1920s. Flappers were a group of rebellious women who drank, smoked, wore short dresses, and engaged in dangerous behavior. Both Daisy and Jordan regularly smoked, drank, and partied together even though Daisy was anything but “free,” as her behavior implied. Daisy’s wild behavior is primarily for attention than to express freedom from male control; when Daisy greets Nick for the first time, she immediately wants to know if her partying friends in Chicago miss her. Even though Daisy embraces the wild and free lifestyle of the 1920s rebellious woman, she is still strictly bound to the structure of her husband’s control. 

The “Roaring Twenties” and The Great Gatsby

As Americans moved to urban areas and saw economic prosperity during the surge in industrialism, suddenly more citizens had disposable income to spend on parties and luxury goods. Consumerism took off with widespread advertisement, and many people could afford to have the same fancy clothes, listen to the same music, or see the same movies. Certain luxuries previously only available to the social elite, such as the Buchanans, were suddenly available to all.

Tom Buchanan is visibly irritated by this wave of “new money” individuals when he attends one of Gatsby’s parties. The various celebrities she sees in attendance enchant Daisy, but Tom is annoyed because he doesn’t “know a soul” (Fitzgerald 104). When Gatsby introduces Tom as “the polo player” to his friends, Tom is even more aggravated. The idea of being lumped in with these suddenly successful actors, musicians, and polo players is offensive to Tom, who sees himself seated in higher social strata due to inheriting his wealth and status.

Another key member of the roaring twenties is the automobile; cars gave people the freedom to go where they wished and gave them access to places where public transportation never traveled. Gatsby’s car is known for shuttling party-goers to and from his mansion, and the car’s bright yellow exterior and rich green interior both serve as stunning witnesses to his financial prowess. However, when Tom insists on driving Gatsby’s car, this is a direct assault on Gatsby’s status, further enforcing Tom’s idea that Gatsby is merely an imposter in the world of the wealthy. 

Prohibition

However, other laws, such as prohibition, were heavily enforced during the 1920s. The prohibition of alcohol was marketed as a religious cause, and a means to curb immoral behavior and lead to a virtuous society. However, this prohibition was also intended to hurt German brewers financially as anti-German sentiments carried on after the war’s conclusion. But the prohibition on alcohol had so many exceptions that it did not do much to curb the sale and consumption of alcohol. Since only the sale of alcohol, not its consumption, was made illegal, American citizens could still easily access alcohol, thanks to the efforts of mobsters like Al Capone.

Organized Crime in 1920s America and The Great Gatsby

No one knows how Gatsby earned his newfound wealth, but the most popular rumor was that Gatsby was a bootlegger. This rumor becomes closer to the truth when Nick is introduced to Gatsby’s business partner, Meyer Wolfsheim. Wolfsheim is clearly a shady character given his late-night phone calls to Gatsby’s house or his absence from Gatsby’s funeral. Even though Gatsby’s dealings with Wolfsheim brought him immense wealth, the cost of this wealth was an untimely death, absent of any true friends except Nick Carraway. 

The “Jazz Age”

Between 1910 and 1920, The Great Migration brought large numbers of African American citizens to northern cities seeking new economic opportunities in the industrial industry. However, many of these new African American residents were forced to live in only certain areas of town, including the Northern Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. This neighborhood soon became known as a rich breeding ground for African American art, music, and culture , and the movement headed by great figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Louis Armstrong was called the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz clubs even began to tear away at strict segregation laws as white patrons sought out this new form of music, attending integrated clubs such as The Savoy. 

Conclusion 

Many readers approach Fitzgerald’s novel through rose-colored glasses, wanting to emulate the glamorous lifestyles and parties held at Gatsby’s mansion. However, Fitzgerald’s intention was not for readers to imitate the lifestyles of the residents of East or West Egg. Rather, he wanted to caution his readers against becoming entrapped by “all that glitters”, realizing that it is not gold but empty vanity. Even though this novel was set during the 1920s and has many connections to this specific time frame, it is still relevant today as readers consider their motivation for success and what that success might cost them in the end. 

Works Cited

“1920s Racism.” Living New Deal , 7 July 2020, livingnewdeal.org/tag/1920s-racism/ . Hindley, Meredith, and Tom Christopher. “World War I Changed America and Transformed Its Role in International Relat.” The National Endowment for the Humanities , www.neh.gov/humanities/2017/summer/feature/world-war-i-changed-america-and-transformed-its-role-in-international-relations . History.com Editors. “Harlem Renaissance.” History.com , A&E Television Networks, 29 Oct. 2009, www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/harlem-renaissance . Jacksonville, Florida State College at. “U.S. History II: 1877 to Present.” Lumen , courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-fscj-ushistory2/chapter/the-great-war-to-the-roaring-twenties/ . “The Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.” PBS , Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/flood-klan/ .

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8 Ways ‘The Great Gatsby’ Captured the Roaring Twenties—and Its Dark Side

By: Sarah Pruitt

Published: November 16, 2018

More than any other author, F. Scott Fitzgerald can be said to have captured the rollicking, tumultuous decade known as the Roaring Twenties , from its wild parties, dancing and illegal drinking to its post-war prosperity and its new freedoms for women.

Above all, Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby has been hailed as the quintessential portrait of Jazz Age America, inspiring Hollywood adaptations populated by dashing bootleggers and glamorous flappers in short, fringed dresses.

But amid that decade of newfound prosperity and economic growth, Fitzgerald—like other writers of the so-called “Lost Generation”—wondered if America had lost its moral compass in the rush to embrace post-war materialism and consumer culture. While The Great Gatsby captures the exuberance of the 1920s, it’s ultimately a portrayal of the darker side of the era, and a pointed criticism of the corruption and immorality lurking beneath the glitz and glamour.

Why the Roaring Twenties Left Many Americans Poorer

For some, the Great Depression began in the 1920s.

The Shady, Get‑Rich Scams of the Roaring Twenties

As Americans dreamed of amassing fabulous fortunes, many became vulnerable to cons.

How Flappers of the Roaring Twenties Redefined Womanhood

Young women with short hairstyles, cigarettes dangling from their painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band, explored new‑found freedoms.

World War I echoes in the 1920s.

Set in 1922, four years after the end of the Great War , as it was then known, Fitzgerald’s novel reflects the ways in which that conflict had transformed American society. The war left Europe devastated and marked the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power in the world. From 1920 to 1929, America enjoyed an economic boom , with a steady rise in income levels, business growth, construction and trading on the stock market.

In The Great Gatsby, both Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby himself are veterans of World War I, and it is Gatsby’s war service that kicks off his rise from a “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (in the words of his romantic rival, Tom Buchanan) to the fabulously wealthy owner of a mansion on West Egg, Long Island.

Speakeasies flourished when Prohibition failed.

Beginning in early 1920, the U.S. government began enforcing the 18th Amendment , which banned the sale and manufacture of “intoxicating liquors.” But banning alcohol didn’t stop people from drinking; instead, speakeasies and other illegal drinking establishments flourished, and people like the Fitzgeralds made “bathtub gin” to fuel their liquor-soaked parties.

“The whole plot [of The Great Gatsby ] is really driven by Prohibition in an important way,” says Sarah Churchwell, professor of humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study and author of Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (2014). “The only way in which Jay Gatsby becomes wealthy overnight is because Prohibition created a black market,” allowing bootleggers like Gatsby and his partners to amass staggering quantities of money in a short time.

Prohibition creates a ‘new money’ class.

As their wealth grew, many Americans of the 1920s broke down the traditional barriers of society. This, in turn, provoked anxiety among upper-class plutocrats (represented in the novel by Tom Buchanan). In The Great Gatsby, Prohibition finances Gatsby’s rise to a new social status, where he can court his lost love, Daisy Buchanan, whose voice (as Gatsby famously tells Nick in the novel) is “full of money.”

“One of the many unintended consequences of Prohibition was that it created this accelerated upward social mobility,” Churchwell explains. “Fitzgerald is reflecting a preoccupation at the time that there were these upstart—as they would have said—these nouveau riche people who came from dubious backgrounds and then suddenly had all this money that they were splashing around.”

The flapper was emerging.

By 1925, when Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby , flappers were out in full force, complete with bobbed hair, shorter skirts and cigarettes dangling from their mouths as they danced the Charleston. But while later Hollywood versions of Gatsby channeled flapper style, the novel itself actually captures a comparatively conservative moment, as 1922 could be considered closer to 1918 than to the heyday of the Roaring Twenties later in the decade. For one thing, the Charleston didn’t even emerge until 1923. Also, Churchwell says, “skirts in the novel are a lot longer than we think they are. We all picture them in knee-length dresses. But dresses in 1922 were ankle-length .”

Jordan Baker, the novel’s most liberated female character, pushes against some of the restrictions still constraining women by the early ‘20s: She’s athletic, single and goes out with various men. “But her society is by no means welcoming that with open arms, and she's getting pushback,” Churchwell says, noting that Tom and Daisy Buchanan, as well as Jordan’s aunt, all voice disapproval of her behavior. “As with Gatsby, and his dark path to upward social mobility, the novel is charting a cultural moment that was anxious about women's new emancipation as much as it was celebrating it.”

The novel depicts decay beneath decadence.

Just as Gatsby’s shifty business partner, Meyer Wolfsheim, was based on the real-life New York gangster Arnold Rothstein, widely believe to have fixed the 1919 World Series, the growing crime and corruption of the Prohibition era is strongly reflected in The Great Gatsby . In Churchwell’s book, she resurrects a real-life crime that made headlines in 1922—the double murder of an adulterous couple in New Jersey—and uses it to explore the background against which Fitzgerald composed his famous novel.

“It typifies a certain kind of story about the dark underbelly of the Jazz Age that is very present in [ The Great Gatsby ],” she says of the murder of Rev. Edward Hall, a pastor, and Eleanor Mills, a singer in his church’s choir . “It's about adultery, it's about people who make up romantic pasts, and it's about the sordidness of it all, the tawdriness of it all and the kind of dark griminess of it.”

New consumer culture leads to a rise in advertising.

Though not all Americans were rich, many more people than before had money to spend. And there were more and more consumer goods to spend it on, from automobiles to radios to cosmetics to household appliances like vacuums and washing machines. With the arrival of new goods and technologies came a new consumer culture driven by marketing and advertising, which Fitzgerald took care to include, and implicitly criticize, in The Great Gatsby .

“There’s this idea that America is worshipping businesses, it's worshipping advertising,” Churchwell says. In one memorable example, the cuckolded George Wilson believes the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, a figure that appears on a giant billboard above the road, are those of God.

The age of the automobile is reflected in Gatsby’s downfall.

Cars had been invented early in the 20th century, but they became ubiquitous in the 1920s, as lower prices and the advent of consumer credit enabled more and more Americans to buy their own. The liberating (and destructive) potential of the automobile is clear in The Great Gatsby , as Gatsby’s flashy, expensive car becomes the source of his downfall.

The novel predicts doom ahead.

Gatsby’s dreams of winning Daisy for himself end in failure, just as America’s era of prosperity would come to a screeching halt with the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression . By 1930, 4 million Americans were unemployed; that number would reach 15 million by 1933, the Depression’s lowest point.

By 1924, when Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby , he seems to have already foreseen the lasting consequences of America’s heady romance with capitalism and materialism. Through his novel, Fitzgerald foreshadows the inevitability that the decadence of the 1920s—what he would later call “the most expensive orgy in history” would end in disappointment and disillusionment.

“This novel is really a snapshot of a moment when in Fitzgerald's view, America had hit a point of no return,” Churchwell says. “It was losing its ideals rapidly, and he's capturing the moment when America was turning towards the country that we've inherited.” 

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Fashion from the Great Gatsby’s roaring twenties

Left: Jeanne Lanvin | Ensemble, Evening; Summer 1923. Right: Jeanne Lanvin | Suit, Evening (Tuxedo); 1927. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Great Gatsby

The recent movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby has turned the spotlight on the fashion and styles of the Roaring Twenties. So what made the twenties roar?

The economic boom was decisive. Soldiers came home from World War I to jobs in manufacturing plants ready to turn from war production to consumer goods; with the flourishing economy, many commodities became affordable for the first time. Another key engine for progress was the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It was signed into law in 1920, heralding unprecedented liberation. The twenties were also a pivotal time for mass communication: radio, cinema, and the automobile sped up the distribution of information—and trends.

Inevitably, fashion began to reflect the changes in society. Women moved away from restricting fashions to more comfortable clothes. Flappers, as rebellious young women were known, turned their backs on corsets, dropped their dress waistlines to the hips, and bobbed their hair. Skirts rose to just below the knee, allowing flashes of leg when dancing the Charleston, the Lindy Hop, and the Foxtrot. Popular hat styles included the Newsboy cap and Cloche hat, and high heels came into vogue. Men’s styles, although slower to change, also shifted from highly formal daily attire to more comfortable garments.

The Artstor Digital Library has many resources for the study of the 1920s. Particularly rich are collections such as the  Museum of the City of New York , which features tens of thousands of images documenting New York City’s changing cultural, political, and social landscape from its earliest days to the present; The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Brooklyn Museum Costumes , which documents nearly 6,000 American and European period costumes and accessories;  Gazette du Bon Ton  (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) , images of French fashion plates that offer a unique visual record of fashion and high society in the early 20th century; and  Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States (Library of Congress) , an overview of American history through images of works within the Library of Congress’ special collections. To find even more images, click on “Advanced Search,” set the date parameters from 1920 to 1929, then click on the classification of your interest.

–   Giovanni Garcia-Fenech

The Great Gatsby and the Roaring 20s: “There was a feeling that it couldn’t really last. And it didn’t.”

Home » Uncategorized » The Great Gatsby and the Roaring 20s: “There was a feeling that it couldn’t really last. And it didn’t.”

Tobey Maguire and Carey Mulligan in “The Great Gatsby”

Cynthia Haven :  Two novels from the same year.  One ends with marriage, the other with death – the comic and tragic sides of an era. Can you give us a little of the historical context that would help us understand the 1920s?

Gavin Jones:   The decade began in turmoil, with the end of World War I and with a mood of socialist revolution in the air. It ended with the Stock Market crash of 1929.

It was very much a boom time.  A time of intense competition as well.  In a way, American society began to look like it does today in the twenties.

Business became a kind of religion. By the end of the twenties, over 40 percent of the world’s manufactured goods came from the U.S.  The U.S. became an enormous global power during this decade.

Mass advertising campaigns began to dominate people’s lives.  The most famous advertisement was for Listerine. Its slogan has become a cliché: “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” In other words, halitosis was pitched as the cause of people’s social failure.

The salesman became a key figure.   Fitzgerald’s father had been a salesman for Proctor and Gamble, and was sacked when Fitzgerald was 12.  Fitzgerald described it as the central crisis of his youth, and became very interested in male failure in his writings.

Henry Ford became the cultural hero of this new business culture.  He claimed to make a new car every 10 seconds.  The road began to take over from the railroad.  There were 23 million cars in 1929, up from 7 million in 1919.  Perhaps the most important development was rise of the closed car.  It led to all sorts of new freedom – it provided a space where young people could become free from parental supervision.

Rex Harrison in 1964’s “The Yellow Rolls Royce”

Haven :  Much like the internet has created a new social space today.

Jones :  Kind of like that, yes.  It’s a good comparison.

Haven :  I remember a rather so-so movie about the era, The Yellow Rolls Royce, written by the playwright Terence Rattigan .   The plot turned on an illicit affair that took place in the car of the title.

Jones :  Religious figures and social leaders saw the car as “a house of prostitution on wheels,” according to one judge.  It was a huge cultural shift to suddenly have all of these automobiles buzzing around society.

Haven :   And wasn’t there a yellow car in The Great Gatsby ?

Jones :   The authorities are able to track Gatsby down because of his yellow car.  Initially all cars were black.  By the mid-20s, however, new finishing processes for cars led to a rainbow of colors.

Tobey Maguire and Elizabeth Debicki in “The Great Gatsby”

Haven :  The Great Gatsby ends with a car accident.  Oddly, the era marks the beginning of the car accident, and car fatalities, as a commonplace occurrence.

Jones :  It is very much a new thing.  It’s the emergence of modernity.  These novels describe a certain kind of modernity in which the fate of humans is intertwined with machines.  You can see it just the role of the accident – people are very much more prone to accident rather than intention.  There’s a loss of agency with the growth of industrial power.

Meanwhile, a self-conscious, isolated intellectual class came to the fore in America: H.L. Mencken was a huge figure.  Debunking popular myths was a popular pastime in the era, so intellectuals like Mencken would criticize bankruptcy of mass culture.

Haven :  Even as they accelerated its destitution…

Jones :  There was great disillusionment with the institutions of society and with human culture more generally.

Haven :  It was a time of transition for African Americans, too, with a massive migration from south to north.

Jones :  Harlem becomes a center—a “race capital,” as it was described.  Elite whites became fascinated with black culture and Louis Armstrong became a household name.  African American music began to flow into American households, thanks to the radio.

While it was a time of sharing racial culture, it was also a decade of racism.  The Ku Klux Klan became national and political power in 1920s – particularly in the Midwest and California.  It had 4.5 million members by 1924.

Yet Fitzgerald describes it as an apolitical time.  Politics didn’t matter in 1920s, he writes.  It was all about a certain kind of thoughtless mass culture.

Haven :  With all the upheaval, it must have felt like the end of the world for many people.

Jones :  There was a kind of apocalyptic sense in 1920s, that it was all going to end.  There was a feeling that it couldn’t really last.  And it didn’t.

People became nostalgic very quickly.  By 1930, Fitzgerald was writing about the Twenties like it was another life.  Like the 1960s were, for many people.

Haven :  Crime is under the glittering surface of both novels.  Gatsby’s wealth is supported by bootlegging, crime syndicates, and gambling.

Jones :  Organized crime reaches unprecedented levels, mostly because of Prohibition and the trade in illegal booze. Al Capone controlled revenue from alcohol to the tune of $60 million a year.  Protection rackets become a kind of institution in 1920s.

Haven :  In a sense, the drug culture today doesn’t really compare with the booze scene then.  Our drug scene seems to lack the folly and exuberance.

Jones :  Drugs are more of a subculture today.  Alcohol was really the fuel of an elite culture in the 1920s.  The connotations were much more positive – it represented a certain kind of nonconformity. There was a cachet, even heroism attached to it.  While at Princeton, I knew professors who still had martinis at lunch, and still thought they had a kind of allure. Gin became the most popular drink in the 1920s.

Haven :  In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , Lorelei and Dorothy represent a new kind of woman, launching out on their own without male protection – and getting as much as they can while committing as little as they can.

Jones :  The flapper was an iconographic figure. These young women smoked defiantly and drank publicly in speakeasies.  Women were also entering labor force in increasing numbers.

Haven :  Women could drink, and vote, and … what about sex?

Jones :  People were obsessed with sex in the Twenties.  The Freudian gospel began to take hold and enter the popular culture.  Sex was seen as a central force in human development – sex explained it all! Terms like inferiority complex, sadism, masochism, the Oedipus Complex entered the language in the twenties.

Premarital sex becomes much more common.  Divorce becomes much more common.  You get what Fitzgerald called the “problem of younger generation,” which was a crucial flashpoint in the Twenties.  The younger generation was Fitzgerald’s great theme.

Movies came to emphasize the body, and kissing – “hot love,” popular confession magazines thrived.  Intense dances developed in the 1920s, emphasizing speed and close bodies, almost falling out of control.  Rudolf Valentino was widely promoted for his lovemaking skills.  Flesh-colored stockings, sleeveless dresses, short skirts: more flesh was on show.   Also, silk and rayon underwear replaced cotton, clinging closer to the skin, showing off the boyish figures that were popular then.

Haven :   America has been described as the land of social dislocation and class anxiety.  In America, money makes the difference between being “upper class” so to speak, and “lower class” – and money says goodbye as often as it says hello.  Certainly social anxiety and insecurity underlie The Great Gatsby , and in a sense, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , too, the story of a hick-town girl toasting champagne with the upper crust.

Jones :  That’s right.  Fitzgerald describes it as a nervous, violent decade.  Things were almost spinning out of control, and people were rising and falling quickly.  There was great social insecurity, a sense that civilization was in crisis.  That attitude takes root after World War I.  It was a time of fragmentation, in which the certainties of the 19 th century were no more.  The Evolutionary Gospel began to take hold, religious faith was increasingly questioned by science.  The backlash: Protestant fundamentalism began in the 1920s.

Haven :  Two world wars.  Two very different reactions.  America reacted to the First World War with wildness and abandon, to the second with domesticity and conformity.  Why the difference?

Jones:   Perhaps it’s because the U.S. became involved much later in World War I.  A general intellectual pessimism about civilization after World War I perhaps signaled the problems that hadn’t been fully resolved.

Europe had been bled dry by that first war.  In England and France, a whole generation of young alpha males had been taken out, a generation is missing.

Haven :  Both books show us the same moment of time from different perspectives – but the superabundance wasn’t worldwide.  Europe was recovering from a catastrophic world war – even Lorelei comments on postwar hardship in Germany.  Yet Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited still shows a Twenties esprit in its portrayal of the era.

Jones :   The situation was much more extreme in U.S.  More money, I think – although we should note that, farmers didn’t prosper in rural America.  In general, however, the sudden rise of business was such a huge force, generating so much enormous wealth.  By contrast, England was declining by the 1920s – it as a colonial and industrial power.

Haven :   So what’s the takeaway?  What do these two novels have to tell us today?

Jones :  I think it’s important to understand all the contradictions that came into play in 1920s, because we’re still living with them.

Haven :  The end of the Industrial Revolution is usually placed at the end of World War I, with its emphasis on machinery and invention – and yet it continued.

Jones:   The Industrial Revolution was the beginning of it all.  What changes is the shift toward consumption.  Everything started to shift from production to consumption.  Both of these novels show the moral pitfalls inherent in consumerism.

Tags: Anita Loos , F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gavin Jones , Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , Terence Rattigan , The Great Gatsby

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History | May 3, 2021

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably)

As the U.S. anticipates a vaccinated summer, historians say measuring the impact of the 1918 influenza on the uproarious decade that followed is tricky

Lila Thulin

Former Associate Editor, Special Projects

On the afternoon of November 8, 1918, a celebratory conga line wound through a three-mile-long throng on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. From high-rise windows, office workers flung makeshift confetti, first ticker tape and then, when they ran out, torn-up paper. They weren’t rejoicing over the close of the influenza pandemic, although the city’s death rate had begun to fall. That afternoon, New Yorkers let loose for another reason: the end of the Great War. The jubilance proved short-lived. A report from the United Press had prematurely declared an armistice in Europe; in reality, it would be a few days more before the war officially ended. “For the moment,” reported the New York Times , “the whole population of New York was absolutely unrestrained, giving way to its emotions without any consideration of anything but the desire to express what it felt.”

In that same edition of the Times that detailed the celebration and described fake caskets for Kaiser Wilhelm being hoisted through the streets, a smaller headline documented 1061 new cases and 189 deaths from the influenza epidemic, still afflicting Americans coast to coast. “About twenty persons applied to the Health Department yesterday personally or by letter to adopt children whose parents have died during the epidemic,” the paper read.

Just a week earlier, over the East River in Queens, purpled bodies had piled up in the overflow shed of Cavalry Cemetery, enough that the mayor brought in 75 men to bury the accumulated corpses.

Together, the end of the war and the influenza pandemic closed out a tumultuous decade and introduced a new era with an indelible reputation: the Roaring Twenties.

On social media and in conversations from behind the shelter of masks, many Americans bat around the idea that the nation is poised for a post-Covid-19 summer of sin, spending and socializing, our own “Roaring 2020s.” On the surface, the similarities abound: A society emerges from a catastrophic pandemic in a time of extreme social inequality and nativism, and revelry ensues. But, historians say, the reality of the 1920s defies easy categorization. “The experiences of the 1920s are uneven,” says Peter Liebhold, curator emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “If you make gross characterizations, you’re dead wrong.”

If the influenza pandemic shaped that uproarious decade, its impact cannot be neatly measured. The misnamed “Spanish flu” left some 675,000 Americans dead. The sickness particularly afflicted young people; the average age of victims was 28. That death toll dwarfs the number of U.S. combat deaths (53,402, with some 45,000 additional soldiers dying of influenza or pneumonia) during World War I. Despite that disparity, authoritative histories of the era relegated the influenza pandemic on the fringes in favor of a narrative dominated by the war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once described the 1920s as “the most expensive orgy in history.” Between quotes like that and canonical works like The Great Gatsby , the author has an outsized role in how the Roaring Twenties are viewed today. “I blame Fitzgerald for a lot of [misconceptions]” about the decade, says Lynn Dumenil, a historian who revisited the decade in her book The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s . In her class at Occidental College, Dumenil would show the feverish, champagne-fueled party scene in Baz Luhrman’s movie adaptation of Gatsby , as good an example as any of the “unnuanced” pop-culture vision of the decade as a flapper bacchanal*. “There’s this notion of the ’20s as a wild period where everyone is just grabbing everything they can get,” adds Nancy Bristow, history chair at the University of Puget Sound. This idea is broad-brush hyperbole of a reality that held true for only a certain class of Americans—not everyone.

“The 1920s were really a time of social ferment,” says Ranjit Dighe, an economic historian at the State University of New York, Oswego. Shifts in women’s roles, leisure time, spending and popular entertainment did characterize the ’20s, so those exaggerated aspects of the decade, while focused on a primarily white and upper/middle-class experience, do have a firm basis in reality. “Only [in the 1920s] did the Protestant work ethic and the old values of self-denial and frugality begin to give way to the fascination with consumption, leisure and self-realization that is the essence of modern American culture,” Dumenil, David Brody and James Henretta write in a book chapter on the era.

Notably, these changes had been brewing for years, leaving historians with no obvious link between the Roaring Twenties’ reputation and the pandemic.

The “New Woman” of the 1920s, typically white and middle- or upper-class, with bobbed hair and newfound social freedom, departed drastically from Victorian norms. With the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, (white) women had won the right to vote, and divorce rates reached one-in-seven by the mid-decade. “Respectable” women now wore makeup, and flappers clad in shockingly short skirts wore sheer pantyhose and smoked. More traditional or religious Americans lamented the prevalence of “ petting parties .” But, as Dumenil writes in The Modern Temper , the idea of the “New Woman” took root before the 1920s. As early as 1913, commentators noted that the nation had struck “sex o’clock”; in the next three years, Margaret Sanger opened one of the country’s first birth control clinics and went to jail days later. These social changes applied mostly to more well-off white women, since other groups of women had been working and having premarital sex well before the ’20s.

Prohibition is the backbone of 1920s mythology, which paints drinking as a glamorous indiscretion. Organizations like the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League had long agitated to dry up the nation’s heavy boozing . Such groups argued that an alcohol ban would reduce societal ills like domestic violence. They also capitalized on xenophobia , since saloons were political hubs for working-class people and immigrants. National success came in 1920, when a ban on selling alcohol went into effect.

The decade’s raucous reputation gets some things right: Prohibition did transform Americans’ relationship with alcohol, turning drinking into a coed, social activity that moved out of disreputable saloons into homes, Dighe says. New York alone housed more than 30,000 speakeasies, many run by gangsters.

But that’s not the whole picture. Alcohol consumption itself decreased in the ’20s. In rural areas, the reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan took it upon itself to enforce the Volstead Act and act upon anti-immigrant hostilities. (Historian Lisa McGirr has argued that Prohibition helped kickstart the penal state and the disproportionate imprisonment of people of color and immigrants.) This dark side of Prohibition highlights an undercurrent of nativism and racism throughout the ’20s: White Oklahomans murdered several hundred Black neighbors in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre , and national quotas enacted in 1924 slammed the door closed on immigration. And those speakeasies in Harlem, with their chorus girl extravaganzas, bathtub gin, and Madden’s No. 1 beer? White patrons came there to go “slumming.”

The ’20s were “a prosperity decade, no question about that,” says Dighe. Gross national product ballooned by 40 percent between 1922 and 1929. The Second Industrial Revolution —most notably electricity and the advent of the assembly line—led to a manufacturing boom. Cars could be put together in 93 minutes instead of half a day, and by the close of the decade, one-fifth of Americans owned an automobile, which they could use for leisure activities like traveling. The popularization of personal credit also enabled middle-class Americans to buy consumer goods in droves. The government, too, under the Republican administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, shared this spirit of wholehearted materialism, boosting corporations and otherwise taking a light touch to policy that corresponded with the prevailing anti-government sentiment of the time.

Examine this upbeat picture of consumerism more closely, though, and you’ll realize the economic boost of the ’20s was checkered. A sharp recession kicked off the decade, caused partially by the declining demand for American agricultural products after the war’s end brought European farming back into commission. (The limited data on the 1918 influenza’s impact indicates that for the most part, it caused short-term, not prolonged, business losses; scholars haven’t linked it to the prosperity of the following decade.) Then, as now, income inequality reached staggering rates. By the end of the ’20s, despite per capita income nearly doubling, the top 1 percent of U.S. families reaped more than 22 percent of the nation’s income.

The wealthy and middle class profited. African Americans, many of whom had moved to Northern cities for work as part of the Great Migration, newcomers to the country, and farmers did not share in that prosperity. The 1920 census marked the first time more than half the country’s population lived in urban areas. For rural Americans, particularly farmers, the ’20s “were roaring as in a roaring fire that was burning people out,” says curator Liebhold.

The influenza pandemic’s origins remain contested, but the disease spread quickly through the world beginning in the spring of 1918, striking crowded military camps and then American cities and towns in three to four waves. The “purple death” got its name from the colors victims’ oxygen-starved bodies turned as their lungs drowned in their own fluid, and it killed quick, sometimes within hours of the first symptoms. Americans donned masks, schools and public gathering places temporarily shut down, and one-third of the globe fell ill. Doctors, with a flawed understanding of the virus’ cause, had few treatments to offer. Life insurance claims rose sevenfold, and American life expectancy decreased by 12 years .

Yale sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis hypothesizes that the 1918 pandemic falls into an ages-old pandemic pattern, one that our Covid-19 present may mimic, too. In his 2020 book, Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live , he argues that increasing religiosity , risk aversion and financial saving characterize times of widespread illness. Christakis expects the Covid-19 crisis to have a long tail, in terms of case numbers and social and economic impacts. But once the brunt of the disease abates in the U.S., which he forecasts for 2024, “all of those trends will reverse,” Christakis says. “Religiosity will decline… People will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs, in restaurants, in bars, in sporting events and musical concerts and political rallies. We might see some sexual licentiousness.”

Like the 1920s, Christakis also predicts lasting social and technological innovations will characterize this decade—think of how remote work and mRNA vaccines might shift status quos permanently. “People are going to want to make sense of what happened,” he says, positing that “we’ll likely see an efflorescence of the arts” post-pandemic. That’s not to say our A.C. (After Covid-19) reality will be all rosy. “We’ll be living in a changed world,” Christakis says, and that includes the lives lost (about 1 in 600 in the U.S.), the economic havoc wreaked, shortfalls in education, and the number of people left disabled due to Covid-19.

In Apollo’s Arrow , Christakis points to an Italian tax collector and shoemaker’s remembrance of the period that followed the Black Death in 1348 as an example of the collective relief we might experience at the pandemic’s end. Agnolo di Tura wrote:

And then, when the pestilence abated, all who survived gave themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns, and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves, and none worries about spending and gambling. And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing.

Mapping the post-pandemic events of the 1920s onto the nation’s post-Covid-19 future resembles trying to trace the path of a nearly invisible thread in an elaborate tapestry. At its height, the influenza pandemic routinely made front-page headlines nationwide, says J. Alexander Navarro, a historian who co-edited the University of Michigan’s digital Influenza Encyclopedia , but by the beginning of 1919, before the pandemic had run its course, those articles grew shorter and less prominent.

“When we look around, unlike the Great War, there are no monuments to the flu; there are no museums to the flu; there are no heritage sites to the flu; there’s not a stamp for the flu, all the signs we associate with commemoration,” Guy Beiner, a memory studies scholar, said during a presentation hosted by the Institute of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He describes the pandemic as an instance of “social forgetting,” an event not wiped from memory but simply left unspoken.

Even historians largely neglected the 1918 pandemic, until Alfred Crosby reignited the field in a 1976 book , where he captured these contradictions:

Americans barely noticed and didn’t recall ... but if one turns to intimate accounts, to autobiographies of those who were not in positions of authority, to collections of letters written by friend to friend ... if one asks those who lived through the pandemic for their reminiscences, then it becomes apparent that Americans did notice, Americans were frightened, the courses of their lives were deflected into new channels, and that they remember the pandemic quite clearly and often acknowledge it as one of the most influential experiences of their lives.

One of the many theories about why 1918 influenza faded from historical memory holds that the trauma of World War I subsumed it. “I don’t think you can divorce the experience of the 1918 pandemic with that of the war,” says Navarro, noting that in places like Denver, Armistice Day coincided with the day social distancing restrictions eased. Public health messaging intertwined the two crises, calling mask-wearing “ patriotic ” and promoting slogans like “Help Fight the Grippe: Kaiser Wilhelm’s Ally.” In Harper’s editor Frederick Lewis Allen’s 1931 account of the previous decade, Only Yesterday , he labels the Twenties as the “post-war decade” and mentions the pandemic a grand total of once.

“My guess is it did not sit with the story that Americans tell about themselves in public. It’s not the story that they want to put in fifth-grade U.S. history textbooks, which is about us being born perfect and always getting better,” says Bristow, who wrote American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic . Americans believed themselves “on the verge of putting infections disease to rest forever,” she explains, and instead, “We couldn’t do anything more about it than anybody else.” Indeed, President Woodrow Wilson, who held the office throughout the multi-year pandemic, never once mentioned it in his public comments.

Navarro floats another theory: Deaths from infectious disease epidemics happened more routinely then, so the pandemic may not have been as shocking. (According to data compiled by the New York Times , despite the much higher proportion of deaths from the 1918 influenza, the Covid-19 pandemic has a larger gap between actual and expected deaths .) Without a solid scientific understanding of the flu’s cause—evangelical preacher Billy Sunday told congregants it was a punishment for sinning—people struggled to make sense of it.

Multiple historians pinpointed another significant discrepancy between the scarring impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and that of the 1918 influenza: Whereas many Americans today have remained masked and distanced for over a year, the 1918 influenza raged through communities quickly. Restrictions were lifted after two to six weeks, Navarro says, and most people still went in to work.

“Talking about [influenza] being forgotten is different from whether it had an impact,” Bristow says. But she hasn’t found much evidence that concretely ties the under-discussed pandemic to the societal upheaval of the ’20s. “One of the places you could find it would be in the writing, and we don’t see it there,” she says. Hemingway briefly remembers “the only natural death I have ever seen” from the flu, but in a minor work. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider , Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Anne Porter draws on her bout of near-fatal flu, writing “All the theatres and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night.” But that novella wasn’t published until 1939.

“When you look at the canon, of cultural literature, of cultural memory,” Beiner points out, “none of these works appear in it.”

Arts and culture undoubtedly flourished in the ’20s as a shared American pop culture emerged thanks to the advent of radio broadcasting, widely circulated magazines and movies. The first “talkie” debuted in 1927 and joined paid vacations and sports games in an explosion of for-fun entertainment options. The Harlem Renaissance gave the nation artists like Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, who performed at the glitzy speakeasy The Cotton Club. While a Clara Bow movie about WWI, Wings , won Best Picture at the first-ever Academy Awards, Bristow says the pandemic didn’t appear much in cinemas, and musical references are also few and far between. (Essie Jenkins’ “The 1919 Influenza Blues” presents a rare exception to this rule: “People was dying everywhere, death was creeping through the air,” she sings.)

Young people , who’d watched peers die from influenza, spearheaded these cultural shifts. “After the Great War cost millions of lives, and the great influenza killed some 50 million [worldwide], many—particularly young people—were eager to throw off the shackles of the old and bring in the new,” says John Hasse, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History. But keep in mind, Hasse explains, that the jazz music and dancing that characterized the performing arts of the decade had roots that preceded the pandemic, like the Great Migration, jazz recording technology, and evolving attitudes about dancing in public.

Just because the memory of the flu wasn’t typeset, filmed or laid on a record doesn’t mean it didn’t bruise the American psyche. About, all 1 in 150 Americans died in the pandemic; one New Yorker recalled neighbors “dying like leaves off trees.”

Pandemics don’t come with a consistent pattern of mental health side effects because humans have responded with different public health measures as our understanding of infectious diseases has evolved, says Steven Taylor, a University of British Columbia, Vancouver professor and the author of 2019’s The Psychology of Pandemics . But he expects the Covid-19 pandemic to psychologically impact between 10 and 20 percent of North Americans (a number sourced from ongoing surveys and past research on natural disasters). Typically, one in ten bereaved people go through “prolonged grief disorder,” Taylor notes, and for every pandemic death, more family members are left mourning . Studies show that one-third of intensive care Covid-19 survivors exhibit PTSD symptoms, and first responders already report deteriorating mental health . Even people with a degree of insulation from this firsthand suffering might still experience what Taylor calls “Covid stress syndrome,” an adjustment disorder marked by extreme anxiety about contacting Covid-19, xenophobia and wariness of strangers, traumatic stress symptoms like coronavirus nightmares, concern about financial security, and repeated information or reassurance seeking (from the news or from friends).

A pandemic slowed to a simmer will, of course, mitigate some stressors. Like Christakis, Taylor says he anticipates an increase in sociability as people try to claw back the “positive reinforcers” they’ve been deprived of in the past year. (Others, like people experiencing Covid stress syndrome, might struggle to recalibrate to yet another “new normal.”) His surveys of North American adults have also indicated a silver lining known as “post-traumatic growth,” with people reporting feeling more appreciative, spiritual and resilient, although it’s unknown whether this change will become permanent.

“Most pandemics are messy and vague when they come to an end,” says Taylor. “It won’t be waking up one morning and the sun is shining and there’s no more coronavirus.” We’ll doff our masks and let down our guards piecemeal. Overlay Covid-19 and the 2020s with the influenza pandemic and the 1920s and you’ll see unmistakable parallels, but looking closely, the comparison warps. If there were a causal link between the influenza pandemic and the Roaring Twenties, clear evidence of a collective exhalation of relief hasn’t shown up under historical x-rays.

The historical record tells us this: Some 675,000 people in the U.S. died of influenza then, and “in terms of a mass public mourning, people just went on with their lives” Navarro says. An estimated 590,000 Americans will have died of Covid-19 by the third week of May. How Americans will remember—or choose to forget—this pandemic remains an open question.

*Editor's Note, May 12, 2021: A previous version of this piece misstated the university where Lynn Dumenil taught. She is a professor emerita at Occidental College, not the University of California, Irvine.

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Lila Thulin | | READ MORE

Lila Thulin is the former associate web editor, special projects, for Smithsonian magazine and covers a range of subjects from women's history to medicine.