Gatsby, Buchanan, and racial paranoia past and present

As most of us turn away from our classrooms, the difficult and troubling resonances with The Great Gatsby, that consummate American novel, continue to come, fast and furious.

This week, it’s New York Times columnist Charles Blow, in “White Extinction Anxiety,” commenting on how Trump’s broader border policy, leaving aside the odiousness of family separation, reflects a panic about “a loss of white primacy.” Blow places Trump’s concerns within the context of Pat Buchanan longstanding ideas about the threats to whiteness, reflected in Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower (2011), his latest blog posts, and his comments on Laura Ingraham’s show.

Here’s a brief snippet from Buchanan’s blog:

The existential question . . . remains: How does the West, America included, stop the flood tide of migrants before it alters forever the political and demographic character of our nations and our civilization?…. We are truly dealing here with an ideology of Western suicide. 

If Europe does not act, its future is predictable. 

The population of Africa, right across the Med, is anticipated to climb to 2.5 billion by midcentury. And by 2100, Africa will be home half of all the people of the planet.

Africans taking over the planet: We aren’t in Wakanda.

The idea that white civilization is about to collapse and that Africans are about to take over the world isn’t new. Lothrop Stoddard offered the same idea in 1920, using the very same flood tide imagery to warn of the threats to the white world. In his The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, Stoddard prophesizes: “Here is the truth of the matter: The white world to-day stands at the crossroads of life and death.” (Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby.)

Like Buchanan, Stoddard worried that both Europe and America, the white homelands, were threatened by “oblivion in the dark ocean” of immigrants from “the colored world.” Stoddard warns, “If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald picked up on Stoddard’s nativist racial paranoia and placed these noxious ideas in the mouth of his arrogant, abusive, philandering, millionaire, Tom Buchanan. Tom argues the point, “violently”:

Civilization’s going to pieces . . . . Have you read “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by this man Goddard? . . . Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. . . . It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out of these other races will have control of things.

Nick Carraway, Gatsby’s narrator, dismisses Tom as “pathetic” in this moment. We might be tempted to dismiss Stoddard and his ideological progeny, Buchanan, as equally pathetic.

But can we afford Nick’s complacency?

Instead, we suggest that teachers of Gatsby seize this moment, both in our broader culture and in Fitzgerald’s uncannily timeless and prescient novel, to explore the racial paranoia and its bizarre coexistence with extreme power and privilege. September and Gatsby are right around the corner. Seize the moment to plan for what Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich calls “the real, and yes, uncomfortable and unpredictable work of teaching and learning.” These difficult but important classroom conversations will make your reading of a 1925 novel more relevant and revealing.

Roseanne Barr and The Great Gatsby? Absolutely!

What could have provoked Roseanne, at this particular moment, to offer her racist comments about Valerie Jarrett? Roseanne, after all, would have seemed to have been at the top of the world. Her eponymous show was rated the third most popular on network television and had been picked up for another season. She should have been at the top of the world, right?

And yet she chose to lash out at Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Obama. Jarrett is not currently in a position of particular power. Obama is not in office. How, at this moment, was Jarrett a threat? Why would Jarrett have merited attack? Why did Roseanne need to bully someone and what made Jarrett a worthy target?

Certainly, the simple answer is that Roseanne’s outburst reflects a kind of commonplace racism. The odd juxtaposition of “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes” in Roseanne’s tweet suggests a kind of knee-jerk and thoughtless targeting and conjoining of Muslims and African-Americans. 

But leaving that base and grotesque racism aside for a moment (as it has received a wellspring of deserved attention from a range of commentators), it’s enlightening to turn to Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel in relation to Roseanne.

The opening chapter of Gatsby offers some surprising answers to the question of why someone in power might be gratuitously cruel. As we read the opening pages of Gatsby, we meet Tom Buchanan, who, like Roseanne, would seem to be on top of his world. 

He is wealthy and powerful, although unlike Roseanne, he was born to this position of power. We learn about his background: Yale. Tom has a heroic football background, “one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven,” and enormous family wealth. When our narrator, Nick, meets Tom, it is at Tom’s “even more elaborate than I expected” house.

Yet with all this acclaim, money, and power, Tom is cruel. He has “a rather hard mouth,” “arrogant eyes,” and “a cruel body.”

Like Roseanne, the object of Tom’s cruelty in chapter 1 of Gatsby is people of color. For reasons that are never explained by Fitzgerald, Tom is obsessed by “The Rise of the Colored Empires” by Goddard (in real life Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy) and the idea that “if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged.” 

To be clear, Tom, at the very top of the food chain, is worried that his kind are in danger of being utterly submerged by people of color. What? Why?

Why the paranoia and cruelty, why the insecurity and gratuitous vitriol from someone at the pinnacle of power? Why Tom? Why Roseanne?

Two units in our new volume on Gatsby may help you explore these timely questions. First, excerpts from Stoddard and Kenneth L. Roberts elaborate on the anxiety about whiteness and power expressed by Tom and other characters in the novel. Second, Paul Piff’s “Does money make you mean?” discusses a series of fascinating social psychology experiments that explore how wealth, power, and privilege breed greed, a diminution of empathy, and unethical behavior. 

Such discussions may seem like a detour from your usual reading of Gatsby, but they offer an important opportunity to help your students use their critical thinking to make insightful connections between the past and the present and better understand the impacts of the various cultural and political discourses across the range of media – from Fitzgerald’s novel to social media – they encounter on a daily basis.

Jesmyn Ward on Gatsby's tricky vision of hope for young readers

Jesmyn Ward, the brilliant author of Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones, has written an introduction to a new Scribner edition of Gatsby. We haven’t yet gotten our hands on the new edition, but an essay version of Ward’s introduction appeared in the New York Times in April 2018. It’s a beautiful, thoughtful meditation on Gatsby, an essay certainly worth teaching and meditating on at length. Ward offers us a model reading of Fitzgerald: careful, nuanced reflections in her own incandescent writing style.

It is striking, however, to note how Ward describes her own early reading experience with Gatsby. She writes of reading the novel as a teenager:

We read it when we are bewildered and delighted at our changing bodies, flush with burgeoning sexuality, heady with the certainty of our ascendancy, the prospect of our future greatness shining off in the distance like a great green star. 

It is easy for young people to see themselves in Gatsby. His earnestness is familiar. His ambition, twinned with desperation, resonates with any teenager who wants to journey off to college or move states away for work, in a bid to escape youthful boundaries.

…. he believed that if he worked hard enough, he could remake himself. He could ascend to a different social class, a class where life seemed to be an enchanted necklace, each moment a pearl on an endless string. It seems to be a universal sentiment of youth: the belief that, given the luxury of time and focus, one can become anything.

Ward offers us here a vision of Gatsby as full of hope. This is Gatsby as the embodiment of the American Dream – full of possibilities. Gatsby, as the ambitious young man, whose aspirations and hard work enable his economic and social mobility.

The novel, however, also carries with it a darker underside. After all, we only meet Gatsby after we have been introduced to the rich and powerful: Tom, Daisy, Jordan, and even Nick. None of them are ambitious youthful strivers. They have each, in their way, been born with silver spoons in their mouths. No striving is required. Nick, the least among them, is himself a legacy at Yale, the son of three generations of “prominent, well-to-do people.” He graduated in 1915 and went to war, from which he came back “restless.” It isn’t until 1922 that he comes to New York to “learn the bond business,” financed in this enterprise by his father and supported by aunts and uncles “as if they were choosing a prep school for me.”

In other words, by the time we meet the striving Gatsby, we have already been well acquainted with the world of the entitled rich, for whom hard work seems entirely unnecessary and the luxuries of time and leisure seem to abound.

For some readers, then, Gatsby seems to be a novel about the impossibility of ascendancy and future greatness for those not born to social privilege. The wealthy within the novel are vastly ahead and inhabit an entirely separate space, engaging begrudgingly with the marginal characters at the margins of their world: the “gray, scrawny Italian child … along the railroad track” or the “gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller” selling puppies.

Tom’s affair with Myrtle only underscores the impermeable boundaries between the elite in Gatsby and everyone else. She may think Tom is going to leave Daisy for her, but she is as clueless about her powerlessness in her relationship to Tom as she is about the “puppies of indeterminate breed.” Tom, however, has no trouble discerning that the puppy is “no police dog.” 

The novel, in other words, can joke about the gray man’s resemblance to the uber-wealthy John D. Rockefeller and about ersatz police dogs because those in power have no difficulty identifying and excluding interlopers.

Ward writes of how easy it is for young people to see themselves in Gatsby. Surely the opposite is also true. If young people see themselves in Gatsby, they may also see how Gatsby’s failure is marked right from the beginning of the novel. They may read Gatsby as a novel that scorns their ambition and tramples their dreams of ascendancy. Perhaps this duality underscores how difficult this novel can be to teach.

Before we even meet Gatsby, we learn about an impenetrable world of the heady, wealthy elite. And then, as we meet Gatsby and see the evidence of his wealth – his fancy house, his elaborate parties, we also immediately hear rumors about his “dim” background. 

Gatsby is not a man with a Yale legacy and an easily understood family past. The idea that he is a fraud is introduced immediately in the novel.

For young people, then, it’s possible to read the novel not as an invitation to aspiration but as a warning. Don’t be ambitious; don’t think you can work hard and succeed. The only access those outside of the elite have to wealth and power is through crime. It’s a rigged system. 

Strive for education and go to an elite college like St. Olaf’s and you’ll be reminded of your place by being tasked to work as a janitor; you won’t last a month. Attend Oxford as a war veteran? You won’t really be able to earn a degree or credibility. Befriend a wealthy patron like Dan Cody? The legal system is set up in ways you won’t understand to be sure that you never inherit any legacy.

And what of Jewish readers and readers of color who encounter the racism and anti-Semitism within Gatsby? As Stephanie Powell Watts, author of No One Is Coming to Save Us, a compelling reimagining of Gatsby, explains her experience: “However swept up and away I may be, I can’t help but fear that the door of the book will suddenly close in my face by excluding or demeaning people of color, women, the poor. . . . it hurts to find yourself on the outside, the butt of the joke.”

Ward argues compellingly that Gatsby endures “generation after generation” because it offers “new revelations, new insights” at every reading. So true. But for young readers, at that pivotal moment in their lives, full of youthful ambition but also youthful insecurity, Gatsby is a tricky and potentially devastating text to encounter.

Perhaps above all else, Gatsby reminds us of the power of narrative: to shape youthful ambition, buoy young readers, and embolden new voices. As teachers of this consummate American novel, our work is tricky. But we can all be heartened at how Gatsby has continued to serve as an inspiration to young people, including to contemporary writers like Watts and Ward, to take ownership of their own narratives and find their own greatness.