Another source for Gatsby's "this man Goddard"

If you’ve been following our work on Gatsby, you are probably already well aware of how often we write about Lothrop Stoddard, whose ideas are parroted by Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan as the work of “this man Goddard.”

Goddard was Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote about the threat of the “colored races” to the white world and white world supremacy. In his 1920 text, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which Tom mis-cites as “The Rise of The Colored Empires,” Stoddard warns of the “influx of undesirable elements” and the devastation of “our race-heritage” because America has not been “reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.” Tom rephrases Stoddard’s ideas: “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 or these other races will have control of things.”

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.

We find the Stoddard text critical and compelling, not just in terms of understanding Gatsby but also in relation to the heightened rhetoric around immigration and nativism that has emerged under the Trump presidency. Using Stoddard excerpts, in connection with a discussion of Tom’s discussion of the “Goddard,” allows an entry-point for these historically-specific ideas about white nationalism in the classroom (with or without explicit connection to the contemporary Trump context).

Imagine our surprise and intellectual delight to discover there is even more to be made of Fitzgerald’s “Goddard.”

It turns out, as we learned recently from a delightful blog from Museum Hack (a great organization that you should check out if you don’t already know about them), that there was also a prominent Goddard in the early 20th century who, like Lothrop Stoddard, was focused on the dangers of immigrants. Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist, was an intelligence researcher, who coined the term “moron” in order to categorize with more scientific precision those he considered cognitively disabled. Hmm. (Note – “moron” is no longer a scientifically precise or acceptable medical term.)

In 1913, Goddard conducted tests of immigrants at Ellis Island. He studied Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and Russians. His findings, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” published in a journal called The Journal of Delinquency and accessible online, outline the tests he performed and his conclusions: “that half of such a group of immigrants [is] feeble-minded.” While noting the seeming impossibility of his findings, he explains that this group “is of a decidedly different character from the earlier immigration … we are now getting the poorest of each race.”

And the poorest of each race are more likely to be feeble-minded? Apparently.

For Goddard, the question is how best to treat these immigrants. He concludes: “Morons as a class, if taken early and trained carefully and so kept from becoming vicious and criminal, could be successfully employed if the employer understands them . . . .”

Still, Goddard worries about the children of these morons, who will, as he concedes, be Americans. And so he ponders, “Shall we exclude the moron immigrants because they are likely to have moron children who will become troublesome citizens?”

As Joella Straley writes on National Public Radio’s Code Switch, the year after Goddard presented his findings, deportation numbers for “feeble-mindedness” doubled.

We have yet to uncover any evidence that Fitzgerald was aware of Henry H. Goddard and his eugenicist work, but the re-naming of Stoddard as Goddard is surely no coincidence.

Regardless, a brief perusal of a few paragraphs of Goddard’s work, such as an excerpt from “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” can serve to underscore the anti-immigrant xenophobia of the world of Gatsby and the ways in which Tom (and Nick’s) racism and anti-Semitism form part of a broader landscape of nativism. An excerpt from Henry Goddard, then, could be easily put into dialogue with Gatsby and, using the discussion and writing prompts and multimedia links provided in our unit on Stoddard, even more deeply complicate ours and our students’ understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel. 

Revamp your Lord of the Flies unit with Prasad's Damselfly

If you are teaching William Golding’s Lord of the Flies this year, consider including Chandra Prasad’s debut YA novel Damselfly as one of the texts in your unit. Yes, we usually talk about using informational text to teach literature, but at the heart of our work is putting texts in dialogue and asking what voices or perspectives are missing from canonical works and common interpretations of them.

In our volume on cross-disciplinary collaboration, we present a unit based on an excerpt from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and a New York Times science article on the study of aggression in male fruit flies. Our goal with that unit is to support students in using scientific knowledge to critically evaluate what Golding depicts in his novel and to develop their understanding of aggression and violence in the present day.

That said, like many other readers, we have some issues with Lord of the Flies, particularly its exclusive focus on very privileged white English boys. Indeed, when we wrote about the abovementioned texts in a piece for the New York Times Learning Network, we included links to additional pieces on bullying and aggression among girls that teachers and students could use to expand their discussion of such timely themes.

Prasad’s Damselfly is an engaging present-day take on Golding’s premise, particularly because it eschews the easy artifice of switching the gender of a single-sex group of teens stranded on a remote island in the Pacific to female (as an upcoming and already widely criticized film adaptation of Lord of the Flies – written and directed by two men – is planned to do – and as Libba Bray’s YA novel Beauty Queens more imaginatively has done).

Instead Damselfly intersects with and updates Golding’s plot, presenting a mixed-gender, mixed-race, yet still privileged 21^st-century group of American teenagers, the members of an elite private school’s fencing team, who had been on their way to a tournament in Japan when their plane crashed. After washing up on various parts of the island (implied to be the same island Golding’s boys crashed on), the survivors work together to build and acquire what they need to survive, but the social dynamics of their previous life and threats from an unseen fellow inhabitant of the island start to unravel their initially united resolve.  

Prasad’s novel is in some ways more engaging than Golding’s because she complicates the relationships between the teens by providing more backstory about them, particularly the Indian-American narrator Samantha and her best friend Mel, who is white. While Samantha attends the elite Drake Rosemont and even plays on its fencing team, she does so only via a scholarship she won partly to help diversify the school’s student body, after applying to the boarding school to escape the dysfunction and abuse at home that she hides even from Mel.

While readers might expect a battle of the sexes to be the primary source of conflict among the group, the most significant tensions fall along lines of race and class. That said, timeless teenage anxieties over popularity, peer pressure, and attractiveness are definitely at play in the conflicts that underscore this engaging novel. But one of the most affecting aspects of Damselfly is an update Prasad makes to the Lord of the Flies character Simon in Anne Marie whose survival struggle on the island is also dramatically complicated by mental illness.

As these power struggles play out, Prasad’s characters express ideas and opinions about each other that will provide ample fuel for students’ discussions about race, gender, class, disability, and how these identities and differences factor into the dynamics of their own families and communities, as well as our society as a whole.

Teachers could incorporate Damselfly into a Lord of the Flies unit in a variety of ways. Excerpts from corresponding parts of each novel could be placed in direct dialogue with each other. Or, after a teacher-led study of Lord of the Flies, groups of students could take the lead in teaching Damselfly, Beauty Queens or one of the film adaptations of Golding’s novel and then critically comparing each version.

Adding something into our curriculum often sparks anxiety about having enough time. But creating a cluster of texts around a canonical work that you love or that you are required to teach can reinvigorate both teacher and student interest in a novel like Lord of the Flies and create a rich learning experience about timely themes that warrants and produces extended discussion and exploration.