The Outstater
The Not-So-Great Gatsby
THIS WEEK MARKS the 100th anniversary of the novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is an occasion, I read in the New York Times, to speculate on Jay Gatsby’s identity, his swarthiness. Was he a member of one oppressed minority or another, or, if not, a literary representation of the ways that race tragically interacts with wealth and social mobility?
Scholars such as Henry Gates, Valarie Smith, Michael North and Marlene Allen have put forward their interpretations. And in a recent article for the Atlantic, Alonzo Vereen described the indeterminate, “unraced” aspects of the Fitzgerald character.. “Gatsby’s American identity is so ambiguous,” Vereen writes, “that the students could layer on top of it any ethnic or racial identity they brought to the novel.”
Oh really?
Fitzgerald clearly says that Gatsby grew up in North Dakota as James Gatz. He has the book’s narrator state that Gatsby attended “the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota.” Gatsby’s father Henry C. Gatz was from a town in Minnesota and in the book arranges a Lutheran service.
Gasp! That would mean . . . yes, that would mean Gatsby was from a group that is so anathema that nobody in modern literature or film would dare pose it in heroic terms. This simply can’t be. No English Lit faculty today would find anything “great” about a German-American-Lutheran Gatsby.
Oddly, this embarrassment — disdain even — exists despite the fact that German decedents are the largest ancestral group in the U.S. And it is a historical point that rapid agricultural settlement by German-Americans in several American colonies and then throughout the Midwest and Great Plains built the economic strength that allowed the early U.S. to resist foreign influence.
In a short four decades, the vast natural resources and agricultural capacity there were harnassed. Indiana came to life, its population increasing from 1.35 million in 1860 to 2.8 million in 1890, Nebraska’s from under 30,000 to over one million. A self-sustaining and rapidly growing economy was created virtually overnight that empowered the Monroe Doctrine and was the beginning of the modern American era.
None of this is mentioned in polite company on either coast. Lamentably, in popular American culture Germans are in demand primarily as villains — Major Dietrich in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Ernst Blofeld in the James Bond series, Col. Hans Landa in “Inglourious Bastards” and of course Hans Gruber in “Die Hard.”
I suppose, though, we all must do our part to keep identity politics alive in all of its sublime idiocy, even if it means throwing the great Gatsby under the woke bus. — tcl
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