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Notes on F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Passing of the Great Race

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

M. Gidley
Affiliation:
University of Exeter

Extract

Nick Carraway, the narrator of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), is slightly taken aback by some of his host's remarks in the course of an otherwise bantering conversation during his first visit to the Buchanans' East Egg residence:

‘Civilization's going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. 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 all scientific stuff; it's been proved … This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things … The idea is that we're Nordics. I am, and you are, and … And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization – oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

1 The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner's, 1925), p. 16.Google Scholar

2 The Rising Tide of Color: A Note on the Historicism of The Great Gatsby’, American Literature, 43 (Autumn, 1971), 442–4.Google Scholar

3 Turlish, , p. 442Google Scholar. See Sklar, , The Last Laocoön (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 135, 356, n. iGoogle Scholar. Founded on a faulty memory of Fitzgerald himself, the Spengler source was one of the houses Stallman, Robert W. built, notably in ‘Conrad and The Great Gatsby’, Twentieth Century Literature, I (04, 1955), 512.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Turlish, , p. 443Google Scholar. Stoddard's book, titled in full The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, was published by Scribners, Fitzgerald's publisher, in 1920, and frequently reprinted. The first mention of the Fitzgerald-Stoddard connexion was by Mizener, Arthur in The Far Side of Paradise (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1951), p. 336, n. 21.Google Scholar

5 Turlish, , passimGoogle Scholar. He also claims that the mention of ‘Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures”’ in Gatsby's library (The Great Gatsby, p. 55Google Scholar) is a more direct reference to Lothrop Stoddard's book. Here I think he is mistaken. Lothrop Stoddard did not publish anything of a multi-volume nature or with the word ‘Lectures’ in the title, whereas a well-known work of the time was John L. Stoddard's Lectures, originally published in ten volumes by Balch Brothers of Boston in 1905–6 and reprinted in 1925 by G. L. Shuman of Chicago. Stoddard, John Lawson (18501931)Google Scholar, Lothrop Stoddard's father, was a reclaimed Catholic (see his Rebuilding a Lost Faith, 1921Google Scholar) and experienced travel writer; volume one of his major work – the pages of which, of course, remain uncut in Gatsby's library – consists of lectures on Norway, Switzerland, Athens and Venice. On this matter, see also Ellis, James, ‘The “Stoddard Lectures” in The Great Gatsby’, American Literature, 44 (Autumn, 1972), 470–1.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 But, all told, as Sklar and others have shown, Fitzgerald went through an organic deepening process during the years immediately preceding the composition of Gatsby, a process which involved an increasingly greater awareness of history. It is improbable that any one work could have served as Fitzgerald's key to an understanding or rendering of historical change; and if one work could have done such service it is more likely, surely, that it was one by Henry Adams or James Harvey Robinson or some other relevant figure known to have influenced Fitzgerald's thinking at that time.

7 Turlish, , p. 443Google Scholar. Of course, most writers on Fitzgerald's social thought have ignored the subject of race; see, for example, Greenleaf, Richard, ‘The Social Thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’, Science and Society, 16 (Spring, 1952), 97114.Google Scholar

8 See the examination of the period in Higham, John's Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New York: Atheneum, 1965)Google Scholar; Murphy, Paul L. provides a briefer analysis of certain aspects in ‘Sources and Nature of Intolerance in the 1920's’, Journal of American History, 51 (06, 1964), 6076.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Quoted in Higham, , p. 172.Google Scholar

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15 This was also published by Charles Scribner's Sons. The edition cited in this essay is that published in London during 1917 by George Bell.

16 The Passing of the Great Race, passim. For a thorough examination of Gian's doctrines, especially of his spurious science, see Spitz, David, Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 137–62Google Scholar. Another interesting commentary on Grant and Stoddard is to be found in Race: The History of an Idea in America by Gossett, Thomas F. (New York: Schocken, 1965), pp. 353–63, 390–8 and 426–7Google Scholar; Professor Gossett, it should be said, preceded others in developing the connexion between Tom Buchanan's outburst and Stoddard (see p. 397).

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20 The Passing of the Great Race, pp. 81–2Google Scholar; this passage may also be found – as the culmination of a well chosen representative sample from Grant – in Handlin, Oscar, ed., Immigration as a Factor in American History (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1958), pp. 183–5.Google Scholar

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24 Ibid., p. 251.

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26 The Beautiful and Damned, p. 382Google Scholar. All told, it is perhaps surprising that Milton Hindus is not more censorious in his ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald and Literary Anti-Semitism’, Commentary, 3 (1947). 508–16.Google Scholar

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28 The Passing of the Great Race, p. 40 and passimGoogle Scholar; see also Grant, 's ‘Discussion of [Alleyne Ireland's] Article on Democracy and Heredity’, Journal of Heredity, 10 (1919), 164–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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