F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, were guilty of
many things. They were impetuous, they were known to drink
too much, and they were prone to bouts of serious depression
and self-destructive behavior, but no one could ever accuse
them of frugality. In 1923 the young couple (he was twenty-seven,
she was twenty-three) set sail for France. Hauling along
seventeen pieces of luggage and a complete set of Encyclopedia
Britannica, they rented an enormous stone villa that rested
2.5 kilometers above St. Raphäel, “a red little
town built close to the sea,” Scott explained to
a friend, “with gay red-roofed houses and an air
of repressed carnival about it.” Their villa was
studded with balconies of blue and white Moorish tiles
and surrounded by a fragrant orchard of lemon, olive and
palm trees that gave way to a long gravel road –
the only passageway out of their Mediterranean castle.
Ironically, it was there – some thousand miles away
from home, in his comfortable perch in the French Mediterranean
– that Scott wrote what was arguably the most important
American novel of the age: The Great Gatsby.
A tale of love and betrayal, Fitzgerald’s novel
told the story of Jay Gatsby, a poor boy of obscure origins
who rises to great wealth and prestige. In many ways,
the novel was emblematic of its time. For as the book’s
narrator, Nick Caraway, discovers, Gatsby’s money
and fame were built on a lie. (If you want to know what
that lie was, read the novel!) In The Great Gatsby,
Fitzgerald exposed the excesses of the 1920s – a
prosperous age in which many Americans came to enjoy the
blessings of consumerism and excess, only to see it all
crash around them with the Great Depression that arrived
in 1929. Caraway described the opulence of Gatsby’s
beachside mansion on Long Island, and the extravagance
of the parties he threw. “There was music from my
neighbor’s house through the summer nights,”
he confides. “In his blue gardens men and girls
came and went like moths among the whisperings and the
champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon
I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft,
or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach…On
week-ends his Rolls Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties
to and from the city…And on Mondays eight servants,
including a extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and
scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden shears, repairing
the ravages of the night before.” Much like the
Roaring Twenties, life in the shadow of Jay Gatsby was
a wonder.
Consider the context in which Fitzgerald was writing:
America in the 1920s was undergoing dynamic changes. Between
1921 and 1924 the country’s gross national product
jumped from $69 billion to $93 billion while aggregate
wages rose from roughly $36.4 billion to $51.5 billion.
The United States had entered World War I a debtor nation
and emerged as Europe’s largest creditor, to the
tune of $12.5 billion. From a relative standpoint, America
was rich, and it showed. When a prominent Philadelphia
banking family raised eyebrows for installing gold fixtures
in its bathrooms, a spokesman for the clan shrugged off
the criticism, explaining simply that “[y]ou don’t
have to polish them you know.”
To be sure, most Americans didn’t have gold faucets,
and very few enjoyed anything approximating Jay Gatsby’s
wealth. But ordinary Americans still shared in the general
prosperity. Whereas only sixteen percent of American households
were electrified in 1912, by the mid-20s almost two-thirds
had electricity. This meant that the average family could
replace hours of manual toil and primitive housekeeping
with the satisfying hum of the electric vacuum cleaner,
the electric refrigerator and freezer, and the automatic
washing machine, all of which came into wide use during
the 20s. By the end of the 1920s over 12 million American
households acquired radio sets. All the while, the number
of telephone lines almost doubled, from to 10.5 million
in 1915 to 20 million by 1930.
Wealth seemed to breed innovation. It took over one hundred
years for the US Patent Office to issue its millionth
patent in 1911; within fifteen years it issued its two-millionth.
Scores of new factory products flooded the burgeoning
consumer market, bearing soon-familiar brand names like
Scotch Tape, Welch’s grape juice, Listerine mouthwash,
Wheaties cereal, Kleenex tissue paper, the Schick electric
razor, and the lemonade Popsicle.
If most people couldn’t travel to the South of France
for repose and inspiration, they did come to enjoy a new
range of public amusements that were scarcely imaginable
twenty years before: dance halls; movie palaces like Chicago’s
Oriental Theater and New York’s Rialto; amusement
parks like Luna and Steeplechase at Coney Island, each
magnificently lit by as many as 250,000 electric bulbs;
inner-city baseball stadiums like Ebbets Field and Shibe
Park, easily accessible by public transportation.
Americans were also able to buy vast quantities of mass-produced
glassware, jewelry, clothing, household items and durable
goods which blurred the distinctions between rich and
poor. Just as Nick Caraway could not discern the lie behind
Gatsby’s wealth and upbringing, many wealthier Americans
now had trouble discerning between social classes. “I
used to be able to tell something about the background
of a girl applying for a job as stenographer by her clothes,”
remarked a businessman in Muncie, Indiana, “but
today I often have to wait till she speaks, shows a gold
tooth, or otherwise gives me a second clue.”
Americans in the 1920s were also obsessed with a new cult
of celebrity. The decade gave rise to sports legends like
Babe Ruth, who was just as renowned for his voracious
appetite as for his homerun record, and Jack Dempsey,
the heavyweight champion who by the mid-1920s appeared
in almost as many films as he did title fights. Whereas
the Saturday Evening Post and Colliers combined published
an average of thirty-six biographical profiles each year
between 1901 and 1914, in the decade after World War I
that figure climbed to about sixty-six profiles annually.
Before 1920 almost three-quarters of these articles featured
political and business leaders; now, over half concerned
key figures in entertainment and sports. The genius of
F. Scott Fitzgerald was his ability to cultivate his own
image in the media. The genius of his signature character,
Jay Gatsby, was his ability to create a veil of celebrity
that masked his true origins.
But for all the dynamism of the age, Americans did not
unqualifiedly embrace the Jazz Age. If they enjoyed its
prosperity, they also feared its social consequences.
The rise of premarital sex, the entry of women into the
workplace, the breakdown of traditional religious mores,
and the influx of millions of new immigrants from Southern
and Eastern Europe gave rise to a powerful backlash. Thus,
the same decade that gave rise to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald
also witnessed a powerful backlash. In towns and cities
throughout America, a revitalized Klu Klux Klan railed
against African Americans, immigrants, Catholics and “loose
women.” Supporters of Prohibition drove through
a restrictive law that banned the sale or production of
liquor (judging by Fitzgerald’s novel, that ban
was of limited effect). Conservative Christians formed
Fundamentalist churches and sought to restore God to his
traditional place in homes and schools. There was, in
short, a deep and pervasive contradiction – and
many Americans sensed it.
Fitzgerald was a perfect chronicler of his time. He was
both an avid participant in, and a stringent critic of,
the culture of prosperity that marked the 1920s. In Gatsby,
his alter-ego, Nick Caraway, recalls wistfully the America
of his youth. In Nick’s mind, the Middle West embodied
a lost age – a simpler time before telephones and
movie palaces and department stores. Setting out by train
from Chicago, “when we pulled into our winter night
and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside
us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights
of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild embrace
came suddenly into the air.” This was “my
Middle West,” he explains in the closing pages of
the novel, “not the wheat or the prairies or the
lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of
my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the
frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by
lighted windows. I am part of that…I see now that
this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom
and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners,
and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which
made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”
But if the West represented for Fitzgerald an older America,
it was clear from his novel that the country’s train
was moving Eastward. By 1920, a majority of Americans
lived in cities. The world was quickly changing and becoming
modern, and the prairies of Nick Caraway’s youth
were slowly but surely becoming the stuff of national
memory.
The world that Fitzgerald chronicled came crashing down
on October 29, 1929. That was Black Tuesday, when the
stock market collapsed. The boom economy went bust. And
America’s Jazz Age was officially over.
Actually, the stock market crash had very little to do
with the onset of the Great Depression. Very few Americans
in the 1920s owned stocks or securities. In reality, the
nation’s most prosperous decade had been built on
a house of cards. Low wages, high rates of seasonal unemployment,
chronic stagnation in the agricultural sector, and a hopelessly
unequal distribution of wealth were the darker story that
lurked behind 1920s-era prosperity.
There was a price to pay for so lopsided a concentration
of the nation’s riches. Good times relied on good
sales, after all. The same farmers and workers who fueled
economic growth early in the decade by purchasing shiny
new cars and electric washing machines had reached their
limit. By the late 20s, when advertisers told them that
their cars and washing machines were outdated and needed
to be replaced, the working class simply couldn’t
afford to buy new ones. Un-purchased consumer items languished
on the shelves. Factories cut their production. Workers
were laid off by the millions. The good times were over.
The Great Gatsby continues to fascinate and grip
Americans today. In an era much like the 1920s –
one in which we have come to enjoy new levels of comfort
and convenience, in which we celebrate celebrity and opulence,
but in which there remain glaring inequalities of wealth
and privilege – Gatsby is more relevant than ever.
“So we beat on,” as Fitzgerald wrote, “boats
against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Bibliography
Milford, Nancy. Zelda. New York: Harper and
Row, 1970.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New
York: Scribner, c1995.
Joshua Zeitz is a lecturer on American
history and fellow of Pembroke College at the University
of Cambridge and is a contributing editor at American
Heritage. His writing has appeared in the New York Times,
Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New Republic, and
Forward. He lives in New York and Cambridge, England.
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