Gatsby/Trump, A Century Apart

Way back when I was an undergrad student at UC Santa Barbara, a fair number of Vietnamese refugees had been and were being relocated to the “student ghetto” of Isla Vista. Some of them even opened a small Asian market to make things at least a bit more like the home they’d had to leave under great duress. I enjoyed watching them launch small fishing boats just below our clifftop shack. But there were also wholly unfounded rumors that everyone should keep their dogs inside as the immigrants were catching and eating them. Sound familiar?

I recently reread, for the third time, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s totemic novel “The Great Gatsby,” originally published in 1926. He wrote most of it in 1924, one century ago. In recent years it has begun to seem all too relevant.

The first time I read it was back in my high school days, when it was assigned reading, but I have no real recollection of it striking me in the way that, say, Jack Kerouac, Kurt Vonnegut, Ken Kesey or Richard Brautigan books did at that point. Fitzgerald was writing about stuffy wealthy East Coast yachting types during the 1920s fabled Jazz Age, not the counterculture figures I was fascinated by and looked up to and even hoped to emulate at that point. A very boring film version of Gatsby arrived to only confirm my suspicion that Fitzgerald was for nerds. After all, hadn’t none other than Bob Dylan mocked him, or rather his devoted readers, as squares, in “Ballad of A Thin Man”: “You’ve read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books / you’re very well-read, it’s well known…”? And Hemingway made mean mincemeat of his supposed friend and mentor Scotty in “A Moveable Feast” as well.

A couple decades later I came across a copy of Gatsby in my piles of books, started reading, and got sucked right in, finishing it in a day. This time I was enthralled and impressed by the skilled writing itself, and saw why many have called it The Great American Novel. So I sought out some of Fitzgerald’s other novels and short stories and was duly impressed again by the evocative writing. The posthumously published collection of non-fiction “The Crack Up” revealed yet more of his brilliance but especially his tragedy as an alcoholic seemingly doomed to an early demise. The unfinished final novel “The Last Tycoon” was considered by some his greatest work, but he was dead, after an attempt to revive his career and finances in the Hollywood “industry,” in 1940 at just 44 years old.

Perhaps most striking to me was this brief bit of dialogue which appears near the start of the novel, as the central characters are casually prepping to party in a waterfront mansion:

“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?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“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.”…

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness…

What this brief passage presents is an early depiction of “replacement theory.” The book by “this man Goddard” was a real one, titled “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy” that received much notice at the time. The Irish and Italians had already been the subject of “immigrant panic” and as that settled down some darker threats to “the white race” were coming into the crosshairs of the elite - unless of course they were reliable and non-threatening gardeners, cooks, chauffeurs, or more distant food producers and other laborers - the very people they relied upon to make their lives so cushy, not to mention keeping the costs of food, construction and maintenance, and so much more much less expensive than would otherwise be the case.

Sound familiar? There should be no need to go into all the current parallels, other than to note that using the threat of foreign invasion via immigration, legal or not, has a long and ignominious history as a political tactic. Crime is the most viscerally effective specter utilized. But as violent crime has been steadily decreasing, with blips, for decades while ethnic diversity increases, one might just as or more accurately argue that the more immigrants, the safer we all are. Not to mention all that very tasty food. But it’s been shown that fear of crime increases the further one is isolated from it, and thus the heavily-armed folks behind multiple gates and guards. Ineffective alarm systems have made a few entrepreneurs very wealthy. Still, the “scary immigrant” trope too often works, for as President Lyndon B. Johnson, a very skilled strategist until he wasn’t, advised in the 1960s, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’ve been picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

I grew up among the coastal wealthy. I heard the same type of arguments mocked in Gatsby in some yes, waterfront mansions, with nice boats docked out front. Most of the yachting set knew nobody, or very few, people who weren’t white. Our lovely Southern California town was like the Deep South in that nonwhites walking or driving through town would often get pulled over and questioned, as I witnessed more than once. Racist comments were casually common. With the rise of Trump they became moreso. And thus the “build a wall” slogan was oft-uttered. In discussion, if one pointed out that such walls rarely if ever worked in any appreciable manner, caused human suffering and environmental disruption, and that soon enough Trump’s wall-building was exposed as a corrupt grift as his chosen contractors were convicted, the discussion went silent. No minds were changed. Trump’s subsequent sabotage of a bipartisan immigration reform deal for his own political purposes was also a conversation killer. One couldn’t even joke about it; when I challenged one old pal’s assertion that “our culture is being erased” by pointing out that I’d lived in an extremely diverse city for decades and loved it, and asked “What are you afraid of, burritos?” that seemed the end of that friendship.

One of Fitzgerald’s most famed passages is found in his story “The Rich Boy” published the same year as The Great Gatsby: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you are born rich, is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are…”.

Of course this is not universally true. Some of my best friends are very rich and don’t feel that way, and are some of the best people I’ve known. They don’t want to show off, do good work in the world, and live their lives outside of any limelight. And they don’t look down on those of different skin color or culture. But when I read the history of wealth in our nation and beyond, and witness what, say, our newer tech would-be overlords say and do and prioritize, Fitzgerald’s fictionalized observations and generalizations are undeniably true to a considerable degree.

I’m typing this just before the national election, which could go either way. But the attitudes Fitzgerald lampooned in his Great American Novel, alas, will be with us regardless. If, in worst case, that results in huge disruption to lives and the economy, if not outright civil warfare, nobody can say we weren’t warned. Like Daisy, maybe the most many of us will be able to come up with in response is some form of “unthoughtful sadness.”