seems racist today but how would that have been viewed in the 20s. Are we supposed to like Tom less because of that?
I’ve heard speculation that Fitzgerald was trying to imply that Gatsby was passing for white, as people used to say. I suppose we’ll never know, though.
Huh? Never heard that. Never thought of it while reading the book either. Anyway wasn’t Gatsby based on a real life person who wasn’t passing for white?
Actually, that theory about the Nordic race passing away was bandied about in the twenties. Back then quite a few people were getting their knickers in a twist about mescegenation, and immigrants having too many babies, and OMG! White women these days want information about birth control, and we’d better start sterilizing the undesirables, etc. etc. Yes, it was very racist, and some did recognize it as that. I believe Fitzgerald was trying to make Tom less appealing as a character by using that.
But even among intellectual circles, that kind of reasoning about race was far more accepted than it is today.
It should also be noted that, at the time, Italians and Catholic Irish weren’t really “white” (“lace curtain” Irish, who were mostly protestant Anglo-Irish, were), either, so it’s entirely possible that Fitzgerald wasn’t talking about blacks, as such. Or at least, not blacks alone.
Eugenics was a big part of the Progressive movement at the time (along with Prohibition, women’s suffrage, and all the rest), and Progressivism was pretty much an ideology of the educated and upper classes. I think the reference was meant to indicate a dilettantish interest in what was then one of The Big Issues. A modern version might have the character nonchalantly misquoting An Inconvenient Truth.
I think athelas is right about the meaning of Tom’s comments about race. It’s one of the first thing that establishes Tom as an unsympathetic boor, and Nick doesn’t think much of what he’s saying. Fitzgerald was referring to a real book by an author with a very similar name. (“The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” by Lothrop Stoddard.) We find out in the same chapter that Tom is cheating on Daisy, right? And I think it’s the next chapter where we watch him sneer at his mistress and later punch her in the face. And it’s impossible to feel anything but contempt for Tom until near the end of the book.
By the way, PSXer, I hope this isn’t your summer reading. 
no I don’t have summer reading. I read this first in high school a few years ago and I loved it and I re-read it sometimes. My high school teacher said that the point was to show that Tom was racist and it made sense to me then but I was thinking about that reading it now and I think maybe that doesn’t make sense from the 1920s point of view so maybe there is another reason.
I always read it as implying that Daisy was passing for white, i.e., Tom Buchanan is letting Daisy know he married beneath him. When he says to the company, "We’re Nordics . . . that is, I am, and you are, and you are . . . " he pointedly omits Daisy. IIRC; long time since I read it.
BTW, the book and author to which Tom was referring, The Rise of Colored Empires by “this man Goddard,” are based on two real-life books and their authors:
The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant (1916).
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop Stoddard (1920).
There are some people who think we’re supposed to believe Gatsby was passing for white. If you look at the evidence… I’m tempted to say it’s just stupid but maybe it’s better to say that it’s much more in the minds of the readers than anywhere in the text.
I think Fitzgerald describes Gatsby as tan at one point, or at least darker than Nick, but I don’t see the evidence that James Gatz from Minnesota is part black. Nothing about it is mentioned when Mr. Gatz shows up at the end of the book either - and if Fitzgerald was trying to say something about race I think we’d get a clue there. But we don’t. It’s unfortunate if people insist on making Gatsby a book about any one particular thing rather than a story that’s open to a lot of readings.
Just a joke. I don’t remember what Nick says about Tom reading the book but I think he tries to change the subject as soon as Tom brings it up. It’s not supposed to make him look good. But I’m sure Tom’s view seemed less horrible in the 1920s because the Nazis hadn’t yet taken power and showed what would happen if eugenics and racial superiority theories were taken to their logical endpoint.
Jay Gatsby needn’t be black to feel he needs to “pass” himself off as something other than what he is.
Even white guy from the middle or lower classes feels out of place among the rich and famous, and may feel like an utter fraud in their presence.
Hey, I’m white and went to an Ivy League school and would STILL feel like a fish out of water if I were invited to a banquet at the home of some old money WASP family. Even if they were the nicest people imaginable, I’d constantly feel as if my manners and my speech patterns were being noticed and judged.
Isn’t, kinda by definition, Gatsby Jewish? Jay Gatz with “gonnegtions” with Meyer Wolfscheim, he of the human-molar cufflinks?
I have always assumed that The Great Gatsby is a literate, and more realistically tragic, example of the Superman story - i.e., a look at the immigrant experience and how outsiders can assume new identities in their quest to become superheroes and accepted by the rich and powerful…
I wouldn’t assume he’s Jewish just based on the name. His real name is James Gatz. Gatz could just be German and I assume James is more popular for Christians. We never learn much about Gatsby and Wolfsheim but I assume it was through Dan Cody or one of Gatsby’s other bootlegging contacts rather than through any kind of shared heritage in particular.
Interesting question. The only info on the Wolfsheim-Gatsby connection was delivered by the WASPy Tom: “…this Gatsby and Wolfsheim bought up a bunch of drugstores, and sold grain alcohol over the counter”
Gatsby:“well, your friend wasn’t too proud to get in on it”
Tom: “and you left him in the lurch”
What Gatsby and Wolfsheim had been doing was a common way of evading prohibition-pharmacies could sell alcohol (brandy, whiskey, etc., under a doctor’s prescription). You just went to your local “Dr. Feelgood”, gave him a few bucks, and he would write you a prescription-for alcohol. Perfectly legal.
?Que? Do you mean GBS’s Man and Superman? If you mean Superman as in Kal-El, I didn’t think he had a quest to become a superhero. And since when does he want to be accepted by the rich and powerful? The only rich and powerful person he hangs out with is Bruce Wayne, who is also a superhero.
In any case, I do find it a bit of a stretch that a black guy would be called Gatz to begin with. And if Gatsby’s family was dead to him because he had to disassociate himself from his darker skinned relatives, I do agree that it would have come out when everyone met his black father at the end.