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 16 percent of American households were
electrified in 1912, by the mid-twenties 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 twenties. 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 Ku 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 twenties, 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. Unpurchased consumer items languished on the shelves. Factories cut their
production. Workers were laid off by the millions. The good times were over.
