Nordicism, a form of racial nativism that became popular in America following World War I, provides a context for understanding the production of classic American literature at mid-decade. Roberts began from the twin premises of Nordicism: “The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race” and “Races can not be cross-bred without mongrelization.” Writing overseas, Roberts speculated that “if a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe” (22). According to historian John Higham, Roberts’s articles, which appeared in the Post and which were published in a 1922 collection under the title Why Europe Leaves Home, became the most widely read effusions on Nordic theory of its day (265, 273). During the same year the Post’s editor, George Horace Lorimer, sent Kenneth Roberts abroad to report on European immigration to the United States. At this time Post editorials advocated the racialist doctrines of Madison Grant. As the nation’s most popular magazine, the Post began publishing nativist opinions in its pages as early as the spring of 1920. During this period Fitzgerald placed many of his short stories with the Post and, as such, it became his most lucrative source of income while composing Gatsby. In this way, Gatsby stages a national anxiety about the loss of white Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the Twenties… Racialist and Nativist Doctrineįitzgerald’s familiarity with the grammar of nativism was likely informed by his professional affiliation with The Saturday Evening Post in the Twenties. A story of entrepreneurial corruption, accented by the language of nativism, competes with and ultimately foils the traditional narrativeof virtuous American uplift.
However, another less virtuous narrative of Gatsby’s self-making unfolds, which connects our hero’s business schemes to the tainted hand of immigrant gangsters. Gatsby’s upward struggle is inspired by traditional purveyors of middle-class success, such as Ben Franklin and Horatio Alger Jr. Through the eyes of Fitzgerald’s narrator, Nick Carraway, Gatsby appears in the guise of the archetypal, if somewhat misguided, self-made man in America. The Great Gatsby (1925) represents the diminishing moral authority of uplift stories in an age of declining faith in the nation’s ability to assimilate new immigrants.
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