James Gatz’s Mentor: Traces of Warren G. Harding in The Great Gatsby

James Gatz'sMentor: Traces of WarrenG. Hardingin TheGreat Gatsby Alice Hall Petry Oneofthe more intriguing minor characters of The Great Gatsby is the man responsiblefor James Gatz's transformation from dreamy small-town boy to wealthy, powerful bootlegger: Dan Cody, the metals magnate whose photograph is enshrined in Gatsby's bedroom. 1 When one considers the enormous impact which Cody had upon the creation of Gatsby-man and myth- it is surprising (and a bit frustrating) that Fitzgerald supplies us with tantalizinglylittle information about him; but the information that he does provideis remarkably suggestive. Dan Cody's very name conjures images of anAmerican hero. According to Robert Emmet Long, the name "suggests the American frontier": Cody is an adventurer "of a former age who has madehis fortune from slender beginnings, and he poses for Gatsby the same possibility'';2in fine, he embodies the rags-to-riches motif so ingrained in the Americanpsyche and so visible in the tales of Horatio Alger. Ernest Lockridge takesthis one step further and sees in the Christian name "Dan" a reference to Daniel Boone, that quasi-mythical hero of the American past, and the surname"Cody" to be a reference to Buffalo Bill Cody, whose later career wassomething of a Western carnival, a lamentable Barnumesque rendering ofthe American Dream of the West which Boone had embodied. 3 I agree withLockridge as far as he goes, but would argue further that Cody represents theultimate American hero: the President of the United States. Specifically, Ibelievethat what little information Fitzgerald provides about Cody points Canadian Reviewof American Studies, Volume 16,Number 2,Summer 1985,189-196 190 Alice HallPet,J· to his having been directly inspired by the twenty-ninth President, Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923), the small-town newspaperman turned world leader whose mysterious death in office was the sensation of the 1920s,and whose brief administration-striated with graft, corruption, infidelity, murder and suicide-destroyed forever the mystique of the Presidency. Written during the summer and fall of 1924 and published in the springof 1925, Gatsby was very much a product of the era of the Harding scandals. Moreover, Fitzgerald had a personal interest in the Presidency, and in particular that of Harding, as is evident from his composition of The Vegetable; or, From President to Postman, a play conceived in the late fall of 1921, revised in 1922, and performed in November 1923 (i.e., a few months after the President's death). The action takes place on the eve of Warren Harding's nomination for President in 1920, and the parallels between Harding andthe play's protagonist, Jerry Frost, are quite striking-especially those which were the result of plain coincidence. 4 Even had he not written The Vegetable, however, it is clear that Fitzgerald was not averse to giving his fictional characters Presidential dimensions. Abe North of Tender is the Night, whose physical description clearly is that of Abraham Lincoln, is a sterling example of this; and in Gatsby the character called "Owl-Eyes" has been associated with Theodore Roosevelt: as such, he is "a symbol of the persistence ofthe uncorrupted American dream, the original and spiritual dream, not the false and material one Gatsby pursues with such spiritual devotion." 5 Once one acknowledges these things, one can be receptive to the striking similarities between Dan Cody and the President who had died in office less than a year before Fitzgerald began work in earnest on The Great Gatsby. Most of what Fitzgerald tells us about Cody is to be found on two pagesof Chapter 6. When Gatsby initially met him, Cody is said to have been "physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness" (p. 100), a description which aptly limns Harding. Tall, "robust" since childhood,6 and a husky 240 pounds while in the White House,7 the strikingly handsome Harding clearly used his imposing physical appearance to enhance his credibility as a candidate for the Presidency (TW, p. 33). But, again like Cody, Harding's mind was considerably less impressive. One of the least intellectual Presidents, Harding had a meager formal education and, more to the point, remarkably poor judgment. Inclined to make instantaneous and grossly inaccurate character appraisals...