White Nationalism in Congress and Gatsby

Now, more than ever, we need to find a way to be sure that all of the diverse students we teach can engage in difficult conversations in our classrooms about racism, religious prejudice, and white nationalism. These conversations, however, can be risky work in our current political climate, particularly as higher education is identified by critics like Attorney-General Jeff Sessions as an “echo chamber of political correctness” (Ruiz 2017). We would argue that many of our great canonical American texts offer us remarkably interesting material with which to enable conversations about inequality and injustice in the United States and that teachers must seize the opportunity to use these texts to foster these conversations in our classrooms.¹ We offer the following discussion of The Great Gatsby as a model for undertaking this important work.

Gatsby hardly seems a radical, left-wing, or politically correct text. Teachers at both the college and secondary level often focus on the novel’s seemingly innocuous elements: the American Dream, the rich people and their careless ways, the culture of alcohol, the green light, the watching eyes. White nationalism, however, in a form that’s remarkably similar to the nativism surging today, appears right in the first chapter of Gatsby when Tom decries that “Civilization’s going to pieces” and asks Nick if he has “read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” (Fitzgerald [1925] 2004, 12). Urging that “everybody ought to read” Goddard’s book, Tom explains, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. . . . [I]t’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things” (13).

Tom’s admiration of Goddard may be both ugly and foolish, but he isn’t the only character to draw the reader’s attention to Goddard. Nick’s conversation with the man with the “owl-eyed spectacles” (45) in the library of Gatsby’s mansion centers on a book seemingly pulled at random from the bookshelf to demonstrate its bona-fides: volume one of Goddard’s lectures. Are its pages uncut because Gatsby eschews its racist sentiments or because he is not a genuine reader?

“This man Goddard” in real-life was Lothrop Stoddard, a well-known advocate of white supremacy in the 1920s whose ideas were widely spread by the media and even cited by President Warren G. Harding. A focus on Stoddard in Gatsby enables students to unpack white nationalism, not just in this novel about the American Dream but in our own time as well.

A selection of a few paragraphs illustrates Stoddard’s (1920) ideas:

Such is Europe’s deplorable condition as she staggers forth from the hideous ordeal of the Great War; her . . . capital dissipated, . . . her industrial fabric rent and tattered, her finances threatened with bankruptcy, the flower of her manhood dead on the battle-field, her populations devitalized and discouraged, her children stunted by malnutrition. A sombre picture.

While Europe, which Stoddard identifies as the “white homeland, the heart of the white world,” has experienced devastating damage from WWI, Stoddard insists that the “colored world remains virtually unscathed” and poses an existential threat to the white world:

If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all. And that would mean that the race obviously endowed with the greatest creative ability, the race which had achieved most in the past and which gave the richer promise for the future, had passed away, carrying with it to the grave those potencies upon which the realization of man’s highest hopes depends. A million years of human evolution might go uncrowned, and earth’s supreme life-product, man, might never fulfil his potential destiny. This is why we today face “The Crisis of the Ages.”

Careful readers will notice the continuity of Stoddard’s ideas with the beliefs of today’s white supremacists and neo-Nazis from Charlottesville and [End Page...