Was the Great Gatsby black?

Or was he Jewish?

In the New York Times, former film critic A.O. Scott concludes his article on the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

Which raises the question of who he has been all along. The theory that Gatsby was “a Black man in whiteface” (to cite the subtitle title of a 2017 book) has been in circulation for some time, linking academic scholarship and internet fan theorizing. Gatsby’s outsider status is suggestive, as is the fact that his nemesis, Tom Buchanan, is an outspoken racist, obsessed with miscegenation and in thrall to the racial pseudoscience of the day.

In a brilliant 2023 essay in The Atlantic, Alonzo Vereen describes teaching “Gatsby” to high school students in a way that highlights the indeterminate, “unraced” aspects of the character’s identity. “Gatsby’s American identity is so ambiguous,” Vereen writes, “that the students could layer on top of it any ethnic or racial identity they brought to the novel. When they did, the text was freshly lit.”

The light at the end of the dock is an entire constellation.

So, was Gatsby black?

Or was he Jewish?

Or was he gay?

Paywall here.

Uh, no, Gatsby wasn’t black. Nor was he Jewish. Nor gay.

After all, if Fitzgerald hadn’t opened his novel by satirizing Tom Buchanan’s bigotry, people would notice his own 1920s anti-Semitism:

“Mr. Carraway, this is my friend Mr. Wolfsheim.”

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the halfdarkness.

Meyer Wolfsheim was inspired by Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish mob boss who bribed the Black Sox to throw the 1919 World Series.

And there’s Nick’s condescension toward uppity blacks:

As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all… .”

Of course, Fitzgerald explains Gatsby’s background in the latter part of the book. It turns out that Gatsby was that least storied type of American, the German-American.

Gatsby grew up in North Dakota as James Gatz.

Blacks made up 0.1% of the population of North Dakota in 1890.

In 2024, according to a new survey by the Jewish Electorate Institute, North Dakota has the second fewest Jews of any state, with 910, 0.1% of the population:

Narrator Nick Carraway notes: “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people.” Gatsby had briefly attend “the small Lutheran College of St. Olaf’s in southern Minnesota.” Gatsby’s father Henry C. Gatz shows up late in the novel from a town in Minnesota, and arranges a Lutheran service.

I realize that the existence of German-Americans is not well remembered since the culture war of 1917, but there really were, and are, a whole lot of German-Americans.

Fitzgerald’s own views could sound like those of Tom Buchanan with a better prose style, at least when room service at his hotels in Europe was unsatisfactory. In 1921 he wrote to literary critic Edmund Wilson from the Hotel Cecil in London:

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it’s a shame that England and America didn’t let Germany conquer Europe. It’s the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. My reactions were all philistine, antisocialistic, provincial and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro … They’re thru and done.

So, what is The Great Gatsby about?

Race? Ethnicity?

Nah, it’s about regionalism, even more than it’s about class. Nick is a homesick son of the Midwest:

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gaieties, to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the 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 brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my Middle West—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 on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. 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.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old—even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg, especially, still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco…

After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

Americans used to be much more sympathetic regarding homesickness, as Susan J. Matt notes in her fascinating book Homesickness: An American History. (Professor Matt finally earned tenure at the sixth college where she taught.)

But over the course of the 20th Century, big institutions noticed that their tasks were simpler if they could get Americans to view homesickness as childish, and thus agree that they were fungible.

So, nobody remembers that Gatsby is Lutheran and that Nick’s anomie is due to his homesickness for the Midwest.