Failure of the Capitalist Ideal in The Great Gatsby
The most striking element in Fitzgerald's demystification of the world of the capitalist ideal is not the human insecurity and moral ugliness bred by the fever of glamour but the absolute failure of the work ethic quite literally to deliver the goods. Only the upper ten percent of the population enjoyed markedly increased income in the 1920s, for as Spindler notes, by 1929 perhaps 50,000 individuals received half of all national share income (166). In 1921, Zinn records, 4,270,000 Americans were unemployed, two million people in New York City lived in tenements condemned as firetraps, and six million families (42 per cent of the US total) made less than $1,000 a year (373); Gatsby opens in the spring of 1922. "Shocking to tell," records Ann Douglas, "71 percent of American families in the 1920s had annual incomes below $2,500, the minimum needed for decent living; in New York in the years just after the war, the average worker earned only $1,144 a year" (18). In addition to the dramatic new polarization of wealth, corporate mergers between 1919 and 1930 swallowed up some 8,000 businesses (there were 80 bank mergers in 1919 alone), in a momentum of monopolistic concentration of wealth and power at the very top that rendered the traditional entrepreneurial dream a hollow fiction for virtually all. By 1929, the 200 largest non-financial companies held nearly half of all corporate assets and over one-fifth of the entire wealth of the nation (Spindler 103). In view of such developments, it is no wonder that Nick finds Tom and Daisy "remotely rich" and feels "a little disgusted" (20), a resentment of privilege shared by the cottagers of the old West Egg fishing village who refuse the offer by the original owner of Gatsby's mansion to pay five years' taxation if they will thatch their roofs. ("Americans . . . have always been obstinate about being peasantry" [89].) Their pride does not save them, however: a few years later even Daisy will feel offended by the "too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants from nothing to nothing" (108). For the truth of this economy gives the lie, as Fitzgerald firmly shows, to glamour's promise. Wilson, worn away by a decade's straining at the gasoline pump, pitied even by Tom (138), knows better than Klipspringer that the economy's real law is unavailing drudgery: "one thing's sure and nothing's surer / The rich get richer while the poor get - children" (96). In this society, where the "stern" names of "the great American capitalists" find no contemporary exemplars save the "gray old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller" and sold mongrel pups on the sidewalk (63, 27), there is only one way from rags to riches, and that is crime. The choice is a simple one between drudgery and a "gonnegtion." The reach of official corruption suggested in the successful "fixing" of the 1919 World Series is re-echoed on a more mundane plane in the white card sent Gatsby annually by the Police Commissioner for doing him "a favor," a card that sends policemen accelerating apologetically away on their motorcycles. Lack of further options is again suggested in the fact that even Tom's friend, Walter Chase, turns to crime to repair his fortunes. As Gatsby explains, Walter "came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport" (135). There were, in the telling new binarism of the 1920s metropolitans, only "suckers" and "racketeers" (Douglas 20).
Gatsby turns to crime only when, though covered in war medals, he becomes literally half-starved in the search in New York for even a menial job. "He hadn't eat anything for a couple of days. . . . He ate more than four dollars' worth of food in half an hour" (172). For, very strikingly, we are nowhere shown in this novel of defeated aspiration - Nick, Myrtle and Gatsby are all failed climbers - a sphere of legal and effective self-betterment. In this landscape of bleak class-entrapment and dead-end labor, wherein rich and poor are frozen in polar extremes (Among the Ash-Heaps and Millionaires had been Fitzgerald's first title for the book), Gatsby could never have even have met and wooed Daisy without the imposed, momentary egalitarianism of uniform. Tom's contemptuous slash lacerates because it is true: "I'll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door" (132). In circumstances of ineluctable paralysis for the masses, of blocked economic ascent, Nick realizes that he himself - "one of the few honest people that I have ever known" (60) - might also have surrendered to a "gonnegtion" at Gatsby's offer, had it been only more diplomatically timed: "I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there" (83-4).
The legitimate economy, where we glimpse it, conveys the very essence of alienated labor. There the senses become, in a condition directly opposed to that of the synesthesia of the parties, starved, dulled and oppressed. Wilson's garage is a dim and almost bare expanse of dust "approached by a trail of ashes," where work has left him "spiritless, anaemic" (25). Up in the city, Nick falls asleep at his swivel chair, attempting "to list the quotations on an interminable amount of stock" (155). The oppressiveness of broiling heat on the train to Long Island is subliminally clinched by association with industry: "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon" (114). (The association may remind us again of the rich, "safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor" [150].) The work ethic is in crisis, its cruel bluff exposed. Fitzgerald's demystification of capitalist promise could hardly be more thoroughgoing. Or so it might seem.
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