The Great Gatsby and the Great Replacement Theory

 

Washington Post Book Editor Ron Charles published this piece in today's print edition of the Post.  I wonder whether those adopting the Tucker Carlson view of the world will urge reading The Great Gatsby, and make Tom Buchanan the hero of the story, or whether they will seek to have F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic banned because the protagonists have such contempt for Buchanan? Literature makes one think -- and that is what the Tucker Carlson elite does NOT want the masses to do.

But on a more serious note, it is indeed disturbing that the theories of who justly were mocked a century ago are threatening to take hold among enough people that that minority could rule over the majority, and destroy the Promise of America. 

Here is the piece:

In the wake of our latest mass shooting, in which Payton Gendron allegedly murdered 10 Black people in Buffalo, America has suddenly discovered “great replacement theory.” Or, worse, we’ve discovered that an alarming number of us share Gendron’s belief in it. According to an AP-NORC poll, “nearly half of Republicans agree to at least some extent with the idea that there’s a deliberate intent to ‘replace’ native-born Americans with immigrants” (story). 

Since the Buffalo massacre, conservatives like New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik and Fox News entertainer Tucker Carlson have been indignantly explaining why their fervent promotion of great replacement theory has nothing to do with great replacement theory. 

But efforts to find the source of this racist conspiracy are misleading. It didn't recently slither out from some neo-Nazi message board on the dark web. The claim that “legitimate” Americans are being systematically replaced by non-white immigrants has deep roots in U.S. political culture. In fact, while listening to Carlson rant against elites determined to “import an entirely new electorate from the Third World,” English majors may have heard echoes of a much earlier preppy racist: Tom Buchanan. 

Early in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby,” we meet Tom at his grand mansion in East Egg. He’s agitated, as though he’s just finished watching an hour of Fox News:

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” Tom tells his startled guests. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard? . . . It’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.” 

It’s clear that Fitzgerald thinks Tom’s little learning is a dangerous thing. Daisy openly mocks him: “Tom’s getting very profound,” she sighs. “He reads deep books with long words in them.”

Tom barrels on: “It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

In her illuminating study “So We Read On: How ‘The Great Gatsby’ Came to Be and Why It Endures,” Maureen Corrigan explains that Fitzgerald is satirizing Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 bestseller, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy” and a popular 1916 book that Stoddard relied on, “The Passing of the Great Race,” by Madison Grant.  

To read Stoddard’s book, as I did this week (you owe me), is to endure a racist screed of pseudoscience, faulty history and economic bunk designed to spur White people to resist dilution of their precious genetic purity. The content is dully disgusting, but what’s most alarming is the currency of the book’s panicked tone. Though written a century ago, this is essentially the Trump-Fox playbook: a xenophobic jeremiad gassed up with numbingly repetitive fear-mongering:

“We stand at a crisis – the supreme crisis of the ages,” Stoddard announces with his typically grandiose rhetoric. “Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.” 

“One fact should be clearly understood: if America is not true to her own race soul, she will inevitably lose it, and the brightest star that has appeared since Hellas” – Stoddard loves the slave-owning Greeks – “will fall like a meteor from the human sky, its brilliant radiance fading into the night.”

Daisy just rolled her eyes at such claptrap, and Nick was too polite to object. But here we are in 2022 comforting fresh victims of this vile paranoia. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”