The Working Class in Fitzgerald"s "Great Gatsby" .

             The first half of the twentieth century saw dramatic changes in the social structure of the United States. In the nineteenth century, it was relatively unusual in many parts of the country to meet a Roman Catholic -- similarly odd to meet someone whose native tongue was not English. Anyone who fit these descriptions was likely to be unabashedly working class. Suddenly, however, the country saw an enormous influx of people whose backgrounds were very unlike those of the founding fathers: Italians, Poles, Russians, Hispanics, Greeks, Slovaks. Some were Roman Catholic, some Orthodox, some Jewish. But their languages and their customs made them suspect to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had come to consider themselves indigenous to the continent, and, taken together with the freed blacks who were steadily making their way into the Northern cities, they reveal a different face from the one the wealthier side of America was used to.

             We can see the degree to which this makes people like Tom Buchanan nervous from the context of his discussion of Goddard's The Rise of the Colored Empires. According to Judie Newman and Douglas Tallack, this book did not really exist, but was intended by Fitzgerald to represent two real books of that era, T.L. Stoddard"s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920), and Madison Grant"s The Passing of the Great Race (1916) (Newman and Tallack, context.htm). These books were written to counter the "melting-pot" philosophy which so dominated liberal politics, particularly in the East. Tom says Goddard has written "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" (Fitzgerald, 19).

             When he says "white", we need to realize that he means something completely different than we do when we use that term.