Through its rambling millionaires, The Great Gatsby satirises racist ideology

In his 1925 novel, F Scott Fitzgerald is not ‘referencing’ white supremacist ideas but attacking them head-on, writes Richard Ellis

Your article about the “great replacement theory” says Madison Grant’s pseudoscientific, racist book The Passing of the Great Race is “referenced” in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (A deadly ideology: how the ‘great replacement theory’ went mainstream, 8 June).

In fact, Fitzgerald’s book satirises the white supremacist ideas that Grant espoused through the corrupt millionaire narcissist Tom Buchanan’s praise of the work of “Goddard”, a thin disguise for Lothrop Stoddard, whose The Rising Tide of Color covers the same ground as Grant.

Fitzgerald is not “referencing” but attacking head-on the work of Stoddard and Grant through Tom’s ramblings, which are so horribly reminiscent of the present-day Republican right and its de facto leader: “These books are all scientific … It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control.” It is Daisy who offers the satiric punctum. “We’ve got to beat them down,” she says, winking ferociously.

Unfortunately, we need much more than such fierce satire today.
Richard Ellis
Derby

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• F Scott Fitzgerald
• Race
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