In Part I we looked at how Fitzgerald’s 1923 play, The Vegetable took a satirical look at the absurdities of The American Dream and what happens to people when they fail to live up to hyper-competitive capitalist and social-Darwinist ideals. The play centred around Jerry Frost, an uninspired 35-year-old railroad clerk who dreams of becoming…
Category: Eugenics and Race
Vegetable Eugenics Part II — Eugenics and Other Evils.
When Scott’s favourite British author, G. K. Chesterton addressed the press on the eve of his lecture tour of the States in January 1921, he had something he wanted to say about America. America wasn’t the great ‘Melting Pot’ it often presented itself as being. Equality may still have been the ideal in America, but…
Vegetable Eugenics Part I — Genius Lost and Genius Regained.
If F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby exposed the tragic reality of Eugenics and the cruel, pyrrhic triumph of the American Dream, then it was only because previous attempts to drive a nail through its genetically superior heart with comedy had failed to prevent its moronic spread. The cheeky, irreverent view the author had taken…
Eugenically Speaking — How F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Love or Eugenics?’ prepared the way for Gatsby
The Great Gatsby wasn’t the first time that F. Scott Fitzgerald had confronted the rising tide of bigotry that had been surging around Eugenics. As an 18 year-old student at Princeton University, Scott had written what even his contemporaries — and more extraordinarily still, his fellow students — had regarded as a vicious but highly…
The Rise of the Coloured Empires — Gatsby and Eugenics
“Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard? Well, it’s a fine book and everyone ought to read it … This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you…