The 1920s are often viewed in a vacuum for the decade’s specific technological advancements and cultural trends, as well as the simmering impact of federal laws prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol. However, it is also the culmination of an era of smokestack laissez-faire capitalism and the compounding effects of such a regime. The Great Gatsby was published on April 10, 1927, and opened up a world of literary, historical, and societal intrigue regarding the novel’s role in critiquing or overly glorifying the excesses and hedonism of Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age.
“The Jazz Age”
Like many of the writers and artists of this period, F. Scott Fitzgerald was operating in an atmosphere of cynicism due to the horrors surrounding the outcomes of the First World War. Not only from the war itself but also from a realization that stark inequality and listlessness burden many without wealth or connections allowing them to avoid mechanized and psychological horrors. Much of the fallout of such revelations evolved into escapism and hedonism as a sense of ephemeral bliss pervaded, especially as creatives convened and lived in postwar Paris.
The Great Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s most famous novel. It captures the lives of Long Island socialites that operate in an amoral and consequence-free world. Initial literary analysis focused on symbols that represented a longing for a simpler past or yearnings towards an elusive future, but today a lot of observers understand the novel to be a lens into the excesses of class in an early 20th century laissez-faire commercial society.
Tom and Daisy Buchanan drive the themes of inherited wealth that allows people to disregard responsibility and other people. Jay Gatsby earned his wealth bootlegging liquor and is viewed as new money.
Symbols still play a role in this regard.
Most strikingly, the billboard displays the large, weary eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, an optician who posted the billboard in the dusted over working-class section of the Long Island peninsula. The billboard is falling apart but the large blue eyes behind a pair of spectacles are clear as day and overarching for the characters. The eyes oversee this ash-heap where Tom Buchanan is conducting an affair. Myrtle Wilson is a prisoner of her own societal status and desire for wealth in a stratified world. Tom takes advantage of this by letting her stay in his Manhattan apartment and pretend to live a life of wealth, though he only sees her as another object to be attained.
Myrtle, who believes she will marry Tom if his wife (Daisy Buchanan) is no longer in the picture, is married to George Wilson, a working car mechanic. The wealthy characters’ carelessness towards driving as they take the technology (they don’t understand as well as George) for granted is another plot driver. Eventually, automobile excesses serve as an incubator for the culminating plot turn when Daisy commits a hit-and-run and kills Myrtle, who ran out towards the car thinking it was Tom.
All of these characters, including the enigmatic title character, Jay Gatsby, are viewed through the lens of the unreliable narrator, Nick Carraway. He is Daisy’s cousin and is living in accommodations that are nearby Gatsby and the Buchanan’s opulent mansions. He is constantly observing the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg as an omnipotent shaming force because the pupils glaze over the immorality on display.
But Dr Eckleburg’s eyes are also a totem of the New Era.
The New Era
This is a period that saw the modernization of corporate entities so that they have more accountability in the workplace and in efficiency regarding the use of resources. These are outcomes of a punctuated Progressive Era within the larger Gilded Age where large industrial entities committed public and private abuses with little structural or incentivized accountability. The other effect of this era was the crystallization of the large corporation itself into its modern outfit with an ever-expanding managerial class with higher efficiency in monitoring supply chains and labor relations.
In a sense, billboards are the materialization of the achievements and excesses of capitalism. The 1920s saw society rapidly enter an age of mass advertising as the economic power of the American nation grew as it consolidates resources and land as well as in its First World War victory. As a country untouched by war and owed a lot of money, the nation was in a prime position to expand into a preeminent economic force to be reckoned with.
Along with this economic victory and a period of public protest came an expansion of living and professional standards for some Americans (but not nearly as widespread as the post-World War II expansion of the middle class). There were higher standards for food safety and organizations formed to clean up city streets and build the infrastructure of community through philanthropy and governing bodies.
The rise of a consumer economy also changed Americans outlook as people bought modern luxuries, such as radios, on a credit-based system. The stock market was trending towards further democratization for investors and thus enabled rampant speculation on business trends that would eventually spiral out of control.
The placement and proliferation of billboards were not necessarily new to the 1920s, but the rising demand for them was a novel development. Thus, techniques developed by Madison Avenue homed in on cutting edge market research that influenced sales tactics, while the choice of sloganeering and visual content all aimed to manipulate people’s inner desires. The advertising revolution in the New Era was crucial to promoting tourism, settlement into more remote American regions, and new products. Billboards served this purpose as more people drove vehicles and protruded purchasing power. The first company specializing in outdoor advertising made it onto the New York Stock Exchange in the mid-1920s. With these forces colliding, the demand for hyperbolic and eye-grabbing advertisements selling a lifestyle also rose.
This was the world in which Gatsby was published.
Despite the improvements in scientific exaction and professional structures within the New Era, this world still featured a titanic business elite built over decades of development. Even the successes of the Progressive Era didn’t alleviate the massive amounts of systemic inequality that existed in the 1920s. The first president of the 1920s, Warren G. Harding, ran on a campaign of normalcy. Harding’s cabinet featured Herbert Hoover at Commerce and Andrew Mellon at Treasury. Both were millionaires and helped push through tax cuts and the Emergency Tariff of 1921 to boost American business. They also began the practice of the president sending a budget to Congress every year.
“…the Government is just a business, and can and should be run on business principles.” - Andrew Mellon
This pro-business backlash reflected the yearning of Americans to slow down in this era. Before this was a massive move towards reform and then international conflicts that changed America in a rapid way since the dawn of the new century.
However, the Progressive movement was far from unsuccessful. The political winds from the surge of awareness regarding labor and business abuses had lasting materialized effects. The establishment of good governance groups and health and safety regulations was an achievement for a world that experienced very few public standards and structures combating faulty and dangerous products. Most of all, women’s suffrage and growing participation in public life was the culmination of decades of progressive energy, fostered by many women in different economic levels.
A major theme of the New Era is the increased professionalization and organization of public and private entities to remedy the failures of the past. However, it doesn’t mean business ambitions didn’t expand, as this era is also notable for the rise of modern corporations. Only two decades before this was the consolidation of U.S. Steel into a modern corporate titan under the auspices of one of America’s most famous moneymen, J.P. Morgan.
Our Gilded Age
Though the Gilded Age is viewed to have ended at the onset of the Progressive era. I view the 1920s as the culmination of a larger era of industrial barons and laissez-faire capitalism that experienced punctuated periods where calls for labor protections heightened. The dominance of America’s business elite over the large pools of people existing in the nation, or who would migrate, was destined to be challenged and altered by historical forces. The political failures of the Republican party in the early-20th century were, in part, a reflection of their inability to answer questions about workplace hazards, low standards of living for workers, and hoarding wealth at the expense of a stable social fabric.
This sounds eerily similar to modern times.
The impact of the New Deal Era created a more equitable playing field for the side of labor throughout the middle decades of the twentieth century. The expansion of the middle-class and the dream of having a home, vacation, and automobile on a middling income were outgrowths of an economic miracle that could only come out of the exact circumstances that the world found itself in at the end of one of history’s most destructive wars.
However, this expansion is also a product of generations of Americans collectively urging the government and private heads of industry to take the foot of unrestricted capitalism off the necks of the larger population.
As we encompass a world where CEOs make 300 times their average employee and Dollar General rather keep its fortunes than invest in the safety of its workers, it is hard not to find parallels in the excesses of The Great Gatsby and the wealth disparity (and what that allows in the workplace) of today.
America did elect president a former corrupt real estate mogul who admitted to this: