Racism and the American Right
Exclusive: From the start of the Republic to today’s Republican ranting against
Barack Obama, racism has been a central element of the American Right. But this
ugly feature of U.S. history has often come concealed behind words praising
traditions, liberty and states’ rights, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from
the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Constitution to
the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American
president. Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always
been there.
Though definitions of Right and Left are never precise, the Left has generally
been defined, in the American context, by government actions
mostly the federal
government responding to popular movements and representing the collective will
of the American people seeking to improve the lot of common citizens and to
reduce social injustice.
The Right has been defined by opposition to such government activism. Since the
Founding, the Right has decried government interference with the “free market”
and intrusion upon “traditions,” like slavery and segregation, as “tyranny”
or “socialism.”
This argument goes back to 1787 and opposition to the Constitution’s
centralizing of government power in the hands of federal authorities. In
Virginia, for instance, the Anti-Federalists feared that a strong federal
government eventually would outlaw slavery in the Southern states.
Ironically, this argument was raised by two of the most famous voices for
“liberty,” Patrick Henry and George Mason. Those two Virginians spearheaded the
Anti-Federalist cause at the state’s ratifying convention in June 1788, urging
rejection of the Constitution because, they argued, it would lead to slavery’s
demise.
The irony of Henry and Mason scaring fellow Virginians about the Constitution’s
threat to slavery is that the two men have gone down in popular U.S. history as
great espousers of freedom. Before the Revolution, Henry was quoted as
declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Mason is hailed as a leading
force behind the Bill of Rights. However, their notion of “liberty” and “rights”
was always selective. Henry and Mason worried about protecting the “freedom” of
plantation owners to possess other human beings as property.
At Virginia’s Ratification Convention, Henry and Mason raised other arguments
against the proposed Constitution, such as concerns that Virginia’s preeminence
might not be as great as under the weak Articles of Confederation and that
population gains in the North might erode Virginia’s economic welfare.
But the pair’s most potent argument was the danger they foresaw regarding the
abolition of slavery. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in
their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was
that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically
unprotected.”
The Slavery Card
At the center of this fear was the state’s loss of ultimate control over its
militia which could be “federalized” by the President as the nation’s commander
in chief under the new Constitution.
“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the
new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit
protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry
called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections the direct result, he
believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”
Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal
government might employ to deny Virginians and other Southerners the “liberty”
to own African-Americans. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg
wrote:
“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate
them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population,
and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must
fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of
existence.
“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery
on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the
slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North
should have its way.”
At Philadelphia in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution had already
capitulated to the South’s insistence on its brutal institution of human
enslavement. That surrender became the line of defense that James Madison, a
principal architect of the new governing structure, cited in his response to
Mason and Henry.
Burstein and Isenberg
wrote, “Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view.
He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and
that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the
Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered
into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’
“Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet
Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand
slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’
with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in
jeopardy.”
Despite the success of Mason and Henry to play on the fears of plantation
owners, the broader arguments stressing the advantages of Union carried the day,
albeit narrowly. Virginia ultimately approved ratification by 89 to 79. However,
the South’s obsession over perceived threats to its institution of slavery
remained a central factor in the early decades of the Republic.
Arming Whites
Though today’s Right pretends that the Second Amendment was devised to give
individual Americans the right to own and carry any weapon of their choice so
they can shoot policemen, soldiers and other government representatives in the
cause of anti-government “liberty”
it was primarily a concession to the states
and especially to the South’s fears that were expressed at the Virginia
convention.
Approved by the First Congress as part of the “Bill of Rights,” the Second
Amendment explained its purpose as the need to maintain “the security of a free
State,” an echo of Mason’s concerns about “domestic safety,” i.e. a Southern
state’s ability to maintain slavery by force and defend against slave uprisings.
As the amendment emerged from various committee rewrites, it stated: “A wellregulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of
the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But that right, of
course, did not extend to all people, not to people of color.
The Second Congress put substance to the structure of state militias by passing
the Militia Acts, which specifically mandated that “white men” of military age
obtain muskets and other supplies for participation in state militias. At the
time, the concerns were not entirely over rebellious slaves, but also over
rebellious poor whites.
Part of the backdrop of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had been Shays’
Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786-1787, an uprising of white farmers
led by a former Continental Army officer, Daniel Shays. After ratification of
the Constitution, the first significant use of federalized militias was in 1794
to crush an anti-tax revolt in western Pennsylvania led by poor whites known as
the Whiskey Rebellion.
That uprising was treated as an act of treason as defined by the U.S.
Constitution, although President Washington used his pardon power to spare rebel
leaders from execution by hanging. Similar mercy was not shown when Southern
states confronted actual or suspected slave revolts. In 1800, Virginia Gov.
James Monroe called out the militia to stop an incipient slave uprising known as
Gabriel’s Rebellion. Twenty-six alleged conspirators were hanged.
Jeffersonian Influences
Of course, slavery and racism were not the only defining characteristics of the
Right during the country’s early years, as economic interests diverged and
political rivalries surfaced. James Madison, for instance, had been a key
protégé of George Washington and an ally of Alexander Hamilton during the
fight for the Constitution.
Madison had even advocated for a greater concentration of power in the federal
government, including giving Congress the explicit power to veto state laws.
However, after the Constitution was in place, Madison began siding with his
Virginian neighbor (and fellow slave-owner) Thomas Jefferson in political
opposition to the Federalists.
In the first years of the constitutional Republic, the Federalists, led by
President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, pushed the limits of
federal power, particularly with Hamilton’s idea of a national bank which was
seen as favoring the financial interests of the North to the detriment of the
more agrarian South.
The Jeffersonians, coalescing around Jefferson and Madison, fiercely opposed
Hamilton’s national economic planning though the differences often seemed to be
driven by personal animosities and regional rivalries as much as by any grand
ideological vision regarding government authority. The Jeffersonians, for
instance, were sympathetic to the bloody French Revolution, which made a mockery
of the rule of law and the restraint of government power.
Nevertheless, history has generally been kind to Jefferson’s enthusiasm for a
more agrarian America and his supposed commitment to the common man. But what is
left out of this praise for “Jeffersonian democracy” is that Jefferson’s use of
the word “farmers” was often a euphemism for his actual political base, the
slave-owning plantation aristocrats of the South.
At his core, despite his intellectual brilliance, Jefferson was just another
Southern hypocrite. He wrote that “all men are created equal” (in the
Declaration of Independence) but he engaged in pseudo-science to portray
African-Americans as inferior to whites (as he did in his Notes on the State of
Virginia).
His racism rationalized his own economic and personal reliance on slavery. While
desperately afraid of slave rebellions, he is alleged to have taken a young
slave girl, Sally Hemings, as a mistress.
Jefferson’s hypocrisy also surfaced in his attitudes toward a slave revolt in
the French colony of St. Domingue (today’s Haiti), where African slaves took
seriously the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” After their
demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system
continued, violent slave uprisings followed.
Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony.
A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s
leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of
politics.
The ‘Black Jacobins’
Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels known
as the “Black Jacobins” gained the sympathy of the American Federalists.
L’Ouverture negotiated friendly relations with the Federalist
administration under President John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, a native of
the Caribbean himself, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution.
But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s
emancipation from slavery. Despite the Federalist sympathies, many American
slave-owners, including Jefferson, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in
St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward. “If
something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the
murderers of our own children.”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution
led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military
commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across
Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.
In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States and his
interests at least temporarily aligned with Napoleon’s. The French dictator
wanted to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson wanted to see the
slave rebellion crushed. President Jefferson and Secretary of State
Madison collaborated with Napoleon through secret diplomatic channels. Napoleon
asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea
to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish
your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to
starvation.”
But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with
Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force,
Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French
empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi
River.
Stopping Napoleon
In 1802, the French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the
slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they
retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the
colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure. L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the
war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would
ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned
himself in.
But Napoleon broke his word. Jealous and contemptuous of L’Ouverture, who was
regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the
French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was
mistreated and died in prison.
Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a
vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army already decimated by
disease was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and
determined not to be put back into slavery. Napoleon sent a second French army,
but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe,
he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before
abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but
they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.
By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon denied his foothold in the New World agreed to
sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson, a negotiation
handled by Madison that ironically required just the sort of expansive
interpretation of federal powers that the Jeffersonians ordinarily disdained.
However, a greater irony was that the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart
of the present United States to American settlement and is regarded as possibly
Jefferson’s greatest achievement as president, had been made possible despite
Jefferson’s misguided and racist collaboration with Napoleon.
“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were
instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its
territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book,
The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. But, Miller observed, “the
decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters went almost unnoticed
by the Jeffersonian administration.”
Without L’Ouverture’s leadership, the island nation fell into a downward spiral.
In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced
L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its
original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the
French, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the
island. Jefferson reacted to the bloodshed by imposing a stiff economic embargo
on Haiti. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a
cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.
Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to
the issue of American slavery. In the 1820s, the former president proposed a
scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States
and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and
America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view,
Haiti would be all black and the United States white.
While the racism of Jefferson and many of his followers may be undeniable, it is
not so easy to distinguish between Right and Left in those early years of the
American Republic. Though Hamilton was more open-minded toward freedom for black
slaves, there were elements of his government intervention on behalf of the
fledgling financial sector that might today be regarded as “pro-business” or
elitist as there were parts of Jefferson’s attitude toward greater populism that
might be seen as more “democratic.”
Stumbling toward War
Yet, as the first generation of American leaders passed away and the nation
expanded westward, the issue of slavery remained a threat to America’s unity.
The South’s aggressive defense of its lucrative institution of slavery opened
violent rifts between pro-slave and pro-free settlers in territories to the
west.
The modern distinctions between America’s Right and Left also became more
pronounced, defined increasingly by race. The North, building a manufacturing
economy and influenced by the emancipationist movement, turned increasingly
against slavery, while the South, with a more agrarian economy and much of its
capital invested in slaves, could see no future without the continuation of
slavery.
Politically, those distinctions played out not unlike what Anti-Federalists
George Mason and Patrick Henry had predicted at Virginia’s ratification
convention in 1788. The North gradually gained dominance in wealth and
population and the South’s barbaric practice of slavery emerged as a hindrance
to America’s growing reputation in the world.
So, a key divide of U.S. politics between Right and Left became the differences
over issues of slavery and race. The racist aspects of the Anti-Federalists and
the “Jeffersonian democrats” became a defining feature of the American Right as
captured in the argument for “states’ rights,” i.e., the rights of the Southern
states either to nullify federal laws or to secede from the Union.
Though the concentration of power in Washington D.C. gave rise to legitimate
questions about authoritarianism, the federal government also became the guiding
hand for the nation’s economic development and for elimination of gross regional
injustices such as slavery. Federal action in defense of national principles
regarding justice eventually helped define the American Left.
But the slave-owning South would not go down without a fight. After the election
of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, 11 Southern states seceded from the Union
and established the Confederate States of America with the goal of perpetuating
slavery forever. It took four years of war to force the Southern states back
into the Union and finally bring slavery to an end.
However, the Southern aristocracy soon reclaimed control of the region’s
political structure and instituted nearly a century more of racial oppression
against blacks. During this Jim Crow era, racism and the cruel enforcement of
racial segregation remained central elements of the American Right.
An Anti-Government Coalition
In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and the early Twentieth Century,
other political and economic factors bolstered the Right, particularly a class
of Northern industrialists and financiers known as the Robber Barons. Their
insistence on laissez-faire economics in the North and their opposition to
reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt dovetailed with anti-federal
attitudes among the South’s white aristocracy.
That coalition, however, was shattered by a string of Wall Street panics and
other economic catastrophes culminating in the Great Depression. With millions
of Americans out of work and many facing starvation, Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration initiated the New Deal which put people back to work building
national infrastructure and imposing government regulations on the freewheeling
ways of Wall Street.
Under Roosevelt, laws were changed to respect the rights of labor unions and
social movements arose demanding greater civil rights for blacks and women. The
Left gained unprecedented ascendance. However, the old alliance of rich Northern
industriasts and Southern segregationists saw dangers in this new assertion of
federal power. The business barons saw signs of “socialism” and the white
supremacists feared “race-mixing.”
After World War II with the United States now a world superpower the continued
existence of institutionalized racism became an embarrassment undermining
America’s claim to be a beacon of human freedom. Finally, spurred on by Martin
Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, the federal government finally
moved against the South’s practice of segregation. That reignited the longsimmering conflict between federal power and states’ rights.
Though the federal government prevailed in outlawing racial segregation, the
Right’s anger over this intrusion upon Southern traditions fueled a powerful new
movement of right-wing politicians. Since the Democratic Party led the fight
against segregation in the 1960s, Southern whites rallied to the Republican
Party as their vehicle of political resistance.
Opportunistic politicians, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, deftly
exploited the white backlash and turned much of the Dixie-crat South into solid
Republican Red. This resurgence of white racial resentments also merged with a
reassertion of “libertarian” economics as memories of the Great Depression
faded. In essence, the late Nineteenth Century alliance between segregationist
whites in the South and laissez-faire businessmen in the North was being
reestablished.
This right-wing collaboration reached a new level of intensity in 2008 after the
election of the first African-American president whose victory reflected the
emergence of a multi-racial electorate threatening to end the historic white
political domination of the United States. With the election also coming amid a
Wall Street financial collapse — after years of reduced government regulation —
Barack Obama’s arrival also portended a renewal of federal government activism.
Thus, the age-old battle was rejoined.
Yet, given the cultural tenor of the time, the Right found it difficult to
engage in overt racial slurs against Obama, nor could it openly seek to deny
voting rights to black and brown people. New code words were needed. So Obama’s
legitimacy as an American was questioned with spurious claims that he had been
born in Kenya, and Republicans demanded tighter ballot security to prevent
“voter fraud.”
Today’s Right also recognized that it could not simply emphasize its Confederate
heritage. A more politically correct re-branding was needed. So, the Right
shifted its imagery from the “Stars and Bars” battle flag of the Confederacy to
the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of the American Revolution. That way, Americans who
don’t overtly see themselves as racist could be drawn into the movement. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Re-Branding: 1860 to 1776.”]
However, the historical narrative that the Right constructed around the nation’s
Founding was not the one that actually happened. In seeking to present
themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution, the Right had to air-brush
out the failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which had made the
states “sovereign” and “independent” with the central government just a “league
of friendship.”
The Constitution represented the nation’s greatest transfer of power into
federal hands in U.S. history, as engineered by Washington, Madison and
Hamilton. Indeed, Madison favored even greater dominance by the central
government over the states than he ultimately got in the Constitution.
However, in the Right’s revisionist version, the Articles of Confederation are
forgotten and the Framers were simply out to create a governing system with
strong states’ rights and a weak federal government. That fabrication played
well with an uneducated right-wing base that could then envision itself using
its Second Amendment rights to fight for the Framers’ vision of “liberty.”
As this right-wing narrative now plays out, Barack Obama is not only a black
Muslim “socialist” oppressing liberty-loving white Christian Americans but he is
a “tyrant” despoiling the beautiful, nearly divine, God-inspired Constitution
that the Framers bestowed upon the nation — including, apparently, those
wonderful provisions protecting slavery.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
Failing Fitzgerald’s Masterpiece
Exclusive: As an author, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a master of subtlety in his
characterizations and his style, not exactly the strengths of modern Hollywood,
as is painfully apparent in the latest big-budget, 3-D adaptation of The Great
Gatsby, as Jim DiEugenio explains.
By Jim DiEugenio
There are a number of interesting, but ignored, comparisons between Orson
Welles’s cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary
masterpiece The Great Gatsby.
Young men, who were mature beyond their years, created both works. Welles
completed his film at age 26. Fitzgerald completed his novel at age 29. Neither
man was able to equal, let alone surpass, the excellence he had achieved at such
a young age. Consequently, both looked back ruefully and at times were bitterly
explicit at the early milestones in their careers that they were never able to
match.
Both ended up in Hollywood doing work they considered menial, and far below
their abilities, just to survive. At times they actually lived at other people’s
homes. Welles at director Peter Bogdanovich’s estate in Bel Air; Fitzgerald at
the Encino home of actor Edward Everett Horton.
This was because the true achievement of their early works was not recognized
when they were first released. That recognition took decades to achieve. For
example, at the time of his death in 1940, the book Fitzgerald considered his
finest had sold only 25,000 copies in 15 years. In 1942, Citizen Kane won just
one Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay, and was snubbed for Best Picture and
Best Director.
Further, Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby share two artistic characteristics.
First, the two works are marvels of both style and technique. As many have
noted, Welles pioneered techniques of artistic expression that no other film
director has surpassed to this day. And when Fitzgerald was at his peak, which
he was here, very few American writers could make complex sentences flow as
gorgeously and effortlessly as he could; yet never losing sight of the meaning
he was trying to convey beneath the words.
And, the meanings of both works strike at the heart of the so-called eponymous
“American Dream,” i.e., the idea that wealth and power and connections will both
make America prosper as a republic, and also bring personal happiness and
fulfillment to its citizens. I know of very few works, perhaps the novels of
Theodore Dreiser qualify, which condemn that concept as harshly or as thoroughly
as Fitzgerald or Welles did.
Fitzgerald’s Frame
Because of the theme he was after, Fitzgerald decided to center his story in New
York, which at that time of the novel the Roaring Twenties had begun to catch up
to London as the financial center of the world. But he deliberately made the
book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, an outsider from the Midwest. (And as we later
discover, Jay Gatsby, whose real name is James Gatz, was also from the west.)
Carraway, who went to Yale, decides to take a job as a stockbroker in New York.
But, by the end of the novel, he is so disgusted with both the people and the
moral milieu of the place that he breaks off with his girlfriend, Jordan Baker,
sells his car, and moves back to the Midwest. (As we shall see, this penultimate
strophe of the novel is inexplicably missing from this present film.)
But although Nick Carraway and his Midwest story begin the novel, we quickly see
that his story soon becomes a framing device around the main action. His tale is
supposed to both parallel and resonate off the actual engine of the plot, which
is the romantic triangle between Gatsby, his long lost love, Daisy Buchanan, and
her husband, the fabulously wealthy Tom Buchanan.
In turn, that triangle is rounded off by an affair Tom is having with a woman
named Myrtle Wilson. Myrtle is far below Tom on the social scale, and she also
has a husband named George, who runs a combination garage/filling station
located between the fictional upper class town of East Egg and New York City.
Nick Carraway is a second cousin to Daisy Buchanan, and he happens to rent a
small bungalow next to Gatsby’s huge mansion in another mythical wealthy enclave
called West Egg. One day he goes to visit his cousin and a young professional
golfer named Jordan Baker is there. At this visit, Carraway learns about Tom
Buchanan’s affair.
He also realizes two things about his mysterious neighbor. First, that Gatsby
gives lavish parties that Jordan Baker has been to, and that Daisy knew Gatsby
from her youth in Louisville.
One day, Nick Carraway gets invited to one of Gatsby’s parties and, by
happenstance, the two neighbors meet and become friends. Nick learns about
Gatsby’s love affair five years previous with Daisy, how they had planned to
marry, and how this was thwarted by the Great War. Nick arranges a meeting
between the two, and this rekindles the lost romance.
As the two begin to see each other, Gatsby insists that Daisy completely
renounce her love for her husband Tom and say that she never loved him. This
struggle culminates in a long and tense two-stage showdown that ends at a room
in the Plaza Hotel in New York. There it is revealed that Daisy cannot bring
herself to do what Gatsby wants her to, and that Tom has found out that Gatsby’s
fortune is based upon his ties to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish-American bootlegger
and gambler.
On the way back from the hotel, Daisy is driving
Gatsby’s car and she hits
Myrtle Wilson and kills her. In another car, Tom sees this and falsely tells
Myrtle’s husband George that Gatsby did the hit-and-run driving.
George then
tracks down Gatsby lying near his pool, whom he kills before taking his own
life.
Nick Callaway helps arrange Gatsby’s funeral, which is attended by almost no one
except his father. He then meets Tom Buchanan on the street. Tom says Gatsby had
it coming for killing Myrtle, revealing that Daisy had lied to him about what
happened. Nick visits the place where he first saw Gatsby standing at the end of
a pier staring at a green light across the bay nearer the Buchanan house.
Disillusioned by all that has happened, he decides to leave New York and return
home.
A Forward Motion
Although the plot includes several major characters, flashbacks and settings,
the forward motion of the story is handled with such skill and dexterity that it
has the effect of a hydraulic transmission: there is nearly no detection of a
shift in place or tone.
What makes this even more impressive is the fact that, strictly speaking, the
book is really a novella. In some versions the text runs to just 176 pages,
meaning there is very little filler in the book. Although Fitzgerald was a
master of descriptive writing, there is very little of that for its own sake.
The author pushes the motion forward and only slows down when he needs to, to
describe an important event or character.
But the marvel of the book is this: In describing the story, characters, and the
author’s technique, I really have not told the reader all that much about the
book. For it really exists in the sharply drawn characterizations, the author’s
memorable depiction of a unique epoch in American history, and his felicitous
use of symbols throughout. All of which give the book a luxurious texture, at
the same time that it lends the novel a rich undercurrent of depth, scope and
meaning.
That final quality is manifest most pungently in the last unforgettable page of
the book where Fitzgerald, after summing up the fate of the rest of the
characters, ends the work with Nick on the beach near Gatsby’s empty house. It
is a lovely crescendo/reverie that almost reaches the level of poetry, summing
up in a few paragraphs the deepest meanings of the story.
Although the ending could have easily been presented visually, that touching and
incandescent coda was not filmed by director Baz Luhrmann in his new movie
adaptation. It is simply presented as text to read. But before presenting the
myriad problems with the disappointing current adaptation, I think it’s
appropriate to address the fact that, historically speaking, Fitzgerald has not
been well served by the film adaptations of his books.
Multiple Adaptations
To my knowledge, this is the eighth effort to film one of his novels. Including
Luhrmann’s rendition, there have been four prior attempts to film The Great
Gatsby; two attempts to adapt Tender is the Night, and one film made of
Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished, novel The Last Tycoon, a book which actually was
about the movie business.
The first version of Gatsby was a silent film starring Warner Baxter. From my
research about it, that film has been lost and only bits and pieces of it
remain. (Some of this can be seen on You Tube.)
In 1949, a talking version of the book was made starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby,
Betty Field as Daisy, and MacDonald Carey as Nick. Reportedly, this version
accented the underworld aspect of the story, turning the tale into at least
partly a film noir. This version was pulled from circulation in 1974, since the
same studio that produced the Ladd version, namely Paramount, also produced the
1974 version.
The 1974 adaptation starred Robert Redford who had not quite attained superstar
status yet as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy, and Sam Waterston as Nick. It had a
script by Francis Coppola and was directed by the Englishman Jack Clayton, who
had made at least one distinguished film in his career, but that was many years
previous. This picture generated a huge amount of advance publicity, including a
Newsweek cover story. But from the script onward, it turned out to be an
overproduced
misfire.
In 2000, a more modestly produced,and much less ballyhooed–version of the story
was made for cable television. This one starred British actor Toby Stephens as
Gatsby, Mira Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway.
If one includes the productions of the other two novels, this writer has seen
all the available films, with just two exceptions: the 1949 version of The Great
Gatsby and the 1985 TV mini-series version of Tender is the Night. I regret not
seeing the latter, not just because it is very difficult to find anywhere today,
but also because it was reliably praised as being perhaps the finest screen
adaptation of a Fitzgerald novel ever.
As mentioned above, the Alan Ladd version of the book made much, perhaps too
much, of the criminal element. Like so much else in the book, Fitzgerald
artfully lays in this aspect as a suggestive, mysterious background near the
beginning, so that it can be used to powerful effect near the end.
For instance, there are calls made to Gatsby from some large cities, calls we
never actually hear. Then there is a brief meeting between Gatsby, Nick, and
Meyer Wolfsheim, whom, Gatsby informs Nick, fixed the 1919 World Series.
Wolfsheim is clearly meant to suggest Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish-American
racketeer who specialized in organizing mobster influence in professional
athletics, reportedly including the 1919 World Series.
Fitzgerald means to contrast how Gatsby made his money, through his
apprenticeship with Wolfsheim, against Nick’s work in the bond market and Tom
Buchanan’s “honest wealth” in stocks. In fact, near the end, in the duel over
Daisy, Tom uses this underworld angle against Gatsby and states that one of his
Wall Street friends lowered himself and much to his regret got mixed up with
Wolfsheim and Gatsby.
Apparently, back in 1925, Fitzgerald did not foresee how the much more serious
gangsterism of Wall Street would one day clearly outstrip the power and reach of
organized crime. Thereby making the illicit profits of the underworld pale in
comparison to the illicit piracy of “bond salesmen.”
The Fitzgerald Revival
What caused the revival of interest in Fitzgerald that has extended out to this
day? Why is he so much more studied and revered now than in his own time? For,
as I noted, The Great Gatsby did not sell well upon its publication in 1925.
In fact, each of his first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful
and Damned, sold more than twice as many copies in their initial run than Gatsby
did in 15 years. And although Fitzgerald always thought it was his best book,
Gatsby did not have anywhere near the critical acclaim while he was alive that
it has today.
Most commentators credit Arthur Mizener’s book, The Far Side of Paradise, with
beginning the Fitzgerald revival. It was published in 1951 and was the first
full-scale biography of Fitzgerald and his mercurial wife Zelda. Although it was
a scholarly look at the writer by a Cornell professor, because Fitzgerald’s life
was so colorful, the book became an unexpected
best-seller.
Mizener’s book became the equivalent of the proverbial first rock in an
avalanche. A whole reconsideration of Fitzgerald took place. His publisher,
Scribner’s, began to reissue his five novels as a set. Academia began to
reexamine the man’s achievement. The Great Gatsby was lavishly praised by such
venerated critics as Lionel Trilling and T. S. Eliot.
By the Sixties, Fitzgerald’s name and reputation had entered the modern American
literary canon. The book made the top ten in both the Modern Library and Time
Magazine lists of the best American 20th Century novels. Today, The Great Gatsby
has sold over ten million copies. It never goes out of print since it is taught
as a standard introduction to the novel at most colleges.
And that immense popularity has contributed to the translation of the book not
only into cinema, but also stage productions. Just this year, there will be
three different theater productions of the novel. One of them an eight-hour
recital of the book itself.
A Subtle Skill
Because of all this devoted analysis, most admirers of his work are today
familiar with how Fitzgerald achieved what he did in this book. First, there is
his flawless writing technique, which reaches a euphony of rhythm and
stateliness that few American writers have ever matched. There is also the
symbology of the book, e.g., the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that
expands into metaphor, but it is so suffused in Fitzgerald’s depiction of his
characters and the historical period that the symbols never obtrude. Not even at
the end. Connected to this, is the author’s use of understatement to make his
effects, and the high points of his drama, speak louder than they normally
would.
As an example of the last, take the first time that Nick meets Tom’s girlfriend,
Myrtle Wilson. With Nick in his car, Tom picks up Myrtle and brings them both to
an apartment he is renting to carry on the extramarital affair. Myrtle invites
her sister Catherine and two neighbors in the building, a couple called the
McKees, up for some drinks.
There is some small talk by the McKees about Mr. McKee’s hobby, which is
photography, and a bit about Gatsby’s parties and his reputed background from
the war. Myrtle then relates how she met Tom, and how she made a mistake in
marrying her husband. Then Mr. McKee falls asleep and Nick gets drowsy.
Nick, who has been drinking too much, then describes an argument taking place
between Tom and Myrtle over the mentioning of Daisy’s name in public. Defying
Tom, Myrtle starts repeating Daisy’s name over and over. This is Fitzgerald’s
next sentence in the book: “Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her
nose with his open hand.”
In the midst of a quiet, expository, almost meanderingly low-key scene, that
sentence has an impact much more potent than its 13, mostly monosyllabic, words.
In fact, once we read it, we can see how the author has been lulling us into a
quiet complacency so that the brutal effect of Tom’s striking a woman who wants
to marry him will be brought home like it was us being struck in the face.
As I watched this scene unfold in front of me in Baz Luhrmann’s film, I could
hardly believe my eyes. First, after the arrival at the apartment, we get the
unmistakable sound of Tom and Myrtle copulating in the bedroom. After this,
Myrtle’s sister Catherine comes to the door, followed by at least seven other
people. None of them, as far as I could see, were the quiet couple, the McKees.
What follows next really resembles something like an orgy. There is loud,
blaring music while everyone is getting drunk. Catherine starts French kissing
Nick in close up shots, and this is intercut with shots of champagne corks
popping. Luhrmann, for no reason I could discern, then takes us outside the
apartment to a black man playing a trumpet outside. Then, the script has Nick
saying something like “I began to like New York.”
Only after all this, does the scene with Tom hitting Myrtle occur. And by then,
because of all the wild clichés that Luhrmann has depicted previously, it has
nowhere near the impact it has in the novel. Instead of saying something about
Myrtle’s yearning for social status, about Tom’s power and brutality, and also
foreshadowing the climactic scene at the Plaza Hotel, where that power and
brutality will assert itself again, it just comes off as being a hackneyed
lover’s quarrel.
And by giving Nick that line out of a commercial about liking New York, that
alters the point that Nick’s outsider character is supposed to make about this
scene. He gets drunk not because he wants to participate in some sex orgy, which
Fitzgerald does not even suggest, he gets drunk because he is bored and then
repulsed by Tom’s actions. In the book, in keeping with the understatement that
sets off the dramatic act, Nick leaves on the elevator with Mr. McKee. He then
ends up at Penn Station waiting for a train while reading the newspaper.
Meeting the Gangster
Take another memorable scene from the book, the one in which Gatsby and Nick go
into New York to eat lunch because he wants to talk to Nick about doing him a
personal favor. At the restaurant, Wolfsheim approaches and sits down thinking
that Gatsby wants to introduce him to Nick for business purposes. During the
scene, Wolfsheim explains how he met Gatsby after the war and took a liking to
him personally because of his good looks and demeanor.
Wolfsheim says quaintly: “There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and
introduce to your mother and sister.” He then adds that Gatsby is “very careful
about women. He would never so much look at a friend’s wife.”
After this brief conversation based upon a mistaken assumption, Wolfsheim
excuses himself and leaves. Nick asks who he is and Gatsby replies he is a
gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series, a fact that astonishes Nick. Again,
this is a quiet, conversational scene which ends with a compelling discovery
about Gatsby’s business relationships.
Luhrmann moves the scene to a barbershop. He then has the characters walk
through a secret door and step down into a speakeasy, a Luhrmannesque speakeasy.
It features literally scores of people, maybe hundreds, drinking up like there
is no tomorrow. There are also girls dancing in a neatly choreographed musical
number with loud music on the soundtrack.
Luhrmann adds to the frenzy of the scene by employing stop-action frames and
jump cuts in his usual headlong editing style. Then, Wolfsheim actually says
something to Nick about Daisy, and finally, Tom Buchanan comes into the
speakeasy, and Gatsby leaves. Again, the problem is that Luhrmann’s over-the-top
operatics actually defeat the purpose of the scene.
The friendliness and almost tenderness that Wolfsheim shows to his protégé,
Gatsby; the matter-of-fact way Gatsby calls Wolfsheim a gambler who fixed the
World Series, a subtle technique that Fitzgerald employs to show how Gatsby has
adapted to this world; and Nick’s quiet astonishment that he could be in the
milieu of such people. All this is lost in the midst of the visual twists and
pyrotechnics Luhrmann is so addicted to.
The Wrong Director
When I first heard that Luhrmann was going to direct this new adaptation, I had
some reservations since I understood his visual style from his previous film
Moulin Rouge. But I thought back to Elia Kazan’s 1976 film of Fitzgerald’s The
Last Tycoon, and I recalled how Kazan had largely restrained his usual
hyperdramatic style in order to capture some of the atmosphere and feeling of
Fitzgerald. Well, Kazan evidently understood something that Luhrmann did not.
Kazan was trying his best to serve the book. Confirming my worst fear, Luhrmann
wants to give us not The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, but The Great Gatsby
by Baz Luhrmann. And the last thing in the world that Luhrmann understands is
understatement, which is very odd because, as Dwight MacDonald once wrote, any
real artist understands that to have effects you have to have contrast, which
Fitzgerald understood very well.
But what Luhrmann does not seem to understand is that if all your scenes scream,
then they drown each other out: that is they all whisper since they are all done
at the same intense pitch.
In addition to his frenetic cutting style, Luhrmann also does something I don’t
ever recall another director doing with a writer of Fitzgerald’s stature. In the
middle of the film, he suddenly starts putting some words from the novel on
screen in white letters, letter by letter. To me, this was jarring and
distracting.
Another textural problem I had was the recurrent use of huge panoramic shots
done by a crane over New York and the surrounding water. I think this was done
for the 3D version of the film. But by doing it repeatedly, it loses its impact
for when it is needed most, which is only in certain spots, especially at the
end of the book.
And then there is the music. In an apparent attempt to cash in on the youth
market, Luhrmann has used some contemporary musicians and singers like Jay-Z,
Fergie, and Beyonce Knowles. Luhrmann wanted to use modern hip-hop pop and
alternative rock and translate these contemporary songs back into Twenties
arrangements.
My questions are: Why not do the opposite? Why not take the music of the Jazz
Age, and modify it with the electronic tools we have today in order to give it a
stereophonic sound? To me, the music does not work either in setting a mood, or
commenting on the story. It seems a simplistic way to make money off the
soundtrack.
Over the Top
As I mentioned above, many people thought that the 1974 version of the film was
overproduced. It may have been. But in comparison to Luhrmann’s adaptation, it
looks like a low-budget B movie. Again, I was taken aback by the depiction of
Nick attending Gatsby’s first party.
In the book, Fitzgerald actually lists the people who attended Gatsby’s parties
that summer. (See the beginning of Chapter Four.) It may be about a hundred or
so people. The first party in Luhrmann’s film easily has ten times that many.
And Luhrmann choreographs it, and I exaggerate here a bit, to resemble something
out of a Busby Berkeley musical. He uses gigantic sets, garish lighting, fast
cutting, loud music, all in the aid of creating a kind of wild bacchanalia. The
problem with this is simple: there is no re-creation of either mood or time. In
other words, there is no transport to a different place in the past.
There is no sense of the epic romantic grandeur Fitzgerald is out to create
through his main character, whom in a line cut from the film one of the minor
characters in the book calls a modern David Belasco, a New York theater
impresario famous around the turn of the century. With Luhrmann’s treatment, one
could call DiCaprio’s Gatsby a modern Ken Russell, the flamboyant English film
director.
Another good example of the contrast between the book and film is the climactic
scene between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby. Daisy has arranged a meeting at her home
to tell
her husband that she and Gatsby are in love and will be leaving. But
the scene shifts to the Plaza Hotel. Realizing what has been going on, Tom has
done some research on Gatsby and his association with Wolfsheim.
And after some back-and-forth bickering between the two men over Daisy, Buchanan
plays his ace card and calls Gatsby a swindler. The argument gets heated and Tom
then reveals that Gatsby’s alleged drugstore business is a really a front for
bootlegging. Fitzgerald subtly caps this scene by using a reference from one of
Gatsby’s first parties, when a girl threw in, among some idle chatter, the rumor
that Gatsby had killed a man. In a masterly return to that early dialogue,
Fitzgerald now recalls the phrase:
“I turned back to Gatsby, and was startled at his expression. He looked, and
this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden, as if he had
‘killed a man.’ For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that
fantastic way.”
Because of the precise, small-scale way that Fitzgerald has calibrated the scene
with the use of certain words, like swindler; with the details of Daisy trying
to light a cigarette; with the music drifting upwards from the dance hall below
and because these have been used like a jeweler setting diamonds in a Swiss
watch, the impact of the above three sentences is like a giant velvet glove
pushing us back in our seats. Gatsby’s ugly past, which he used to attain the
wealth he thought he needed to win back his lost love, has been tragically
exposed.
Cinematic Histrionics
That kind of artistry does not interest Luhrmann. So again, I sat incredulously
as this scene approached its climax in the film. With all the subtlety of say
Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio first swings his hand back and smashes a glass to the
floor. He then flies into a rage, turns around, and walks across the room to Tom
and stands over him.
And then Luhrmann cuts into a close up of DiCaprio actually getting right into
Tom Buchanan’s face, separated from it by about 10 centimeters. Needless to say,
this is not Fitzgerald and it’s not in keeping with the character he created.
Although some have said that Luhrmann and his co-scenarist Craig Pearce have
followed the story fairly faithfully, I disagree. To the point that I wonder how
many of these reviewers have read the book lately.
Luhrmann and Pearce have adapted the book loosely; it’s a liberal adaptation. In
addition to the points I have already made, they have, for all practical
purposes, jettisoned the entire romance between Nick and Jordan Baker, the
professional golfer Nick meets when he first drives over to see his second
cousin Daisy.
Jordan Baker is in the film, but her role is greatly reduced and there is no
parallel coupling of the two as in the book. Therefore, the story loses a
dimension since Fitzgerald used the Carraway-Baker affair to comment on the
Gatsby-Buchanan affair, and also to differentiate Nick’s character from Gatsby.
Luhrmann and Pearce further tinker with the story by installing their own
framing device. Nick is still the narrator, but at the beginning we see him in
some kind of sanitarium talking with a doctor. The doctor tells him to start
writing down the experience that landed him there. Therefore, the telling of the
story becomes part of the rather trite device of mental therapy. (This is how
those white letters of the novel appear on the screen.)
Pearce and Luhrmann also cut out the final meeting between Nick and Tom, where
Nick learns about Daisy’s deception about running over Myrtle Wilson, and how
this lie led to both Gatsby’s death and the Buchanans leaving the area shortly
afterwards.
Mishandling the Funeral
And what Pearce and Luhrmann do to the ending! One of the most endearing
episodes in the novel is Nick arranging Gatsby’s funeral. He can’t get anyone to
show up, not even Wolfsheim. This is very strange to the Midwesterner since so
many people had taken advantage of the man’s prodigal generosity at his parties.
But unexpectedly, Gatsby’s father shows up. And there follows one of the most
touching scenes in the novel. Mr. Gatz shows Nick a little card he retrieved
from a book his son had. On the card is written a set of rules the boy should
obey in order to advance in the world. Mr. Gatz comments that he always knew his
son would be a formidable figure one day.
The unstated irony, of course, is that those rules did not make Gatsby what he
was. His association with Wolfsheim did.
But besides cutting that out, prior to the funeral, Luhrmann shows us Gatsby
lying in state. And we see scores of people filing by his exposed body in a
casket. Then, realizing that this is the opposite of what Fitzgerald wrote, he
then shows us the sparely attended funeral. Never bothering to explain why so
many would be at the former, yet so few at the latter.
Then there’s the acting. Tobey Maguire, a man whose success I have never been
able to figure out, is Nick. As others have noted, Maguire’s voice is so
nondescript that you forget it very soon after he speaks. So he was not a good
choice for the narrator just on that score.
But as a character, Nick Carraway is the kind of man who has to exist
essentially in a mode of discovery and reaction. Therefore, what was needed was
an actor of real intelligence and resourcefulness who’s own economic means of
expression matched the author’s. Perhaps a young Jon Voight could have pulled it
off. Instead, in Maguire, Luhrmann has cast an actor who could barely handle the
comic book character Spiderman. He’s simply a zero.
As Daisy, Luhrmann gives us the 28-year-old Carey Mulligan who had mostly done
television up until this time. To me, she was as non-descript as Maguire in face
and voice. She never captures the wonderful line Fitzgerald gives to Gatsby
about Daisy: her voice was full of money.
Joel Edgerton is cast as her husband Tom. Fitzgerald means Buchanan to be a
newly rich neighbor trying to affect learning and class and likeability, but
whose natural instincts keep exposing all that as a sham. Edgerton captures none
of that surface. He comes off as a sweaty rugby player almost from the start.
DiCaprio’s Interpretation
To complete the failed ensemble, there is Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatz/Gatsby. The
man who tried being successful the All-American way and found out that it didn’t
work, who then did achieve success the scorned-upon way and tried to hide this
from an upper class of snobs and hypocrites who, in many ways, are worse people
than he.
Gatz/Gatsby is a man who has essentially, by his own will and imagination,
created an illusion of a country squire to aid in sustaining his dream. Very few
actors could create this almost ethereal character who has now become an icon to
millions. The problem is that DiCaprio is really just an earnest yeoman in the
part. He never actually inhabits the character from the inside out.
And Luhrmann does not help him. To create a character like this takes a talented
and dedicated actor being coached by a director who understands how uphill the
journey is, and is willing to be there as a tutor all the way.
Far and away, the best performance I ever saw as
a Fitzgerald hero was a young
Robert DeNiro as Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon. DeNiro was directed in that
film by Elia Kazan, one of the founders of the The Actors Studio, and one of the
best actors’ directors ever. DeNiro lost over 40 pounds for that part and he
rehearsed with Kazan on weekends. He needed to master Stahr’s walk and carriage.
Plus, DeNiro did mental exercises so as to perfect the overbearing attitude of a
very bright studio president who had everything under his control.
To put it
mildly, I don’t see any of that kind of hard preparation work in DiCaprio’s
performance. He can’t even capture the externals of the character: his voice
keeps on slipping around without any consistency and there is nothing
ethereal about his bearing or walk.
DiCaprio here is the opposite of what DeNiro was. Not an artist, but a leading
man. A hundred actors could do what he did.
Decades ago, the redoubtable film critic Stanley Kauffmann mapped out two ways
to evaluate adaptations of estimable books: 1.) Does the film create the effect
of the novel in a substantial way? If not, then 2.) Does it create an effect by
way of its own artistry?
There have been films that have achieved the first category e.g. The Spy Who
Came in from the Cold. And there are some who have achieved the second, Roman
Polanksi’s Tess. This film does neither. And it does so in an arrogant, loud and
brash way that is offensive to those who understand the complex statement
Fitzgerald was making about the so-called American Dream.
I have little doubt that if Fitzgerald could see this pastiche, the dirt atop
his grave would be quaking.
Jim DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His new book is Destiny Betrayed
(Second Edition) from Skyhorse Publishing.