Lifeboat Ethics and Immigration Fears

In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces us to the nativism that was so much a part of 1920s culture. “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged,” Tom Buchanan tells the narrator, Nick Carraway. “It’s all scientific stuff, it’s been proved.”

An embarrassed Nick says nothing. But Fitzgerald doesn’t let Tom’s remarks (which parallel Calvin Coolidge’s 1921 observation, ...