Statism In The Great Gatsby

The 1920s when, “The parties were bigger, the pace was faster, the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser, and the liquor was cheaper” (Tales of a Jazz Age). This was the time when Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald got the chance to explore the world, and grow his beliefs on it. He went into it with a rule the world attitude and left it a suffering alcoholic. What happened? Life happened. Reality hit during WWI when he realized he didn’t want to die in the war and become another statistic. So during the days of waiting for possible deployment he went ballistic writing his heart out in, “The Romantic Egotist”, which turned out to be a flop. He fell in love and was rejected, until he wrote “This Side of Paradise” receiving
His dream of not becoming another statistic drove him to the verge of insanity. Connecting to the 1920s as everyone from his generation was going a bit crazy and their environment reflected that with it’s higher than ever before skyscrapers that match the generation’s high hopes and dreams for a better future. No one had higher hopes than the character Nick from The Great Gatsby. Nick moved to the West Egg in hopes of making it as a bondsman buying tons of books on the topic, but then finding himself get caught up in the world of a man named Gatsby. Gatsby lived and died from the darkest of the 1920s, and is Fitzgerald’s own struggles that make Nick disgusted with the world that society pushed as exciting and fulfilling at the time. That those exciting things were hidden evils that lessened the purity of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a social commentary of the low morals and high crimes that plagued the
It all started with the owner of the White Sox, Charles A. Comiskey, who didn’t pay or treat his players fairly. (Milner) The players went to the top gamblers of the time, such as Arnold Rothstein. Arnold Rothstein is represented by Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, where both of them rigged the World Series. (Syrett) In the 1920s a court case was finally filed ending with Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis put a blanket ban on anyone who knows of or is a part of any conspiracy of rigging games, and the players were exiled from the sport (Milner). However they shouldn’t have taken all the blame, the gamblers and the coach weren’t punished. This is a dilemma since technically it all started because of the coach and the gamblers were the ones who really put the crime into action. The coach was morally wrong keeping the money for himself rather than paying his players. The gamblers, like Wolfshiem, got off rich. Then used their money to spend the rest of their life hidden away wasting away their money on pleasures as when we last see Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby he’s with women. In fact Gatsby may have even been in on the scheme as Wolfshiem said, “I raised him out of nothing… We were thick like that and everything. Always together” (The Great Gatsby, 112). Maybe since Fitzgerald was well acquainted with the bootleggers he knew more of what happened at the World Series