“The Great Gatsby,” written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925, offers a vivid portrayal of post-World War I America.
Fitzgerald, and the characters in his novel, were deeply shaped by the Great War. By placing the story in its historical context, he reveals the complex societal shifts in the United States in the years after WWI.
F. Scott Fitzgerald and WWI
Born in September 1896, Francis Scott Key (F. Scott) Fitzgerald was 20 years old and attending Princeton University in 1917. He had been courting a young girl named Ginevra King. (That failed relationship is thought to be one of the inspirations for the character Daisy in “The Great Gatsby.”) Fitzgerald was already writing for university clubs and nearing graduation when Congress declared war. Despite this, he chose to drop out of Princeton to join the U.S. military, accepting a commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
The Army assigned Fitzgerald to the Officer Training Corps at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was trained as an infantry officer. He wrote his first draft for “This Side of Paradise” during this period – and (as he later told it to the Saturday Evening Post) was reprimanded for writing it instead of studying infantry tactics by his training officer, future five-star general and 34th President of the United States Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In June 1918, Fitzgerald was on the move. He went with the 9th Division to Camp Sheridan, a mobilization camp just outside Montgomery, Alabama.
By day, his brigade was busy building new units, training recruits and draftees and preparing to ship overseas to the Western Front – typical for many of the newly-activated units of the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.). By night, young officers found themselves with time on their hands to explore Montgomery and take in the social life. For Fitzgerald, this relatively calm period gave him time to edit his manuscript for “This Side of Paradise.”
It was during one of those jaunts to Montgomery when he met his future wife, Zelda Sayre. Their stormy relationship is thought to be another inspiration for Daisy in “The Great Gatsby.” He even appropriates a quote from Zelda about their own daughter as one of Daisy’s lines.
“I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”
—Daisy Buchanan in “The Great Gatsby,” originally spoken by Zelda Fitzgerald
On Oct. 26, 1918, Fitzgerald and his unit were moved again – this time to Camp Mills on Long Island, New York, with plans to be sent to France. Fate would intervene: the Armistice was signed on Nov. 11. He never went “Over There.”
Fitzgerald always seemed to regret never experiencing the war firsthand, as suggested in his 1936 story “I Didn’t Get Over.” Yet World War I, its veterans and the new world that emerged from it deeply shaped his post-war writings, including “This Side of Paradise” (1920), “May Day” (1920), “The Crack-Up” (1936), “The Beautiful and the Damned” (1922) and “Winter Dreams” (1922). And of course “The Great Gatsby,” published in 1925.
Based on a True Story? Historical Context for “The Great Gatsby” Characters
Jay Gatsby
The rumors fly around Gatsby’s social circle, tarnishing his reputation:
“A German spy during the war,” some say.
He is “a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s.”
There are even whispers Gatsby is a murderer connected “to Von Hindenburg.”
The novel later reveals his true identity as a U.S. WWI veteran, but at that time in history, accusations of German loyalty in the United States could ruin lives. German and Austro-Hungarian nationals in the U.S. faced bans, registration requirements and restrictions on firearms and communications devices. Law enforcement arrested many under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, detaining over 10,000 people and interning around 2,300 German-born individuals at camps like Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia and Fort Douglas in Utah. Among those arrested were ordinary citizens, often involved in labor disputes or “radical” politics.
Anti-German sentiment lingered into 1921 – the novel’s setting – affecting Gatsby’s image even at his funeral. Some characters know of his U.S. military service, but the facts of his stories are questionable.
Gatsby served as a first lieutenant in the 7th Infantry Regiment at Camp Taylor in Kentucky. The 7th Infantry Regiment (part of the 3rd Division) fought in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in France, which was a crucial battle in WWI. The entire 3rd Division was sent to hold the line for the Allies, while the 5th Division advanced to capture more land from the Central Powers. If Gatsby were involved in anything heroic, it would have been during this operation.
Yet his heroic stories contain historical inconsistencies. He claims to have led a machine gun battalion deep into enemy lines, but such a unit would have been separate from infantry regiments – as the character Nick Carraway, a veteran of the 9th Machine Gun Battalion, would know.
“In the Argonne Forest I took the remains of my machine-gun battalion so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead.”
—Jay Gatsby telling his story to Nick Carraway
For Gatsby’s account to be true, he would have had to be reassigned and retrained.
Another inconsistency: Gatsby describes his regiment’s firearm as the Lewis gun, which would raise doubts for Nick since over 80 percent of the machine guns used by the U.S. Army in 1918 were Vickers field machine guns. The likelihood of an American unit using a Lewis gun on the Western Front in France in late 1918 would have been very low.
“I was promoted to be a major, and every Allied government gave me a decoration—even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”
Little Montenegro! [Gatsby] lifted up the words and nodded at them—with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.
—Nick Carraway listening to Jay Gatsby’s story
Gatsby shows Nick a medal awarded by Montenegro, a small nation that faced significant challenges in the early 20th century. At the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913, the Central Powers were negotiating to split Montenegro between Albania and Serbia. However, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated on June 28, 1914, the split had not been finalized, leaving Montenegro’s leaders to make a difficult decision during the July Crisis of 1914. Initially, they considered neutrality but ultimately chose to join the Allied Powers to support Serbia and Russia.
Montenegro struggled throughout 1914 and 1915 to maintain its independence. By January 1916, it was forced to disband its army as the King fled the country. With no political authority remaining, peace negotiations were impossible, and the Austro-Hungarian military occupied Montenegro. After the Armistice, the fate of the nation was in the hands of the Allies. Although U.S. President Woodrow Wilson favored King Nikola and an independent Montenegro, the country’s occupation by Serbia led to its dissolution and integration into neighboring states in 1919.
Several characters refer to Gatsby as an “Oxford man,” and he shares a photo of himself with a cricket bat among other scholars in a courtyard at the university. He later tells Tom Buchanan that he spent five months at Oxford in 1919, claiming,
“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice. We could go to any of the Universities in England or France.”
Gatsby is referring to a portion of General Orders No. 30 from the General Headquarters of the A.E.F. on Feb. 13, 1919, a program which aimed to promote education and gave selected officers “the privilege of attending educational institutions of the nations associated with the United States in this war. Arrangements have already been made whereby selected members of the A.E.F. may be ordered to detached service in attendance on French and British universities during the current spring term which will terminate June 30, 1919.”
Nick Carraway
Throughout the novel, Fitzgerald writes very little about Nick Carraway’s experiences during the Great War. He was in the 1st Division of the 9th Machine Gun Battalion, which was also part of the 3rd Division that Gatsby was assigned to. Nick shares almost nothing with any other character about his service and does not bring the reader into those details of his life. There could be a variety of reasons for this, but we know some soldiers who came home from the war were discouraged from staying too attached to emotions rooted in their experiences.
The 9th Machine Gun Battalion participated in six battles in France from June 1918 through October 1918, one of which would have placed Nick on the same front that Gatsby describes, though in a different area. The entire 3rd Division had a total of 16,117 casualties. Machine gunners’ missions were “primarily to hold their positions in spite of all enemy pressure, even after being completely surrounded,” which implies that holding the position was more important than their individual lives.
We don’t know what Nick went through, but WWI changed the lives of its veterans forever.
Some soldiers returned home physically maimed – yet even they were pressured to figure out how to continue life as normal. Soldiers with mental and emotional trauma struggled in different ways to go back to life as it was before the war. “Shell shock” emerged as a new diagnosis, describing symptoms now associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker
Fitzgerald does not provide much of the women’s wartime backstories (though their characterizations might have been greatly different if the novel had been set pre-WWI). Nick does learn of Daisy’s contribution during the Great War:
[Daisy] asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day?
—Jordan Baker telling a story about Daisy Buchanan
Although Fitzgerald made only one passing reference to it, American women significantly contributed to the war effort.
Not only did they volunteer for organizations like the Red Cross, Salvation Army and the YMCA/YWCA at home and overseas, but many entered the paid workforce for the first time, filling roles as factory workers, switchboard operators, technicians and jobs in countless other industries.
Over 20,000 women served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. Others joined the U.S. Navy as yeomanettes or “Yeoman (F),” working as truck drivers, mechanics, translators and radio operators while receiving the same pay as their male peers.
The Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit, established by General John J. Pershing, improved battlefield communications on the Western Front – a key to Allied victory.
In their homes and communities, women conserved food, ran Liberty Bond drives and generally kept up positive morale and patriotism.
The details of the characters’ lives reflect the changes that WWI made in society: Daisy and Jordan have the right to vote, for example. Congress ratified the 19th Amendment on August 18, 1920, a civic landmark that granted most women the right to vote nationwide.
It wasn’t just a political whim of the 1920s; activists had agitated for more than a century for this cause, and the enormous efforts women went to during World War I played a significant role in the passage of the amendment. As President Wilson said, “we have made partners of the women in this war... Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?”
Daisy and Jordan also live more freely than many women could before the war. Jordan stays single, becomes a competitive golfer and wears whatever she likes. How? Women transformed traditional gender roles when they proved their capabilities in the workforce during the war. The casual acceptance of women wearing pants, as Jordan does when she plays golf, can be traced back to women in positions such as ambulance driving who needed practical clothing for their work.
Throughout the Roaring Twenties women used fashion and work, and the social freedoms extended to them during wartime, to push for more independence.
The historical and cultural context of 1920s America paints Gatsby, Nick, Daisy and Jordan’s stories more vividly for the reader.
But understanding that context also shows that as the Great War shaped F. Scott Fitzgerald and the world of his novel, so too does it shape the world of today.
