The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. The division and envy between old money and newly acquired wealth is a tale as old as America itself. But only once has the mercantile danced with the affluent to such sensuous effect in the realm of fiction. It was exactly a century ago that readers first became acquainted with West and East Egg, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s barely concealed noms de plume for New York’s Long Island neighborhoods of Great Neck and Sands Point. The former played the role of cynosure for the neophytes of the new high society, the latter remaining the bastion of genteel estates and social exclusivity. The novel Fitzgerald wrote was, of course, The Great Gatsby, and the location was one that the author knew well. Both Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, lived in Great Neck in the early 1920s, giving them both plenty of scope to observe newly moneyed, self-made millionaires building their grand houses. Gatsby simply couldn’t have existed without Long Island, and the prominence of the novel’s location was noted from the day of publication, as Anne Margaret Daniel illustrates in her article on the author and his relationship with the New Yorker magazine. “When, shortly after its publication,” Daniel writes, the New Yorker began recommending Gatsby in their “Tell Me A Book To Read” column (designed to direct readers to “a few of the recent ones best worth while”), Gatsby was summarized thus on 22 August 1925: “Quixote dismounts near Great Neck from a blind-tiger Rosinante, to sacrifice himself to a despicable Dulcinea.” Other blurbs in the “Tell Me” column during the spring and summer of 1925 would call Gatsby the “[u]gly-duckling emergence of a true romantic hero in North Shore Long Island high low life” (30 May); “a Yankee Quixote so fine as to be taken seriously” (6 June); and “a rough diamond of devotion and chivalry, cast before swine on Long Island” (20 June). In the same column on 4 July, the New Yorker had to admit that Fitzgerald, the “grandfather of the Long Island flapper,” had “ripen[ed] as a novelist.” Despite its bucolic (at least in parts) atmosphere, Long Island has never been a stranger to antagonism between tyros and old-timers. As early as the 1620s, the Dutch and English settlers who established farming and fishing communities came into conflict with the remnants of Algonquian-speaking peoples. These included the Montaukett, Shinnecock, and Matinecock people, who had lived in semi-permanent villages and hunted, fished, and farmed on the island for centuries. Yet the eventual dominance of the Dutch and English émigré way of life wasn’t without its pleasures, as hard as the physical toil of working the land was for the new arrivals. There’s something almost Arcadian in Jacqueline Overton’s 1933 description of this landscape of labor. “Mothers had learned to concoct all manner of new dishes out of pumpkins and Indian corn,” she wrote. “Samp, for instance, was a favorite dish made in autumn by crushing Indian corn in a samp mortar.” Indian crops were such a necessity of colonial life that [c]aptains of vessels well acquainted with the harbors used to say in joke that they “could tell when they were coming upon the Long Island coast in an autumn fog by hearing the sound of the samp mortars when the breeze blew off shore.” They certainly did not lack for a variety of food. One funny old verse says: If fresh meat be wanting to fill up our dish, We have carrots and pumpkins and turnips and sich, And if there is mind for a delicate dish, We haste to the clam-banks and there we catch fish. One has to wonder how the mothers felt about it all, literally grinding through the days. After wrestling control of Long Island from the Dutch, British rule went mostly unchallenged for over a century before the region played host to the largest battle of the American Revolutionary War. The Battle Of Long Island (or Battle of Brooklyn, as it was also known) was won by the British, enabling them to capture the island and New York City. Yet Britain failed to capitalize on the success, underestimating the American ability to regroup and continue fighting. “If the British had used their naval power to trap Washington and his army on Long Island, the American Revolution may well have foundered,” argues William L. Calderhead in an article published in 1976, the bicentennial year for the United States. Calderhead focuses on the British tactic, enacted two days after the initial attack, of moving their fleet into Flushing Bay to anchor for the night. The British were obviously not aware that Washington’s army, a scant seven miles away by direct line but about ten by water, was trapped at the tip of Long Island. If the ships had continued on course for two more hours, and the Americans had little to impede them, they would have been in sight of the Brooklyn ferry crossing. In this position they would have observed the first moves at dusk for the evacuation. Most likely their presence would have forced the Americans to postpone their efforts to escape. Instead, the British ships stayed at Flushing Bay just beyond range, leaving the doorway to escape wide open. In the early days of the post-colonial United States, Long Island farms supplied New York City, while the whaling industry thrived in Sag Harbor. In 1837, the opening of the Long Island Rail Road improved access from New York City and spurred suburban growth. Wealthy industrialists built summer estates and mansions on Long Island’s North Shore, later given the moniker of the “Gold Coast.” If you were rich, and living around the areas Fitzgerald portrayed as the homes of Tom, Daisy, Nick, and Gatsby, then you could consider yourself one of the most privileged citizens in the country. Politically, the affluence manifested in Long Island establishing itself as a bastion of the Republican Party, showing strong support for Hoover in his doomed Presidential campaign against Roosevelt. Lorraine Lupinskie-Huvane and Alan Singer explain this voter behavior in the OAH Magazine of History. “Part of the reason for this opposition to Roosevelt was the relative affluence of Long Island,” they write, especially north shore towns in Nassau County. Residents of the town of Great Neck included business leaders Walter P. Chrysler and Joseph Grace and the well-known entertainer Eddie Cantor. In a 1932 article in the local newspaper, each praised the area’s beauty, suburban isolation, and convenience to New York City. None of them mentioned any local problems related to the Great Depression. Roosevelt, and a substantial section of the less fortunate inhabitants of the region, felt otherwise, and the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) began building on Long Island, constructing roads, sewers, beaches, parks, and buildings and preserving historic sites. This development made Long Island, particularly after the end of World War II, a hugely attractive location for manufacturing, retail, and, later, the service economy. But concomitant with this were tensions around the concept of localism, an ethos with its roots in the conditions and convictions of the earliest settlers. Autonomy and self-sufficiency, without “big government” interference, were prerequisites in places like, then isolated, Long Island in the seventeenth century. The echoes of this feeling resounded clearly three centuries later in the increasing disconnect between suburban mobility and localism. Arnold Silverman and Lina Schneider explore this schism in their 1979 analysis of what they termed “Long Island’s regional crisis.” “Many Long Islanders were part of the 1960s and 1970s white flight from New York City neighbourhoods, which were deteriorating under the tensions of racial change,” they wrote. Such experiences of deliberate deurbanization were politically formative. Such suburbanites often brought to their new communities a “never again” mentality. For them, local self-government has become a fortress, and the drawbridge is up. Thus, current fears reinforce a pre-existing localism, and infuse it with new and intense emotions. These suburban residents hope that vigilance will prevent the process of neighbourhood change from beginning. In the city, they experienced first-hand how small changes could quickly generate forces of irreversible change. Today, Long Island remains a blend of suburban life, coastal culture, and historic estates while also facing challenges of rising seas and housing affordability. Not all of these concerns would have been entirely foreign to the characters in Gatsby. But has there been much of an evolution in the attraction of Long Island between Fitzgerald’s era and now? Marius Bewley, in a 1954 issue of the Sewanee Review, questions the motivations of Gatsby’s guests much in the way we interrogate tourism today. “Why did they come?” he wonders. It’s true, there is the answer of the plotted story-the free party, the motor-boats, the private beach, the endless flow of cocktails. But in the completed pattern of the novel one knows that they came for another reason-came blindly and instinctively-illusions in pursuit of a reality from which they have become historically separated, but by which they might alone be completed or fulfilled. And why did Gatsby invite them? As contrasted with them, he alone has a sense of the reality that hovers somewhere out of sight in this nearly ruined American dream; but the reality is unintelligible until he can invest it again with the tangible forms of his world, and relate it to the logic of history. Whether it rests on day-trippers visiting the East End Seaport Museum or scions of industry investing in new security gates for their mansions on the North Shore, Fitzgerald’s vision of new money looking enviously across the water at old money remains an integral part of the chimera of the American Dream.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-long-and-winding-island/