There is not a single word that can pin down the 1920s. The word "Roaring" is often attached to the era, but for all the noise and hustle and bustle that the 1920s created with the sounds of jazz playing, radios blaring, and Model Ts honking, the 1920s were many other things as well. "And people in the 1920s, whether they felt the time to be liberating or frightening, very often found themselves flooded with a sense that theirs was a decade in which all was changing, all was new" (Lutz, 1). Hopes were up, yet cynicism was abundant as well, and this is most evident in New York City -- the city that welcomed numerous newcomers but never made any promises to them. In 1920s fiction, New York City is the setting for the migrant who leaves home to find a better life. What a better life entails for the literary character, though, depends upon his/her objective for moving to New York City.

The novel most highly revered for its depiction of the dream that brought people to New York City is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby has secured a place in the literary canon by readers and critics who voice sentiments like those of critic James Callahan, "Fitzgerald embodied in his tissues and nervous system the fluid polarities of American experience: success and failure, illusion and disillusion, dream and nightmare" (374). To read the novel is to be plunked down into the era of bootlegging and all the anxieties that came with it. For all that the novel contained, it also left out important pieces of the 1920s puzzle that would create a more complete representation of the decade.

The term " the American dream" is associated with The Great Gatsby because of central character Jay Gatsby's ascension from poor North Dakota farm boy to that of powerful New York money-man. People who are "self-made men" or who have "pulled themselves up with their bootstraps" are applauded in the United States, and from the appearance of Gatsby he seems to be someone who deserves roaring applause. But Gatsby is not a simple poor-boy-makes-good story; it is a story about a poor boy who will always be that no matter how much money he makes. Gatsby is clouded in the nativist rhetoric of the decade, is in turmoil with the changing times, and is dependent upon the notion of the American dream.

The American dream is associated with class and economic upward mobility, and Jay Gatsby aspires to rise above the status he was born into and to achieve a place in the upper echelon of wealthy society. Critic Jeffrey Louis Decker points out that the term "American dream", "was not put into print until 1931" (67), therefore, "If we want to interpret The Great Gatsby historically, we should stop using the American dream as an analytical category altogether" (68). Dismissing the American dream when analyzing Gatsby because the term was not yet "invented" is ludicrous; the American dream is an important analytical category that does not deserve to be ignored solely because of when its first official appearance in a printed text occurred. What also needs to be taken into account is that the twenties are probably what caused the term to become a recognized part of the American idea landscape. The twenties were a prosperous time for the United States that allowed for its citizens to dream big. Ann Douglas writes of the twenties to be, "when America seized the economic and cultural leadership of the West" (3). The term was probably coined in the thirties because of the feeling that the twenties had offered hope for a person to improve his/her lot in life.

Decker writes, "Lionel Trilling's statement that Gatsby 'comes inevitably to stand for America itself' best exemplifies the consensus among Fitzgerald critics who have turned the Great Gatsby into the novel of the American dream" (55). Decker is correct in asserting that Gatsby should not be regarded by critics as the hallmark story of the American dream, but this is not because Gatsby cannot be linked historically to the term or because a group of outdated critics endorses it. The reason why Gatsby should not be regarded as the model American dream story is because the American dream that Fitzgerald writes about is one that is very narrow and exclusionary and focuses on a character who attempts to fulfill his dream in corrupt and obsessive ways. Gatsby is a man who takes his dream to an extreme and goes to the lengths of lying about his identity, engaging in illegal crime, and committing adultery. Fitzgerald writes about the traditional white American dream which is born out of capitalistic ideals, and, thus, reliant on material acquisitions and attaining high social status. And while he does a fine job creating shallow, wealthy characters that cause the reader to think twice about the benefits of wealth, he never shows the American dream from a different perspective other than from people residing in a privileged, white world.

There is more to the American dream, though, and Decker's argument stops short of exposing it when he refuses to acknowledge the presence of the idea. When Decker says the American dream does not exist in the twenties, he does so without looking to the literary genre that develops a more virtuous definition of the American dream. Whereas Decker's article "Gatsby's Pristine Dream: The Diminishment of the Self-Made Man in the Tribal Twenties" educates readers about the problematic racism and prejudice against immigrants of the twenties and the role these issues play in Gatsby, the article neglects to look at what these "outsider" groups were aspiring to during this time. When examining the story of an African American migrant to New York, a different dream emerges - one not based on materialistic yearnings -- but based upon attaining a station in life that offers basic freedoms that most whites take for granted. The 1925 Rudolph Fisher short story "The City of Refuge" illuminates a fundamental American dream that can be described as the hope and cultivation of acquiring basic human freedoms. This American dream is based upon freedom from oppressors, fear, and threats. The African American migrants from the South who venture North in the 1920s value freedom in a way that the whites of Gatsby do not.

Robert Ornstein writes, "Gatsby is a story of 'displaced persons' who have journeyed eastward in search of a larger experience of life" (57). He notes that it is the "stultifying small-town dullness" of the Midwest that drives the Gatsby clan East (59). Is that really reason enough to migrate to what Ford Madox Ford called the "City of the Good Time" (Douglas, 10)? Perhaps it is for bored whites in the middle of the country who saw a dead-end life as inevitable, but African Americans in 1920s fiction do not head to New York from the South simply to escape Dullsville like characters in Gatsby do. These migrants are trying to obtain a life that the oppressive Jim Crow South is not going to provide, and with a growing renown for being a thriving cultural and economic center, Harlem is the place that draws many migrants to its doorstep. The central figure in "City," King Solomon Gillis, is in New York because he killed a white man who was seeking revenge on blacks who were finding success in farming. This crime forces Gillis to flee from the terror and threat of the lynch mob. Harlem is a place that signifies freedom from the post-Reconstruction ways of the South, so Gillis seeks "refuge" and the chance at a new life there. Fisher's story, set in its historical context, shows what it truly means to search for an improved way of life. Fitzgerald neglects to show what New York City symbolizes for so many African Americans at this time and the role that race inevitably plays in the American dream. This exclusion diminishes his picture of the city that is often regarded as the finest depiction of it. Fitzgerald is the person who first used the term "Jazz Age," a term which is suppose to describe the quickened pulse, heightened interest in popular culture, and spirited embrace of an ever developing America. However, Jazz is also the musical form popularized by African Americans, and that causes problems when labeling Gatsby as a Jazz Age text because the novel ignores the people who made Jazz a thriving cultural and artistic movement in New York City.

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Fitzgerald's depiction and inclusion of African Americans in The Great Gatsby is not accurately reflective of African Americans in New York City in the 1920s, a fact which ought to cause white flags to go up when placing Gatsby at the head of the pantheon of Jazz Age novels. The key scene involving African Americans in Gatsby is when Nick and Gatsby are going into the city to meet with Wolfsheim.

"The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds, and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby's splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell's Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

'Anything can happen now that we've slid over this bridge,' I thought; 'anything at all . . . '" (69)

This passage contains the nostalgia, the romanticism, and the underlying anxiety that permeates Gatsby. Nick drinks in the view of New York City while safely tucked into Gatsby's car, and the crowded, congested city appears more pristine than if he were walking the sidewalks or driving down a busy street. However, even looking at the city from a distance does not mean that the Anglo-Saxon crowd is safe from those who are infiltrating New York. Nick encounters a car of Southeastern Europeans who with their "tragic eyes and short upper lips" serve as a depressing reminder of their presence.

Unlike the immigrants, the African Americans who notice Nick act as competition to the Gatsby car. "When, during the Twenties, black empowerment threatened white privilege, nationalists readily abandoned their nativist attack on non-Nordic Europeans and reasserted the need for black/white separation through appeals to (among other things) intra-white brotherhood" (Decker, 58). Yes, the African Americans are a threat to whites because the race is emerging into mainstream society as a powerful minority group; but Decker fails to realize that as African Americans do this they, too, are cultivating an American Dream - one that grants them access into previously predominantly white realms like education, the arts, and the workplace. The economic threat African Americans pose is evident in the limousine that rivals Gatsby's Rolls Royce, and the African Americans have an edge over Gatsby by having a chauffeur, and a white one at that. The white chauffeur is a haunting reminder of the changing times. The word choice of "buck" makes the African American men sound threatening in a physical sense, yet it is a demeaning term and helps Nick believe he has the upper hand. Nick is safe in the Rolls and "Beyond the obvious racial stereotyping of the happy darkies aping white ways, note the pleasure Nick takes in observing the high-spirited Negroes, an amusement indebted to the legacy of blackface minstrelsy in the United States" (Decker, 57-8). By laughing at them, Nick is keeping them at a distance and assures himself that these African Americans are just an exception or some kind of farce. As the car slides over the bridge and Nick thinks that "anything can happen now" the romantic fa�ade of the city slowly crumbles away.