A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby
by John Marsh
136 pages / $19.95 / 978-1-68590-083-0

Excerpted from Chapter 2: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires

“But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away.” —Nick Carraway, on closing his relationship with Jordan Baker

Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby.

The previous chapter explored how clothes in The Great Gatsby followed a Veblen-like logic of conspicuous leisure and, still more so, conspicuous consumption. For Veblen, what unites conspicuous leisure and conspicuous consumption, beyond their need for visibility, is waste. To conspicuously consume, the wealthy need to advertise that they can waste resources. So they spend thousands of dollars on a watch when a ten-dollar one would do, or, spend grotesque amounts of money on food and alcohol, as Gatsby does for the parties he throws.

But waste informs The Great Gatsby in ways other than conspicuous consumption, nowhere more so than in the valley of ashes that characters pass through on their way to Manhattan and on whose outskirts George and Myrtle Wilson live. In these ashes, we can foresee the culture of waste that has irrevocably harmed our own world and threatens to harm it still more. Although no one is innocent, including us for mimicking them, the wealthy, just as they did in the realm of clothes, bear more responsibility for this culture of waste than do others. The story starts not on Long Island, where The Great Gatsby largely takes place, but in Brooklyn. It ends, like the novel, on Long Island, but it ends with one extraordinarily ambitious reader, the urban planner Robert Moses.

By 1898, when Brooklyn joined the other boroughs to form New York City, it had already run out of room for its garbage and the tons of ashes generated by the coal its residents burned to heat their homes. Until 1906, the Street Cleaning Department had used horse-drawn carts to collect garbage and ash and haul it to dumps, some as far as ten miles away. Or they simply threw it in the ocean. Because of this laborious system, the New York Times reported in 1907, “It was a common thing in any street in the borough to see barrels running over with ash standing for days and sometimes a week in front of houses.”

Enter the Brooklyn Ash Removal Company and its treasurer, the Tammany Hall confrere John “Fishhooks” McCarthy. Accounts vary, but his nickname is thought to refer to how, whenever a bill appeared, his hands, like fishhooks, got caught in his pockets, making it impossible for him to pay…. | more…