1919

The year 1919 marks a pivotal moment in the moral landscape of The Great Gatsby, the year in which the World's Series was fixed by Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler and Gatsby's business partner. This single event, disclosed casually over lunch, exposes the vast, hidden machinery of corruption that underwrites the era's glittering surface and directly implicates Gatsby's own wealth in a scheme that betrayed the faith of fifty million people.

The Fixed World's Series

It is during a lunch in a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar that Nick Carraway learns of the 1919 World's Series fix. Gatsby introduces him to Meyer Wolfsheim, a small, flat-nosed Jew with fine growths of hair in each nostril, who speaks of the old Metropole and the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal. When Nick asks who Wolfsheim is, Gatsby hesitates and then answers coolly: "He's the man who fixed the World's Series back in 1919." The idea staggers Nick. He had remembered that the World's Series had been fixed in 1919, but he had thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to him that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe. When Nick asks how Wolfsheim managed it, Gatsby replies simply: "He just saw the opportunity." And when Nick asks why Wolfsheim is not in jail, Gatsby answers: "They can't get him, old sport. He's a smart man."

Wolfsheim's Partnership with Gatsby

Wolfsheim's role in Gatsby's life is foundational. He tells Nick that he first met Gatsby when the young major, just out of the army and covered with medals, came into Winebrenner's poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a job, having not eaten for a couple of days. Wolfsheim took him to lunch, and Gatsby ate more than four dollars' worth of food in half an hour. "I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter," Wolfsheim boasts. He saw that Gatsby was a fine-appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when Gatsby told him he was an Oggsford man, Wolfsheim knew he could use him. The partnership was close: "We were so thick like that in everything," Wolfsheim says, holding up two bulbous fingers. This partnership almost certainly included the World's Series transaction, and it extended into the drug-store business that Tom Buchanan later exposes, in which Gatsby and Wolfsheim bought up side-street drug-stores in New York and Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter.

The Year's Broader Significance

1919 is also the year in which Gatsby, after the Armistice, is sent to Oxford instead of being allowed to return home immediately. He stays only five months, but this period becomes a crucial part of the identity he constructs for himself. When Tom Buchanan challenges him at the Plaza Hotel, demanding to know when he went to Oxford, Gatsby answers: "It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That's why I can't really call myself an Oxford man." The year thus marks both the beginning of Gatsby's legitimate claim to a cultivated identity and the moment of his deepest entanglement with the criminal underworld that will ultimately destroy him. The same year that saw the World's Series fixed also saw Gatsby's brief, transformative exposure to the world of European universities, a paradox that captures the irreconcilable tension at the heart of his dream.

Consequences and Aftermath

The 1919 World's Series fix reverberates through the novel's climax. When Tom Buchanan confronts Gatsby at the Plaza Hotel, he reveals that he has made an investigation into Gatsby's affairs. "I found out what your 'drug-stores' were," Tom says. "He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That's one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn't far wrong." Gatsby's connection to Wolfsheim and to the 1919 fix becomes the weapon that Tom uses to destroy Daisy's faith in Gatsby. After Gatsby's death, when Nick tries to reach Wolfsheim to attend the funeral, Wolfsheim refuses, writing a letter that says: "I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now." When Nick visits his office, marked "The Swastika Holding Company," Wolfsheim explains his rule: "When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out." The man who fixed the World's Series in 1919, who played with the faith of fifty million people, will not risk his own position for the friend he raised up out of nothing.