Theme Of Crime In The Great Gatsby

Crime and the Roaring 20’s More than 12,000 murders occurred a year in the mid 1920’s ("The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938"). The reason for this large amount of death and destruction has to do with the crime lords of the 1920’s. These gangsters had a far reaching influence on the way American society operated in the 1920’s. Things like bootlegging, gambling, and even prostitution could all be things that gangsters had operations for ("The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938"). This idea of crime affecting American society can be seen throughout Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby. In Fitzgerald’s novel one can see the manifestation of the gangster through his character Meyer Wolfshiem. Through Meyer Wolfshiem’s character one gets a sense of what a gangster really was like back in the 1920’s, and his/her impact on American society. Gangsters far reaching impact on American society can be seen throughout Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald characterizes the ideal image of a gangster in the …show more content…
Many gangsters achieved this by paying off police and local politicians. This allowed gangsters and crime lords alike to get away with many small crimes as well as larger scale crimes if they had the connections. We can see an example of this in the novel when Gatsby gets pulled for speeding and waves the policeman a white card. He later explains to Nick that the gets a Christmas card from the commissioner every year for doing him a "favor" once. In the quote "Taking a white card from his wallet, he waved it before the man's eyes. "Right you are," agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. "Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!" "What was that?" I inquired. "The picture of Oxford?" "I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he send me a Christmas card every