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yet the form of American nationalism that emerged out of and in conjunc- tion with prohibition seems to have more profound influences on these American characters than they openly admit. Prohibition groups such as the Anti-Saloon League sought to create a new “Americanism” that favored the white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class and excluded what they con- sidered the unsavory immigrant element in their society. While American expatriates certainly left America to avoid its artistically oppressive environ- ment and to absorb the culture of Europe, I would argue that the type of American nationalism created and spread through prohibition and by such prohibition groups as the Anti-Saloon League became yet another oppressor in America at this time and influenced these artists’ decisions to leave Amer- ica, while simultaneously influencing their behavior and attitudes while liv- ing as expatriates in Europe.
In The Sun Also Rises, when Jake and Bill are on their fishing trip in the Basque village of Burguete, these two Americans engage in a satirical dia- logue that alludes to American politics, and particularly prohibition. In this scene, after Bill has just found out that Jake has brought only two bottles of wine for their fishing lunch, Bill jokingly teases Jake: “You’re in the pay of the Anti-Saloon League.”3 Jake claims that he went to college with Wayne B. Wheeler and tells Bill that “the saloon must go” (p. 128). Bill agrees, and says, “The saloon must go, and I will take it with me.” In the midst of this conversa- tion, Jake and Bill mention other American political and social figures besides Wheeler, who was the foremost leader of the Anti-Saloon League during this period. While the significance of these allusions is lost on most modern readers, Hemingway’s readers in 1926 would have certainly understood these allusions and known the famous and infamous American figures mentioned in this scene. Although these individuals are merely alluded to in this banter between Jake and Bill, the politics they are involved in at this time in Ameri- can history is quite significant in the formation of the American nationalism of this period, as well as the anti-nationalist feelings of American intellectuals such as Bill and American expatriates such as Jake.
In addition, the setting of the Basque countryside for this discussion and this section of the novel, which is often considered the most restor- ative part of the novel, seems particularly notable. During this period, the Basques, who were caught between the countries and cultures of Spain and France, were fighting for their independence from Spain and developing a nationalism of their own. Jake and Bill, however, fit in with this group of people very well, as evident from their bus ride through the mountains. By first examining the American nationalism of this period in conjunction with the significant allusions in Jake and Bill’s satirical dialogue, by sec- ondly examining how this nationalism influences the American characters
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in the novel, and by finally analyzing the construction of the Basque people and their interaction with the Americans in the novel, I will explicate how the Basque culture of The Sun Also Rises actually represents a criticism of 1920s American nationalism.
I
During the fishing scene in Burguete, Jake and Bill satirize America through their allusions to five political and social figures who were consequential in the formation of American nationalism in the 1920s. The first individual mentioned by Jake and Bill is William Jennings Bryan, three-time presiden- tial candidate, who was a leading supporter of prohibition and known for his involvement in the Scopes Monkey Trial. The historian Thomas M. Coffey describes Bryan, the Great Commoner from Nebraska, as “a devout, fun- damentalist upholder of the Bible, and a fierce defender of America’s rural or small-town values against the dangers of city license and sophistication.”4 Bryan’s policies and platforms attempted to “purify” America, and favored the white, Protestant, rural, middle-class American. As Coffey explains, “There was danger in the cities, those bastions of cocktail-sipping intel- lectuals and guzzling foreigners—the Irish and their whisky, the Germans and their beer, the Italians, Jews, Greeks, French, and Spanish with their wines” (p. 10). For conservatives such as Bryan, the growing urban centers of the Northeast, especially New York, were considered the worst threats to American values, for these cities contained the largest number of working class immigrants, who were mostly Catholics and Jews.
In fact, the 1920 census indicated for the first time in America’s history that America was an urban rather than a rural nation, largely in part to the influx of immigrants into these urban centers.5 By 1920, New York City was America’s largest urban center, and yet only “1 million of the city’s 6 million residents were white native-born Protestants.”6 In Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s, Ann Douglas describes the social and literary culture of 1920s New York City, and particularly notes the influence that the increas- ing numbers of immigrants had on this urban atmosphere. Douglas explains, “conservative race ideologues of the day used the word ‘mongrelization’ to describe (with horror) the imminent era of miscegenation” (pp. 5–6). Ameri- cans such as Bryan thus viewed these urban centers as a threat to their rural and conservative way of life, for they believed that the mixing of various eth- nic and racial groups in these cities would taint America’s purity. In addition, these conservatives noticed (again, with horror) that prohibition “was a joke in most of urban America, but in New York it was an all-out full-scale farce” (p. 24). Consequently, these nationalists began to blame urban immigrants, in particular, for this violation of the prohibition law.
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In his book Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism, Walter Benn Michaels further explicates this ethnic and racial prejudice so present in 1920s America. Michaels uses the term “nativist modernism” to describe the prevalent 1920s nationalist attitude of Americans who made absolute distinc- tions between what they considered “American” and “un-American” in 1920s American culture. As Michaels explains, assimilation of immigrant groups into American society was a danger to these nationalists, for it threatened the “purity” of their Anglo-Saxon “white heritage” in America.7 The result of this spreading nationalist attitude was increased discrimination against immigrants, as well as against all Americans not of Anglo-Saxon ethnic and racial origins.
In addition to the growing societal discrimination against immigrants in America, legal measures were taken to prevent additional immigrants from “corrupting” America during this period. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 severely limited the number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States; in fact, as a result of the Johnson-Reed Act, “of the 35.9 million Europeans who came to the United States between 1820 and 1975, 32 million came before 1924.”8 As Marc Dolan observes in Modern Lives: A Cultural Reread- ing of “The Lost Generation,” “In 1924, Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Act, which imposed fairly sweeping restrictions on American immigration, and almost simultaneously the mechanisms of Anglo-Saxon discrimina- tion became both more extensive and more visible throughout American society.”9
The mention of William Jennings Bryan in The Sun Also Rises is sig- nificant, for Bryan was in fact one of those Americans who made distinctions between what he considered “American” and “un-American” and desperately fought to retain what he considered a pure America. Bryan’s prosecution of John Thomas Scopes in the Scopes Monkey Trial positions him—as well as the large number of Americans who condemned Darwinism and evolu- tion—as not only a fundamentalist, but also as a bigot who was unable to accept the supposition that all humans, whether black, white, Italian, German, Anglo-Saxon, Catholic, Jew, or Protestant, evolved through a similar process and are in some way linked. During the fishing scene in The Sun Also Rises, Bill mimics Bryan’s rhetoric from the Scopes Monkey Trial,10 proclaiming to Jake, “Let us not doubt, brother. Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hencoop with simian fingers” (p. 127). In addition, “as a tribute to the Great Commoner,” whose death had just been announced in the paper the day before (July 26, 1925), Bill decides that during lunch he should put the chicken first and then the egg (p. 126). While Bill’s “tribute” can certainly be seen as mocking Bryan’s resistance to Darwinism and evolution, it can also be examined in terms of the paradoxical Americanism that Bryan and other
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prohibitionists and fundamentalists supported. Through this new American nationalism, these groups were seeking to ostracize American immigrants who they believed were tainting “their America”; however, America itself was founded by immigrant groups (albeit different ethnic immigrant groups) only a few centuries prior. Hence, Bill’s joke invites the question: which came first, the American or the immigrant? While Bill’s chicken-egg joke mocks the cre- ation/evolution debate, it also mocks this 1920s American nationalism.
Hemingway’s satire of 1920s Americanism also appears within the sat- ire of his contemporaneous novel The Torrents of Spring. Having written The Torrents of Spring in the fall of 1925 just after finishing his first draft of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway employs the same satirical style in these two nov- els to parody some of the same popular political and societal issues. Most notably, Hemingway’s subtitle for The Torrents of Spring: A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race evokes Madison Grant’s widely-read, anti- immigrant book of the 1920s, The Passing of the Great Race (first published in 1916, with new editions appearing in 1921 and 1923).11 Along with Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color (1920), The Passing of a Great Race claimed that the rapid immigration and breeding of “non-whites” (which included all ethnic and racial groups other than white Anglo-Saxons) would eventually overwhelm the “pure white world.”12 The Torrents of Spring satirizes this 1920s Americanism through the depiction of the Nordic character of Yogi Johnson, who since World War I had “never wanted a woman.”13 This lack of desire changes for Yogi at the end of the novel, when he sees a naked Indian squaw and departs with her into the night. The Indian squaw is not a “white” Nor- dic American, however, and therefore the white race is presumably doomed to extinction.14 Through the language and plot of this story, Hemingway is clearly parodying the racist beliefs of American nationalists such as Grant and Stoddard; thus, Hemingway’s mocking of this Americanism in The Tor- rents of Spring coincides with the satire of the fishing scene of The Sun Also Rises in which Jake and Bill mock 1920s political and social figures such as William Jennings Bryan for their American nationalist beliefs.
Historically, Bryan’s rallying cry for American nationalism and prohibi- tion did not end solely with America, however. After prohibition was legal- ized in the United States, Bryan made a speech that showed his desire to force this nationalism on other countries as well:
We must turn our energies to other countries until the whole world is brought to understand that alcohol is man’s greatest enemy. Thus it is a fortunate thing that the abdication of the Kaiser and the fall of arbitrary power came in the same year as does the fall of the brewery autocracy and that these two evils came down together
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. . . Now we can go out for the evangelization of the world on the subject of intoxicating liquor.15
By linking prohibition with America’s victory in World War I, Bryan and his supporters implicate America’s foreign foes (particularly Germany), as well as their American immigrants, in the “evils” of both their anti-Ameri- can positions in the war and their alcohol consumption.
In The Sun Also Rises, while Jake and Bill certainly mock Bryan for these prohibitionist and fundamentalist beliefs, they also seem to mock him for his political hypocrisy. Bryan, who claimed the noble cause of prohibition in speeches such as the one cited above, was secretly employed by Wheeler’s Anti-Saloon League and was paid $11,000 a year to support prohibition and give prohibition-related speeches. In 1920, a year after he gave this pro- hibition speech, newspapers revealed this information about Bryan’s secret employer.16 Thus, when Bill jokingly accuses Jake of being “in the pay of the Anti-Saloon League” (p. 128), he is most certainly satirizing Bryan and his Anti-Saloon League payoffs.
Also during this satirical dialogue, Bill claims he met Bryan when Bryan, H. L. Mencken, and he “went to Holy Cross together” (p. 127). Bill is obviously joking by implying they all went to Holy Cross, a Catholic col- lege, but the close association of Mencken and Bryan is also ridiculous con- sidering Mencken was a social and political critic who believed that every reformer was “a prehensile Methodist parson, bawling for Prohibition and its easy jobs.”17 Nevertheless, although Mencken was opposed to prohibi- tion, he condemned the American expatriates for leaving their country. In April of 1925 in the Paris Tribune, Mencken directly criticized the American expatriates: “The emigrés who flock to Paris, seeking to escape the horrors of the Puritan kultur, find only impotence and oblivion there; not one of them has written a line worth reading.”18 Early in The Sun Also Rises, Jake reflects, “Mencken hates Paris, I believe. So many young men get their likes and dis- likes from Mencken” (p. 49). Jake then tells his American friend Harvey, “I just can’t read him” (p. 50). Thus, while Mencken opposes the political beliefs of Americans such as Bryan, he still acts as a voice and presence that seeks to conform Americans to certain opinions and to insulate them within their own culture and country. As the character of Scripps O’Neil in Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring considers during one of his many disconnected musings within the novel, “Was Mencken really after him? It wasn’t a pretty prospect to face” (p. 19).
The mention of Frankie Frisch next in Jake and Bill’s drunken discussion is significant in illustrating the corruption of American society, even within one of America’s “purest” pastimes, baseball. After the joke about Bryan and
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Mencken attending Holy Cross with Bill, Bill says, “Frankie Fritsch went to Fordham” (p. 127). Frankie Frisch (misspelled “Fritsch” in The Sun Also Rises) was a professional baseball player who graduated from Fordham University in 1919 and was a leading player in four consecutive Giants World Series pennants from 1921–1924.19 Interestingly, Frisch is the only individual in this passage that Jake and Bill actually assign to the correct college, which is significant in light of how Frisch contrasts with the other mentioned political and social figures because of his Catholicism and non-Anglo-Saxon name. Nonetheless, Frisch also becomes implicated in the corruption of the Ameri- can nation since he was suspected of being involved in a payoff to insure the Giants pennant victory in 1924.20 For Jake and Bill, Frisch becomes a “sell- out” to American popularity. Frisch, probably the most recognized player on the New York Giants team in 1924, thus represents yet another aspect of what the expatriates viewed as America’s degradation and vacuity.
Jake next joins this satirical college “name-game,” claiming that he went to Loyola with Bishop Manning, who was the outspoken and well-known rector of the Anglican Trinity Parish in New York City during this period and who was both a fundamentalist and prohibitionist.21 Like Bryan and the prohibition leaders, Manning depicts immigrants as blockades to American patriotism through his nationalist rhetoric. On May 29, 1916, in a New York Times article entitled “How a Nation May Lose Its Soul,” Manning writes that the lack of patriotism in America “is due in part to our mixed population, including vast numbers of people who are not assimilated to our national life.”22 Jake’s mentioning of Bishop Manning is particularly significant for what Bishop Manning personally represents to Jake. Manning strongly spoke out in favor of World War I and against pacifism, and claimed that “This war shows us that the religion of Jesus Christ is the one hope of the world. Christianity is the one thing that has not failed.”23 Considering the physical and emotional impotence that the war has caused Jake, and considering Jake’s uncertain relationship with religion, Jake’s mentioning of Bishop Manning undoubtedly contains underlying feelings of bitterness; Manning’s ideology represents an American ideal of courage and Christianity that has caused Jake’s post war desolation. Likewise, Jake’s ironic association of Manning, an Episcopal bishop, with the Catholic college of Loyola connotes an underly- ing bitterness. Catholicism, the religion to which Jake is most closely linked, becomes a joke, for it is a religion very much outside of the American nation- alism of Manning and the other non-Catholic, American political figures mentioned in Jake and Bill’s dialogue.
The last American, though perhaps the one most entrenched within this American nationalism, mentioned in this drunken dialogue between Jake and Bill is Wayne B. Wheeler. As previously mentioned, Wheeler was the
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leader of the Anti-Saloon League who pushed for the prohibition amend- ment to the Constitution. Wheeler’s nationalism, like Bryan’s, clearly con- demned American immigrants, especially the Catholics and the Jews. In fact, the Anti-Saloon League often supported the same political agendas as the Ku Klux Klan, and due to the prohibitionist stronghold in the southern and midwestern United States, the two groups often became conflated. Gover- nor Al Smith of New York State, who was a Catholic, believed that at the June 1924 New York City Democratic convention, “the Klan and the anti- saloon forces in the convention were practically identical.”24 In addition, at this convention, Bryan refused to denounce the Klan because of the strong support they gave to the prohibitionist and anti-Darwinist causes.25 Where the Volstead Act and prohibition groups failed, the Klan often succeeded in enforcing prohibition through their own vigilante actions.26
In Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, John Higham analyzes the anti-immigrant sentiment of the 1920s, and particularly its relation to the Ku Klux Klan and prohibition. Higham notes that “the ban on alcohol hit the immigrants two ways: it increased their conspicuousness as lawbreakers and brought down upon their heads the wrath of a 100 per cent morality” (p. 268). The Klan believed themselves the guardians of this “100 per cent morality,” and therefore prohibition “created a much more highly charged situation, for it precipitated a head-on collision between mounting lawlessness and a new drive for social conformity” (p. 267). Unlike the first Ku Klux Klan of the post–Civil War era, which admitted any white man regard- less of ethnic background, the Klan of the 1920s admitted only native-born Protestant whites as members, and joined its traditional anti-Negro platform