James Gatz's Mentor: Traces of Warren G. Harding in The Great Gatsby

One of the more intriguing minor characters of The Great Gatsby is the man responsible for James Gatz's transformation from dreamy small-town boy to wealthy, powerful bootlegger: Dan Cody, the metals magnate whose photograph is enshrined in Gatsby's bedroom.1 When one considers the enormous impact which Cody had upon the creation of Gatsby—man and myth— it is surprising (and a bit frustrating) that Fitzgerald supplies us with tantalizingly little information about him; but the information that he does provide is remarkably suggestive. Dan Cody's very name conjures images of an American hero. According to Robert Emmet Long, the name "suggests the American frontier": Cody is an adventurer "of a former age who has made his fortune from slender beginnings, and he poses for Gatsby the same possibility";2 in fine, he embodies the rags-to-riches motif so ingrained in the American psyche and so visible in the tales of Horatio Alger. Ernest Lockridge takes this one step further and sees in the Christian name "Dan" a reference to Daniel Boone, that quasi-mythical hero of the American past, and the surname "Cody" to be a reference to Buffalo Bill Cody, whose later career was something of a Western carnival, a lamentable Barnumesque rendering of the American Dream of the West which Boone had embodied.3 I agree with Lockridge as far as he goes, but would argue further that Cody represents the ultimate American hero: the President of the United States. Specifically, I believe that what little information Fitzgerald provides about Cody points to his having been directly inspired by the twenty-ninth President, Warren Gamaliel Harding (1865-1923), the small-town newspaperman turned world leader whose mysterious death in office was the sensation of the 1920s, and whose brief administration—striated with graft, corruption, infidelity, murder and suicide—destroyed forever the mystique of the Presidency.