“I'll tell you God's truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West — all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways — and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it, or choked on it, as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt, his whole statement fell to pieces, and I wondered if there wasn't something a little sinister about him, after all.

“What part of the Middle West? ” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn, as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg, but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

Does Gatsby know where San Francisco is? If he does, his response is an odd gesture. “Epic theatre is gestural,” wrote Walter Benjamin of Brecht. Gatsby, too, is gestural: as Nick Carraway would have it, “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him” (p. 2). Except that Gatsby's gestures are broken, and by Gatsby himself. To “tell … God's truth” he raises his right hand — isn't that taking the truth a little too seriously? When speaking of loss he pauses in the right place; indeed, in a place so right that the addendum “all dead now” might just be bad acting, not lying. The creator of a criminal network operating Richard Godden is Lecturer in American Studies in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs. ST5 5BG, England.

On 21 February 1947, the US Government was informed of Britain's decision to terminate aid to Greece as from 31 March 1947. This produced a flurry of activity culminating in President Harry Truman's address to Congress on 12 March 1947 in which he requested $400m. aid for Greece and Turkey and pronounced the Truman Doctrine, thereby commiting the United States to the worldwide containment of Communism by means of American aid to nations threatened either by Communist insurgency from within or by Communist aggression from abroad. Debate on the Greek-Turkish Aid Bill and on the implications of the Truman Doctrine was one of the important sources of Secretary of State George C. Marshall's speech at Havard University on 5 June 1947 which initiated the idea of the Marshall Plan, the four year programme (1948–52) of American Aid to sixteen European nations designed to build up the economics of these countries and to lessen the prospect of Communism gaining strength within them. Was Britain's sudden withdrawal of aid from Greece determined simply by financial weakness, or did British policy have a more positive and subtle aim, namely to induce the United States to commit itself decisively to a policy of containment in both its political and economic form? The British Foreign Office papers for the late 1940s, as well as the papers of other government departments such as the Treasury, which are now open as a consequence of the thirty year rule, facilitate a better understanding of British policy in 1947–48 and of the British view of American policy in those years, in particular with regard to the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.

When she was twenty-one, Willa Cather wrote, “The mind that can follow a ‘mission’ is not an artistic one. An artist can know no other purpose than his art.… The feminine mind has a hankering for hobbies and missions.” From the outset of her writing career as a journalist, Cather was intensely conscious of what to her seemed a difficult anomaly: being a serious writer and being a woman. She believed that women were conditioned to think and write in a literal and “horribly subjective” fashion, so that their literary productions were “an infernal mess.” When she embarked on a full-time writing career at the age of thirty-nine, she insisted that to avoid a feminine mind, one must avoid a feminine way of life:

One must have the power of refuse most of the rest of life … to be free, to work at [my] table — that is all in all. …. There are fates and fates but one cannot live them all. Some would call mine servitude but I call it liberation. Miss Jewett too, turned away from marriage.

Cather's single-minded determination to succeed and her uncompromising way of life that would ensure success as a writer rather than a woman writer prompted her to reject her background in her first pieces of fiction. She lived in rural southern Nebraska for seven years, from the ages of ten to seventeen, and in some early short stories she portrayed small-town life on the Plains as narrow, spiritually crushing and dominated by terrible physical hardship.

Jennifer Bailey is Lecturer in American Literature in the Department of American Studies at the University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD.

Five years after William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow bitterly debated the descent of man before the world's press at the Dayton, Tennessee, “monkey trial,” the New York liberal weekly The Nation brought news to its metropolitan readers that “A new battle on evolution is raging in the South. This time, however,” wrote Harry Schacter, “the issue is not religious but economic… The battle is between the small retailer, taking the fundamentalist position, against the chain store, an exponent of modernism in distribution.” The “chain-store menace” was, Schacter judged, “the question most talked of below the Ohio.” Not just in the South, but from the Rockies to the Appalachians and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, hundreds of organizations sprang up in the winter of 1929–1930 to urge all good citizens to “trade-at-home” by boycotting the “foreign-owned, community-wrecking” chain stores. Dozens of anti-chain newspapers were rushed into circulation, while broadcasters emulated the example set by the undisputed leader of the enemies of the chains, Shreveport radio station owner W. K. Henderson. In all, the agitation was carried on “with a virulence which has not been matched in business since those early days in the Pennsylvania oil regions when the ‘independents’ rose up in their wrath against John D. Rockefeller's ‘Anaconda,’” and although the full passion of revivalist fervour lasted but a few months, the agitation proved to be the prelude to a decade of bitter legislative struggle between chains and independents.

In his second annual message to the Congress on 2 December 1851, President Millard Fillmore defended his administration's enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. Although “lawless and violent mobs” had resisted federal officers trying to enforce the statute, he happily noted that resistance was sporadic and ineffectual:

I congratulate you and the country upon the general acquiescence in these measures of peace which has been exhibited in all parts of the Republic … [T]he spirit of reconciliation which has been manifested in regard to them [the 1850 compromise measures] in all parts of the country has removed doubts and uncertainties in the minds of thousands of good men concerning the duration of our popular institutions and given renewed assurance that our liberty and our Union may subsist together for the benefit of this and succceding generations.

Fillmore also received support from both the Democrats and Whigs; at their national conventions in 1852 they pledged to honor the Compromise of 1850 and earnestly hoped that sectional differences would wane.