Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the hour — 20 minutes without Trump. Today, literature in 1925, a hundred years ago. 1925 is being celebrated this year as the centenary of ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzerald — but we’re interested in some of the other books published that year. And so we turn to Tom Lutz – his new book is titled “1925: A Literary Encyclopedia” – it’s 800 pages long – and only 7 are on “The Great Gatsby.”  But first: Jamie Raskin talks about Trump – and us.  That’s coming up, in a minute.
[BREAK]
It’s time to talk politics now with Jamie Raskin, Congressman from Maryland and currently the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. He was the lead impeachment manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial, and he served on the select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol. His book about January 6^th, titled Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, was a number one bestseller. And we see a lot of him on MSNBC. Jamie Raskin, welcome to the program.

Jamie Raskin: Hey, I’m very psyched to be with you, Jon.

JW: Trump prefers to rule by executive order, ignoring Congress, even though Republicans control both Houses. But there’s one big thing he can’t do without Congress – the budget, the tax cuts for the rich. And we’ve known ever since election night that Trump’s tax cuts would cause big problems for Republicans in the House. They have to cut spending, most spending can’t be cut, they’re going to have to cut Medicaid. And now a bunch of them are saying they won’t do it, because they know the proposed cuts to Medicaid will lead to millions of people losing their coverage. And then they’ll lose a dozen or more seats in the midterms. Then Democrats will take control of Congress. We’ve known all this was going to happen – for months. Is there anything the Republicans can do to solve their problem?

JR: They could grow a spine, perhaps. Look, Donald Trump and his family are involved in a world historical grift. We’ve never seen corruption like this. They’ve been making more than a billion dollars a month. And I’m not just talking about the $400 million flying grift or Bribe Force One, I guess they’re calling it, from Qatar. I’m talking about the crypto scam where they’ve opened up gateways for billions of dollars to flow in from corrupt autocrats all over the world, pardon seekers, anybody who wants to do business with the US government and so on. And it’s going right into the pockets of the Trump family.
At what point do my Republican colleagues wake up and say, “Wait a second, this guy’s going to be out of here. They’re going to become the richest people on earth. They’re going to ditch us”? And then the Republicans get holding the bag for having cut $880 billion out of Medicaid and other essential social programs like Meals on Wheels and Head Start and the SNAP program. They’re the ones going to be left to holding the bag for the authoritarian war on the poor and the middle classes in the country, but Donald Trump doesn’t give a damn. So I would hope that they would stand up to him. But so far, Elon Musk’s money and Donald Trump’s threats have been enough to get them to toe the line.

JW: And I also want to talk a little about Trump’s tariffs. You have introduced a bill called The Truth in Tariffs Act. Sounds like a good idea. What is the idea?

JR: Well, if you’re selling a car for 20,000, but with Donald Trump’s on again, off again, tariffs in place, if you’ve got to sell it for 25,000, you simply say the car costs 25,000. That’s 20,000 for the car and 5,000 for the tariff, which is like a national sales tax. That’s how we deal with taxes when you go to a restaurant. You got your burger and your fries, and then it says how much your sales tax is. And so now that we’re going to have a nationwide sales tax with these tariffs, people should know what it is. Also, so that we don’t have businesses who are ripping people off and inflating the prices even further, but for most of the businesses who are doing the right thing, they shouldn’t have to take the hit, or at least they should be able to say to the consumers, ‘There’s nothing we can do. Donald Trump has imposed this on us.’

JW: You’ve also joined a lawsuit challenging the legality of Trump’s tariffs. This is an amicus brief supporting 12 states, led by Oregon. You say the power to impose tariffs resides in Congress, not the president. Where did you find this information?

JR: Article one of the US Constitution, which says Congress has the power to regulate commerce internally in America and also with foreign nations. Donald Trump is claiming to be imposing these tariffs on the authority of IEEPA, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. That doesn’t mention tariffs, that act, and it’s never been used for tariffs before. The emergency that Donald Trump declares is the basis for these wide-ranging global tariffs in this global trade war against everybody but Russia is an emergency that he says has been going on for four or five decades and he’s the first person brave enough to challenge it. Well, what kind of emergency is that? In other words, he doesn’t like the international trade system that’s been going on for decades, so he can just declare it an emergency.
And in fact, a lot of what he’s declaring an emergency are trade agreements that he put into place himself during his first administration. So like everything else with him, it’s completely nonsensical and absurd. I think he’ll lose in court. There are now 156 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders against his executive orders, against DOGE actions, against his birthright citizenship abolition order, you name it. I mean, we’ve never seen a president suffer more judicial invalidation than Donald Trump. Of course, he says that’s because all of the Republicans who are doing this are radical left judges, radical left “rogue judges” he calls them, like Judge Boasberg in DC who’s a Bush appointee to the bench originally. He was Justice Kavanaugh’s roommate. But the guy’s a stickler for the rule of law, and he’s actually pressing for criminal sanctions, for criminal contempt against the administration, for refusing to turn the planes around, to give due process to people like Abrego Garcia, who were just shackled, thrown into an airplane, and then dumped in a torturer’s prison in El Salvador.

JW: Yeah. Let’s talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, one of your constituencies from Maryland. Trump says he was deported to that prison in El Salvador because he’s a member of a violent killer gang. His defenders say he’s not. Is there any way to decide who’s right about this?

JR: Yes. It’s the way that has been refined over centuries. It’s called going to court. And so, all we’ve been saying is we agree with the Supreme Court, which on a nine to zero basis says there must be due process. There’s got to be due process. So he was obviously offloaded into the dictator’s prison in El Salvador with no due process. He’s got to be back for due process.
I have no idea whether he’s committed other crimes. I mean, it was Trump’s immigration judge who said he was fine and should have been given asylum, but his petition was late, therefore there was the withhold deportation order. But in any event, let’s say he ran the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and he was responsible for storming the capitol in 2021. Bring him back, bring forward the evidence, and then you can convict him and then you can deport him from the country. But if not the guy’s guaranteed due process like anybody else.

JW: I want to ask about the Harvard lawsuit. You’re a Harvard alumnus, undergrad and law school. Of course, so are justices Neil Gorsuch, Elena Kagan, Katanji Brown Jackson, and Chief Justice John Roberts. Trump is trying to destroy Harvard. Harvard is fighting back against this $2 billion in funding cuts with a lawsuit. It’s the only school to do that so far. Harvard is arguing that Trump is violating the First Amendment by using this funding freeze to coerce Harvard into ideological conformity. They’re also arguing that the funding freeze is illegal. You can’t cut funding to schools that you say violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act without a whole bunch of steps first, investigating, trying to negotiate a settlement, provide for—

JR: Back to due process.

JW: Yeah, due process. Trump hasn’t done any of those things. So Harvard says the court should block the cuts and order the grants restored. Would you say Harvard has a good case here?

JR: It’s got a powerful case, a very compelling case. And look, I’ve never been prouder to be a Harvard graduate. In my glory days as a student activist, we were in major conflict with the Harvard administration, which refused to divest hundreds of millions of dollars from corporations operating in apartheid South Africa. And I called Harvard out at that point but I’m very willing to praise Harvard for what it’s doing now. I do think it’s a matter of necessity for the school. The First Amendment covers academic freedom, and as the president of Harvard said, President Garber, “No, Harvard is not going to allow Donald Trump to take over the hiring of faculty, the admission of students, what’s being taught in schools, student discipline, and so on. No. No way.” So it may have taken the richest school in the country to be able to say ‘No’ — but it now is a standard-bearer for academic freedom across America. And I think there are hundreds and hundreds of other colleges and universities that are taking a tough stand.
And it is a real object lesson for Columbia about what happened because if you cave in to these kind of Salem witchcraft style tactics that were being used by Elise Stefanik and the federal government, it’s very tough to turn around. There’s no appeasing authoritarians. You’ve got to cut them off right when it begins and say, “Hell no. We’re not participating in this. You are not going to dictate to us the content of what we do at our institution.”

JW: On another front, I see that you’ve introduced a bill called the “Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act.” What’s that about?

JR: Dude, we have a number of Elon Musk bills. That one was my colleague Melanie Stansbury from Maryland and I think it’s to cut off salaries for people in DOGE, because DOGE was never created by Congress and we have a very simpatico decision of the Federal District Court in Northern California on Friday night last Friday, which said that all of this is lawless because DOGE doesn’t really have any formal standing in our government.
That’s why when this first started, I said, “I don’t understand who DOGE is. It’s like a fourth branch of government.” I mean, they just slashed $811 million worth of Department of Justice grants to community safety, local police, victim assistance organizations, after it was voted and adopted by Congress in an appropriation, signed into law by the president, programmed by the Department of Justice, and awarded to all of these groups. And then DOGE terminated it. I just don’t understand what the legal standing of that is.
And we’ve got 156 preliminary injunctions and TROs against the government, and I hope that we’ll be able to get those monies restored because I’m hearing a lot about that from community safety and police groups all over the country.
Can I just interrupt and correct myself?

JW: Sure.

JR: I misremembered that original Nobody Elected Elon Musk Act. This would actually say that Elon Musk and anyone else at DOGE is liable for claims against the federal government for illegal actions they took. So this simply makes them liable for their own unlawful action.

JW: For the rest of us who are not in the halls of Congress, people are trying to figure out what can we do? What should we do? We’ve got a year and a half until the elections. You’ve been very active outside the halls of Congress speaking to all of these rallies. Three million people came out to say hands off on April 5th, hundreds of thousands rallied on April 19th, again on May Day. Coming up we have the Unite for Veterans March in DC on June 6th and the nationwide No Kings Day of Mobilization, June 14th. You think this is the right way to go? Do we want more and bigger rallies? Should we be doing something different at this point? What do you think?

JR: A rally a day keeps the fascists away. And I said that at my very first protest during this nightmare at NOAA, and I’ve been not just to NOAA, but FDA, NIH, Department of Education, you name it. We need to be fighting them in the House of Representatives and committees and subcommittees in the Senate. We got to fight them in the federal district courts and the appeals courts, in the Supreme Court, and we’ve got to be fighting in the streets to defend democracy and freedom against this onslaught.
Monarchy, autocracy, dictatorship, these are all based on the will of one great leader who’s going to dictate to everybody what to do. Democracy is based on everybody being engaged and involved. So no good act is wasted in this process. And I mean every rally, every protest, every boycott, every march, every concert, every puppet show, you name it, we need to have a surge of Democratic movement and we also need to take it out to red districts. I’ve been to a bunch of red districts to do town halls where my Republican colleagues are afraid to face their own constituents.

JW: What do you think about people writing their members of Congress? The Indivisible Guide says it’s much better to call your congressman than to write. And they say email barely even counts. Is that right?

JR: Calling does communicate a sense of urgency. So I’d agree that a call is more effective than a letter. An email I think is very effective if you write it yourself. If it’s just part of a mass boilerplate email, that maybe it gets tabulated numerically, but that doesn’t mean so much. But I would say if you’ve got, as your representative, a swing district person, like a Republican like Mike Lawler or somebody like that, who’s right on the edge and feeling the heat on Medicaid and Social Security and other issues, call their offices and tell them where you are. And if you voted for them before, say, “I voted for you last time, but I’m never going to vote for you again if you vote to dismantle Medicaid or Head Start or the Department of Education or what have you.” And if you’ve never been on their side, just say you thought that they were a moderate, they’ve called themselves a moderate. How can they go along with this extremist agenda?

JW: Well, now it’s time for Your Minnesota Moment – news from my hometown of St. Paul that you won’t get from Sean Hannity. In The Nation, I read about your grandfather, Samuel F. Bellman, who is part of Minnesota history. Tell us about him.

JR: Well, I’m looking at my grandfather’s first campaign poster right now. He was in politics in Minnesota in the ’30s and ’40s. He was a great lawyer. He was a great activist in the Democratic Farm Labor Party. He was a pillar of the Jewish community. And he was a great Rooseveltian New Dealer, DFLer in his day. And I always knew maybe I could go into politics because I watched my grandfather and how he operated. And whether he was practicing law or he was acting as a representative in politics or being a delegate to the National Convention or whatever, he always thought of it as a form of service. And he was profoundly committed to his constituents, and he’s profoundly committed to his clients. And so anyway, I was always proud of him. And for me, when I think about the things people say about politicians and the terrible name, we have from Marjorie Taylor Greene and people like that, I do think about my grandfather who thought that it was a thing of honor actually to occupy public office and to be able to serve people and help them.

JW: You brought him up in your speech to Congress when the House was voting on censuring Rashida Tlaib. Tell us about that.

JR: The censure of Rashida Tlaib was ridiculous because it was purely over speech. We had never censured anybody over speech before. We censured people like Preston Brooks, who went over to the Senate and beat the daylights out of a US Senator, Senator Sumner from Massachusetts. Or we censured people for taking bribes or for unethical conduct, corruption and so on. We never censured people for speech before. I said, “We go down this road, we’ll be censuring people constantly.” I mean, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson supports Bowers versus Hardwick. He does not think that gay people should have a right to get married and he doesn’t think that gay people should have a right not to be thrown in prison for having a love life or a sex life. Okay, should we censure him for that? Because those views are so far outside of the mainstream and because we disagree? I mean, that’s kind of ridiculous.
The Speech and Debate Clause gives you the right to say what you want. In fact, Rashida Tlaib was censured for not even things she said, but things that I think she put on a video. She had a march where people had signs saying, “From the river to the sea.” That’s not my language. I don’t support that. I’m for a two-state solution. And I want the Jewish people to thrive and the Palestinian people to thrive, and I want an end to the human rights violations and the occupation and the violence taking place there. But in any event, it’s just language. It’s just speech. We shouldn’t be censuring people for that.
But anyway, you asked why I brought my grandfather up.

JW: Yes.

JR: My grandfather was the only Jewish person in the Minnesota legislature, so that was kind of a lonely position to be in. When the Democratic Foreign Labor Party had their retreats, it was at a country club that didn’t allow African Americans or Jewish people to go in. He went and talked to the Speaker of the House about it, and he said, “Hey, I’d like to be able to go to the retreat, and they don’t allow Jews.” And the speaker basically said, “Hey, I am sorry, Sam, but those are their rules. They’re not our rules, but their rules, and there’s nothing we can do about it.” And so he couldn’t go.  He made a speech about anti-Semitism at one point, and a lot of the members just left the floor. So that was a lonely position.
And I always thought about that story with Rashida Tlaib, who of course is the only Palestinian in the House. And they were picking on her. They were zeroing in on her and scapegoating her, purely for speech, which is not something we’ve done for the speech of anybody else. So I invoked my grandpa. I hope he would’ve been proud of me on that day.

JW: Last question – we have friends who are discouraged, pessimistic, fearful. I wonder if you have any advice for them.

JR: Oh, I mean, don’t be! Look at the great civilizing movements of American history. Look at the Civil Rights movement. Look at the women’s movement, the LGBTQ movement. Look at the labor movement, the environmental movement. These movements have gone up against the odds at least as bad as the odds against us now. And Donald Trump is sinking in the polls like a stone. His tariffs are terribly unpopular. His gutting of the US government is unpopular. Elon Musk is unpopular. And we have millions of people who are engaged in the fight every day.
When I was a kid, my dad used to say, “When everything looks hopeless, you’re the hope.” So don’t be despondent, don’t be discouraged. We’ve got tremendous moral, political, intellectual, cultural, social, financial resources at our disposal, and we need to share them with people who have fewer resources to fight back, like immigrants who are really under the gun here, like the transgender community which is the target of so much wrath and scapegoating by the MAGA forces.
We need to stand strong for those people. We’re going to get through this thing, and we’re going to be stronger than we ever were before. Because we’ve got to save humanity from climate change. I mean, this outrageous assault on our institutions and on our freedom is taking place at a time when we really all should be focused on doing whatever we can to turn around the relentless dynamics of climate change. And these people are in denial about climate change and they’re dismantling all of the regulatory changes that we’ve made to try to reverse the damage and to turn things in other directions. So we’ve got to save our democracy first, from the authoritarians, and then we’ve got to save the ecosystem for our species.

JW: He’s the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee – Jamie Raskin, thanks for everything you do, and thanks for talking with us today.

JR: It was all my honor, Jon. Thanks for having me.
[BREAK]

JW: It’s time now for ‘20 minutes Without Trump,’ a special feature of this broadcast. Today: literature in 1925, 100 years ago. 1925 is being celebrated this year as the 100th anniversary of ‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but we’re interested in some of the other books published that year, and so we turned to Tom Lutz. His new book is titled ‘1925: A Literary Encyclopedia.’ It’s 800 pages long, and only seven of them are about Gatsby. Tom Lutz is an award-winning writer, literary critic, and novelist. He’s the founder of the LA Review of Books. His own books include three travel memoirs, most recently,’ The Kindness of Strangers’ — we talked about it here. He’s also written several award-winning books of cultural history.  My favorite there is ‘Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America.’ And he’s written a wonderful novel, ‘Born Slippy.’ A sequel is coming out in October. I suggested calling the sequel ‘Hang on Slippy,’ but instead, he’s calling it ‘Chagos Archipelago.’ Tom Lutz, welcome back.

Tom Lutz: Thanks so much, Jon. Thanks for having me.

JW: In 1925, the literary world must have been so much smaller — with proportionately fewer books, fewer readers, fewer places that reviewed books compared to our world today. Is that right?

TL: [Laughter] No, that’s exactly wrong. No, it was perhaps the height of American literary culture. Even very bad, very marginal books by people nobody ever heard of got 10 and 12 reviews. The big books, when Dreiser’s ‘American Tragedy’ came out, there were reviews in every newspaper in the land. The literary conversation was at the center of the culture. I mean, Hollywood was getting big, Hollywood was getting important, but literature was still the center of the cultural universe.

JW: Of course, ‘The Great Gatsby’ is getting all the attention right now, but it’s far from the only book now regarded as a classic. What are some of the other big books of 1925 from our perspective today?

TL: Well, you know, it’s interesting that ‘Gatsby’ was not considered a classic right away, right? It didn’t do as well as his earlier books, and people thought it was a weird detour in his career. Maybe he would recover and start writing good books again someday, but they weren’t sure. And some of the other books that we consider classics now, tGertrude Stein’s ‘The Making of Americans,’ Ernest Hemingway’s first book, ‘In Our Time,’ both published in 1925, they were barely noticed. Other big books were William Carlos Williams’’ In the American Grain,’ as I said, Dreiser’s ‘American Tragedy’, Edith Wharton, and on and on and on.

JW: In 1973, more than 50 years ago, Gore Vidal wrote a two-part essay for the New York Review, looking at the top 10 books on The New York Times bestseller list for January 7th, 1973. This was considered a monumental undertaking –  to read all 10 of the bestsellers of the year. You wrote about more than the top 10 books of 1925. How many entries are there in your book on 1925?

TL: There are around 500. Each author gets an entry, and so if the author has more than one book, which was true for about 100 of these authors — So I talk about, I think 1,000, maybe 1,500 different books that were published in 1925.

JW: And you read not only the books; you also read the book reviews.

TL: Yeah. I decided fairly early on that what I wanted to do was give people a sense of the literary culture of the time, and one of the easiest ways to do that was just to quote a bunch of book reviews, because the book review would often do some of the work that I would normally do and laying out the plot, or making general observations about the style and tone and whatnot. So I let the reviewers from 1925 tell my readers about the books. The book reviews are a central part of the discourse of the time, and therefore, a central part of the book.

JW: For historians of the United States, 1925 was a big year, first of all for the Klan, which had been undergoing a huge revival in the north, especially in Indiana.  But 1925 also marks what we consider the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance — with the publication of Alain Locke’s book,’ The New Negro.’ Tell us about ‘The New Negro.’

TL: ‘’The New Negro started as a special issue of a magazine called Survey Graphic. Survey and Survey Graphic were magazines that were kind of sociological, kind of sociology for the general public. And, for instance, the issue right before’ the Harlem Renaissance issue was by Lewis Mumford, and it was on the suburb. The Survey Graphic issue was not called ‘The New Negro.’ It was called ‘Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro.’
Locke was a professor at Howard, professor of philosophy, and a kind of academic philosopher himself, and he put together one of the anthologies where almost everything in it is a winner. So we had Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, many, many poets, many, many fiction writers.
Of course, the Renaissance crashes along with the economy in 1925, and everybody has to kind of pack up and find other means of making a living. But until that time, he knew who was doing the interesting work, and he got it all together.

JW: 1925 for historians was also a triumphant year for anti-immigrant activism, coming right after the historic 1924 bill, ending immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe.  But it was also the year a great immigrant novel was published, Anzia Yezierska’s book, ‘The Bread Givers,’ the first book by a Jewish immigrant woman novelist to break out.

TL: Yeah. This is an amazing book. It’s an autobiographical novel. Anzia Yezierska grew up on Hester Street in New York, and it’s the story of a young girl with a rabbinical father, who’s a tyrant and a bully, and is marrying his daughters off to the highest bidders, and is just a terrible person. And our heroine breaks away and goes to Teachers College, and gets her own apartment, and gets out of what she considered the tsuris of her own home. And then, once she gets there, she has a kind of classic, again, immigrant experience, which is, “Okay, I have assimilated, I’ve made it, and now what? And now I feel empty, and now the color is gone from my life.”
James Weldon Johnson’s ‘The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man’ is going into production in ’25 as well in its new edition, and that book ends the same way. He passes for white and for, he says at the end, a mess of pottage. He’s lost his relation to his community.
So it’s a great novel. I also think it’s a novel that is, in all sorts of ways, very flawed. It’s not one of the great American novels by any stretch. It’s a bit of a mess structurally, and there’s some missing plot points and whatnot, but it develops a very interesting theory of ethnicity, which is that what’s important about where you come from, the people you come from, is not that what they think is important about where they come from, but something else. What’s important is the aesthetics that you inherit from the past. And I would argue that that’s been an important part of American ethnic understanding ever since.

JW: So on the one hand, Anzia Yezierska wrote ‘The Bread Givers’ in 1925; on the other hand, Anita Loos wrote ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’.

TL: [Laughter] Yes. This is not a bildungsroman. This is not an autobiography, but it is a very interesting book. Anita Loos was a smart player in Hollywood and on Broadway. There’s a chapter in ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ where our heroine, Lorelei Lee, goes to Vienna and meets Freud. She spells it F-R-O-Y-D. Freud is fascinated by her, but most men are fascinated by her. That’s who she is, right? She’s the Marilyn Monroe figure from the film.  And he tells her that he would like to study her more. He says, “You’re very special case. You’re the first person I’ve ever met who has no unconscious.”And so it’s just a little bit of a joke, but all through, you can see that this is a woman who is completely up-to-date on all of the intellectual trends of her time. She was just a smart woman, very much aware of what the gender system did to women and to men.

JW: Now it’s time for Your Minnesota Moment, literature from my hometown of St. Paul that you won’t get from Sean Hannity. Of course, F. Scott Fitzgerald was from St. Paul, but the most celebrated and honored Minnesota writer of 1925 was not Scott Fitzgerald, it was Sinclair Lewis, who published ‘Arrowsmith’ that year, and a few years later, of course, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tell us about ‘Arrowsmith.’ It does get one of your longest entries — quite a bit longer than ‘The Great Gatsby.’

TL: Is that right? I did not realize that. It follows the career of a young man, Martin Arrowsmith, as he becomes first, a doctor, then working in a public health office, and then a medical researcher, and it follows him to an island in the Caribbean, where he is trying a attempted cure for the plague that was attacking this island. His career in medicine is a kind of great tour through every corner of the medical world, from quack salesmen of questionable medical devices, to people doing research in the institutes, to the university system, to the hospitals, small country doctors, patent medicines, public health, things like no spitting in the streets, a real tour of all of it.
His ethical dilemma in the crucial scene in the book is whether he should stop his experiment, his double-blind study of whether this cure is going to work or not, because he’s seeing it work.  His crisis is, “Do I let all of the people in my control group die, or do I give them the medicine, which is pretty clearly working?” And so he ends up doing that and destroying the kind of scientific validity of his experiment when doing so.
And one of the reasons I’ve spent so much time on that entry is that it’s one of these books about work that I also talk about in ‘Doing Nothing,’ one of these kind of hymns to the work ethic that populates American literature from its beginnings to the current day. And we also have hymns to slackers, of course, but part of the same. All Martin Arrowsmith really wants to do is work. and he marries a very rich woman. She wants him to go to parties and wants him to go to dinners. He wants him to take over as the director of the institute that he’s been a researcher at, and he doesn’t want to do any of that. He just wants to do his research. He wants to work. So he and his best friend, like Tom and Huck at the end of Huckleberry Finn, they go into the wilderness, where in the woods of Maine, they set up a little research laboratory and just do nothing but work all the time. So it’s an interesting book for me because of my obsessions.
And Sinclair Lewis, of course, is somebody who, it’s very easy to go hot and cold on, I find. He sometimes seems so brilliant and sometimes seems so sophomoric, and often paragraph to paragraph.  But it’s a great book.

JW: Your book ‘1925’ also has a fabulous website, theyear1925.com — no spaces, with photos, music, movies.  Starting with the A’s, we have Louis Armstrong, ‘Gut Bucket Blues,’ then we have Fatty Arbuckle, silent comedy highlights. Fantastic stuff. It’s easy to spend hours just kind of getting lost in your website.

TL: Thanks. Yeah, I had fun putting it together. And I think I have every side that Louis Armstrong recorded as a YouTube clip on the site, and everyone that Bessie Smith did, and every  one that Duke Ellington recorded, even a Duke Ellington recording under other bands names.  And also every book that I talk about — because they’re all out of copyright now. I have links to either Internet Archive, or HathiTrust, or one of the places where you can get the full text of the book. So you can not only read the 840 pages of my book, you can read the 300 pages of each of the thousand or 1,500 books that I talk about as well. So yeah, I think the website’s fun.

JW: Big picture here — a lot of the writers of 1925 were sexist – Hemingway, for example; or racist – Mencken; or anti-Semitic — T.S. Eliot. Over the last couple of decades, a lot of literary scholarship has gone into exposing the way the authors you write about here provided cultural support for the dominant class. Were you one of those scholars dedicated to exposing writers for their complicity in systems of oppression?

TL: I went to graduate school in the 1980’s. I worked as a professor in the 1990’s, in the aughts, in the teens.  And so: Yes. In a way, we saw a lot of that as our job.
But what I try to do in this book, and I don’t always succeed, is to figure out where there’s some babies in the bath water of a lot of the stuff that people have thrown out over the years.
I do think that ‘In Our Time’ is a brilliant book, and the interesting-

JW: ‘In Our Time’ is written by …

TL: Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway’s book, right? And even though Hemingway — I think ‘Across the River and Into the Trees,’ which is one of his last books, is perhaps the single worst book ever written by a great American author.  And ‘The Old Man in the Sea’ is not far behind — patronizing bullshit. So I dislike most of what he wrote.  But this book is a work of genius.
You can’t not talk about the books that are truly racist and the aspects of the books that are truly racist or sexist — you can’t just ignore them, one has to talk about them. One has to talk about that stuff, and I do. 
But I’m much more interested in finding out where there’s some value, often despite that, or often alongside that, or often in addition to that. These are complex people, trying to figure out where the world is going and what their part in that direction is.  And they sometimes get it pretty badly wrong, and they sometimes get it pretty stunningly right.

JW: To end here, I want to ask you about ‘Gatsby,’ today’s most famous novel of 1925. I think it seems sort of like nobody reads Sinclair Lewis today outside of grad school, nobody reads Dreiser, and nobody reads Dos Passos; Hemingway is deeply sexist and frowned upon. Of all the dead white men in American literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald lives on — with ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It has sold 25 or 30 million copies; four movies had been made of the book — in the most recent one, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio is Jay Gatsby. Why do you think ‘Gatsby’ remains so popular? Does it deserve its cultural status?

TL: It is a little jewel of a piece of work. If you are a lover of the literary word, it’s very hard not to love that book. So yeah, does it deserve to have its renown? Yes, absolutely.

JW: Tom Lutz — his amazing book, ‘1925: A Literary Encyclopedia,’ 800 pages long, is out now. Tom, thank you — for all of this.

TL: Thank you, Jon. It was a pleasure to talk to you as always.