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Ragtime
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Ragtime Analysis
Progressivism
The early part of the twentieth century, as Ragtime explains,
saw a shift in public sentiment away from the values of the wealthy, the
established fraternity of men who had run business and government with
increasing disregard since the end of the Civil War. At the end of the
nineteenth century, the wealth of the country was absorbed by a small
number of financiers who owned interests in key industries and bought
out or forced out competitors in order to establish monopolies. Among
the most prominent of these men were John D. Rockefeller, who built a
petroleum empire; Andrew Carnegie, who dominated the market in steel;
Andrew Mellon, who controlled banking; and the most powerful of them
all, John Pierpont Morgan, who appears as a character in the book. In
1882, Rockefeller established the first trust, and many other industries
followed soon after. A "trust" is a legal agreement that allows one
owner or corporation to control the stock of several companies within
the same industry, thereby giving it control over the prices charged to
consumers and the wages paid employees.
The mood of the country changed early in the twentieth century,
favoring workers and those without political or social power. Across the
world, Socialism had been gaining support since the 1870s, which led to
the formation of groups such as the Industrial Workers of the World
(the socialist trade union mentioned in the book in the Textile Mill
Strike episode). The I.W.W. reached its peak in America between 1912 and
1917, when it had 60,000 to 100,000 members. A less radical, more
mainstream form of support for workers was known as Progressivism.
Progressivism was the movement to establish fair living wages for
workers, and to loosen the control that the trusts had on the economy.
The figure most associated with Progressivism is Theodore Roosevelt, who
was president from 1901 to 1909. He was known as a "trust-buster" for
using the provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which Congress had
passed in 1890 but never enforced, to break up the business monopolies.
In 1912, having been out of office for a term, Roosevelt ran for office
again with a new political party that he called the Progressive Party.
Progressivism was such a popular idea that the three U.S. presidents who
held office between 1901 and 1921—Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson—identified
themselves as Progressives.
While Progressivism opposed big business, it did so in order to
promote the rights of the poor. Progressivism supported suffrage (the
right to vote) for women, minimum wage laws, and child welfare
regulations. Unlike Socialists like Tateh in the novel, who wanted
sweeping changes in the structure of the government, and anarchists like
Emma Goldman, who supported violence as a justifiable way to destroy
the existing system, Progressives generally came from the middle class,
like the nameless family from New Rochelle.
After Vietnam and Watergate
In 1975, the year Ragtime was published, the Unites States was
dealing with losses suffered by two of its most powerful establishments,
the military and the presidency. The year 1975 marked the fall of
Saigon, the capitol of South Vietnam, which American forces had fought
to defend against the Communist government in North Vietnam from 1961 to
1973. The Vietnam War was one of the central issues that had U.S.
citizens protesting against the government during the tumultuous 1960s.
Opposition to the war started on college campuses, where students who
had grown up following the civil rights protests of the 1950s and early
'60s applied the same methods to organize protests against the war. The
protestors felt that the government's goal to "stop the spread of
Communism in the world" was not a good enough reason for fighting. As
the years wore on, with American soldiers dying by the thousands and no
clear objective to be gained, more and more Americans agreed that the
fighting should end. Military officials, many of whom began their
careers as young men participating in the great American victories in
World War II in the 1940s, could not accept the idea that America could
lose in combat against a tiny country like North Vietnam. They did not
want to leave without winning, and they expanded the war, spending more
money and more lives and spreading the violence into the neighboring
countries of Cambodia and Laos, which served to intensify the protests
at home. President Richard Nixon, hoping to please both sides, promised
that a settlement would be negotiated but that America would not accept
"peace without honor." In 1973 the U.S. troops were withdrawn. In 1975
the U.S. government stopped sending money and weapons to South Vietnam,
and almost immediately the capitol city of Saigon was taken over by the
Communists of the North. On television, U.S. citizens watched American
diplomats in Saigon fleeing in terror, as army helicopters tried to
carry them away—a strong visual image that the war had not been settled,
giving the impression of America running away.
At the same time President Nixon was arranging the withdrawal of
troops, he was concerned with the collapse of his own presidency. It
started on June 17, 1972, when five men were arrested for breaking into
the headquarters of the Democratic National Party in the Watergate Hotel
in Washington, DC. Investigators soon found connections between the
burglars and Nixon's reelection committee. As the 1972 presidential
elections approached, stories associating the burglars with the Nixon
White House trickled out, but citizens paid little attention, and in
November Nixon defeated the Democratic candidate, George McGovern.
Throughout 1973 and 1974, however, investigations continued to turn up
incriminating evidence that connected the men who planned the break-in
to higher government officials, including Cabinet officials and Nixon's
Chief of Staff. These investigations also uncovered other crimes
associated with Nixon, including tax problems and using government
agencies to harass his political enemies. On August 9, 1974, Nixon
resigned. The man who followed him as president, Gerald Ford, granted
Nixon an unconditional pardon for any crimes he may have committed while
in office. Disappointed that he had let Nixon go without making him
stand trial for his crimes, the country voted Ford out of office in the
1976 elections. In 1975, while Ragtime was a huge success on the bestseller lists, the country was recovering from watching its social institutions unravel.
Point of View
The point of view of this novel is uncertain. The prevailing
consciousness is certainly that of the Little Boy—his personality is
explained in detail, and much of the information that is given could
have reached him, either from direct experience or through secondary
sources, such as his uncle's diaries or newspaper clippings. When the
narrative places itself in time as speaking "nearly fifty years after
Houdini's death," it leaves open the possibility that the grown-up boy
is telling the story (Houdini died in 1926, nearly fifty years before
the book was published). On the other hand, there are many details here
that the Little Boy really could not know, such as the intimate thoughts
of prominent figures like J. Pierpont Morgan and Archduke Franz
Ferdinand. Throughout the book the narrator speaks as an unidentified
"we," presumably representing America. The narrator is given a distinct
persona in the last chapter, when it speaks in the first person: "Poor
Father, I see his final exploration." Contradictions abound, but most of
the evidence indicates that, if the narrator is a particular person (as
opposed to the omniscient narrator, who tells the story but is not part
of it), it is probably the Little Boy.
Zeitgeist ("Spirit of the Time")
More important to the success of this novel than any particular
characters or plotlines is the way that it creates a convincing sense of
what life was like in America in the first years of the twentieth
century. Although no novel or historical work could ever give readers
the experience of exactly what it was like then, Ragtime
struggles to make clear what the issues of social concern were and who
the celebrities were, in order to give the flavor of the time. The
structure of the book, with quick scenes and short chapters covering a
wide variety of people and situations, helps readers to feel the new
century's spirit of motion and confusion. One of the most irrelevant,
yet symbolic events in the book involves novelist Theodore Dreiser, who
appears in one paragraph at the end of Chapter 4 and then never again:
"One day he decides his chair was facing the wrong direction. He gets up
to move it, then moves it again, then again. Throughout the night
Dreiser turned his chair in circles seeking the proper alignment." The
uneven motion of the book and its characters has been compared to this
exasperated circling. Each of the real-life people chosen to represent
this time period—Harry Houdini, Harry K. Thaw, Sigmund Freud, Booker T.
Washington, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, and the rest—adds a slightly
different, unique color to the overall picture, with no single story
being more important than the overall effect.
Irony
This novel has a strong flair for irony, setting readers up to expect
one thing but then leading to developments that, while logical, are
quite different than expected. Usually, these reversals seem to deflate
pomposity. Houdini, with the best intentions toward all humanity, offers
money to subway workers who escaped a catastrophe, introducing himself
as an "escapologist," and he is lifted off his feet and thrown out of
the hospital. Morgan assembles America's wealthiest men to trade wisdom,
and he finds them concerned with digestion, dozing off and muttering
inanities: "Without exception the dozen most powerful men in America
looked like horse's asses," he concludes. Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
whose death triggered the global catastrophe of World War I, is so
befuddled by his formal, ceremonious meeting with Houdini that he thinks
the airplane Houdini brings with him is his own invention. After a
lifetime of actions against the government, the event that leads to Emma
Goldman's deportation is her commenting about the Coalhouse Walker
affair. J. P. Morgan, seeking eternal knowledge in the pyramid, instead
finds bedbugs and catches the cold that kills him. Any good novel will
have a number of surprises, in order to avoid being predictable, but Ragtime
consistently uses reversal of expectation to point out the weakness of
the old ruling order, although the book's ironic tone continually
pretends to be upholding the old notions.
The narrative strategy of Ragtime is inventive and complex. The
point of view is that of a minor character, the only child of Father
and Mother, but this small boy is seldom seen in the novel, and his
credentials as a future narrator are not explained until the middle of
the book. Readers of Ragtime have to imagine that the story has
been assembled by this character at a later date when he has matured and
thought about the history of his family. The novel is thus told in the
first person, but the storyteller is almost completely absent from the
action as it unfolds. Only in Chapter Fifteen does Doctorow explore the
mind and imagination of the small boy, and thus explain the design of
his narrative strategy.
Equally inventive is the technique of mixing history and fiction.
Doctorow combines the two in such a seamless manner that fictitious
characters like Coalhouse Walker come across as more realistic than
figures who are based on fact like Sigmund Freud or Booker T.
Washington. When there is a conversation between Coalhouse Walker and
Booker T. Washington, it is the voice of the former that rings with more
validity in the novel. Doctorow has apparently succeeded in turning
history into fiction and fiction into history.
Another hallmark of Ragtime is its cinematic style. Doctorow
writes in short sentences with rapid cuts from one scene to the next.
The effect is that of a fast moving camera at work capturing a decade of
history before it disintegrates into a world war. This style is in
keeping with the mind of the young narrator who is fascinated by the new
art of moving pictures. The short sentences and rapid cuts from scene
to scene represent the imagination of the narrator who believes "that
the world composed and recomposed itself constantly in an endless
process of dissatisfaction ."
Doctorow's experimentation with narrative method, his design for
bringing together history and fiction, and his complex vision of
American character and destiny are all topics open for thoughtful
discussion. Ragtime is a narrative tour de force, and its bold
combination of fictional and historical figures has stimulated a lively
debate about the truth of art. "If you ask me whether some things in the
book 'really' happened," Doctorow tells us, "I can only say, 'They have
now.'"
1. Who is the narrator of Ragtime? Why does Doctorow wait until
almost the middle of the novel, Chapter 15, to describe the mind and
interests of the possible narrator?
2. Why does Doctorow include so many historical characters in this
work of fiction? What liberties does he take with the history of America
in the decade before World War I?
3. What aspects of American politics and culture are represented by
the different careers of Father and Tateh? How do the views of the
author tip the balance in favor of the immigrant artist?
4. What do the caricatures of J. P. Morgan and Commander Peary have in
common? Is the novel a satire on the vanity of such figures and the
futility of their ego trips?
5. Why does Doctorow include Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit in Ragtime?
How are their misfortunes drawn from period newspapers, and shaped into
sympathetic accounts for readers of the novel in the 1970s?
6. What response does Doctorow want us to have to the conduct and
character of Coalhouse Walker? What are the arguments for and against
his status as a tragic hero in the novel?
7. How do events in Ragtime foreshadow the coming of World War I? What vision of America's destiny does the novel project?
