John Raeburn
American Studies Department
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA 52242 USA
Published in 1975 to critical acclaim and popular success, Ragtime
was E.L. Doctorow’s fourth novel and his “breakthrough” book, establishing
him as one of the leading American writers of the generation that came of age in the midst
of the Cold War. His first two novels, Welcome to Hard Times (1960) and Big as
Life (1966), toyed with the conventions of genre fiction (the Western and
science-fiction, respectively), and attracted only desultory attention, although the first
if not the second has subsequently come to be regarded as significantly foreshadowing his
later work and a strong novel in its own right. The Book of Daniel (1971), however,
was a succ?s d’estime, fictionalizing with great imaginative brio the case of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and recreating (as well as contrasting) the special political
atmospheres of the Old Left of the Thirties and Forties, Fifties McCarthyism, and the New
Left of the Sixties. But its structural and narrational complexity kept it from becoming
much of a popular success, and Doctorow determined to write a next novel that, as he said,
“garage mechanics would read.” How many mechanics read Ragtime is
unknown, but it was, as he hoped, a best seller, one that has had an uncommonly vigorous
and continuing popular appeal, as the enormously successful musical version of it mounted
in the Nineties testifies.
Ragtime undertakes to fashion a cultural history of the first
two decades of the twentieth century, doing so by interweaving the fates of three
fictional families with actual personalities and events of the Oughts and Teens. Each of
the fictional families is emblematic of one or more of the cultural circumstances of those
years. The white New Rochelle family, its members enumerated by their structural position
in it-hence Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother, the Little Boy, and Grandfather-represents
the morally earnest and comfortable upper middle class that historians have identified as
the constituency that gave force to the era’s “progressivelquote reform
impulses. The larger social grouping that this family exemplifies was a familiar one in
the historiography of this era in American culture. Indeed, it is fair to say that most of
the accounts of what historians denominated quote the Progressive Era” had centered
on the activities and concerns of just such people.
This was not the case with the social groupings represented by the
other two families, which were largely invisible to historians during the first two-thirds
of the twentieth century. On the novel’s very first page its narrator startlingly
remarks, “There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants,” and while this is
meant to suggest the limited prospect of the New Rochelle family, it describes as well the
selective vision that had also characterized American historical narratives. The family of
Tateh and Mameh (Yiddish for father and mother) and their little girl are emigrants from
the Jewish Pale, evoking the Jews, Slavs, and Italians who arrived in the United States by
the millions between 1880 and 1920. Like many Jewish immigrants, Tateh is a democratic
socialist, and with his transformation from committed socialist to assimilated capitalist
filmmaker Doctorow meant to invoke the fate of radicalism, specifically Jewish radicalism,
in American culture. When such immigrants appeared in the historical literature, they
usually did so sentimentally, as “huddled masses yearning to be free,” in the
words of Emma Lazurus’ poem learned by every American schoolchild, or as presenting
social problems that progressive reformers set about to solve. The social grouping
represented by third family, of the “Negro” ragtime musician Coalhouse Walker,
his common-law wife Sarah, and their child, did not enjoy even this minimal depiction in
historical discourse about the Oughts and Teens, just as African Americans more generally
were invisible to white Americans until the Civil Rights Movement forced recognition of
their circumstances.
Locating fictional characters within a defined past has long been a
means by which novelists assume the role of cultural historians, as in The Scarlet
Letter or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but in Ragtime Doctorow more
conspicuously and self-consciously dons the historian’s mantle by making actual
historical personages and events central features of it, even in some cases by having the
fictional and historical figures interact. Thus, Booker T. Washington, the preeminent
African American of the turn of the century, counsels Coalhouse Walker, and Mother’s
Younger Brother pursues a relationship with Evelyn Nesbit, the femme fatale at the
center of the era’s most sensational murder, of the architect Stanford White by Harry
K. Thaw, the scion of a wealthy Pittsburgh industrial family. Dozens of “real”
personages populate the novel, from Freud on his only American visit to the financial
magnate J.P. Morgan to the “escapologist” Harry Houdini, giving to it a
historical density rivaled in American literature only by John Dos Passos’ U.S.A.
trilogy, Doctorow’s most important literary model.
History saturates Ragtime, but scrupulous chronology-the spine
of normative historical writing-does not. Only two dates are mentioned, both in the first
pages, 1902 when Father built the New Rochelle house, and 1906 when Thaw murdered White.
Nonetheless, a loose sense of chronological development is maintained by references to
well-know historical events, such as Peary’s discovery of the North Pole in 1909, the
IWW-led Lawrence, Massachusetts strike in 1912, and the sinking of the British liner Lusitania
by German U-boat attack in 1915. Doctorow’ s history is a highly selective one as
well. Left out or only fleetingly alluded to are phenomena emphasized by most historical
accounts of this era: “progressive” political reform-on the national scene,
presidential efforts to bring under federal oversight the activities of business
corporations, and on the local level, attempts to curtail the pernicious influence of
urban political “machines”mdash and in foreign affairs the rise of the United
States to world power status and the nation’s involvement in World War One.
The writing of any history is ineluctably a process of selection, no
such beast as a “comprehensive” history even remotely possible, not even for a
village much less an entire national culture. The question then is, what choices for
inclusion has the historian made, and to what ends? Or, to put it another way, why did
Doctorow choose these years from about 1900 to 1920 to center Ragtime on, what view
of them did he wish to propose, and what hopes did he have for his interpretation of them?
This last inquiry raises yet another. In one sense all written history is present tense,
about the historian’s own time as well as the past one he or she is nominally writing
about, and it cannot be otherwise because the historian is enmeshed in his or her own
culture, just as the people being written about were in theirs, and this inescapable fact
shapes the history being written, infiltrating into it the preoccupations of the
historian’s own era. What traces, then, of the Sixties and early Seventies, the time
of Ragtime’s composition, may be found in it?
The novel’s title itself provides a hint of Doctorow’s
ambition. An era’s characteristic music often provides the cultural historian with a
shorthand term for designating its central themes, as in e the Jazz Age” of the
Twenties or “the Acid Rock Era” of the Sixties. In fact, taking their cue from
Scott Fitzgerald and adopting his nomenclature, many cultural historians have denominated
the Twenties as a watershed decade, when technological and industrial modernization
attained maturity and a new consciousness emerged utterly unlike that of the pre-war era.
Such a view was fortified not only by Fitzgerald’s fiction, but also by that of his
contemporaries like Hemingway and Dos Passos, as well as by such social scientists as
Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown, arguably the most important study of American
culture in the interbellum years. By titling his novel Ragtime, Doctorow at once
participates in this historical convention and implicitly stakes out a claim that his
period is at least as central for understanding twentieth-century American cultural
history as the decade following it, and, as the novel unfolds, the Era of Ragtime in fact
anticipates more revealingly than the Jazz Age the major themes dominating the rest of the
century. Thus, with Ragtime, Doctorow engaged in an act of historical revisionism,
proposing a new scheme of periodization that would rearrange posterity’s
understanding of its antecedents.
Ragtime was revisionist in another way as well, also
anticipated by its title. The inventor of ragtime music was the African American Scott
Joplin, whose admonition not to play the music too fast provides the novele s epigraph,
and the dominant figure of the novel’s latter half is Coalhouse Walker, whose
profession is playing Joplin’s music. The novel’s title thus squarely locates
its center of gravity in the activities of African Americans and, more broadly, in those
of marginalized social groups outside the prevailing male and WASP hegemony, working class
Jewish immigrants like Tateh and Harry Houdini, political and cultural radicals like Emma
Goldman and Mother’s Younger Brother, incipient feminists like Mother, and black
proto-revolutionaries like Coalhouse Walker’s followers who occupy the Morgan Library
and proclaim an insurrectionary Provisional American Republic.
Doctorow’s emphasis on such outsiders and their dissatisfactions
with how American life was organized contrasts with the standard historical interpretation
of this period that prevailed at the time he was composing the novel. Professional
historians denominated it “the Progressive Era” and emphasized how Presidents
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had moved to control the power of big business while
other middle-class reformers initiated reforms in the structure of government that
diffused political power more broadly and democratically. For these historians the
Progressive Era was the first step in a continuing reform process that, after an
interregnum of conservative reaction in the Twenties, reached its apex in the New Deal and
Fair Deal of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman in the Thirties and Forties. The story they
told was one of a half-century in which the excesses of capitalism were brought under
control, working men and women formed unions and secured a fairer share of the fruits of
their labor, and political reform made the society more democratic and inclusive. Such
change was possible because, they believed, there was broad agreement among most Americans
about political means and ends and this consensus engendered evolutionary rather than
revolutionary change.
Virtually none of the phenomena emphasized in this standard
interpretation finds a place in Doctorow’s conspectus of this era. Instead of
consensus, he emphasizes conflict, between blacks and whites, capital and labor, men and
women, haves and have-nots, and it is these conflicts which hold the key to the meaning of
American history. Instead of a stately and rational unfolding of reform that makes the
society more equitable and democratic, he portrays a society in which fundamental
questions of legal and economic equality are left unaddressed and in which financiers like
J.P. Morgan aggrandize power that outstrips any government’s. Moreover, the most
articulate spokespersons who oppose these developments are not middle-class reformers, who
are virtually absent from the novel, but outsiders and dissidents like Goldman and Walker.
In place of the historianse basic optimism about American “progress,” Doctorow
substitutes an ironic skepticism about whether any such progress is possible, at least not
without a fundamental reordering of social, economic, and political power. This mordant
view is underscored by the fates of the novel’s most principled characters: Coalhouse
Walker is assassinated and his followers scattered; Emma Goldman is deported; and Tateh
abjures his political principles and recreates himself as their antithesis, as an émigré
aristocrat.
If, unlike the professional historians, Doctorow did not formulate his
Era of Ragtime as the Progressive seedbed of the more extensive reforms of the New and
Fair Deals, he did make it the forerunner of the ferment of the Sixties. Coalhouse
Walker’s insurrection would find its analogue in the Black Panthers and the Black
Muslims and an avatar of Coalhouse himself would seem to be Malcolm X; feminists would
hold up Emma Goldman as among the most important of their foremothers; Mother’s
Younger Brother’s moody romanticism that leads him to despise his own bourgeois
origins and thus to embrace political radicalism anticipates the middle-class children who
constituted the New Left; and even Evelyn Nesbitquote s brief flirtation with radical
activity seems to be echoed by Patty Hearst’s sixty years later. Three major
correspondences link these two eras: a substantial degree of social and political
violence; the development of a grassroots, utopian, and non-Marxist radicalism; and,
perhaps most important, the new cultural visibility and access to the public arena of
groups formerly denied it, Jews primarily in the earlier period, as represented by Tateh,
and African Americans in the later one
These characteristics of the Sixties help to explain the features of
the Oughts and Teens that Doctorow chose to emphasize (and in the case of Coalhouse
Walker’s rebellion, to invent, since no such black insurrection occurred in those
years), and they illustrate how the preoccupations of the historian’s own time can
influence the history he or she writes. All serious historians strive to be more than
antiquarians, that is, they want their understanding of the past to have some contemporary
relevance as well, to illuminate by their long view of human behavior the problems and
potentialities in their own culture. In the case of Ragtime, the effort was not so
much to suggest that history was cyclical, or that it repeated itself as farce, as Marx
would have it, as to provide a lens that paradoxically distanced and yet made more
intimate the dynamics of change and resistance to it that characterized both eras. Such a
lens encouraged readers-garage mechanics or otherwise-to develop a more discerning and
critical view of the history of which they were the products and likewise of the history
that they were themselves participants in.