Ragtime. EL Doctorow.

Ragtime
EL Doctorow
New York; Bantam Books. 1973. 1976.

Why read it? In his novel, Doctorow presents an impression of the ragtime era, the period before WWI. These were the “good old days.” With vivid prose and facts, Doctorow paints a picture of a raw society divided into few very rich and many poor. It was the era of immigrants, slavery in the coal mines, women without equal rights and child labor. In this novel, you will gain a realistic view of just how “good” the “old days” were.

Real and fictional people populate the novel. Houdini, Admiral Peary, the Model T Ford and the industrial model that replicated it endlessly, JP Morgan’s obsession with Egypt, Emma Goldman and the Women’s Suffragette Movement, the Harry K Thaw/ Evelyn Nesbitt/ Stanford White scandal. He describes the immigrants, the development of many of our modern weapons and the beginnings of the movies. The detail sucks you into the pages of the novel and you are there.

The plot involves the destruction of Coalhouse walker’s Model T by Negro-baiting volunteer firefighters and the death of Coalhouse’s fiancée when she tries to implore a politician on behalf of the injustice that Coalhouse has experienced and turns Coalhouse into a vengeful machine. Firehouses are blown up, fire horses gunned won and firemen killed. Coalhouse has made it clear that all he wants is his automobile restored to its original condition. He wires up and plants bombs throughout JP Morgan’s mansion with all of its historic artifacts and threatens to blow up the house if his conditions are not met. The standoff is resolved when the Fire Chief and his volunteers restore the automobile, which had been sunk in a pond, with the interchangeable parts used in making every Model T. Coalhouse’s gang is allowed to escape in the newly restored car, including the narrator’s mother’s younger brother, a genius in making explosives. Coalhouse comes out of the mansion and is shot dead.

The novel ends with the narrator’s father’s sunk on the Lusitania while bringing explosives and weapons to Europe on the eve of WWI. And Tateh, a pioneer in movie making, sees his daughter and other youngsters on the lawn and thinks of making a movie of “The Little Rascals.”

Some sample ideas from the novel: “The immigrants were immediately sensitive to the enormous power of the immigration officials. These immigration officials changed names they couldn’t pronounce and tore people from their families, consigning to a return voyage old folks, people with bad eyes, riffraff and those who looked insolent.” “They [the immigrants] were despised by New Yorkers…were filthy and illiterate…stank of fish and garlic…had running sores.” “…by the end of the month of June a serious heat wave had begun to kill infants all over the slums; tenements glowed like furnaces and the tenants had no water to drink…raced through the streets looking for ice. Hustlers cornered the ice supply and sold little chips of it at exorbitant prices. Pillows placed on the sidewalks, families slept on stoops and in doorways. Horses collapsed and died in the streets.”

“Mrs. Fish was one of the Four Hundred…was famous for her wit…had given a ball at which everyone had to talk baby talk.” “At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.” “The laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one wealthy man, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country.” “In the coal fields a man made a dollar sixty a day if he could dig three tons…lived in the company’s shacks and bought his food from the company stores.” “On the tobacco farms Negroes stripped tobacco leaves thirteen hours a day and earned six cents an hour, man, woman or child.”

“If there was a problem about employing children it had only to do with their endurance…more agile than adults but they tended in the latter hours of the day to lose a degree of efficiency…the hours they were most likely to lose their fingers or have their hands mangled or their legs crushed.” “One hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One hundred miners were buried alive. One hundred children were mutilated.” “The truth is Emma Goldman went on quickly, women may not vote, they may not love whom they want, they may not develop their minds and their spirits, they may not commit their lives to the spiritual adventure of life. Is women’s genius only in the womb? Can we women not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind? Must women’s fate always be physical?” “He was looking at her as she had seen him look upon a roach before he stepped on it.”

Quote: “In the paper was the news of Teddy Roosevelt’s African safari. The great conservationist had bagged seventeen lions, eleven elephants, twenty-one rhinos, eight hippos, nine giraffes, forty-seven gazelles, twenty-nine zebras and kudu, wildebeest, impala, eland, waterbuck, warthog and bushbuck beyond number.”