"RAGTIME" AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

On the eve of an American holiday reserved for beer and fireworks, Daniel Arizona considers the nature of a national "spirit". E.L. Doctorow's novel "Ragtime" offers some guidance ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In his inaugural speech, Barack Obama delivered the central theme of his administration: "everywhere we look, there is work to be done", he intoned to adoring throngs. Like the grand out-of-the-ashes speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he called for sacrifice, "firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character than giving our all to a difficult task."

Every July 4th, between knocking back a few cold ones, wolfing down hot dogs and playing mediocre baseball, Americans consider the subject of a national "spirit". The traditions are reassuring--even patriotic, in its way. But somehow America's history gets lost in the shuffle. Notions of sacrifice give way to fireworks.

Here's a suggestion of some summer reading, an epic novel that splendidly brings America's past to life: “Ragtime”, by E.L. Doctorow. Published in 1975, on the cusp of the country's bicentennial (and also near the end of the Vietnam war and during an economic nadir), it captures the inherent possibilities, frivolities and tragedies of America's great experiment. In chronicling a distant time plagued with familiar troubles, it manages to capture something quite timeless. (It is perhaps for this reason that the musical adaptation of the book will return to Broadway this autumn.)

Anything seemed possible in America in 1908. The Wright brothers were flying, the Model T was driving, buildings scraped skies, pictures moved and records played. The Cubs won the baseball World Series and Americans raced to the North Pole. The term "melting pot" entered the American lexicon in 1908, too.

In the spirit of good voyeuristic historical fiction, “Ragtime” depicts the class struggles and human foibles that underpin moments of innovation and crisis. Doctorow enters the minds and lives of different slices of the American pie, with New York narratives about J.P. Morgan, a financial titan who controlled much of the country; a middle-class family in New Rochelle; and a desperately poor Jewish family living in a tenement on the Lower East Side. The novel condemns the debauchery and boorishness of the rich and the iniquities of wage-labour, but Doctorow does not preach. He merely animates the facts.

Like many who chronicle American history, Doctorow betrays sympathy for plain-spoken, self-made men, such as Henry Ford. But he reserves most of his compassion for those who toiled under these captains of industry--the nameless, faceless, suffering thousands who made such wealth possible. Doctorow communicates this most effectively when he buries his indictments within simple declarative phrases:

One hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred children were mutilated. There seemed to be quotas for these things. There seemed to be quotas for death by starvation…It became fashionable to honor the poor. At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls…One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered in white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.

Mimicking the new hustle and bustle of the city streets, Doctorow breathlessly parades historical figures before the reader. It is a colourful cluster of haves and have-nots, villains and heroes. One incredible moment features Emma Goldman, a famous anarchist, chastising Evelyn Nesbit, America’s first mass-media sex symbol, for her scandalous and insipid lifestyle while she undresses and massages her. In another instance, Doctorow introduces Harry Houdini to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Countess Sophia. This scene perfectly contrasts the transgressive ebullience of the new century with the inherited world order, soon to be extinguished.

The title “Ragtime” is itself an interesting choice. Taken literally, it refers to a period of squalid circumstances for the sweatshopped masses. Musically it celebrates America’s first original contribution to world culture. A highly syncopated, offbeat, rollicking sound pioneered by black musicians, ragtime quickly swept its way across the ocean and into the cabarets and nightlife of Europe, granting fame to Scott Joplin, a composer and pianist, and to American music in general. Joplin doesn’t appear in the novel, though he can be perceived in the character of Coalhouse Walker, a debonair, black, ragtime piano player who becomes a victim of racism.

Early in the novel Doctorow details a whirlwind visit by Sigmund Freud to Manhattan, Coney Island and Niagara Falls, where he observes a “maniac” in ballet slippers walking a wire with a parasol. After returning to the conservative gilded world of Vienna, an exhausted Freud pronounces, “America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake”. “Ragtime” seeks to refute this, above all, despite the country's evident problems. Doctorow undercuts America's self-mythologising, yet admires the country's resilient optimism. The book's multiple narratives decentralise any one story, but it’s this disparateness that makes the novel so identifiably American.

Our economy is still prey to the whims of the few, and our national conversation is still steered by witch hunts, celebrity and scandal. In this humbling time of national uncertainty, a flurry of books have come out that seek to divine answers from the past, relive happier times or augur the decline of American hegemony. But as Doctorow documented--and America's recent presidential election reinforced--the country has a remarkable ability to reinvent itself, to shift with the times and meet new demands. This Fourth of July is a perfect time to celebrate America's constant transformation, while also appreciating the struggles that both necessitate it and make it possible.

Picture credit: lj16 (via Flickr)

(Daniel Arizona is a writer based in New York. His last story for More Intelligent Life was about Jenny Holzer and the influence of anxiety.)