The American Dream in Ragtime

It's been brought up more than once in class that Ragtime is a book that's not necessarily just about the 1900's, it's meant to draw comparisons between that time and the time it was written. More specifically, it tries to ask questions about a time that many Americans see as one of the high points of the nation's culture as it's classically imagined (maybe more in the 70's than now; the 50's seem to occupy that place today). When people think of the 1900's, their minds are immediately drawn to sandlot baseball, apple pie sitting on a flawless white windowsill, an American flag in front of every house, and immigrants Americanizing and making it big in a true meritocracy. At least when I imagine 1910, everything is sunny and green and there are kids playing nonstop in the streets. As a result, it's a time that gets pointed to (again, probably more in the 70's than now) as an ideal that we should be trying to return to. By challenging the preconceptions people have of the 1900's -- or, more accurately, by challenging the idea that the things we remember about the 1900's were actually good things -- Doctorow is trying to argue against the conservative political ideas aiming to return America to that "high point." One of the most important arguments that would have been around in the 70's, and which is still ongoing, is the image of the Americanized "outsider" getting rich quick, and it's a topic that Doctorow looks at in some depth in the novel.

There's a very clear divide in the novel between people who are "classically" rich in the sense of aristocratic WASPs like Harry K. Thaw, Stuyvesant Fish, and Pierpoint Morgan, whether they earned their own money or not, and the people who succeed financially but find themselves still somehow different from their respectable white American counterparts, like Harry Houdini, Tateh, and Coalhouse Walker. The behavior of the first group shows people who are fully comfortable in their positions of power; they feel like they deserve everything they have and more, by virtue of who they are. Morgan's belief that he is the descendant of pharaohs is an extreme example, but it fits with the general point; even if Thaw or Fish don't necessarily express that they're above "normal" people because of their blood, it's implied in their actions. All three of these characters do things that dehumanize other people and make it clear that they think of people "beneath them" -- Evelyn Nesbit, the circus freaks, or Morgan's servants -- as basically worthless. By comparison, the characters who are more outside the expected group for success feel more self-conscious and conflicted about their positions, which manifests itself in a number of different ways. 

In the case of characters of European origin, like Houdini or Tateh, success brings with it changes in their beliefs to make them fit more with how they imagine rich people to be. At first, both characters show at least some level of class tension against the rich, with Tateh's socialism the stronger example. However, as both get more and more successful, they seem to emulate more and more the rich people they know of -- especially the European aristocracy. Houdini comes to respect Archduke Ferdinand, despite the book describing him in very unflattering terms, and Tateh goes one step further, actually giving himself a false name and pretending to be a foreign noble. This change in name, which both Houdini and Tateh go through, also signifies an acceptance on the part of the two main Jewish characters' parts of their difference from mainstream American society. The names "Houdini" and "Baron Ashkenazy" are both stage names that play up the mysterious otherness of the people who take them, and probably contribute in some way to their success.

By comparison, Coalhouse Walker isn't willing or able to play up his status as outside the American mainstream. To his mind, he simply is American, black or no. As a result, his stage name -- assuming Coalhouse even is a stage name -- sounds all-American, exactly like the kind of thing a musician out of St. Louis would call himself. He doesn't see any reason why he shouldn't behave the way any other successful person would, which means he has the right to wear expensive clothes and speak formally and drive a nice car. When he comes up against working-class whites treating him as though he's beneath them even though, to his mind, he's as above them as a wealthy white person would be (in the JP Morgan-esque philosophy of the time), it causes him to suddenly realize just what the limits are on his success as a black man in the early twentieth century. If he was like Houdini or Tateh, who both accept that they are outsiders and embrace it, this wouldn't be so much of a problem; but since he considers himself as "American" as any white man, and he does everything he can to fit in with the image of what a respectable (white) American is supposed to be like, to have all that dismissed simply because of the color of his skin flies in the face of everything he's been working his whole life for. What's the point of going for the American Dream if your ceiling in that dream is still lower than everyone else's?