The unrealistic yet somehow realistic world of Ragtime

One of the big things that stood out to me as I read Ragtime was the description of the worker’s strike and its consequences for Tateh and his little girl. The way his experiences were narrated somehow highlighted and made personal this experience of marching and striking to the workers in a way I didn’t feel when I learned about this event in history. The story from the two’s perspective really gave me the immigrant point of view through Tateh, who does whatever he needs to survive.

I felt a sense of realism in the narrative despite Tateh being a fictional character. Doctorow somehow managed to capture the “feel” of the time period a lot better than just a statement of facts or a historically accurate fictional work. In some ways, I was able to learn more through this telling of the times compared to other more conventional methods of teaching. The interesting interactions between historical characters who never would have met otherwise (each one being unrealistic, yet realistic in its own way), the way each of the characters seems to symbolize a bigger change within the community, the way there is no clear-cut “wrong” or “right” but rather everything is like an opinion (it may be “correct” to me, but not to others) is a very good lens through which to portray reality, because in real life it is often true that there is no true black or true white, but rather a mix of gray.

Examples of this include the way Father goes on a journey and comes back to find his wife running the business and managing the house without him as well as approaching him with less care for chasteness (“He realized that every night since he’d returned they had slept in the same bed. She [Mother] was not as vigorous modest as she’d been.” (111)), the seamstresses going on strike (“At his office he was told that the seamstresses in the flag department had joined a New York union.” (110)) and the maid ceasing to listen to directions (“She [Brigit, the maid] was doing what she could to lose her place. She was no longer efficient or respectful.” (110)). These things are all indications of the changing times. As women’s rights become more prominent in society and workers begin to demand rights, these changes are reflected in Father’s life. Another example is Tateh, who travels far away from his workplace and ends up taking part in worker strikes. The changes that are happening in his life more directly point to the changes in society that Father subtly noticed. On a side note, I personally thought it was really interesting how in the end he chose not to participate in the strikes any longer and instead moved to the city where he began to capitalize off of his skill instead of being a mere worker: namely, his artwork and his “movie books” -- this felt extremely ironic to me, as Tateh literally seemed to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, which was what the people arguing against worker reform said that these immigrant laborers should do instead of complaining about unfair working hours and wages. This was especially ironic considering the fact that Tateh mentioned beggars on the streets of the city literally doing nothing and earning more than immigrant laborers.

In some ways, Tateh felt more real to me than the other historical figures. Perhaps the reason for this was that these famous figures were tainted in some way by the stereotypes that surrounded them. For example, with Henry Ford, I was somehow surprised and a bit unable to reconcile the amazing innovator of the assembly line and Ford cars that I knew with the somehow callous and reincarnation-believing man who was portrayed in the books. I was even more surprised to learn (through a Google search) that Ford in fact did believe that he was reincarnated. He was also antisemitic. This may be somewhat of a tangent, but I recently took up Mr. Mitchell’s recommendation to read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, and I had a similar disconcerting experience as I read about these important historical figures who were portrayed as heroes when, in fact, many of them fell short or didn’t quite match the glorious legacy they left behind. One of the very first examples in the book was of Helen Keller. She was far from being just a blind and deaf woman who managed to learn how to read, she was also an adamant socialist and a political activist whose strong views stemmed from her experiences as a woman with multiple disabilities. Another example was Woodrow Wilson -- while often glorified in history textbooks as an American hero, he was also racist and a white supremacist and some of his policies (which the textbooks tried desperately to justify) were just blatantly a result of his not-so-wonderful beliefs.