Ragtime: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

In the early spring of 1909, William Howard Taft is inaugurated. Taft is a corpulent man in the style of the late 19th century, when carrying around a bit of fat was a mark of success. But that changes in the early 20th century. Evelyn’s first lover, Stanford White, was “fashionably burly.” Her husband Thaw is smaller but nevertheless doughy. And her newest lover, Mother’s Younger Brother, is lean and muscular. In the wake of Tateh’s disappearance, Evelyn begins paying the rent on his hovel, where she and Younger Brother meet and have sex in the narrow brass bed.

When Evelyn isn’t with Younger Brother or fruitlessly searching the Lower East Side for her lost friends, she attends Thaw’s trial. Photographs of her arriving at the courthouse and drawings of her on the stand (cameras aren’t allowed in the courtroom) fill the papers, turning her into America’s first “sex goddess” and setting an important model for the kind of celebrity that businessmen involved in the newfangled moving pictures will cultivate for their starlets. This, as Goldman and other labor organizers quickly realize, makes her a potent tool in the hands of the elite, because a working man looking at her picture and daydreaming of having the wealth necessary to woo a woman like Evelyn is easily distracted from the cause of his own justice.

One day as Evelyn watches Thaw at trial, she realizes how much she misses White, whose demands as a lover nevertheless pale in comparison to the domineering Thaw. She tries to understand what went wrong. In a letter, Goldman warns her not to “overestimate [her] role” in Thaw and White’s antagonistic relationship.

The jury in Thaw’s first trial can’t reach a verdict. At the conclusion of the second trial, he’s sentenced to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Evelyn tries to negotiate for one million dollars in the divorce, but her mother-in-law’s private detectives introduce evidence about her affair with Mother’s Younger Brother, and she only gets $25,000. The paltry sum reminds her of a warning delivered by Goldman that Evelyn, daughter of a middle-class family, would have to content herself with what the wealthy think she deserves. She fritters the money from her testimony and her divorce away on anonymous contributions to political causes, but this doesn’t make her feel better. She becomes depressed.