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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ragtime, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The American Dream
Replication and Transformation
Freedom, Human Dignity, and Justice
The Cult of Celebrity
Women’s Roles
Social Inequities
Summary
Analysis
Ford’s cleverness has brought him to the attention of the man at the zenith of American business: John Pierpont Morgan. In Ford, Morgan sees a potentially world-dominating kindred spirit. Morgan’s wealth and success put him in a class of his own. Entire governments have less power and sway than Morgan, who once bailed the United States government out of bankruptcy. But he sees his so-called peers—elites like Rockefeller and Carnegie—as foolish, boring, uncreative old men whose wealth has dulled their drive. He concludes that he no longer has any peers, at least until he learns about Ford. An amateur Egyptologist, Morgan is fascinated with the idea that Osiris and the gods send humanity guides in every age. He believes that Ford, with his genius for mechanization and his uncanny resemblance to the recently unearthed mummy of pharaoh Seti I, is one of them.
John Pierpont Morgan represents the old guard of the American Elite while Ford stands for the newer generation. And while many of the facts about Morgan’s life and career presented in this chapter are factual, his interest in ancient Egyptian mystical knowledge is a fictitious creation of the book. Morgan’s fictional interests include a fascination with reincarnation—perhaps the ultimate form of replication. Notably, despite its supernatural elements, Morgan’s belief is essentially conservative, as it suggests that the same people keep getting reborn as society’s elite guides. If Ford is important now, it’s because he was also important in the past. Thus, Morgan’s belief system leaves little room for innovation or social mobility of the type promised by the American Dream.
Themes
