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Chapter 21
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
Mother’s Younger Brother begins going back down to New York City that spring, mostly in search of the sex workers who haunt Broadway and Central Park in the wee hours. He starts drinking in disreputable bars. He begins hanging around outside the headquarters of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth magazine. One night, a youngish man (later identified as Ben Reitman) calls him inside, thinking him a police spy. When Goldman enters the room, on her way to a speaking engagement, she recognizes Younger Brother instantly. She invites him to come, and he tags along to a rally in support of the Mexican Revolution, a conflict Brother didn’t even know was going on.
Bereft of purpose once Evelyn has left him, Younger Brother finally turns back to the last place he felt something meaningful: with Emma Goldman. Granted, what he felt was carnal desire for Evelyn. But the fact that his trips to the Central Park sex workers aren’t soothing him suggests that what he really yearns for isn’t sex, but purpose. Goldman and her friends have plenty of ideas about how a young man like Younger Brother can get involved in revolution. It’s a mark of Younger Brother’s privilege (and perhaps of American myopia) that he isn’t aware of a bloody civil war in a neighboring country.
Themes
Younger Brother listens, rapt, as Goldman describes the ongoing armed revolt of the Mexican peasants, including the brave actions of Emiliano Zapata. She tells the crowd that their struggles and the Mexican peasants’ struggles are part of the same universal fight for freedom. Afterward, Younger Brother hangs around the stage then follows Goldman and her friends back to the Mother Earth offices, hoping to talk to Goldman. But she’s too busy with her guests and other comrades. Brother watches as Ben Reitman—her current lover, as it turns out—hands out punch and listens as he describes a horrifying recent incident in San Francisco in which he was tarred and feathered.
Ben Reitman’s unfortunate kidnapping places this speech in 1913 or thereabouts, about three years into the Mexican Revolution. Emma Goldman talks openly about the need for radical, transformative, and sometimes violent change to bring about a world that’s more just and dignified for all. The book has hinted at these ideas already, but through the figure of Goldman, it becomes increasingly forthright about them now. In a way, the book mirrors the radicalization of Younger Brother whose transformation begins with the seeds Goldman’s impassioned speech plants in his heart and mind.
Themes
Eventually, however, Younger Brother does find himself alone with Goldman. She advises him to move on from Evelyn and asks him why he allows another person’s love to measure his self-worth. She encourages him to free himself, saying that desire fades. Only friendship and shared ideals last. She should know—two of her former lovers and her current lover are all among her inner circle because they believe in the same cause. And then, briefly noting his similarity to Leon Czolgosz, she sends Younger Brother on his way with a hug and a kiss. On the train ride back to New Rochelle, he considers jumping beneath its wheels. He wonders if he will ever feel warm again.
Goldman realizes that his desire for Evelyn was the first—and thus far only—thing that has given Younger Brother a sense of meaning. She invites him to reconsider his priorities, but it’s clear from his agonized train ride home that he doesn’t yet have a sense of his own ideals. If he did, Goldman and her friends note, he would be a force to reckon with, given his energy and drive. She thus lays out a roadmap for his potential transformation. Leon Czolgosz was a second-generation Polish American and laborer who became an anarchist amid growing tensions between American workers and their bosses in the late 1800s. In 1901, he assassinated President McKinley to draw attention to the plight of working people.
Themes
