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Chapter 39
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
When Coalhouse Walker Jr. finally leaves J. P. Morgan’s library with his hands above his head, there are no civilians on the street. Father listens from inside as—at some undoubtedly slight provocation he cannot see—the police open fire and riddle Coalhouse’s body with bullets. The police claim he tried to run.
Coalhouse knew that his life would be forfeit after his campaign of violence. But he leaves the library with his head held high, having at least cowed the city into capitulating to his demands rather than simply ignoring him.
Themes
After returning to Harlem with the rest of the gang, Younger Brother takes the Model T and drives south and west across the country. Eventually, he winds up in Mexico where he joins the insurgent army under Zapata. He makes bombs for Zapata and leads guerrilla raids until his death, the circumstances of which are unclear.
And while Coalhouse dies, the cause of human dignity, justice, and freedom lives on in Younger Brother, who takes the fight elsewhere. In this action, he follows Goldman’s dictate that all struggles for freedom and dignity are connected.
Themes
By the time Younger Brother dies, Woodrow Wilson is in the White House and the world is on the brink of war. J. P. Morgan notes the rising tensions on his last trip to Europe—the one he is on when Coalhouse takes over his library. Royals and nobles entertain him as lavishly as ever, but they all seem on edge. And more of them than usual seem anxious to liquidate their art and historical artefacts. Morgan amasses a hoard of treasure to take home with him.
Historically, the Progressive Era ends with the end of World War I. Even before that violence erupts, there are signs that the old way—the way of monarchs and empires—is ending. Yet Morgan sees this as little more than an excuse for personal enrichment, suggesting that the future good of humanity cannot possibly lie in the hands of men like him.
Themes
When his Nile steamer is finally ready, Morgan goes on to Egypt, where he plans to choose a site on which to build his own magnificent burial pyramid. First, however, he stops at Giza, where he spends the night in the Great Pyramid, anxious to receive a sign from Osiris. Instead, he has a dream about being a peddler in an ancient bazaar and he’s attacked by bedbugs. When he emerges in the morning he discovers—much to his shock—the New York Giants baseball team clambering over the Sphinx. They’re on a world tour.
In case readers haven’t already picked up on the book’s rebuke of Morgan’s worldview, his embarrassing and uncomfortable experiences in Egypt confirm it. There is nothing special or superhuman about the man, regardless of his delusions of grandeur. In the end, he’s as subject to suffering, discomfort, and indignity as anyone. He’s more like the poor peddler in his dream than he believes.
Themes
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Returning to Europe, Morgan experiences a sudden decline of his health. Buoyed by the thought of his immanent reincarnation, he admonishes his family not to be sad and he passes away at the age of 76. Soon afterwards, Archduke Franz Ferdinand dies by the hand of a Serbian patriot in Sarajevo. The news makes few waves in America, where most people write it off as the start of yet another obscure conflict in the Balkans. But Harry Houdini finds it unsettling to hear about the death of a man he remembers so vividly from their one meeting in Germany.
J. P. Morgan died on 31 March 1913; World War I broke out a little over a year later, on 28 June 1914. The way the book links these events suggests a final criticism of Morgan’s belief in replication and reincarnation—that the old ways will continue more or less unchanged forever. Humanity isn’t carried forward by men with the same old ideas but by the cataclysmic changes brought about by revolutionaries like Franz Ferdinand’s assassin.
Themes
At the very moment the Archduke dies, Houdini is in the middle of a performance in Times Square. He’s fastened into a straitjacket and hoisted by his ankles halfway up the Times Tower. On his ascent, someone calls “Fuck you,” from a window. “Up yours!” Houdini replies. His grief for his mother has faded as his zealous quest to debunk spiritualism has given him new purpose. As he hangs from the crane, halfway through wriggling free of the straitjacket, Houdini suddenly remembers his encounter with Little Boy in New Rochelle years earlier. He calls on the family within the week, but no one is there to receive him.
The book has used Houdini’s escapes as a running reminder of the importance of freedom and the power (and limitations) of the American Dream. Houdini has risen from the ashes of his dreams and recreated himself. And he doesn’t care what other people think any more, it seems: now, he’s facing life on his own terms. The book thus offers him as a potential symbol for American in the years following the Great War—a country that can choose to embrace freedom and remake itself into something greater.
Themes
That’s because Mother and Little Boy are touring upstate New York in Mother’s new car, which she drives herself. The news of Younger Brother’s death drove the final wedge into her relationship with Father, and now he lives in Washington, D.C. He advises the State Department as they develop more than a dozen weapons Younger Brother designed before he left Father’s company. Father dies accompanying a shipment of these munitions to Europe when a German U-boat attacks the Lusitania. Mother mourns for a year, as is fitting, then quickly marries Tateh (Mameh has long since died). They move to California, where one day, watching Little Boy, Little Girl, and the baby (whom the family ultimately christened Coalhouse Walker III) playing in the yard, he gets the idea for a series of films featuring the hijinks and adventures of an interracial gang of “little urchins.”
As always, the lives of the two families trace the changing contours of American society. Mother and Father separate because Mother looks toward the future while Father tries to cling to a past that gave him an inflated sense of his own importance and status. Younger Brother anticipates the violent conflicts of the 20th century with his weapons. And Mother and Tateh’s blended family points toward an increasingly diverse national character. However, readers should note that the book has sacrificed Mameh, suggesting its failure to live up to some of its own ideas about the importance of female empowerment. Quietly, this moment also reinforces a sense of the racial hierarchies at play—Mother, a privileged white woman, gets a future while the poor, immigrant, and oppressed Mameh is consigned to obscurity.
Themes
And with Tateh’s newest idea, the era of Ragtime—of progressive reforms, of Emma Goldman and the anarchists, of the once-beautiful Evelyn Nesbit, of the Great War—ends. And every year, Harry K. Thaw, having been released from Matteawan as a rehabilitated man, marches each year in the Armistice Day parade.
The book closes with an image of Thaw as a rehabilitated member of society. He represents many of the social ills of the era, including the abuse of wealth, the exploitation of women, the lack of justice in a system that gives more privileges to certain people than others. And so, his final cameo raises questions about whether the Coalhouses, Goldmans, Younger Brothers, and other revolutionaries and reformers of the era truly changed society as much as they hoped.
Themes
