E. L. Doctorow: Ragtime. New York: Fawcett Crest, 1987 [1975].
E. L. Doctorow is the epic poet of the disappearance of the American radical past, of the suppression of older traditions and moments of the American radical tradition[.]
— Fredric Jameson
The turn of the century in America — around 1899 to 1913: a generation since the Homestead Act, honky-tonk pianists on the Mississippi and the Missouri, the waves of immigrant workers from a Europe ruined in part by US grain exports, the entrapment of emancipated Blacks in the neoslavery of sharecropping (as seen in Richard Wright's Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)), the party machines; McKinley's cabinet stuffed with millionaires.
It was the age of ragtime. In this period, the United States became the archetypal monopoly capitalist country in the world. By 1913 half of the railroad track laid on the earth's surface was in US territory.
Along with expanded transport means, the late 19th century strikes our imagination because of the most advanced industries at the time: livestock and meatpacking. In the 20th century they were joined by the oil and steel trusts. (Upton Sinclair, anyone?)
Roosevelt's expansionism against Spain reflected this young capitalist country's need to compete against the older empires, who already had their chance to secure new territories and markets. America's aggressive foreign policy (Dollar Diplomacy, Open Door Policy) was born here, and in retrospect it was a premature attempt to kick off the first world war to redivide the globe.
This is the America represented, though not in any straightforward way, in E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime.
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