The Good Old Days

The enduring appeal of traditional historical fiction, I think, has a lot to do with nostalgia—the kind of imaginative “time travel” that a convincingly detailed, imaginative reconstruction of the past allows can appeal to a reader’s latent or sometimes explicit sense that things were somehow better “back then.” Life was simpler, less chaotic, less mediated or cacophonous. The reader is allowed a temporary escape from the confusion of the modern (or postmodern) world; there’s a kind of solace in it, even as we’re maybe less inclined to view our present age in a rose-colored hue by comparison.

When Ragtime was published in 1975, the United States was in dire need of such nostalgia: the Bicentennial celebrations would hearken back to a heroic and idealistic time when the nation was formed—an armed insurrection against an occupying power that, unlike our recent messy entanglements with armed insurrections against occupying powers in Southeast Asia, seemed to have clear moral bounds, “good guys” (the American Revolutionaries) and “bad guys” (the Redcoats). The national mood had been traumatized by the quagmire in Vietnam as well as revolutionary dissent at home, from the violent strife of the civil rights movement and the disillusionment of Watergate to the more militant and still controversial actions of radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground. For many Americans, it must have been difficult to muster a whole lot of patriotic fervor; the “Spirit of ’76” was pretty ambivalent.

The early years of the twentieth century have often been portrayed as a period of comparative placidity and prosperity in the United States (even as imperial powers in Europe were amassing arms and rattling sabers in preparation for world war). From what I’ve read, Random House’s marketing campaign for Ragtime tapped into this national desire for nostalgia quite explicitly—the novel was cast as a kind of “national story,” a backward glance to our origins, a time just before the dawn of modernity, world war, genocide, and the attendant horrors of the twentieth century. Father’s business—“the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism,” as we’re informed on the opening page of the novel—might be seen as an explicit “tease” to such a reader who opens the novel with a kind of red, white, and blue bunting of the mind. (Buntings and flags were booming business in 1976, as well.) But Doctorow’s narrator gives a hint to his contradictory impulses when he adds, “including fireworks.” “Patriotism was a reliable sentiment in the early 1900’s,” indeed—but as this novel continually reminds us, so were explosives, and they weren’t all being deployed in the cause of celebrating American triumphalism. In fact, “Guns were going off everywhere” (191), and one of this novel’s primary aims seems to be to demolish the sepia-toned image of a placid ­fin de siècle. The Family’s complacent view from New Rochelle—“There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants” (4)—is compromised immediately as the narrative unfolds. Their lives become intimately bound with those of immigrants (first, superficially, with Houdini, and later more substantially with Tateh and his daughter) and African Americans (Sarah, Coalhouse, and their son). Younger Brother’s awkward quest to “find himself” ends up leading to an idealistic and self-destructive “career as an outlaw and revolutionary” (243), under the influence of immigrant anarchists like Emma Goldman and Ben Reitman and inspired by the proud defiance of Coalhouse Walker and his “Negro insurrection.” Far from a nostalgic trip down memory lane, a stroll through simpler times when women were laced up in corsets and kept their opinions to themselves and black people (like Mathew Henson) “knew [their] place” (162), Ragtime depicts the years before World War I in the United States as fraught with political violence, grotesque gaps between extreme wealth and dire poverty, and casual racism, sexism, and xenophobia. This is not only a challenge to the prevailing view of this period itself; it’s a challenge to the very idea of nostalgia, the “metanarrative” (perennially appealing, it seems) that tells us we are living in an age that has lost touch with its roots, a diminished and decadent corruption of traditional values. The deeper we get into this novel, the more 2023 starts to look like 1910.

Although he likes to think of himself as a “progressive” (231), Father is probably the most nostalgic figure in the novel: he’s the most unnerved by Coalhouse Walker and his refusal to deploy “the customary deferences practiced by his race” (162); he’s alarmed by the boatload of immigrants his ship passes on its way to the North Pole (“A weird despair seized him” [13]); he chafes as his traditional role as head of the household seems to have eroded during his Arctic sojourn (“Toward his wife he felt drastically slipped in her estimation, an explorer in body only” [225]). The very idea that his self-image is pinned so thoroughly on his imagined role as an “explorer” (“he had been to the Arctic, to Africa, to the Philippines. He had traveled out west” [225]) aligns him more with a nineteenth-century colonialist attitude than that of the dawning twentieth century (it’s significant that the ship he travels on to the pole is the Roosevelt).

In chapter 30, when Father takes his son to the storied Polo Grounds, perhaps the most nostalgically laden ballpark in the history of the most nostalgically laden sport in American culture, to witness the storied N.Y. Giants under the storied manager John McGraw, we can observe this clash between nostalgia and reality on a number of levels. The setting itself—father and son bonding at the ballgame—is probably the most nostalgic cliché in American culture, and Father himself is shocked to witness the reality of what baseball has become since his Harvard days (“when the players addressed each other as Mister and played their game avidly, but as sportsmen, in sensible uniforms before audiences of collegians” [230-31]). The “paternal figure and commander of his team” (228), McGraw himself, vigorously cusses out the opposing team, and the crowd of cigar-chomping drunks participates vicariously and with gusto in the violent brawls on the field. Even the postmodern reader is likely shocked by spectacles such as the “Boston midget” and the “dirt eater” mascots, grown men whom the players pat on the head for luck. It’s not only Father’s nostalgia that is under attack here; Doctorow challenges the contemporary reader to reconsider the ease with which sports history (especially of baseball) lends itself to the metanarrative of nostalgia. Anyone familiar with the handwringing commentaries in the sports pages that lament the corruption and decline of the “steroid era” or the influence of players’ unions will know what I’m referring to. More than any other professional sport, “America’s pastime” indulges in nostalgic revisionism, and this is simply one more aspect of the “Ragtime era” Doctorow wants to undermine.

And yet, is it possible that the novel allows for another kind of nostalgia? Does the reader who feels alienated by the slick commercialization and end-to-end packaging of professional sports today maybe find this crude atmosphere somewhat appealing? Does the reader who despairs of the perceived diminishment of social activism and the decline of the labor movement in the twenty-first century (who might be heartened by the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements) read Doctorow’s historically anchored accounts of Emma Goldman’s crowded anarchist meetings or the international network of IWW activism with a kind of nostalgic longing? Does Coalhouse Walker’s campaign seem to embody a clear moral position, in contrast to the ambiguities of racism in the “color-blind” post-civil-rights era? Does any evocation of the past tap into such feelings? Is Doctorow himself indulging in a little nostalgia here, despite his subversive, postmodernist, metanarrative-challenging intentions?