Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps and Read This!

The American Dream. We’ve all heard of it. Though we typically imagine immigrants to the United States searching to accomplish the American Dream, U.S. citizens as well seek to achieve this goal. But what exactly is it? Defined by Merriam-Webster, the American Dream is “a happy way of living that is thought of by many Americans as something that can be achieved by anyone in the U.S. especially by working hard and becoming successful.” Ragtime displays several characters attempting to reach this goal, with varying definitions of success. To Harry Houdini, success was making a living from magic shows. To Ford, it was profiting from an accessible car given to everyone rather than just a select few. To Tateh, it was ensuring a better life for his daughter, Little Girl.

            An immigrant from Hungary, Harry Houdini attempts to maintain the American lifestyle by “pulling himself up by the bootstraps,” or building himself up with no outside help by perfecting his magic acts and obtaining a large audience to observe his craft. His magic act at the prison in which Thaw is imprisoned goes to show the mastery of Houdini’s skill, in which parallels are drawn to represent his ability to make a name for himself out of nothing (immigrating to a new country) and escape the confines of harsh reality by creating his own world (forming a new life after moving to another country). This scene also highlights the great economic disparity between the rich living the American Dream and the poor aspiring to live the American Dream. Examples of this would include Harry K. Thaw receiving dinner on a silver table, paying off the guards for additional privileges, and paying off Evelyn Nesbit to testify on his side. The undressing and dressing of Thaw and Houdini also highlights the differences between those who work for their wealth, Houdini, and those who simply inherit it, Thaw. This is in stark contrast to the gruesome labor conditions described on pages 39 and 40, in which the narrator expresses the great dangers of working for an insufficient payment, such as the loss of a finger or the crushing of a hand or leg. This distinction grows even more apparent as the narrator recounts the poverty balls held by the rich, in which it had become “fashionable to honor the poor,” exemplifying the inability of the higher class to sympathize with the lower class.

            E.L. Doctorow continues to highlight immigrants improving their lives in the storyline of Henry Ford, born from immigrant parents. In his assembly line that would build Model T cars for most everyone, Ford was represented as God and Capitalism in Ragtime. Doctorow refers to Ford in a generally positive light, especially in comparison to the other business tycoons of the age. However, this success also came with the heavy exploitation of his workers. Highly concerned with the efficiency of his company, Ford would implement elements found in nature into the methods his workers would produce the cars. His observations of cows and birds allowed him to further the dehumanization of his workers by showcasing the unnecessarily want to celebrate when one could instead continue working. In this storyline, Doctorow shows both the success and the fallacy of the American Dream by contrasting the success of Ford himself and how Fordism perpetuates the ideology that one must strive for a meager pay from strenuous labor.

            A victim to this ideology, though not under Ford himself, was Tateh, an immigrant who remained idealistic regarding his socio-economic position and the future he would deliver to his daughter, Little Girl. However, after realizing he did not reap much reward for his labor, he abandoned this false hope and instead pursued his entrepreneurial skills to sell his animated book, which allows him to earn far more of a profit than his portraits had. Consequently, Tateh transforms into an image of the possibility and imagination in America, an essential part of the American Dream.

            Doctorow details several elements of the American Dream in Ragtime, which presumably continues to make references to this theory throughout the book. The heavy emphasis on becoming a self-made individual is quite prevalent not only in society, but also in this book. This image shapes the American Dream, a phrase with connotations that vary greatly between person-to-person (or character-to-character) and their differing means of securing their vision.