Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

Winslow Homer

Today, nearly fifty years since his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

A while later the Roosevelt passed an incoming transatlantic vessel packed to the railings with immigrants.

It was a rag ship with a million dark eyes staring at him.

Yet aboard her were only more customers, for the immigrant population set great store by the American flag.

his self-imposed training, his dedication to the perfection of what he did, reflected an American ideal.

Freud and Jung took a boat together through the Tunnel of Love.

The entire population seemed to him over-powered, brash and rude. The vulgar wholesale appropriation of European art and architecture regardless of period or country he found appalling. He had seen in our careless commingling of great wealth and great poverty the chaos of an entropic European civilization. He sat in his quiet cozy study in Vienna, glad to be back. He said to Ernest Jones, America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake.

A union was an affront to God.

One hundred Negroes a year were lynched. One hundred miners were burned alive. One hundred children were mutilated.

Traveling Italian gardeners kept the lawns trim.

Father kept himself under control by writing in his journal. This was a system too, the system of language and conceptualization. It proposed that human beings, by the act of making witness, warranted times and places for their existence other than the time and place they were living through.

this new season,

From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture—not only that the parts of the finished product be interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts.

He was a monarch of the invisible,

You think you are special, losing your lover. It happens every day. Suppose

This way you can feel sorry for yourself, she said. And what a delicious emotion that is.

Why do you have to cling to someone in order to live?

At this time private volunteer companies were maintained as auxiliaries to the municipal fire department;

He kept a diary from the day of his arrival in Harlem to the day of his death in Mexico a little more than a year later.

Younger Brother was totally integrated in their community. He was one of them. He awoke every day into a state of solemn joy.

malapropisms

This is most important today, in this country, where everybody is so new. There is such a need to understand.

There were commonly in America at this time titled European immigrants, mostly impoverished, who had come here years before hoping to marry their titles to the daughters of the nouveaux riches.

He wanted to drive from her memory every tenement stench and filthy immigrant street.

They stood up and saw flights of heavy black clouds coming over the ocean.

Winslow Homer

black killer.

Booker T. Washington,

Booker T. Washington was at this time the most famous Negro in the country.

But I would hope this might suggest to you the solemn calculation of my mind. And that therefore, possibly, we might both be servants of our color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands.