Ragtime

by E.L. Doctorow

Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable. Runaway women died in the rigors of ecstasy. Stories were hushed up and reporters paid off by rich families. One read between the lines of the journals and gazettes.

A man like Roosevelt had run at the Spanish on San Juan Hill and now sent a fleet of white battleships steaming around the world, battleships as white as his teeth. The wealthy knew what was important. They looked on him as a child or a fool. Yet his self-imposed training, his dedication to the perfection of what he did, reflected an American ideal. He kept himself as trim as an athlete. He did not smoke or drink. Pound for pound he was as strong as any man he had ever run up against. He could tighten his stomach muscles and with a smile invite anyone at all to punch him there as hard as they liked. He was immensely muscular and agile and professionally courageous. Yet to the wealthy all this was nothing.

So damning…and yet so true it hurts

At least a decade would have to pass before Freud would have his revenge and see his ideas begin to destroy sex in America forever.

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.

Goldman sent off a letter to Evelyn: I am often asked the question How can the masses permit themselves to be exploited by the few. The answer is By being persuaded to identify with them.

It is the law of wealth that such people only profit from the money that is taken from them.

Tateh shook his head. This country will not let me breathe.

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

To headquarters the word filtered back: Not one of our Negroes. Not one of ours.

God love you, you were cruel lads at St. Catherine’s and yer cruel now. Willie, the Police Chief said, we had to wait to hear from the black man himself that one of your shenanigans is what started this, you dumb Mick, telling us now we’re in this together.

Thank God someone told this guy off

He felt stupid and plodding, available simply to have done to him what circumstances would do. Coalhouse ruled. Yet he had been to the Arctic, to Africa, to the Philippines. He had traveled out west. Did that mean only that more and more of the world resisted his intelligence?