Lecture on Ragtime
THIS IS THE TEXT OF A LECTURE DELIVERED BY MICHAEL MEEROPOL AT WESTERN NEW ENGLAND COLLEGE AS PART OF A SPRING SEMESTER COLLQUIUM examining the historical fiction of E.L. Doctorow.
E. L. Doctorow was once asked why he situates his novels in a historical period. He answered that:
“A historical period gives you closure. In other words, you can write about a region, take an area to write about … or you can take a period of time to write about, and it's the same nice kind of enframing of facts for you to build with. I don't have any particular affection for any period. Whatever images move me or evoke something within me is usually the reason for the books getting done.”
The book, Ragtime, is clearly enframed by the period of time it covers – roughly from 1900 to 1917. Please note the double-meaning of the title. Ragtime is a musical form and it plays an important role in the novel. But it is also a time in American history – a time where change and struggle were central.
My role in this presentation is to give you my sense of some of the historical background to the novel – to elaborate on some of the themes that Doctorow introduces us to.
TWO EMPHASES FOR THIS LECTURE
I have chosen to focus first, on the economic transformations represented by Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan, and, second, on the demographic and cultural transformations represented by the story-line around Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the black ragtime pianist. I could just as easily have focused on labor struggles, feminism, anarchism and imperialism – all of which play an important role both in that period of American history and in the novel. However, I only have 50 minutes!
Last week, Professor Beagle ended his lecture on The March by suggesting that despite the victory of the Union Army and the defeat in the Civil War of what the northerners called the slave power, we, the United States, are still on that march over 100 years later --- the “march” to expunge the sin of slavery from our nation’s DNA. I have put the text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural onto the course’s web site and want to begin my presentation where Dr. Beagle’s ended his.
Lincoln hoped the war would end but when he delivered that inaugural, it hadn’t ended yet. And so he said that if the war would go on
“until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil [-- meaning unpaid labor] shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"
In an extremely prophetic statement in Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had written:
“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other….. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. ... And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: …”
One can read this as having predicted the bloody Civil War – the “true and righteous judgment of the Lord” in Lincoln’s words.
And yet Professor Beagle asserted that in the various ambiguities introduced in The March – particularly the failures on the part of some white unionists to fully embrace the complete humanity of the freed slaves, the successful assassination of President Lincoln and our knowledge with 20-20 hindsight that the promise of, to use Lincoln’s words at the Gettysburg Address, “a new birth of freedom” – all of those hopes were dashed in the decades following the Civil War.
The opportunities for the ex slaves in the post Civil War era at first seemed boundless. Guaranteed the rights of citizenship by the 14th Amendment and the right to vote by the 15th Amendment – their ability to buy property, hold elective office, exercise political power through the Republican Party (yes – the Republican party was once the party of black ex-slaves as well as business entrepreneurs and small independent mid-western farmers!) led to great advances in the South – advances which were stopped and crushed by an alliance between domestic terrorists known as the Ku Klux Klan and the racism that Doctorow so clearly portrays in The March and which is so clearly evident in the longer quote from Jefferson which I posted to the internet over the weekend.
I do not want to walk us – or march us if we want to continue the metaphor from Professor Beagle’s lecture -- through the history that African Americans endured between the end of the Civil War and the events described in Ragtime but I want to
describe for you briefly the situation – the context – if you will for the section of the novel devoted to the reaction of Coalhouse Walker, Jr. to the indignities heaped upon him by the volunteer fire-fighters of New Rochelle under the leadership of one Will Conklin.
By the time 1900 rolled around, African Americans had been consigned to second class citizenship in the South while northern politicians had completely abandoned their cause. The white population had come to accept racist stereotyping – perhaps it was more virulent than it had been at the time of the Civil War –
For example: In 1914, a movie was made: Birth of a Nation. (We have it in our library – though it takes a strong stomach and spirit, I believe it would be valuable for most people to watch it) This film was wildly popular and it was shown to President Woodrow Wilson at the White House – where he gave it his full political and professional imprimatur. To quote one description: “President and former history professor Woodrow Wilson … proclaimed it not only historically accurate, but like ‘history writ with lightning’." In that movie the heroic southern whites after being defeated in the Civil War win back their rights from lascivious freed blacks who are dominating the post-Civil War governments with corruption --- the heroic southerners create the Ku Klux Klan to free the South from post-Civil War bondage ---
Thus, the true “birth of a nation” – The Civil War ends slavery and solidifies the union – while the second half of the movie frees southern whites, solidifying white supremacy. The last scene in the film is on election day. Blacks emerge from their shacks to see a group of Klansmen in full regalia ready to take care of them … They look, and give up their right to vote by going back into their shacks!
So that’s one context of the novel Ragtime – the second class citizenship of African Americans and the virulent racism of the white population.
But there was a lot of other history that America experienced between the end of the Civil War and 1900.
The major economic transformation was from a nation of farmers where the majority of the population was employed in agriculture to a nation where the majority of the population worked outside of agriculture and industry was “coming of age…”
The coming of age of industry between the Civil War and the end of the century meant a significant increase in the percentage of the population who worked for wages – The Jeffersonian ideal at the end of the 18th century was for a nation of independent farmers and independent craftsmen. And certainly, aside from slaves and newly arrived immigrants, the male population earned their living mostly by way of these independent activities. In fact, according to Eric Foner’s book The Story of American Freedom, the 18th century conception of freedom revolved around such economic independence. The idea of working for someone else – even for a wage – was considered a state of relative “unfreedom…” That supposed unfreedom was the basis of the original laws in most State Constitutions which gave only owners of property the right to vote because they were the ones who were truly free to exercise the franchise and they were the ones with a true stake in the well-being of society.
But Foner points out that in the context of the Civil War and the growth of wage labor after the Civil War, a new conception of freedom emerged – the idea that working for a wage enhanced the dignity of man – Certainly, the ex-slaves felt that way -- Here is how the runaway slave Frederick Douglass described his feelings after securing employment as a free laborer in New Bedford Mass.
“I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop with a load of oil. It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.”
That transformation from independent farmers and artisans to tenant farmers and wage laborers occurred in the context of the rise of industry and commerce until it came to dominate the American economy. Even before the time period described by Ragtime, the value of manufactures was three times the value of agricultural products in 1890. Between 1880 and 1900, to take a few examples, many industries more than tripled their total value added (the production attributable to that industry net its raw materials cost).
Machinery increased fourfold from 111 million to 432 million.
Iron and Steel from 105 m. to 339. m.
Men’s clothing from 78 m to 262 m.
Another major transformation that actually occurred in a sort of continuous process from the 1870s through the turn of the century was the rise of giant corporations and the end of American industry as a relatively competitive system. A competitive system has lots of small businesses vying for the consumers’ dollars – forced to charge “the market price” because their levels of output were such a small percentage of the entire industry that they could not affect the price by increasing or decreasing their total production. After the Civil War, as railroads knitted the entire nation into the beginning of a national market, businesses that had only sold locally could now sell regionally and even nationally. At first this led to expanded output – but as all previously isolated firms increased output to sell to larger and larger areas they came into competition with each other. At this point, these firms behaved just as in the textbook discussions you have seen in Principles of Economics classes when they describe perfect competition – they were price takers with no control over the price they sold their products at and thus were helpless before the fall in prices as a result of all that new competition.
This led to efforts gain some control over prices --- To make a long story short (and I make this a significantly longer story in my American Economic History class) by the end of the 19th century, many large firms had figured out ways to reduce competition. Usually this involved either merging with competitors or beating them and driving them out of the industry. The rise of the great American companies: Standard Oil of New Jersey, Swift, Armour, American Tobacco, International Harvester, involved not just the creation of giant businesses but a significant reduction in competition by price. The end of the 19th century saw the first billion dollar corporation, the U. S. Steel Corporation, created with the help of the investment banker J.P. Morgan – an important character in Ragtimel. Morgan engineered the creation of this company because Andrew Carnegie who had made his fortune in steel was such a tough competitor he was driving steel prices down and thereby harming the industry. He was persuaded to sell out by Morgan and the result was that for at least 60 years, there was no price competition among steel makers – instead, all of US Steel’s competitors let that company act as a “price leader” – and instead of undercutting the prices charged by US steel, they merely priced so as to “meet” the competition. (This last line is a direct quote from an executive at one of US Steel’s competitors before a Senate committee in the 1950s!)
So when we meet Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan we are meeting individuals at the top of the economic food chain in the first decades of the 20th century. Morgan is the financier, the banker – the fixer – Henry Ford is the man who according to some economic historians put his stamp on the entire century. Some economists even refer to the kind of economy our nation experienced during the 20th century as fordism – a system dependent on mass production techniques to cut costs and spread the opportunities of high wages and high consumption spending to workers.
So the prelude to the events of Doctorow’s novel as far as industry is concerned is that by 1900 the US was an industrial powerhouse – that a group of captains of industry had arisen in the course of the last third of the 19th century – and that American industry had entered a consolidation phase – where the era of many firms competing with none big enough to “rig” the market gave way to the rise of giant firms, many of whom had significant power within their selling markets to be price makers instead of price takers.
Two topics for this lecture:
First and foremost: racism – the “ambiguity” left over from the Civil War and from the novel The March.
On the first page of Ragtime, Doctorow introduces us to the wonderful world of Father/Mother/and the rest of the family in New Rochelle. But, on the very last line of the first page we are introduced to somewhat discordant notes – “there was a lot of sexual fainting” – “there were no Negroes” -- and flipping to the second page, “There were no immigrants.”
Come to find out, of course, that there were “Negro servants” one of whom delivers an illegitimate baby and tries to “get rid of it” – only to have the infant rescued by “Mother” – a rescue that changes the dynamics of the family completely, and ultimately brings the family into contact with one of the truly heroic characters of the novel – Coalhouse Walker, Jr.
The world of immigrants arrives on page 13 of the novel when we are thrust into the world of a central character – tateh (which by the way is the Yiddish word for “father”).
The tide of immigrants into the US – particularly into the urban centers of the US is only one aspect of the transformation of the US between the Civil War and World War I.
I have some data on the handout sheet representing the transformation of the US between 1900 and World War I.
US Population: 1900 – approximately 76 million
1917 – 103.3 million --- population grew by 35% -- averaged 2.1% per year – that’s higher than during the baby boom after World War II.
In 1900, the immigrant population in the US was 13.6% of the population.
By 1910, despite rapid population growth – the immigrant population had grown to 14.7% of the population.
In New York State whose largest city is the center for the action in Ragtime the immigrant population was 26.1% on 1900 and 30.2% in 1910.
New York City’s population was 3.4 m in 1900 and 4.8 m in 1910.
US urban and rural percentages of the population:
1900 – 39.6 to 60.4
1910 – 45.6 to 54.4
1920 – 51.2 to 48.8.
NY State was already 72.9% urban in 1900.
Let me tell you a bit about what I’ve referred to above as fordism.
The transformation of the production process occurred between 1910 and 1914 at the Ford Motor Company’s Highland Michigan Plant.
The principle of “scientific management” had been propounded by Frederick W. Taylor. The key was to divide up the task (say of making a car) into discrete, separate activities.
The next step was for the engineers to design machines to do these activities. The real innovation was the assembly line. Every input into the ultimate car would move [here I’m quoting from the piece I put on the course’s web site]
“… from foundry to machine shop to assembly department, seemingly flowing from tiny streams to small rivers and ultimately to the final assembly line. “
This change was profound for the workers. Work became routinized and monotonous – Adam Smith had warned in The Wealth of Nations that if a workman were to be relegated to doing a small simple task over and over again, he would become as “stupid” as a human being can be.
The introduction of the assembly line changed industrial processes in the direction Smith warned against --- it reduced the role of skilled workers while increasing the control of the speed with which workers worked.
The change was remarkable. Quoting again:
“At the end of the nineteenth century, the all-round craftsman dominated the workshop and represented about 40% of the workforce. The partially skilled machine operators and the unskilled laborers each constituted about 30% of the workforce. After the coming of mass production, the Ford Highland Park factory employed a majority of unskilled (definitely not semiskilled) specialists, both as machine operators and assemblers. By 1917, the unskilled specialists amounted to over 55% of the Ford workforce.”
The speed with which workers worked, and the end of the independence of the craftsmen led to tremendous discontent:
“In 1913, the rates of absenteeism and labor turnover, or quit rate, were staggering. Daily absenteeism averaged 10 percent per day, which meant that around 1,300-1,400 extra workers needed to be hired to keep the integrated production system in operation. With a yearly labor turnover rate of 370 percent, Ford managers had to hire 52,000 workers to maintain Highland Park’s existing workforce. Another indication of worker discontent was the flurry of union activities when both the radical Industrial Workers of the World and the more conservative American Federation of Labor threatened to capitalize on this.”
By introducing the prospect of receiving $5 a day (which doubled the average wage at the time) Ford basically solved the labor problems.
The high wages bought cooperation with the new methods of production.
Ultimately, the main objective of work reorganization, line production, and the social engineering of workers’ lives was to produce more and more Model T Fords to match the enormous and growing popular demand for them. Once Ford officials solved their labor problems, the powerful new production system proved hugely successful and profitable. As a measure of the success, consider the enormous amounts of money Ford invested for Model T production. Between 1910 and 1919, he invested millions of dollars in the new Highland Park factory, he more than doubled the wages of thousands of workers, he reduced the Model T’s price from around $800 to $350, and he became the world’s first billionaire.
This established a pattern which basically persisted (with interruptions such as the Great Depression) right up through the golden age of the post-war Economic expansion from 1945 to the 1970s. Very rapid assembly line work creates tremendous increases in output per hour of work – out of which, business can afford to pay higher wages. These higher wages between 1945 and 1970 ultimately produced the great American middle class …
Social mobility is one of the keys to the 20th century – it represents the success of the “American dream.” But it is essential to remember that it was partial.
In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States we read the following:
“A study of immigrants in N Y between 1905 and 1915 finds that 32 percent of Italians and Jews rose out of the manual class to higher levels … But it was also true that many Italian immigrants did not find the opportunities inviting enough for them to stay. In one four-year period, 73 left NY for every 100 that arrived. Still enough Italians became construction workers, enough Jews became businessmen and professionals to create a middle-class cushion for class conflict.”
At this point, I want to get to the section of the novel related to the “revolt” by a group led by Coalhouse Walker, Jr.
You have to understand that when the beginning of the novel says “There were no Negroes” to a large extent that was true. To most northerners, blacks were invisible. For example, they represented less that 2% of the population of New York State in both 1900 and 1910 – The great migration north did not begin till around the time of World War I – and after that it was extremely dramatic. In the period covered by the novel, however, they represented a small part of the population.
But they had always been there --- and from time to time (such as in the New York City Draft riots of 1863) they had been subjected to organized violence by the white population and the authorities. In fact, there was what was called in the early years of the 20th century a “race riot” in 1900 in New York City after a black man allegedly stabbed a white plainclothes police officer.
By the way, it is important to understand that these early 20th century race riots were not what we have become accustomed to seeing on the news in the context of the 1960s or the riot in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict – these “race riots” were situations where white mobs would burn businesses owned by African Americans, beat or even kill African Americans that they found on the streets – often attacking residences of African Americans as well. (And of course some blacks would fight back – leaving some white casualties as well).
In fact, the settlement of Harlem after 1910 was the result of significant numbers of blacks being driven out of a neighborhood further downtown.
In 1902 when Ragtime opens, blacks in the United States had reached a kind of “Nadir” of oppression. (In 1901 there were 99 lynchings for example!). I already mentioned disenfranchisement in the South --- in 1895 Booker T. Washington (the man who the authorities called upon to attempt to “persuade” Coalhouse Walker to give up!) had given a major speech at the Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta. The speech catapulted Washington to the position of leader of African Americans.
In that speech he promised acceptance of the loss of political rights in the South and touted the value of black labor to southern agriculture and industry. His educational philosophy was to train African Americans for “useful work” (as opposed to “intellectual work”) and to attempt to persuade whites that they had no longer to fear blacks --- in one perfect metaphor he stated – “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
However, in fairness to Washington, he was not merely surrendering to white supremacy – he was also charting a course of self reliance – economic achievement – for the black population.
Nevertheless, in the context of the early years of the 20th century, his accommodationist approach coincided with what David Levering Lewis, the great biographer of W.E.B. DuBois described as a descent … “into the caste status of subhumans in the South and into a marginalized mass in the North … “
W.E.B. DuBois was by the turn of the 20th century perhaps the most accomplished African American academic in the US. Having completed a brilliant Ph D at Harvard in 1898, he was appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to do a sociological study of the black population of Philadelphia which was published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro.
According to his biographer, Lewis, at the turn of the century DuBois agonized “that the humanity of an entire race was again a serious national question …
“The ethos, science and propaganda of racial dehumanization and Bookerite compromises … unsettled and finally drove DuBois into the ranks of the so-called civil rights radicals.
“It was grim enough that his people were being lynched in the South and ghettoized in the North but there now loomed the even more horrendous prospect that such brutalities would cease to be deplored as un-American and become, … officially sanctioned instruments of racial subjugation.
“With rare exception, noted anthropologists located Negroes somewhere on the frontier between the great apes and hominids. Biologists found their average brain weight less than Causcasians’ … Psychologiests identified a primal sexuality and irrationality in Negroes … The national white consensus emerging at the turn of the century was that African Americans were inferior human beings whose predicament was three parts their own making and two parts the consequence of misguided white philanthropy.”
And so DuBois chose to publish, a rebuttal to Booker T. Washington in a book of essays called The Souls of Black Folk. I recommend highly that anyone interested in this issue have a look at the essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in that book.
DuBois rejected Washington’s accommodationism –
“In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses … that a people who surrender voluntarily such respect or cease striving for it are not worth civilizing.”
Lewis elaborated: “Washington would have his people [i.e., blacks] renounce three means of empowerment: political power, civil rights and higher education.”
The publication of that book represented a split with Washington’s accommodationism and foreshadowed the creation in 1910 of the NAACP –
From that point onward, there were fierce black and white advocates for racial equality whose dogged intellectual and political work would finally bear fruit after World War II …
What has this got to do with the Coalhouse Walker, Jr. episodes in Ragtime?
Here I would like to suggest that Doctorow’s genius as a writer takes over from his desire – as quoted by Prof. Beagle – to tell the story of historical experience as “how it felt.”
There is no doubt that the injustice visited upon Coalhouse Walker, JR. – including the virtual murder of his bride to be (and mother of his child) by police who were guarding the vice president -- could have induced the retaliatory rage that led to his taking up arms for justice ---
I propose a slight detour and a question for the group. Was Coalhouse Walker, Jr justified to retaliating with violence for the crimes committed against his property, dignity and family?
That will be one of the potential paper topics I propose for you
Despite the rhetorical differences between DuBois and Washington, the anti-acommodationist positions of people like DuBois were purely political. They may have been agitational, but they were not physically confrontational!! DuBois provided intellectual justification for strong, principled resistance but in the context of 1910 he would have recoiled with horror from activities such as were undertaken by Coalhouse Walker, Jr. and his allies.
I believe that Doctorow was reading backwards from the “rebellions” of the 1960s where there was burning and looting (and sniper fire) in Newark and Detroit. Even though most of the dead were blacks and most of the property destroyed was where blacks lived, these rebellions moved and shocked the nation into awareness. The result was a national commission that produced The Kerner Report and more importantly – a big push for black advancement. Blacks suddenly became much more prominent on television and in movies and in corporate and academic America – and affirmative action actually began to be taken seriously in the early 1970s
Sorry to be so blunt – but it was almost as if the cliché: “The only thing these people [=white America] understand in violence!” had been proven right. White America actually woke up to the plight of northern blacks in the 1960s as a result of the rebellions in Newark, Detroit and elsewhere.
Ragtime was written in the aftermath of these experiences and though I haven’t asked Doctorow about this – I believe he had to have been informed by the responses to those explosions of violence when he imagined Coalhouse Walker, Jr. following his rage wherever it took him --- something that perhaps many aggrieved African Americans felt (here’s that term “how it felt”) but never acted upon in the first decade of the 20th century.
[for a footnoted version of this, please e-mail Michael Meeropol at mameerop@wnec.edu]
E. L. Doctorow was once asked why he situates his novels in a historical period. He answered that:
“A historical period gives you closure. In other words, you can write about a region, take an area to write about … or you can take a period of time to write about, and it's the same nice kind of enframing of facts for you to build with. I don't have any particular affection for any period. Whatever images move me or evoke something within me is usually the reason for the books getting done.”
The book, Ragtime, is clearly enframed by the period of time it covers – roughly from 1900 to 1917. Please note the double-meaning of the title. Ragtime is a musical form and it plays an important role in the novel. But it is also a time in American history – a time where change and struggle were central.
My role in this presentation is to give you my sense of some of the historical background to the novel – to elaborate on some of the themes that Doctorow introduces us to.
TWO EMPHASES FOR THIS LECTURE
I have chosen to focus first, on the economic transformations represented by Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan, and, second, on the demographic and cultural transformations represented by the story-line around Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the black ragtime pianist. I could just as easily have focused on labor struggles, feminism, anarchism and imperialism – all of which play an important role both in that period of American history and in the novel. However, I only have 50 minutes!
Last week, Professor Beagle ended his lecture on The March by suggesting that despite the victory of the Union Army and the defeat in the Civil War of what the northerners called the slave power, we, the United States, are still on that march over 100 years later --- the “march” to expunge the sin of slavery from our nation’s DNA. I have put the text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural onto the course’s web site and want to begin my presentation where Dr. Beagle’s ended his.
Lincoln hoped the war would end but when he delivered that inaugural, it hadn’t ended yet. And so he said that if the war would go on
“until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil [-- meaning unpaid labor] shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether"
In an extremely prophetic statement in Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson had written:
“There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other….. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. ... And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: …”
One can read this as having predicted the bloody Civil War – the “true and righteous judgment of the Lord” in Lincoln’s words.
And yet Professor Beagle asserted that in the various ambiguities introduced in The March – particularly the failures on the part of some white unionists to fully embrace the complete humanity of the freed slaves, the successful assassination of President Lincoln and our knowledge with 20-20 hindsight that the promise of, to use Lincoln’s words at the Gettysburg Address, “a new birth of freedom” – all of those hopes were dashed in the decades following the Civil War.
The opportunities for the ex slaves in the post Civil War era at first seemed boundless. Guaranteed the rights of citizenship by the 14th Amendment and the right to vote by the 15th Amendment – their ability to buy property, hold elective office, exercise political power through the Republican Party (yes – the Republican party was once the party of black ex-slaves as well as business entrepreneurs and small independent mid-western farmers!) led to great advances in the South – advances which were stopped and crushed by an alliance between domestic terrorists known as the Ku Klux Klan and the racism that Doctorow so clearly portrays in The March and which is so clearly evident in the longer quote from Jefferson which I posted to the internet over the weekend.
I do not want to walk us – or march us if we want to continue the metaphor from Professor Beagle’s lecture -- through the history that African Americans endured between the end of the Civil War and the events described in Ragtime but I want to
describe for you briefly the situation – the context – if you will for the section of the novel devoted to the reaction of Coalhouse Walker, Jr. to the indignities heaped upon him by the volunteer fire-fighters of New Rochelle under the leadership of one Will Conklin.
By the time 1900 rolled around, African Americans had been consigned to second class citizenship in the South while northern politicians had completely abandoned their cause. The white population had come to accept racist stereotyping – perhaps it was more virulent than it had been at the time of the Civil War –
For example: In 1914, a movie was made: Birth of a Nation. (We have it in our library – though it takes a strong stomach and spirit, I believe it would be valuable for most people to watch it) This film was wildly popular and it was shown to President Woodrow Wilson at the White House – where he gave it his full political and professional imprimatur. To quote one description: “President and former history professor Woodrow Wilson … proclaimed it not only historically accurate, but like ‘history writ with lightning’." In that movie the heroic southern whites after being defeated in the Civil War win back their rights from lascivious freed blacks who are dominating the post-Civil War governments with corruption --- the heroic southerners create the Ku Klux Klan to free the South from post-Civil War bondage ---
Thus, the true “birth of a nation” – The Civil War ends slavery and solidifies the union – while the second half of the movie frees southern whites, solidifying white supremacy. The last scene in the film is on election day. Blacks emerge from their shacks to see a group of Klansmen in full regalia ready to take care of them … They look, and give up their right to vote by going back into their shacks!
So that’s one context of the novel Ragtime – the second class citizenship of African Americans and the virulent racism of the white population.
But there was a lot of other history that America experienced between the end of the Civil War and 1900.
The major economic transformation was from a nation of farmers where the majority of the population was employed in agriculture to a nation where the majority of the population worked outside of agriculture and industry was “coming of age…”
The coming of age of industry between the Civil War and the end of the century meant a significant increase in the percentage of the population who worked for wages – The Jeffersonian ideal at the end of the 18th century was for a nation of independent farmers and independent craftsmen. And certainly, aside from slaves and newly arrived immigrants, the male population earned their living mostly by way of these independent activities. In fact, according to Eric Foner’s book The Story of American Freedom, the 18th century conception of freedom revolved around such economic independence. The idea of working for someone else – even for a wage – was considered a state of relative “unfreedom…” That supposed unfreedom was the basis of the original laws in most State Constitutions which gave only owners of property the right to vote because they were the ones who were truly free to exercise the franchise and they were the ones with a true stake in the well-being of society.
But Foner points out that in the context of the Civil War and the growth of wage labor after the Civil War, a new conception of freedom emerged – the idea that working for a wage enhanced the dignity of man – Certainly, the ex-slaves felt that way -- Here is how the runaway slave Frederick Douglass described his feelings after securing employment as a free laborer in New Bedford Mass.
“I found employment, the third day after my arrival, in stowing a sloop with a load of oil. It was new, dirty, and hard work for me; but I went at it with a glad heart and a willing hand. I was now my own master. It was a happy moment, the rapture of which can be understood only by those who have been slaves. It was the first work, the reward of which was to be entirely my own. There was no Master Hugh standing ready, the moment I earned the money, to rob me of it. I worked that day with a pleasure I had never before experienced. I was at work for myself and newly-married wife. It was to me the starting-point of a new existence.”
That transformation from independent farmers and artisans to tenant farmers and wage laborers occurred in the context of the rise of industry and commerce until it came to dominate the American economy. Even before the time period described by Ragtime, the value of manufactures was three times the value of agricultural products in 1890. Between 1880 and 1900, to take a few examples, many industries more than tripled their total value added (the production attributable to that industry net its raw materials cost).
Machinery increased fourfold from 111 million to 432 million.
Iron and Steel from 105 m. to 339. m.
Men’s clothing from 78 m to 262 m.
Another major transformation that actually occurred in a sort of continuous process from the 1870s through the turn of the century was the rise of giant corporations and the end of American industry as a relatively competitive system. A competitive system has lots of small businesses vying for the consumers’ dollars – forced to charge “the market price” because their levels of output were such a small percentage of the entire industry that they could not affect the price by increasing or decreasing their total production. After the Civil War, as railroads knitted the entire nation into the beginning of a national market, businesses that had only sold locally could now sell regionally and even nationally. At first this led to expanded output – but as all previously isolated firms increased output to sell to larger and larger areas they came into competition with each other. At this point, these firms behaved just as in the textbook discussions you have seen in Principles of Economics classes when they describe perfect competition – they were price takers with no control over the price they sold their products at and thus were helpless before the fall in prices as a result of all that new competition.
This led to efforts gain some control over prices --- To make a long story short (and I make this a significantly longer story in my American Economic History class) by the end of the 19th century, many large firms had figured out ways to reduce competition. Usually this involved either merging with competitors or beating them and driving them out of the industry. The rise of the great American companies: Standard Oil of New Jersey, Swift, Armour, American Tobacco, International Harvester, involved not just the creation of giant businesses but a significant reduction in competition by price. The end of the 19th century saw the first billion dollar corporation, the U. S. Steel Corporation, created with the help of the investment banker J.P. Morgan – an important character in Ragtimel. Morgan engineered the creation of this company because Andrew Carnegie who had made his fortune in steel was such a tough competitor he was driving steel prices down and thereby harming the industry. He was persuaded to sell out by Morgan and the result was that for at least 60 years, there was no price competition among steel makers – instead, all of US Steel’s competitors let that company act as a “price leader” – and instead of undercutting the prices charged by US steel, they merely priced so as to “meet” the competition. (This last line is a direct quote from an executive at one of US Steel’s competitors before a Senate committee in the 1950s!)
So when we meet Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan we are meeting individuals at the top of the economic food chain in the first decades of the 20th century. Morgan is the financier, the banker – the fixer – Henry Ford is the man who according to some economic historians put his stamp on the entire century. Some economists even refer to the kind of economy our nation experienced during the 20th century as fordism – a system dependent on mass production techniques to cut costs and spread the opportunities of high wages and high consumption spending to workers.
So the prelude to the events of Doctorow’s novel as far as industry is concerned is that by 1900 the US was an industrial powerhouse – that a group of captains of industry had arisen in the course of the last third of the 19th century – and that American industry had entered a consolidation phase – where the era of many firms competing with none big enough to “rig” the market gave way to the rise of giant firms, many of whom had significant power within their selling markets to be price makers instead of price takers.
Two topics for this lecture:
First and foremost: racism – the “ambiguity” left over from the Civil War and from the novel The March.
On the first page of Ragtime, Doctorow introduces us to the wonderful world of Father/Mother/and the rest of the family in New Rochelle. But, on the very last line of the first page we are introduced to somewhat discordant notes – “there was a lot of sexual fainting” – “there were no Negroes” -- and flipping to the second page, “There were no immigrants.”
Come to find out, of course, that there were “Negro servants” one of whom delivers an illegitimate baby and tries to “get rid of it” – only to have the infant rescued by “Mother” – a rescue that changes the dynamics of the family completely, and ultimately brings the family into contact with one of the truly heroic characters of the novel – Coalhouse Walker, Jr.
The world of immigrants arrives on page 13 of the novel when we are thrust into the world of a central character – tateh (which by the way is the Yiddish word for “father”).
The tide of immigrants into the US – particularly into the urban centers of the US is only one aspect of the transformation of the US between the Civil War and World War I.
I have some data on the handout sheet representing the transformation of the US between 1900 and World War I.
US Population: 1900 – approximately 76 million
1917 – 103.3 million --- population grew by 35% -- averaged 2.1% per year – that’s higher than during the baby boom after World War II.
In 1900, the immigrant population in the US was 13.6% of the population.
By 1910, despite rapid population growth – the immigrant population had grown to 14.7% of the population.
In New York State whose largest city is the center for the action in Ragtime the immigrant population was 26.1% on 1900 and 30.2% in 1910.
New York City’s population was 3.4 m in 1900 and 4.8 m in 1910.
US urban and rural percentages of the population:
1900 – 39.6 to 60.4
1910 – 45.6 to 54.4
1920 – 51.2 to 48.8.
NY State was already 72.9% urban in 1900.
Let me tell you a bit about what I’ve referred to above as fordism.
The transformation of the production process occurred between 1910 and 1914 at the Ford Motor Company’s Highland Michigan Plant.
The principle of “scientific management” had been propounded by Frederick W. Taylor. The key was to divide up the task (say of making a car) into discrete, separate activities.
The next step was for the engineers to design machines to do these activities. The real innovation was the assembly line. Every input into the ultimate car would move [here I’m quoting from the piece I put on the course’s web site]
“… from foundry to machine shop to assembly department, seemingly flowing from tiny streams to small rivers and ultimately to the final assembly line. “
This change was profound for the workers. Work became routinized and monotonous – Adam Smith had warned in The Wealth of Nations that if a workman were to be relegated to doing a small simple task over and over again, he would become as “stupid” as a human being can be.
The introduction of the assembly line changed industrial processes in the direction Smith warned against --- it reduced the role of skilled workers while increasing the control of the speed with which workers worked.
The change was remarkable. Quoting again:
“At the end of the nineteenth century, the all-round craftsman dominated the workshop and represented about 40% of the workforce. The partially skilled machine operators and the unskilled laborers each constituted about 30% of the workforce. After the coming of mass production, the Ford Highland Park factory employed a majority of unskilled (definitely not semiskilled) specialists, both as machine operators and assemblers. By 1917, the unskilled specialists amounted to over 55% of the Ford workforce.”
The speed with which workers worked, and the end of the independence of the craftsmen led to tremendous discontent:
“In 1913, the rates of absenteeism and labor turnover, or quit rate, were staggering. Daily absenteeism averaged 10 percent per day, which meant that around 1,300-1,400 extra workers needed to be hired to keep the integrated production system in operation. With a yearly labor turnover rate of 370 percent, Ford managers had to hire 52,000 workers to maintain Highland Park’s existing workforce. Another indication of worker discontent was the flurry of union activities when both the radical Industrial Workers of the World and the more conservative American Federation of Labor threatened to capitalize on this.”
By introducing the prospect of receiving $5 a day (which doubled the average wage at the time) Ford basically solved the labor problems.
The high wages bought cooperation with the new methods of production.
Ultimately, the main objective of work reorganization, line production, and the social engineering of workers’ lives was to produce more and more Model T Fords to match the enormous and growing popular demand for them. Once Ford officials solved their labor problems, the powerful new production system proved hugely successful and profitable. As a measure of the success, consider the enormous amounts of money Ford invested for Model T production. Between 1910 and 1919, he invested millions of dollars in the new Highland Park factory, he more than doubled the wages of thousands of workers, he reduced the Model T’s price from around $800 to $350, and he became the world’s first billionaire.
This established a pattern which basically persisted (with interruptions such as the Great Depression) right up through the golden age of the post-war Economic expansion from 1945 to the 1970s. Very rapid assembly line work creates tremendous increases in output per hour of work – out of which, business can afford to pay higher wages. These higher wages between 1945 and 1970 ultimately produced the great American middle class …
Social mobility is one of the keys to the 20th century – it represents the success of the “American dream.” But it is essential to remember that it was partial.
In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States we read the following:
“A study of immigrants in N Y between 1905 and 1915 finds that 32 percent of Italians and Jews rose out of the manual class to higher levels … But it was also true that many Italian immigrants did not find the opportunities inviting enough for them to stay. In one four-year period, 73 left NY for every 100 that arrived. Still enough Italians became construction workers, enough Jews became businessmen and professionals to create a middle-class cushion for class conflict.”
At this point, I want to get to the section of the novel related to the “revolt” by a group led by Coalhouse Walker, Jr.
You have to understand that when the beginning of the novel says “There were no Negroes” to a large extent that was true. To most northerners, blacks were invisible. For example, they represented less that 2% of the population of New York State in both 1900 and 1910 – The great migration north did not begin till around the time of World War I – and after that it was extremely dramatic. In the period covered by the novel, however, they represented a small part of the population.
But they had always been there --- and from time to time (such as in the New York City Draft riots of 1863) they had been subjected to organized violence by the white population and the authorities. In fact, there was what was called in the early years of the 20th century a “race riot” in 1900 in New York City after a black man allegedly stabbed a white plainclothes police officer.
By the way, it is important to understand that these early 20th century race riots were not what we have become accustomed to seeing on the news in the context of the 1960s or the riot in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict – these “race riots” were situations where white mobs would burn businesses owned by African Americans, beat or even kill African Americans that they found on the streets – often attacking residences of African Americans as well. (And of course some blacks would fight back – leaving some white casualties as well).
In fact, the settlement of Harlem after 1910 was the result of significant numbers of blacks being driven out of a neighborhood further downtown.
In 1902 when Ragtime opens, blacks in the United States had reached a kind of “Nadir” of oppression. (In 1901 there were 99 lynchings for example!). I already mentioned disenfranchisement in the South --- in 1895 Booker T. Washington (the man who the authorities called upon to attempt to “persuade” Coalhouse Walker to give up!) had given a major speech at the Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta. The speech catapulted Washington to the position of leader of African Americans.
In that speech he promised acceptance of the loss of political rights in the South and touted the value of black labor to southern agriculture and industry. His educational philosophy was to train African Americans for “useful work” (as opposed to “intellectual work”) and to attempt to persuade whites that they had no longer to fear blacks --- in one perfect metaphor he stated – “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
However, in fairness to Washington, he was not merely surrendering to white supremacy – he was also charting a course of self reliance – economic achievement – for the black population.
Nevertheless, in the context of the early years of the 20th century, his accommodationist approach coincided with what David Levering Lewis, the great biographer of W.E.B. DuBois described as a descent … “into the caste status of subhumans in the South and into a marginalized mass in the North … “
W.E.B. DuBois was by the turn of the 20th century perhaps the most accomplished African American academic in the US. Having completed a brilliant Ph D at Harvard in 1898, he was appointed by the University of Pennsylvania to do a sociological study of the black population of Philadelphia which was published in 1899 as The Philadelphia Negro.
According to his biographer, Lewis, at the turn of the century DuBois agonized “that the humanity of an entire race was again a serious national question …
“The ethos, science and propaganda of racial dehumanization and Bookerite compromises … unsettled and finally drove DuBois into the ranks of the so-called civil rights radicals.
“It was grim enough that his people were being lynched in the South and ghettoized in the North but there now loomed the even more horrendous prospect that such brutalities would cease to be deplored as un-American and become, … officially sanctioned instruments of racial subjugation.
“With rare exception, noted anthropologists located Negroes somewhere on the frontier between the great apes and hominids. Biologists found their average brain weight less than Causcasians’ … Psychologiests identified a primal sexuality and irrationality in Negroes … The national white consensus emerging at the turn of the century was that African Americans were inferior human beings whose predicament was three parts their own making and two parts the consequence of misguided white philanthropy.”
And so DuBois chose to publish, a rebuttal to Booker T. Washington in a book of essays called The Souls of Black Folk. I recommend highly that anyone interested in this issue have a look at the essay “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in that book.
DuBois rejected Washington’s accommodationism –
“In the history of nearly all other races and peoples the doctrine preached has been that manly self-respect is worth more than lands and houses … that a people who surrender voluntarily such respect or cease striving for it are not worth civilizing.”
Lewis elaborated: “Washington would have his people [i.e., blacks] renounce three means of empowerment: political power, civil rights and higher education.”
The publication of that book represented a split with Washington’s accommodationism and foreshadowed the creation in 1910 of the NAACP –
From that point onward, there were fierce black and white advocates for racial equality whose dogged intellectual and political work would finally bear fruit after World War II …
What has this got to do with the Coalhouse Walker, Jr. episodes in Ragtime?
Here I would like to suggest that Doctorow’s genius as a writer takes over from his desire – as quoted by Prof. Beagle – to tell the story of historical experience as “how it felt.”
There is no doubt that the injustice visited upon Coalhouse Walker, JR. – including the virtual murder of his bride to be (and mother of his child) by police who were guarding the vice president -- could have induced the retaliatory rage that led to his taking up arms for justice ---
I propose a slight detour and a question for the group. Was Coalhouse Walker, Jr justified to retaliating with violence for the crimes committed against his property, dignity and family?
That will be one of the potential paper topics I propose for you
Despite the rhetorical differences between DuBois and Washington, the anti-acommodationist positions of people like DuBois were purely political. They may have been agitational, but they were not physically confrontational!! DuBois provided intellectual justification for strong, principled resistance but in the context of 1910 he would have recoiled with horror from activities such as were undertaken by Coalhouse Walker, Jr. and his allies.
I believe that Doctorow was reading backwards from the “rebellions” of the 1960s where there was burning and looting (and sniper fire) in Newark and Detroit. Even though most of the dead were blacks and most of the property destroyed was where blacks lived, these rebellions moved and shocked the nation into awareness. The result was a national commission that produced The Kerner Report and more importantly – a big push for black advancement. Blacks suddenly became much more prominent on television and in movies and in corporate and academic America – and affirmative action actually began to be taken seriously in the early 1970s
Sorry to be so blunt – but it was almost as if the cliché: “The only thing these people [=white America] understand in violence!” had been proven right. White America actually woke up to the plight of northern blacks in the 1960s as a result of the rebellions in Newark, Detroit and elsewhere.
Ragtime was written in the aftermath of these experiences and though I haven’t asked Doctorow about this – I believe he had to have been informed by the responses to those explosions of violence when he imagined Coalhouse Walker, Jr. following his rage wherever it took him --- something that perhaps many aggrieved African Americans felt (here’s that term “how it felt”) but never acted upon in the first decade of the 20th century.
[for a footnoted version of this, please e-mail Michael Meeropol at mameerop@wnec.edu]
posted by WNECONOMICS at 10:07 AM
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