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Chapter 16
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ragtime, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The American Dream
Replication and Transformation
Freedom, Human Dignity, and Justice
The Cult of Celebrity
Women’s Roles
Social Inequities
Summary
Analysis
Two conductors haul Tateh over the railing and help him into the train, where he finds Little Girl alone in the car reserved for the Philadelphia-bound children. A doctor attends to his injuries. Slightly concussed, Tateh spends most of the trip south in a daze. In Philadelphia, he and Little Girl spend the night in the station. The attack at the Lawrence train station is front-page news the following morning. Tateh knows the strike will be won, but he also knows that the mill owner’s small concessions won’t be enough to transform the lives of the working class. He decides not to go back. They’ll start again in Pennsylvania with just the clothes on their backs (although Little Girl has a few changes of underwear), the $2.50 in Tateh’s pockets, and the two flipbooks.
In this pivotal trip to Philadelphia, Tateh has a revelation: incremental change is doomed to failure. Even the violence of the backlash against the strike will only result in a few extra cents a week for workers. Only radical change will get him out of the repeating patterns of poverty, oppression, and abuse—especially because the social and political elites benefit from the patterns that keep poor immigrant workers down.
Themes
Tateh and Little Girl spend the day exploring the city. It’s bitterly cold. They wander into a department store to warm up. The system of baskets on cables with which the clerks move goods and money around fascinates Little Girl. Back on the street, they pass the storefront of the Franklin Novelty Company. Little Girl looks only briefly over the variety of wares in its window—sneezing powder, whoopee cushions, magnetic rings, and the like—but Tateh remains transfixed for a long time. Eventually he goes inside and shows the proprietor one of his flipbooks. He leaves $25 richer, and with a commission for four more “movie books.”
The department store provides a stark reminder of material comforts available not just to the social elites like the Harry Thaws, Stanford Whites, and Mrs. Fishes of the world, but also to the growing American middle class. And these comforts are built on the exploitation and cheap labor of immigrants like Tateh. Little Girl’s fascination seems to renew Tateh’s commitment to leaving their lives of poverty behind. If this is the turning point in their American Dream story—the moment when Tateh begins to change his life—it’s a wry comment on American society that this happens in a department store.
Themes
