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Chapter 19
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
One snowy winter day, Ford arrives for a light lunch (only seven courses plus coffee) with Morgan. He respects Morgan’s carefully ordered world as much as Morgan respects Ford’s fine-tuned assembly lines. After lunch, Morgan shows Ford into the grand library he had built adjoining his brownstone mansion, where he offers the manufacturer a cigar (Ford refuses) and begins to explain what he considers their common interest.
The book slyly mocks the blinkered worldview of the extremely wealthy by categorizing seven courses as a “light” lunch while people like Tateh, Little Girl, and the other poor workers in the factories owned by men like Ford can barely afford to eat. No comfort is denied to a man like Morgan, while people starve or die of dehydration in the downtown tenements.
Themes
Morgan thinks that Ford’s industrial breakthrough—capitalizing on interchangeable parts—reflects natural truth. The individual members of a species are essentially interchangeable. Within humanity, for example, only the smallest differences distinguish individuals. Ford interrupts to point out that Jewish people are the exception to this rule. Momentarily disconcerted, Morgan falls silent. Then, he takes another tack. He warns Ford against arrogantly assuming that his success is the result of his efforts alone, and he offers to reveal the “patterns of order and repetition” that give the world meaning.
By making the value of replication an article of faith for men like Morgan and Ford, rather than the transformative figures of Tateh, Younger Brother, and another still to be introduced in the novel’s second half, the book classifies replication as outmoded, limited, and elitist. Despite casting its fictious characters as types (Mother, Father, Tateh, Little Boy/Girl), the book provides each of its nameless protagonists with individual temperaments, eloquently claiming that they’re not interchangeable cogs in a vast social machine. Readers should keep in mind that Ford and Morgan only have room for certain types of people in their visionary worlds. Although Ford’s comments here are relatively mild, he was virulently antisemitic throughout his life. He even published a book of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories which later inspired some of the views of Adolf Hitler.
Themes
Morgan leads Ford into a secret room at the heart of the library which, he reveals, contains manuscripts and artefacts pertaining to the Hermetica—mystical knowledge first uncovered by Egyptian priest Hermes Trismegistus and later preserved by various secret societies throughout history. Morgan claims that the enlightenment was a conspiracy to hide the mystical truths of reality. Intent on proving his theories, he’s in the process of planning a series of expeditions to Egypt. He invites Ford to join him (free of charge, of course) so Ford also has an opportunity to discover the truth about the universe—and himself.
Morgan’s interests in secret societies, ancient mystical knowledge, and conspiracy theories all points toward the past—rather than the present or the future—as the source of cultural power. In this way, his views fall out of alignment with those the book (and its characters) expresses, which on the whole look hopefully toward the future as the place where the best version of humanity may someday be found.
Themes
Ford sits silently for a long moment, then he asks Morgan bluntly if he means reincarnation. Of course, Ford goes on, he believes in reincarnation. He can’t understand his own particular genius otherwise. What’s more, he didn’t need private scholars or archaeological digs to prove it. He discovered the truth in a little book called An Eastern Fakir’s Eternal Wisdom, which he purchased from the Franklin Novelty Company for just 25 cents. Morgan finds Ford’s blasé attitude disappointing. But he’s excited to find someone else—someone whose genius and acumen he respects—who believes the same things he does. He and Ford are thus the founding—and only—members of The Pyramid, a secret and exclusive society which funds esoteric research to this day.
Ford’s plainspokenness (and the places he’s done his homework) offer a pointed reminder that he didn’t start out on the same social plane that Morgan did—he’s earned his wealth and power, while Morgan (at least in part) inherited his. This suggests that the American Dream does, in fact, work—although it often requires a person to make an audacious break with their roots. Readers should note the name of Ford’s book, “Fakir,” looks like an exotic name, but it also renders the title “An Eastern Fakir’s Eternal Wisdom.” Fakirs are Muslim ascetics who renounce worldly possessions as part of their spiritual quest, and in by the early 20th century this word was used more generally to indicate religious practitioners of any faith who renounced their worldly possessions, particularly those residing in the Middle East and South Asia. The fact that Ford’s book was published and sold by a novelty company, however, suggests its dubious origin.
Themes
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