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Chapter 17
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
Tateh has caught the entrepreneurial sentiment of the country. He’s done striking and dying in the streets for a few more pennies each week. He sees factory work for what it is: soulless replication. Everywhere in the country, there is a mania for replication. In Detroit, Henry Ford is perfecting the idea of the assembly line, based on the belief that the average human is too stupid to earn a good living. Ford breaks the complex job of assembling a car down into foolproof steps and assigns each one to a single worker. At first, the time between one Model T rolling off the assembly line and the next is six minutes. This impresses everybody but Ford. He knows he can refine the process of “industrial manufacture” even more until not just the parts but the workers themselves are interchangeable.
This brief chapter links Tateh’s story to the story of the United States and the ideal of the American Dream by drawing a line between his small-scale entrepreneurial spirit and the large-scale projects of a man like Henry Ford. Although Ford didn’t have Tateh’s double disadvantage of being an immigrant, he also started life in a lowly place as the son of midwestern farmers. Yet he rose to become one of the most important and wealthy businessmen of the 20th century. But while it’s the promise of success stories like Ford’s that drew immigrants to America, his success also carries a warning, because it is built on treating humans like cogs in a machine. This suggests something antithetical in the American project itself (at least in the era) to the recognition of human dignity and hints at the emptiness of the American Dream mythology.
Themes
