Wealth in America
In class Pomona brought up how the presentation of class struggle in Ragtime is Michael Mooresque, starting from building sympathy towards the working class by laying out the facts of their plights and then switching to a scene of overindulgent wealth. Clearly, Doctorow does not kindly look upon the rich that dominated the early 1900s as he points out how greed creates and feeds the wealthy’s mentality that they are superior to other people through the line, “the laboring man would be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, said one man, but the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom had given the control of the property interests of this country.” Then Doctorow elicits disgust, as he nonchalantly describes the workers’ deaths and maiming that allow the wealthy to fund balls that make a farce of charity. When reading this passage, I felt disillusionment with the regulatory system that upheld the rich at the expense of the poor and I realized that the themes of...