Women, likewise, believed in and worked for positive change. Political leaders resisted the unions, but most Americans were confident that humankind was moving toward perfection. The growth of labor unions, begun in the late nineteenth century, continued. Both the assembly line and the automobile greatly affected the course of American history. Some languished in a poverty they did not expect to find others found jobs in sweatshops still others manned posts in Henry Ford’s assembly line. Most settled in the cities as America became an urban rather than a rural nation. The population of America rose significantly during the period, influenced greatly by the flood of immigrants who washed over Ellis Island onto America’s shore. The time the book covers, roughly 1900-1917, the Ragtime Era, was a time of great social, political, scientific, and industrial change in America, reflected as well in the age’s other name-the Progressive Era. Both the content and the form of Ragtime support this theme. Generally, the characters who recognize the nature of the conflict fare much better than those who resist change. 1 Like Joplin’s caution for restraint in the face of an impulse for speed, most of the characters and events reflect the dialectical struggle between time’s inexorable force toward change and the human desire for stability. It is never right to play Ragtime fast.” This epigraph suggests the conflict that seems to hold together Doctorow’s odd mixture of fictional and historical characters and events: the struggle between change and stability. Doctorow’s Ragtime is, appropriately, a quotation from Scott Joplin: “Do not play this piece fast.
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