Film

In my essay on “Emergent Ethnic Literatures” for The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, I noted that the committee charged in 2002 with picking a book that might serve as the basis for a “One Book, One City” reading program managed to deem E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) insufficiently multicultural for its purposes. Perhaps, I suggested, the members of the committee hadn’t finished the book and therefore hadn’t gotten to the final paragraph which includes this passage about the reconstituted, multicultural family that has been assembled from the three families — one white, one African American, one Jewish immigrant — whose lives the novel has charted:

One morning Tateh looked out the window of his study and saw the three children sitting on the lawn. Behind them on the sidewalk was a tricycle. They were talking and sunning themselves. His daughter, with dark hair, his tow-headed stepson and his legal responsibility, the schwartze child. He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again. Actually not one movie but several were made of this vision.

The movies to which the passage refers are, of course, the popular Our Gang shorts produced by Hal Roach between 1922 and 1938 and later syndicated for television as Little Rascals. The first films were silent; sound films were produced beginning in 1929. Class and race were always central issues in the films, which depicted the adventures of a group of poor ragamuffins who often came into conflict with snotty rich kids.

At the end of my lecture on Ragtime yesterday, I promised to post an example of an Our Gang film. Below is the 1930 film Bear Shooters, which was the 98th Our Gang short and the tenth to feature sound.

It’s worth noting that Doctorow’s novel doesn’t end with Tateh’s vision. Instead, this cosmopolitan optimism is tempered by the final image of Harry K. Thaw, scion of white privilege, ultimately getting away with murder:

And by that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano. We had fought and won the war. The anarchist Emma Goldman had been deported. The beautiful and passionate Evelyn Nesbit had lost her looks and fallen into obscurity. And Harry K Thaw, having obtained his release from the insane asylum, marched annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade.

Thaw, you’ll remember, had murdered the architect Stanford K. White, who’d been having an affair with Thaw’s wife Evelyn Nesbit. White’s murder essentially kicks off the plot of Ragtime.