Of the Anarchist and the Media Star (Doctorow's Ragtime Again)

One of the more striking episodes in E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime was its (fictional) meeting between the anarchist Emma Goldman and the model and actress Evelyn Nesbit, and what the former thought of the latter. In his narration describing Nesbit as essentially the first sex symbol, he offered a fairly uncommon view of the invention as "a greater threat to the workingman's interests than mine owners or steel manufacturers." Seeing Nesbit's picture in the paper, Goldman thought, "the laborer . . . dreams not of justice but of being rich."

It is a particularly provocative variation on the theme of working class people being dissuaded from radicalism by a preference for thinking of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed capitalists" instead--and for his part Doctorow declares that those leftists who perceived in Nesbit that "greater threat" had "correctly prophesied."

I suspect otherwise--that Doctorow takes too much for granted, not least the "temporarily embarrassed capitalist" self-image whose actual pervasiveness, certainly among those who can be described as a "workingman" or "laborer," is open to argument, and encouraged by much, much more than sexual fantasy. Still, it does seem to me a natural thing for a writer from a generation raised in an age of centrist psychologism setting great store by the power of sexual impulses and human irrationality generally, and rather less by the possibility of working-class politics or positive social change, to think so.