The real history behind 'Ragtime' on Broadway

Learn about the origins of ragtime music, the era in which the musical is set, and the historical figures featured in this story of NYC in the early 20th century.

Summary

• The Broadway musical Ragtime features multiple characters from early-20th century history
• Real-life figures seen alongside the fictional characters include Harry Houdini; Booker T. Washington; and Evelyn Nesbit
• Ragtime music originated during this time

"It was the music of something beginning." In the Broadway musical Ragtime, the syncopated, lively musical style of the title symbolizes the social changes of an era whose legacy is still being played out today. The more progressive characters can literally hear and play ragtime music that the more traditional characters struggle to grasp.

Based on the 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow, the Ragtime musical weaves together the experiences of three different groups — wealthy white Americans, African Americans, and immigrants, each represented by one family — living in New York City in the early 20th century. The second Broadway revival of Ragtime, now at Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont Theater, stars Caissie Levy as housewife Mother, Joshua Henry as Black musician Coalhouse Walker Jr., and Brandon Uranowitz as Latvian Jewish immigrant Tateh.

Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty, and Terence McNally's musical sets these fictional characters' lives amid real people and events. Scroll down to learn about the pivotal American era that inspired Ragtime, the historical figures who appear in the musical, and more.

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The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era immediately followed the Gilded Age in American history. Spanning from the 1890s to the early 1920s, it was an era of major change across society. The main characters in Ragtime come from different socioeconomic classes and have varying responses to the reforms being implemented in the world around them. Some reflected in the musical include:

• Social welfare programs, education reform, antitrust laws, and public health movements sprung up in response to industrialization, modernization, and the hoarding of wealth by so-called robber barons like J.P. Morgan, a character in the musical.
• Settlement houses were established to provide essential services to impoverished immigrants like Tateh and his daughter.
• The American Federation of Labor had just been founded, sparking movements for fair wages, anti-child labor laws, and more. A labor rights speech, delivered by union organizer Emma Goldman at Union Square, is featured in Ragtime.

Other prominent sociopolitical movements during this time included the temperance movement (which led to Prohibition) and the suffrage movement.

Ragtime music

Ragtime music originated at the beginning of the Progressive Era. Rooted in African American musical traditions from the South, the style is known for its syncopated rhythms — or ragged rhythms, hence the name. Ragtime is a precursor to jazz, swing, and classic Broadway music.

In Ragtime on Broadway, Coalhouse plays a song called "The Getting Ready Rag" as he prepares to win back his lover, Sarah. That song draws inspiration from the rags written by Scott Joplin, an influential musician known as “The King of Ragtime.” While ragtime music can be adapted for many different instruments, it is most commonly associated with the piano, which Coalhouse plays.

Historical figures who appear in the Ragtime musical

Ragtime centers on the journeys of the fictional Mother, Coalhouse, and Tateh, but they are surrounded by dramatized versions of historical figures of the era. Learn more below about the real people depicted in Ragtime on Broadway.

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was an anarchist and political activist in America known as “the high priestess of anarchy.” Like Tateh, she was a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, born in what is now Lithuania. Goldman was an accomplished writer and lecturer who advocated for labor rights, women's rights, and social issues. In real life and in the musical, she spoke against authority and capitalism, acting as a foil to industrialists like J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford. (In Ragtime's opening number, she calls these two men "the demons who are sucking your very souls dry.")

In Ragtime, Goldman also supports a Lawrence, Massachusetts strike in which Tateh participates. There really was a famous strike there, dubbed the Bread and Roses Strike, in 1912 in support of fair pay for immigrant textile mill workers.

Goldman actually appears in one other Broadway show: Assassins, where she inspires Leon Czolgosz to shoot President William McKinley — an event referenced in Ragtime.

Harry Houdini

Born Erik Weisz in Budapest, Hungary, illusionist and escape artist Harry Houdini came to America as a child and took the stage name Houdini in honor of French magician Jean Eugene Robert Houdin. Houdini became known for his seemingly impossible and daring escapes from handcuffs, straitjackets, and sealed spaces. At one point, he was the highest-paid performer in vaudeville.

As shown in the musical, Houdini also worked in silent films later in his career. Though he of course wouldn’t have worked for Tateh (who becomes known as "The Baron Ashkenazy"), he might have worked for a studio head from a similar background. Many early Hollywood producers, including Louis B. Mayer, were also Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Ragtime also nods to Houdini's interest in spiritualism; he is described as “wanting to believe there was more,” even though he spent many years exposing fake spiritualists. Several times throughout the show, the Little Boy (Mother's son) tells Houdini to "Warn the duke" — that is, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination led to the outbreak of World War I. Houdini encounters the Archduke in Ragtime and could have warned him if he'd understood the boy. This meeting, however, is entirely fictional; the "one genuine mystical experience" of Houdini's life was Doctorow's invention.

Evelyn Nesbit

Evelyn Nesbit was arguably the original influencer: the most photographed woman and ideal beauty standard of her time. As the musical states, “If she wore her hair in curls, every woman wore her hair in curls.” She was a successful model and chorus girl in 1906, when her railroad tycoon husband Harry K. Thaw shot her lover, Penn Station architect Stanford White, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden during a show. (The non-consensual start of their affair and the 30-year age gap between Nesbit and White — she was 15, he 45 — are left out of the musical.)

The newspapers called the murder “The Crime of the Century,” as Nesbit’s Ragtime song is titled, though it was the second 20th-century shooting to receive that name. (McKinley's 1901 assassination was the first.) They also called her "The Girl on the Red Velvet Swing" — shortened to “the girl on the swing” in the musical — in reference to a famous photograph of Nesbit in White’s apartment.

In the musical, we learn Nesbit’s story mostly through her vaudeville act. Though we glimpse hints of Nesbit’s cynicism underneath the smiles — especially in Act II — we rarely see her when she's not performing. Perhaps that's indicative of how much of her life was an act for the public.

Booker T. Washington

Booker Taliaferro Washington was a prominent African American leader, educator, and founder of the National Negro Business League. Born in Virginia under slavery, he was freed at age 9 during the Civil War and taught himself to read. Washington went on to found the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), providing both academic and vocational training to Black students.

Washington was the first African American to dine at the White House, and he was respected by many members of the white liberal elite. Unlike some of his contemporaries who more publicly, actively opposed segregation, he believed in moderation: the idea that Black people would slowly gain full acceptance into American society through education and hard work.

In Ragtime, Washington serves as a mediator when Coalhouse takes over the Morgan Library in a climactic scene. “With guns and dynamite, you are destroying everything I have fought for,” Washington says.

J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford

J.P. Morgan and Henry Ford were wealthy industrialists who represented “the apex of the American pyramid,” as Morgan self-describes in Ragtime’s prologue. Both men champion a white, Christian-centic version of meritocracy and the American dream. They succeeded at the expense of others’ labor: Morgan was a ruthless robber baron, and Ford invented an assembly line system that turned each worker into “a cog in motion.”

Coalhouse Walker Jr. is influenced by Ford and Morgan. He buys a new Ford Model T as proof of his ability to “rise on the wheels of a dream” and achieve a better life. After his car is vandalized in an act of racism, the Ford comes to symbolize something darker, and Coalhouse's quest for justice leads him to violently take over the Morgan Library.

Robert Peary and Matthew Henson

Admiral Robert Edwin Peary was a U.S. navy officer and explorer who traveled to the Arctic Circle in 1909. At the time, people believed he was the first person to reach the North Pole. Now, however, some think Matthew Henson, his African American deputy, was actually the first. Henson was the first African American to be inducted into the Explorers Club as a life member, and he was posthumously awarded the Hubbard Medal from the National Geographic Society. (Peary received the medal in 1906.)

Peary and Henson make brief appearances in the musical when Father journeys with them to the Arctic. When they pass a ship of immigrants coming to America, Henson makes a thinly veiled reference to slavery, noting that his ancestors “were also brought here on ships.” The Admiral and Father pointedly choose to ignore Henson’s remark.

Ragtime may be set in the Progressive Era, but this moment is one of many that reminds audiences of the progress that had yet to be made.

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Top image credit: Caissie Levy, Joshua Henry, and Brandon Uranowitz. (Photo by Marc J. Franklin)