I've read many non fiction books before, and I've read many fiction books before, but I've never read a book that incorporates nonfictional historical characters into a fictional story like Ragtime does. Additionally, each "real" character serves a different purpose in the overall landscape of the book. JP Morgan, for example, can be used to show the vast contrast between the lifestyle of the rich and the lifestyle of the poor or even upper middle class. He lives so lavishly that it makes us readers wonder if he really needs every ancient Egyptian artifact.
Another historical character in Ragtime is Harry Houdini. Houdini relies greatly on his motherland cannot function very well when she dies, so he starts spending time looking into the supernatural and communication with the dead. In reality, Houdini was very close to his mother, even presenting her in style at a ball one time. In the book, Houdini is seen as a character with upper class wealth but still finds himself performing and hanging out with lower class people. This creates a wonderful contrast between Morgan, a man who gained his wealth through banking and being in a wealthy family, versus Houdini, whose wealth was attained by performing amazing feats of escape. The difference here is obvious, banking is an upper class way to get wealth while performing escape seems more like saloon entertainment.
Henry Ford is another well known character in history who is placed in this book to create a backdrop for what is happening at the time of Ragtime. Ford comes from a non-wealthy background but makes gobs of money with Ford Motors and the invention of the assembly line. Ford seems somewhere in between Morgan and Houdini, having risen from nothing, but having inserted himself --unlike Houdini-- into the upper class. In the course of history, As well as creating a long lasting car company, Ford helped industrialize the nation, reducing the need for skilled workers and making factory workers less personalized and more like machines.
Some nonfictional characters are introduced into the novel to help or hinder the arguments of the more important fictional characters in the book. Specifically, Emma Goldman and Booker T. Washington. Goldman is introduced earlier in the book as a political activist who initially spurns Tateh's hatred for Evelyn Nesbit, the sex symbol of the Ragtime era. Goldman is reintroduced in the novel near the end to back up Coalhouse Walker's rebellious cause. Booker T. Washington, however, is brought into the novel for quite a different reason. Washington is extremely against Walker's cause. He believes that black people should earn their rights through peace and friendship to get help from white people.
Washington and Goldman, as well as many other nonfictional characters are brought into Ragtime in order to connect and to contrast with the arguments of the more important fictional characters in the book.
The Russian critic M. M. Bakhtin described the novel as a "dialogic" form in its essence, by which he means that in a novel, various competing points of view are allowed to speak for themselves, with the author's own views remaining (often) hidden or obscured among these competing voices. He saw it thus as a more democratic form, wherein the reader has to sort through a range of views and position him- or herself among them. Your description of Doctorow's use of Goldman and BT Washington near the end fit nicely into this view of the novel: we get two interpretations of Coalhouse's action, and they don't necessarily contradict each other--they simply represent different interests, and different ways of viewing the situation. Goldman makes a strong point when she alludes to Morgan's own "appropriating," suggesting a moral parallel between Coalhouse and Morgan. Washington reflects on certain practical issues attending the questions of civil rights and racial equality when he denounces Coalhouse as essentially selfish, willing to besmirch the hard-won advances in the African American community with his extremist nonsense. They both have a point, we might say, and it's not immediately clear who "the novel" agrees with--if either of them. And maybe it's even possible to see BOTH views as equally valid.
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