Politics & Power Quote by E. L. Doctorow

Assimilation, in Doctorow's telling, isn’t a polite climb up the ladder; it’s a scramble through whatever door happens to be unlocked. Pairing “gangsterism” with “art and politics” is the provocation: three routes into legitimacy, all powered by performance, ambition, and the selective enforcement of rules. He’s collapsing the comforting moral hierarchy that separates the novelist from the ward boss, the ward boss from the racketeer. Different costumes, similar stakes: recognition, access, power.

The line works because it treats gangsterism as a social technology rather than a pathology. Immigrants and outsiders in American history are often told to “integrate” while being barred from respectable institutions; organized crime becomes, perversely, a training ground in networks, capital, and public visibility. The gangster learns America’s real curriculum: leverage, loyalty, branding, and the management of violence (literal or bureaucratic). Doctorow isn’t romanticizing crime so much as indicting a society that routinely rewards ruthless entrepreneurship, then pretends to be shocked when it shows up without a necktie.

Context matters: Doctorow’s fiction (especially Ragtime and Billy Bathgate) obsessively maps how Americans manufacture status amid industrial wealth, corruption, and mythmaking. His worlds are full of immigrants, hustlers, artists, and politicians all trying to rewrite their names in public. The subtext is bleakly comic: “assimilation” is often just the moment the dominant culture decides your tactics look familiar enough to tolerate. Gangsterism becomes not an aberration but an exaggerated mirror of the nation’s own origin story.