by Studs Terkel
I gave a speech and demanded that the trustees sign a contract with the people, setting a date to end that pollution at their next regular meeting. The five trustees present made little speeches and signed their names. The people were just absolutely elated. The roof almost went off. For the first time in their lives they saw the culprits responsible for the smoke that was polluting their neighborhood. The people felt they had won. The trustees —I’ll give them credit—have lived up to the agreement. It’s a much cleaner neighborhood now. If it wasn’t for the pressure of the people, this air would still be polluted.
In 1971 we started to fight U.S. Steel because of pollution. That’s the company my dad works for. This company broke the agreement about cleaning up. How could we fight it? We didn’t have a consumer angle. Ordinary people don’t buy steel ingots. We started investigating U.S. Steel’s tax history. We discovered it was under-assessed by P. J. Cullerton 96 to the tune of sixteen million dollars a year. Here were people being polluted to death by a company they were actually subsidizing, because the money lost by the county had to be made up by the small people. As we investigated further, we found out other companies and banks and race tracks were also under-assessed. We went to the county building, en masse, and demanded redress.
The people have now learned the importance of coming out in large numbers. We’re peaceful. We trust ourselves not to be violent. Our strongest weapon is the volume of our voices. Confronting a person up to now considered unapproachable and making him show his face—and state his position in our presence. The people have become politically independent. They recently threw out an alderman . . .
Tremendous changes have occurred in their lives. They are able to understand that their problems in society are not just caused by what they used to consider goofy little minority groups. They’re becoming extremely politicized. They’re able to see people—even black people—as allies, rather than enemies you have to run away from if they move next door to you. What these people are seeing now is a common enemy. It can be called city hall. It can be called the private corporation. It can be called big money. God, have I seen attitudes change!
The most exciting moment in my life? Picture this. It’s the annual meeting of the shareholders of Commonwealth Edison, one of the largest public utilities in the entire country. The chairman of the board and all the directors are up on the stage. We had about two thousand people in the lobby.97 It was like a festival—people dancing. About twenty of us entered the hall. The chairman heads for the podium and is about to gavel the meeting to order. We walk down the aisle. Here is the symbol of the establishment of the United States—the annual meeting of a large corporation. I look up at the chairman and I tell him, “We’re here to find out what you’re going to do about pollution. You have a half-hour to give us your answer.” People were on their feet: What is this priest doing here, disrupting this meeting? We did it.
It was a liberating experience for me. I never believed I would be able to do that kind of thing. I had always been taught to be polite. To say, Yes sir, No sir. To stay in my place. I should be seen and not heard. But I felt, Hell, if you’re not heard, you’re never gonna be seen.
We had the rally outside. A half-hour later we came into the hall again. They let us in, one at a time. Only about ten of us were allowed. They tried to seat us in different parts of the hall. I made a break for this aisle and the others broke away and followed. I faced the chairman again and asked for his answer. There was no answer. He threatened to adjourn the meeting. I said, “Okay, here’s our answer. You won’t listen to the people, but we’re not gonna take it. We’re gonna go to city hall and force this issue through law.” By this time one of our women who had been wrapped in an arm lock by a security guard—she didn’t know whether to be a lady or kick him or bite him—broke away. She told the chairman a thing or two. We all walked out together.
At the city council we forced them to pass one of the strongest air pol-lution ordinances in the country. We tangled with the all-powerful Commonwealth Edison and forced them to purchase six million tons of low sulphur coal. They’ve retired much of their antiquated equipment. It’s not over yet. There’s a lot of struggle ahead. But we’ve had a touch of victory and it’s sweet.
To be free is to have some kind of say-so about your life. I have no vote on the board of directors of Commonwealth Edison. I count for absolutely nothing. But that company is polluting my environment, is shaping my life, is limiting it and the chances of the kids at St. Daniel’s parish. It’s killing me as a person, as life in the steel mill is killing my father. I have to fight back. That brash act—that rude act—of interrupting the chairman of the board did it. I felt free. I don’t have to be afraid of him. He goes to the toilet the same way I do. What makes him better than me? His hundred thousand dollars a year? Hell no. Well, that act made me free. You can’t emerge as a person if you’re a yes-man. No more yes, Mr. Mayor. No more yes, Mr. Governor. No more yes, Mr. Chairman.
JACK CURRIER
It was a chance encounter on the Illinois Central. He is a teacher of English at a branch of the City College, At night he conducts adult education classes at an urban university; among his students are ADC mothers. He is thirty-seven.
My father is the comptroller, treasurer, and a member of the board of directors of a large corporation. His title, salary, his house in the suburbs, everything about his life—the successful American life—is right out of the picture book. But I wouldn’t trade places with him for a million dollars.
My father’s spent his life adding up numbers for somebody else. Any connection between his real life and his work seems to be missing. I feel, with all my doubts about the institution I work for, with the sense of hypocrisy, there’s a connection.
In order to do a better job, I have to become a better man. In the business world, in order to do a better job, you have to become ruthless. In order to make more money, you have to care for people less. In order to succeed, you have to be willing to stab your competitor in the back.
A couple of years ago I was in my father’s office. I think we were getting ready to go out for lunch. He got a phone call. His boss was chewing him out for something—in a tone and language that was humiliating. Here’s my father who had worked for this company for thirty years.
My father’s a dignified man and he works hard. God knows he’s given that company all the years of his life. He doesn’t have anything else. There are no hobbies. He wasn’t close to any of his children. Nothing outside of work. That was it. He would get up in the morning and leave the house and come home twelve, fourteen hours later, six days a week. That was it. Yet here he is at sixty and here’s a guy chewing him out like he’s a little kid. I felt embarrassed being there. I felt sorry that he knew I was watching that happen. I could see he was angry and embarrassed. I could see him concealing those feelings. Sort of shufflin’ and scratchin’ his head, in the face of higher authority. We went to lunch. We didn’t talk about it at all.
I would hate to spend my life doing work like that. If work means something to you, it doesn’t matter what the boss . . . I can imagine being fired from my job. I can imagine an administrator at the college disapproving my teaching methods. But there’s no way he could deprive me of the satisfaction that comes from doing my job well.
If my father were ever let go, I don’t know what he would do. I suppose he could find somebody else to add up numbers for, although at this age that would be hard. There ought to be a reason behind what men do. We’re not just machines, but some of us live like machines. We get plugged into a job and come down at nine o‘clock in the morning and someone turns us on. At five o’clock someone turns us off and we go home. What happens during that time doesn’t have any connection with our real lives.
I have a lot of respect for my father. He worked hard. During the Depression he went to night school in Washington, D.C., and got a law degree. He was a soda jerk in the drugstore of the Mayflower Hotel and he worked his way up to be t
he chief accountant. He gave his whole life to that corporation. I don’t know any man more honest, more conscientious than my father. But what is it worth? What has it gotten him?
His family and his children got away from him. When I got old enough to go to college, I went off and that was it for me. My sisters graduated from high school and, soon as possible, moved out. It was a place where we all slept, but it wasn’t home.
I felt, as long as I stick to talking about his job, we could have a pleasant, superficial conversation. As I became interested in music and politics, I found no comfortable way to pursue those things with him. His job was the only topic . . . He makes some contribution to the Republican party, he always votes, and he reads the newspaper every day on the train, but the job is really it. After all those years, that’s his life. To ask whether he loves the company or not—it’s irrelevant.
I had a series of jobs in the early fifties, after flunking out of college. I worked for a bank, sold insurance . . . I ended up with a good job as a traveling salesman for a business machine company. I was twenty-three years old and making ten thousand dollars a year. I probably could have made it seventeen thousand the next year. I could see it was going right up.
I began to run into conflicts with my own feelings. I couldn’t accept the way my boss did busines or the way in which everybody in the field did business. If I had remained, I’d be sitting on top of a business of over a million dollars. One of the outfits that had become disenchanted with my boss offered to take me on as their manager and buy them out. It looked like a beautiful proposition. But I just . . . it wasn’t my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wasn’t doing it.
I think about guys that were in college with me in the early fifties. They sell real estate, insurance, they’re engineers, they’re bankers, they’re in business. They probably make a lot more money than I do. It’s like they’re twenty years older than me. They seem a lot closer to my father than they do to me. They’re in a groove, they’re beyond change. They’re caught into something which is so overpowering—it’s as though their life was over. It’s all settled. I think my job is keeping me young, keeping me alive.
He went back to school, the experimental St. John’s College in Maryland. He taught elementary school for a year in a depressed rural area. “I just felt I had to get into teaching and really try my hand at it.”
Laing98 says in a sick society almost anything that is done is harmful. I have that feeling about my classes. You walk into a classroom and you’ve got an enormous amount of power. I’m six seven and here were these fourth graders. You can imagine how much power I had there. They all listened when I spoke. I was the big father figure. They all loved me and I took care of them and it was a great thing for my ego. But I felt it wasn’t really using enough of me dealing with fourth graders. There was something missing for me.
I ended up teaching adults. Again, that’s very satisfying for the ego. You get into a classroom and you have all the power of the institution. You tell people what to do and they do it, what to read and they read it. You tell people what to think, how to interpret things . . . You can make them feel guilty because they haven’t read certain things, because they’re not familiar with them. Teachers are playing that kind of game all the time. And I was right in there, with both feet.
I was scared of my students when I began. I did everything I could to keep from being caught in an error, in a lapse of knowledge. I used all the authority I had to keep them at a distance, to keep them in their place. If any of the students didn’t hate my guts, it wasn’t because I gave them no reason. There was no communication going on in that classroom at all.
The traditional education sees the school as a place where the student gets poured into him the accumulated knowledge of the past. I’ve gone very much from one end of the pole to the other in the last seven years. I’m very interested in listening to my students. But I still feel hypocritical about my work. I suspect people in the business world have to stay away from thoughts like that. Yet there are things I feel pretty good about. I know there are students I’ve helped. I’m not sure I ever helped anyone when I was selling business machines or insurance.
I’ve become suspicious of the teacher who automatically thinks he’s superior to somebody who’s out there working as a salesman. I don’t think there is anything automatic about it. I am working for an institution that turns out students so they will be salesmen.
When I began teaching at college, I pretended to be this authoritarian figure who knew everything. Gradually, over the years, it’s become possible for me to walk in the class and to admit to my own confusion. As I present the person I really am to my students, they present the people they really are to me.
When I was a salesman, there was never a day in which I felt I could be absolutely honest. It was essential that the role be played. I was on somebody else’s trip. I would fit into that slot and behave in a certain way. In order to do that, it meant wearing a mask every minute on the job.
One summer I took a job out in Missouri, selling insurance. After I learned the pitch and got out in the territory I realized it was a crooked operation, a con game. Oh God, they were a terrible outfit. (Laughs.) I needed the money and I was a salesman. I found out I couldn’t do it. I’d be driving down the country road and I’d come to the farm where I was supposed to make my pitch. It was difficult just to turn the car into the driveway. I’d drive around the place three or four times before I could pump myself up enough to go in and talk to the guy. I sold one policy in seven weeks and then quit.
I feel that my unwillingness to settle into a groove—my fear of being caught in a rut—is related to my father and his job and his success. While my contemporaries have been out pursuing exactly what it is my father has, I got a good look at it early enough. So I knew it wasn’t the way I’d spend my life.
The corporation really wants that person’s whole life. They like to have a guy who will join a country club for the corporation, marry an appropriate wife for the corporation, do community work for the corporation. These are the peple that really make it. That’s my father’s life.
It’s hard to think of a friend that my father has. I don’t know of one. There are people he works with. These are people in the family. That’s it. Because of his particular job he’s less in contact with people than a lot of businessmen. He’s an accountant, a bookkeeper.
I can’t talk to him about my social life. I’m sure he’d disapprove of a lot of people I’m close to, a lot of things I do. I really feel my life is wide open. I’ve got problems, there are things that get me down, but on the whole, I feel younger than I did ten years ago. I have a lot of friends, students, who have affected my life.
When I think of my father, the strongest memories are the very, very early ones. He hadn’t been completely sucked into that business. He still had a life separate from the job. I must have been less than four. There was a parking lot across the street. I can remember sitting with my father at the window and he would name all the different kinds of cars for me. I remember his taking me out on a Sunday morning in the park. I’d be riding the tricycle and he’d be walking . . . I can’t remember a time we spent together after that.
By the time I was ten I was aware of the distance between us. I was aware he didn’t understand me. I was aware he didn’t know what I was thinking, what I was feeling. That gap continues . . . (Pause.) When I got old enough to go out on my own there was nothing to hold me back. His job is the key to his life and, I think, the key to mine.
HAROLD PATRICK
He is small, compactly built; his battered face has seen all sorts of weather. His shoulders are stooped—reluctantly, it would seem. He is sixty-six. Two of his sons are city firemen and one is a policeman.
I started workin’ when I was eleven years old. With a peddler on Saturdays, at five o’clock in the morning until it was done. For twenty-five cents. The peddler used to yell out the wares and the woman would holler out the
window, “Bring me up the potatoes.” I’d run upstairs and give it to the woman. Fifty years later I’m runnin’ a freight elevator. I been runnin’ it for the past thirteen years. A man does a certain job and it becomes so repetitious there’s no imagination left . . .
There’s all kinds of problems in retiring. The inflation makes it difficult for a man to retire because the money he gets is wiped out and the number of years he has to be in a union in order to acquire a pension is such that he never reaches it. Most of my friends died on the verge of getting pensions. I have pictures of when I was a truckdriver. There’s eight guys in the picture. Me and one other fellow are left. All the rest are dead. So retirement for the average man is pretty rough. He feels he’s finished and even then he can’t be finished because he hasn’t got the means to live on, or has to depend on his family. And he doesn’t want that.
He recounts past jobs, more than a half-century’s worth, with the detail and in the manner of a Leporello cataloguing the amorous adventures of Don Giovanni: “I was an errand boy, I drove horses, I drove automobiles, small ones, and I drove trailers and trucks about twenty-five years. I worked as a seaman, I was on ships and fired below as fireman. I worked as a longshoreman, loaded coffee on ships, workin’ for the Panama Pacific and Morgan Line and the various Cunard lines. I drove a winch on a ship. For a while I was a sailor on deck. I worked as a rigger. I worked as a bricklayer’s helper. I worked cutting trees down, cleaning roads to put up telephone poles. I guess I done most every kind of work.”