by Studs Terkel
It being Saturday, the lobby is busy. Cards played; racing forms studied; politics and religion argued; women discussed, pro and con. All is silence as I enter. They have an idea. Horace Bane is staring out the window. I look toward him. He doesn’t see me. I study the calendar hanging crookedly on the wall. Its artwork: September Morn . It doesn’t matter.
If a man’s home is his castle—and surely that was the raison d’être of my behavior in the Stauffer affair, or so I convinced myself—why didn’t I knock? There was that moment of uncertainty, outside the door. Why did I pause, with my knuckles poised, instead of doing the most natural thing: knocking on the door of a guest? Of course, the detective would say, Shhh, don’t know. That’s his job. But I am not a detective. I am not a cop. I’m a hotelier. And as I have told myself, not once but thousands of times, a man’s home is his castle. Oh, boy. In that moment, at the age of sweet sixteen, I had behaved as a precocious advocate of the no-knock law.
George Simmons, alias Glenn Stauffer, was a bank robber. Perhaps he had a gun. Perhaps. The hard fact is: I knew Glenn Stauffer, not George Simmons. When I heard the Three-Star’s crackle outside his door, I envisioned Glenn on the bed, for I could tell from whence the sound came. I envisioned him in his shorts, for on past occasions I had seen him thus. The hard fact is: I wasn’t worried about any violence on his part. I was thinking of pleasing the detectives. Quite obviously, I succeeded.
Because of my righteous behavior, I still see a small man in polka-dot shorts, in the presence of his sweetheart, hoisted high, an absurd and helpless baby. In his home that is his castle. Talk about humiliation. I can’t speak for Glenn Stauffer. I can only speak for myself.
That was 1928. I was the Good Citizen and I still feel guilty. Perhaps that mark on my buttock should have remained.
Part II
8
Seeking Work
I was twenty-two when I graduated from law school, and like most students during the Depression, I was worried about getting work. We all looked in the Civil Service News to find available civil service jobs. Though it was 1934, the panic of ’29 had taken hold and the country was still in shock.
The Civil Service entrance examination, modeled after British Career Service exams, lasted three or four days and asked about history, arithmetic, current events, everything. I was among those who passed, and I applied for a job as fingerprint classifier for the FBI. I didn’t give much thought to the FBI aspect of it. I was thinking “fingerprint classifier,” I was thinking about the job—the FBI had the most openings.
My first test was to appear before the bureau chief in Chicago, Melvin Purvis. Hoover attacked Purvis because he’d become nationally known for setting up the killing of Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger, and Hoover was feeling eclipsed. Purvis was a Southerner, soft-spoken and polite when he interviewed me. Mostly, he wanted to know what books I read. I remember mentioning Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel and Ring Lardner’s You Know Me,Al. He passed me.
I discovered this years later, after requesting my FBI dossier, in which I found a memorandum from Hoover to his comptroller: “Put Louis Terkel on the payroll at $1420 a year as fingerprint classifier.” I was in. It was a University of Chicago professor, his name blacked out, who said: “I remember him. Slovenly, didn’t care much, a low-class Jew. He is not one of our type of boys.” The next note is another from Hoover to his comptroller: “Take Louis Terkel off the payroll.” I was out. Today I wonder how I was not “one of our type of boys.” (Here’s a fantasy: Mr. Hoover re-hires me for reasons I cannot fathom. It may be the end of Public Enemy Number One, Dillinger, at the hands of Melvin Purvis and he wants credit for capturing the New Public Enemy Number One. This is by far more dangerous. Nobody knows who he looks like, nobody has ever seen his face. He is absolutely elusive. I was hired as a fingerprint classifier, which called for precision; but I become my other self: Inspector Clouseau, the hapless, fumbling detective, Pete Sellers’ film creation. He has been my role model—or have I been his? In any event, my unique approach has come through. I have found my man. Only I have seen his face. My immediate supervisors are elated. They call a national conference—all radio and TV stations are alerted. As multi-millions hold their breath, I slowly, ever so carefully peel off the seal and there is the face and name—posilutely and absotively—of John Edgar Hoover.)
I wasn’t despairing because there was still an open-territory feeling. The whole country was in a strange, unsettled state. Soon after, another job came along: Roosevelt had created the FERA, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. They hired me for a project that involved understanding the nature of unemployment at the time. In what industry was unemployment highest? Where? San Francisco, unemployed longshoremen; Pittsburgh, steelworkers; Akron, rubber workers. We had to find out who the unemployed were and why they lost their jobs.
Each city was assigned a table, and each table had a guy and five girls—the guy got more money, he was in charge. I was the guy in charge of Omaha. What’s in Omaha? Stockyards. This was a good period for me: The job wasn’t civil service, but it paid, I didn’t have to put up an attorney’s shingle, and the girls were good company.
In 1935, a horse named Omaha was running in the Kentucky Derby. I’m saying to the girls, “Omaha! I’m going to bet a half a dollar on him.” Below the Wells-Grand was a cigar store that was run by a bookie. The girls had never placed a bet in their lives, but I got them excited about Omaha, so each one gave me a quarter. The Derby is Saturday afternoon, and I’m with my friend and we’re going to see a movie. I figure we’ll go to the movie and I’ll place the bet—my half-a-dollar and the girls’ money—later. We see Bolero, with George Raft and Carole Lombard, at the Castle Theater, right next to the Boston Store where my brother worked as a shoe dog on the fifth floor. We leave the movie, and go outside, and what is the headline? OMAHA WINS DERBY, PAYS 8 TO 1. Oh my God. I can imagine they’ll be jumping up and down on Monday when I come in. I can’t tell the girls I didn’t place the bet. So it’s $3.50 times five girls. I had to borrow about $18 to pay them because I had picked the winner. What happens Monday? The girls are jumping up and down, kissing me. They’d heard about it on the radio, and oh, were they happy. Just my luck: picking a winner who costs me twenty-eight bucks. And George Raft can’t even act.
I’d have stuck out the Depression in Chicago, but for reasons of personal safety, I felt the need to decamp for other pastures. An event from my shady past had caught up with me.
College kids would often pick up an extra ten bucks or so working as poll watchers on Election Day. Moler’s was a college barbershop where barbers trained and gave free or ten-cent haircuts—a favorite spot for the guys on skid row. The barbershop was closed that day so it could be a polling place, and many of the skid-rowers came in to vote, early and often, as the Chicago saying goes. A guy named Berghoff was my poll-watching partner. The city election officials would hire five guys: Three were judges and the other two were clerks. They’d get paid $7.50 a day. These were guys like some who stayed at the Wells-Grand Hotel—doddering old men, unsure and frail. These old guys were simply officials of the city, whereas the precinct captains, the guys who arranged for them to serve, were Republicans and Democrats. The Democratic precinct captain’s name was Gordon and the Republican’s was Romano, which happened to be the name of a Chicago family involved in various quasi-legal activities.
My righteous colleague, Berghoff, sat at the table by the judges, scribbling notes. I sat in the barber chair and watched. When Berghoff wasn’t writing, he was glaring at me because I wasn’t taking any notes. Some guys came in to vote three, four times. Money changed hands outside the barbershop; bottles of muscatel in paper bags, too; precinct captains kindly accompanied certain voters right into the booth. This went on all day. At one point, Gordon stuck a five-dollar bill in my shirt pocket. “Buy yourself a hat.”
I said, “I don’t wear hats,” and handed back the five-dollar bill. Anything wrong going on?
Sure enough, this particular precinct was investigated. There’s a trial, and Berghoff and I are subpoenaed. Who’s on trial? The trembling old guys, the judges and clerks. The prosecutor is a light-skinned black guy named Cashin; the judge is named Jarecki.
Berghoff, good-looking, a law student, one of these upstanding law-and-order guys, is the first to testify. “Do you recognize these five defendants?” The five guys stand up and they’re called by name. I’m thinking they’ll probably get six months in prison, probably die there. Of course, the names of the two precinct captains are never mentioned!
It’s my turn. Now what do I do? I could be Berghoff and say exactly what happened. Instead I say, “I don’t remember.”
Cashin says, “You don’t remember? You just heard your colleague, Mr. Berghoff.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t remember.” I don’t think I knew I was going to lie until the moment I did.
I was like Huck Finn on the raft. When did Huck decide? Remember Jim, the runaway slave, and his companion, Huck, on the raft. The slave chasers, the bounty hunters say, “Is that guy on the raft white or black?” And in that one moment: “He’s white.” Oh my God. Well, here am I saying, “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember?” You see the guys, shaky, about to fall down. So very much like guys I know from the hotel. That’s when I decided, and at that moment I committed something close to perjury. The old guys were let off because of the split testimony. The gumless one, the gimpy one, the old rummy, the shaky one—Civilization, Teddy Tils . . .
Berghoff looked at me and I looked at him, and we hated each other’s guts. I obviously violated a law, yet why did I feel good? As Huck put it: “If I go to hell, I go to hell.”
Time passes and the court decides to call on the precinct captains, Gordon and Romano.
Prince Arthur Quinn was our precinct captain (later to become our state senator).20 Young Prince Arthur knew my brother Benny, because Benny used to play the horses and gamble at a joint called Johnson’s, a big booking palace on Clark Street two blocks away from the hotel. Prince Arthur was known to stop in at Johnson’s now and then.
One day he comes in and says, “Hey, Ben, you got a kid brother. You like your kid brother?”
“Oh, I love my kid brother.”
“Louis, is that his name?”
“Yeah.”
“You want him to live, don’tcha?”
“Yeah.”
“You know, he may get shot.”
Artie explained: “I just wanted you to know that your kid brother is going to be called up as a witness against Romano. The Romano your brother remembers weighed about two hundred and sixty pounds. He’s lost about a hundred pounds, he wears glasses, has a mustache. Your brother won’t recognize him, he won’t know who he is. But at the same time, I know his relatives, these wops, they’re gonna knock him off if he fingers Romano. All Louis has to say is, ‘I don’t know the guy.’ ”
Benny says, “Oh, my brother, he’ll play along.”
So Benny tells all this to me. I think, holy Christ, I can’t get called in front of Jarecki again. I can’t tell the judge I don’t remember Gordon and Romano. What am I gonna do? Then I thought of New York. I was in good standing with the FERA guys who ran the project because I did a decent job. I told them my aunt was very ill in New York and asked if they had any openings there. They did. They said they’d see if they could work something out. It so happened they could.
I went to New York for about six months and worked on the same unemployment project. And I kept seeing plays. Saturday, you could always pick up a single ticket for a matinee. That season I saw Winterset, about the Sacco and Vanzetti case, with Burgess Meredith. And Porgy and Bess. I saw Nazimova as Mrs. Alving in Ghosts, and Ruth Gordon and Pauline Lord in Ethan Frome. I was hooked on theater.
While I’m in New York living with my grandmother, I get a wire. The examination I’d taken for the fingerprint job had led to a different offer: counting Baby Bonds for the treasury department. It was an addition to the bonus FDR gave shortly after he was elected. A couple of thousand of us who hadn’t made fingerprint classifier were called to Washington. Roosevelt had finally come through for the veterans of World War I. Remember? In 1932, thousands of veterans and family members, suffering from the Depression, campaigned and demonstrated in Washington, demanding the cash payout Herbert Hoover had vetoed in that failed attempt. The great marine hero Smedley Butler spoke on behalf of the soldiers, but to no avail.
An aside: Butler was “a pint-sized Marine for all seasons,” in the words of his colleague General Douglas MacArthur, who once described him for Smithsonian magazine. “He was small, round-shouldered. He weighed barely 140 pounds dripping wet, and even when he was dry his uniforms seemed to hang off him like an oversize bathing suit. Yet this unlikely model for a recruiting poster was one of the really great generals in American history.”
It was somewhat astonishing, a pivot punch from nowhere, to read how this hero described himself in Common Sense magazine, November, 1935:I spent 33 years and 4 months in active as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism . . . Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street . . . I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1909–12.
When the World War I veterans refused to leave, Hoover ordered the police to remove them. The D.C. chief of police, Captain Pelham Glassford, refused to take part in assaulting the veterans, in effect saying: I will not tear-gas my buddies. So Hoover instead enlisted Douglas MacArthur, with George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower as aides, to smoke the veterans out with tear gas and scare them off with bayonets.
It was a disaster—people were injured, some died. But now Roosevelt is president and finally a bonus is passed. Then came a move by congress to give the veterans an extra bonus—that was called the Baby Bonus. Say a guy named Joe Miller in Provo, Utah, is going to get an extra fifty bucks. I count out two $25 bonds. That’s what we did all day. That’s all we did all day. It drove me crazy.
I ended up sharing an apartment with a colleague, Monroe Campbell Jr., a very funny Southerner. He was gay, which I didn’t realize until we started living together. He kept it quiet so he wouldn’t get fired. Monroe found a nice Georgetown apartment up above a tearoom. Fifty bucks a month in Georgetown! Monroe liked to throw parties, and naturally, I was his co-host—mostly his friends, gay, wonderful people. All of Monroe’s women friends looked like Dorothy Parker or Louise Brooks: bobbed helmet hair, only gray instead of black.
We used to go to the Deck, a gay bar with a nautical theme. The bouncers were women, very butch, some tough. But they all liked me. They knew I was hetero and the word they used for me was “jam.” It’s not a term used today, but apparently back then it applied to someone they could trust—a straight guy, wholly innocent, not overly hip, but someone you could bank on. Monroe was the first gay person with whom I became good friends.
We had a number of homosexuals who lived at the hotel, but I did not know them. Unlike the happenings in the Book of Luke, there was always room at the inn. Even for gay people.21 Even for couples without luggage.
I wasn’t in Washington, D.C., for long, less than a year, but if it hadn’t been for my friends and acting, I’d have lost my mind counting those endless Baby Bonds.
I had heard about the Washington Civic Theater Group and their plan to stage Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, a play about fascism coming to America. Remember, there were several Ameri-can fascist groups, among them the Silver Shirts.
Gerald L.K. Smith, Brinkley, the monkey-gland quack, the founder of the America First Party, et al. I auditioned for the director, Day Tuttle, and won the role of a George Wallace–type figure named Shad LeDue. We performed at the Wardman Park Hotel Theatre, which seated four or five hundred people. I received a glowing write-up from a reviewer at the Washington Star.22
Shad LeDue is a handyman working for a man named Doremus Jessup, an old-world liberal editor of the paper. Jessup is basically a nice person, but he looks down on LeDue as crude, as a nothing. LeDue belongs to a group called the Corpos that take over the community, and he becomes a sort of gauleiter, a petty tyrant of the town, strutting around in a special Corpos uniform. What hit me most about playing LeDue was the question: Who are the guys who join these kinds of groups? Who are the guys who become like him? Who are the ones who fix the lock on the door, who put the bulb in?
You’re the professor and the janitor hates your guts because he thinks you look down upon him or barely even recognize his presence. There are millions who, deep, deep down, feel disdained (which is exactly how the Reagan Democrats came into being). I remember years later C.P. Ellis telling me of how he became a Klansman and how the Klan used him, feeding on his feelings of being a nobody. Because if you’re nobody, you can’t endure it unless there’s somebody below you.
I have never forgotten performing the role of Shad and the feeling I had standing on the stage in front of that large audience, the feeling of power in wearing that uniform. If ever there were a contemporary (2007) challenge to our sense of self, it is this one; especially, fundamentalism in either its spiritual or its secular form.