by Studs Terkel
The rabble-rousers hated me. I had the longest horns in the country because I was using the very book they were using. I turned the guns the other way, as it were. I interpreted as I thought the prophets would interpret it, given the situation.
We have a religious phenomenon in America that has its origin in the South. Established churches followed urban trends. People out here were isolated and delivered religion on the basis of what they saw. Store-brought clothes—which they could not buy out of poverty—became wordly and sinful: “We had rather be beggars in the House of the Lord than dwell in king’s palaces.” They were denied schooling. They were called rednecks and crackers and damn niggers. But the Bible was God’s Book. Refused access to medical aid, faith healed the body as well as the soul: “We seek another world.” It was a protest against things economically unavailable. I interpreted this protest and related it to the Bible—instead of calling them hillbillies and rednecks.
I translated the democratic impulse of mass religion rather than its protofascist content into a language they understood.
In Winston-Salem, when we went out to organize the tobacco workers, the leader said: “If you crack this in two years, it’ll be a miracle.” We went to the oldest church. It was a bitter night. The pastor was a white woman, Sister Price, sitting there with an army blanket around her shoulders and a little old hat. I knew she was the bellwether. Unless I got her, I got nobody.
I gave the gospel of the Kings: Good News is only good when it feeds the poor. This woman pastor got up and drawled: “Well, this is the first time I heard the gospel of three square meals a day, and I want in on it. I love to shout and now I know every time I shout, I know I need shoes.” First thing I know, she was touching cadence and going way off.
I had to translate this emotion into action. But if I’d let her go on shouting, we’d never have made it. In three months, they called a labor board election. We won. We called on the Bible and the Son of Man.
Imagine Claude Williams meeting Mrs. B. in Girard, Pennsylvania. She has a Sister Price within her. If only Mrs. B. could meet Claude Williams, she could be one of the most stalwart of humanists.
24
Evil of Banality
When Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem:The Banality of Evil, she was referring to the trite, the trivial, the meaninglessness, and the lack of serious thought that leads to fascism.
Consider: KEEP OFF THE GRASS. That is an order. You may kill someone near the grass, i.e., a Jew or a lefty—but do not disturb the lovely symmetry of the lawn.
When Federico Fellini offered us in his tender and affectionate remembrance of his hometown, Amarcord, the lighthearted and light-headed exchanges between the villagers, he was also telling us of the vulgar, the flatulent brass of Il Duce’s braying band in the background. The one dissenter was cleansed by the castor-oil treatment. Things went on as usual.
Let us reverse the phrase of Hannah Arendt. Let’s call it, even more properly, the evil of banality. It has profoundly affected our language, and it has perverted our speech.
The word “liberal” today has replaced the word “Communist” as used in the high-flying days of Tailgunner Joe. When John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president, Vietnam War hero, defends himself, “I am not a liberal,” as though to be a liberal were shameful, less than American, we are deeper than Alice ever was in Wonderland.
I look up the word “liberal” in the dictionary.
Liberal: 1. Having, expressing, or following social or political views or policies that favor non-revolutionary progress and reform. 2. Having, expressing, or following views or policies that favor the freedom of individuals to act or express themselves in a manner of their own choosing.
I thought that’s what Tom Paine was writing about when he said, “Reason is not to be confused with treason.” Being a liberal, I had thought, is to believe in the First Amendment.
I think of myself as a radical conservative. Radical means getting at the core of things. Louis Pasteur was a radical. Some would have called him a nut. The physician Ignaz Semmelweiss, who said, “Wash your hands,” was a radical. He was called a nut. I’m a radical conservative. Conservative: I want to conserve the blue of the skies, the potability of our drinking water, the First Amendment of the Constitution, and whatever sanity we have left. Labels mean nothing ; issues mean everything. How do you stand on the issue of social security, or national health care, or the death penalty?
“Banality” is the operative word. We stare daily into our TV set, turn the dial on the radio, flip through the local tabloid. What do we experience?
Britney Spears, a pop singer, shaves her head and goes into rehab. Most Americans know her name. She is a celebrity. None of the contestants in a recent episode of Jeopardy, a popular TV quiz show, knew who Strom Thurmond was. For most of the twentieth century, on the floor of the Senate, he was the drum major of segregation. Not even his fathering a black child was within the ken of the Jeopardy participants. Nor did they know the name of Kofi Annan (the newly former United Nations secretary general).
There have been exceptions in the past. During the civil rights fighting days, TV did a good job. At least, it showed us the dogs of Birmingham. It did a decent job, to some extent, on the Vietnam War—The Television War, Michael Arlen called it, in The New Yorker magazine. Today, our commander in chief forbids the showing of caskets carrying slain American soldiers home from Iraq, and the networks comply.
Basically, there is an affront going on, an assault on our intelligence and sense of decency. We have a language perverted, a mind low-rated, and of course, the inevitable end result—forgetfulness. This is what haunts me at the moment.
The young know nothing about the past, nothing about the fight of abolitionists, nothing about Elijah Lovejoy, or Frederick Douglass. The gap is deep here between almost all generations.
We say “younger generation.” What is a younger generation? Do I have to be ninety-four years old to remember these names? Are they otherwise erased from history?
Were you to ask the average kid today who our enemies were in World War II, they would know Germany and Japan, because of films if for no other reason. I’ve a hunch that 50 percent might say the Soviet Union was our enemy. During the Cold War that followed World War II, a phony “patriotism” took over. Forgotten was the fact that the Soviet Union army wiped out four out of five German soldiers on the Eastern Front.
Gore Vidal uses a phrase, “The United States of Amnesia.” It’s on the button. But we’ve got something even deeper than amnesia. If there is no past, we can invent our own past. And so we invent our own past.
In our political elections, we vote on the basis of absence of memory. What was the New Deal, what did it do? What is Social Security, what does it do? Why did it come into being? Has everyone forgotten something called the Great American Depression? The grandchildren, boys and girls whose granddaddies had their butts saved by big government, are the ones saying, “Too much big government!” They condemn the very thing that allowed their ancestors to carry on when the spine of the Free Market had shattered.
Memory itself is part of the brain. A brain is like a muscle, and unless it’s used, it rots away and becomes useless. We haven’t used our memory to call on the past because it’s always the present, this moment, that is it. We have the news today about what’s the latest—Iraq’s got weapons of mass destruction. The next day we find it’s untrue. We, unabashed, go on to other matters. Our memory is also determined by what we see and hear, and what we see and hear depends to a great extent on television, and bit by bit we’ve gotten a media that’s in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
We have been deceived so often, the memory of the past is the memory of so much deceit. We erase it.
We want to be left alone and not to think of a past that might disturb us. Might disturb what? Might disturb our sense of complacency, our sense of satisfaction.
Chester Kolar, technician, two-flat homeowner. “I’m cold
to it, these war photos. The only remark of me and my friends is, ‘What do you know about that?’ What does John Q. Public know what should happen? Let’s not stick our nose into something we know nothing about. We should know once a month, let’s have a review of the news: what will happen and what has happened. What will happen these people should be worried about painting their rooms . . . they should become industrious.”
Fortunately, there is Stanley Cygan, a retired steel-mill laborer. “I want to know, what is [speaking precisely, using all five syllables] re-la-tiv-i-ty. I ask professor at Hull House, they can’t explain to me. I must know the meaning—I know it is important—re-la-tiv-i-ty.”
He is the next-door neighbor of Chester Kolar. He, too, lives in a two-flat. Thus, we have two Americans.
I THINK ALL human beings want the same thing. They’d like a good job, friends, happy family. They’d like to be undisturbed by things and to live in an ideal world. If they could live in a vacuum, that would be perfect.
We can’t; we are related to the world whether we want to be or not. And now, more than ever, we are a part of the world.
I have a memory of something in 1945, a very great moment, to me the most hopeful moment in my life and perhaps even in the life of the planet: when the United Nations was formed in San Francisco. It was such a fantastic moment! That is a memory.
After World War II, we had a boom period, things were easy, and all the talk about another world that could be, a world that was possible, was forgotten. I remember the words of the brilliant radio writer Norman Corwin: “Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend.” Although we were the strongest, the most powerful, the most generous of all the nations, at the same time we were part of the world community. The memory is now so warped that when the president said: “To hell with the U.N.!” thousands applauded. Fifty years ago, who would have dreamed of that occurring?
Memory. How can we have memory if we don’t have any knowledge? If we have no history, no memory of what happened yesterday, let alone what happened fifty years ago?
It’s ironic that a thing like the GI Bill, which greatly benefited World War II veterans, has fed into our forgetfulness. The GI Bill gave returning veterans money to go to college, and in the case of many, the GI was the first in the family to attain a college degree. The GI Bill helped them buy houses in the new suburbs, like Park Forest, or Levittown. As a result, something happens to this new American. He is a college graduate and a homeowner, and suddenly the term “middle-class” belongs to him. All his life he wanted to be something above that blue-collar guy. He is helped, of course. But at the end of World War II, something else happened: the Cleaver family and consumerism. He’s now part of a new class, and he wants more.
Farmworker and organizer Jessie de la Cruz described one of the people most virulently against the Chicano workers’ struggle to form a union as a guy who was once a Joad. He said: “I was an Okie. I own this! I worked hard.” He could have been little Winfield Joad. Remember that little boy in The Grapes of Wrath? What happened to him after they found the camp? Winfield fought in World War II, got the GI Bill, went to college, and studied agronomy. And he bought a house! He became part of the affluent society; he made it. The result? All history is forgotten.
What happens to all Alzheimer’s sufferers is tragic. What I’m talking about is what I call a national Alzheimer’s—a whole country has lost its memory. When there’s no yesterday, a national memory becomes more and more removed from what it once was, and forgets what it once wanted to be.
We’re sinking under our national Alzheimer’s disease. With Alzheimer’s you forget what you did yesterday. With Alzheimer’s finally, you forget not only what you did, but also who you are. In many respects, we have forgotten who we are.
We’re now in a war based on an outrageous lie, and we are held up to the ridicule and contempt of the world. What has happened? Have we had a lobotomy performed on us? Or is it something else? I’m saying it is the daily evil of banality.
25
. . . And Nobody Laughed
Apoll involving millions of viewers was recently taken by a couple of TV channels. Question: Who was America’s best leader ever? Among the candidates were Abe, George, Thomas J., and Franklin D. The winner, hands down—Ronnie Reagan . . . and nobody laughed.
We declared war on Grenada. Most of us had no idea who or what Grenada was. Was it one of the Seven Wonders of the World? The dustup involved a number of American dental students who may have been experiencing bicuspid trouble. We triumphed over Grenada . . . and nobody laughed.
(1998: General Augusto Pinochet, the former president of Chile, was indicted in an international tribunal as a war criminal and mass murderer.)
February 15, 2006: A huge op-ed piece appears in the Chicago Tribune. It is headed: IRAQ NEEDS A PINOCHET. “I think all patriotic and informed people can agree; it would be great if the U.S. could find an Iraqi Augusto Pinochet. In fact, an Iraqi Pinochet would be better than an Iraqi Castro. Both propositions strike me as so self-evident as to require no explanation.” The op-ed is signed: “Jonah Goldberg, Editor of The National Review Online” . . . and nobody laughed.
John Kenneth Galbraith told me a funny story. Several years ago, Public Television featured Milton Friedman, the godhead of the good ship Free Marketry. There were ten or twelve hours weekly. Following that series was one featuring Galbraith, who expressed a wholly different point of view. Galbraith was given equal time. There was one difference: Friedman’s lectures had no rebuttals. Every one of Galbraith’s shows had a Free Market–driven rebuttal . . . and nobody laughed.
My old friend, Philip Clay Roettinger, CIA whistle-blower, came right to the point. “I got word in 1954 that we were planning to overthrow the government of Guatemala. A fellow came to my office and said: ‘We’re planning to overthrow a government.’ Simple as that.”
“Did he give any reasons?” I wondered.
“No, no, no, you didn’t have to do that,” Phil said, and laughed. He elaborated:They sent me to Miami, where the headquarters of the operation was: the Marine Corps station in Opa-Locka, Florida. I didn’t give it any thought because they said it was a rotten government, bad, Communist-influenced. Several of us went to Tegucigalpa in Honduras and set up a “contra” force. We didn’t use the word in those days.
Boy, it worked fine, like clockwork. The president was a Communist, a bad guy. Actually, he was the best president they ever had. He was legally elected. Jacobo Arbenz, a professor. He’s the one we overthrew. It wasn’t that he was a Communist, nothing to do with it. He had a program for agrarian reform. A program of land distribution: unused land for the Indians to cultivate up in the mountains.
We’ve never had one that worked so well. We had a guy working for Arbenz who was our boy—the boy who double-crossed him. He’d be it. But we also had Castillo Armas. We owned him and told him he was it. It was our second coup. The first was overthrowing Mossadegh, newly elected in Iran. Armas was with us in Nicaragua, in hiding. He, their future president, was becoming a pain in the ass. I got so damned tired of him begging to get back to Guatemala, I said, “Go ahead,” and he became the president.
Our boy who double-crossed Arbenz got sore, so John Puerifoy pulled a .45 caliber and told him to get lost. Armas, the guy we put in, got shot in the back by one of his guards. My friend at the embassy says, “What do we do now?” Well, this other boy wanted to be it, so we said, “Go ahead.” He was our new boy. That’s how we democratized Guatemala.
And nobody laughed.
26
Old Gent of the Right
Many of the readers are acquainted with the name of David Dellinger. But they never knew the man, nor his father, Raymond. We know of the celebrated Conspiracy 8 trial in Chicago as a result of the tumultuous happenings during the Democratic presidential convention in 1968. Governor Kerner, in a governmental paper, referred to it as something of a police riot as well as a study o
f the two Americas. It was a devastating report.
Hundreds of thousands of the country’s young, as well as furious Vietnam veterans who felt betrayed by their leaders, did battle with Daley the Elder and his city’s finest. Eight of the country’s leading activists, objecting to the pursuance of our misadventure in Vietnam, were tried for encouraging violent behavior on the part of the many.
Of those eight, three were iconic in stature. The late Abbie Hoffman had become renowned for his wit, especially at the expense of the doddering jurist, Judge Julius Hoffman. Tom Hayden was involved in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and author of the Port Huron Statement. The third was the eldest, Dave Dellinger, a lifelong pacifist and activist. During World War II, he had done time as a conscientious objector in a federal prison.
I was guest at a reunion between Dellinger and a group of seminarians he’d studied with at Union Theological Seminary. They recalled old times at the C.O. jail as they watched a number of ball games, all the while maintaining their objection to the killings in any war. The common sentiment: Whoever won in an armed struggle, it wouldn’t be the people.
Dellinger was voted Wakefield, Massachusetts’ top athlete of the half-century, as well as being awarded an Oxford scholarship. However, in 1936, when he heard of the war in Spain against the Fascist Franco, he volunteered. By the time he returned, he was a committed conscientious objector, no matter what the war.
From then on he knew his assignment in life. He had by the time of the trial become a figure of front-page repute. He was certainly the most stalwart of the eight. The trial was something of a farce and the journalists in town, especially the redoubtable Mike Royko, had a high old time of it. The result was that all of the convictions were reversed on appeal. Dave went back to work again, objecting to all wars, wherever they might be.