The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  Consider Peggy Terry.

  She came out of the Ozarks, out of hard times and soup lines, out of stoop labor in the scorching fields. Out of fifth-grade schooling, she became the voice of the mountain people in the big city. “Today you’re made to feel it’s you’re own fault. If you’re poor, it’s only because you’re ignorant and lazy. I once hated blacks. If I really knew what changed me.... I’ve thought about it and thought about it. You don’t get anywhere because you always see yourself as something you’re not. As long as you can say I’m better than they are, then there’s somebody below you can kick. But once you get over that, you see you’re not any better than they are. In fact, you’re worse off ‘cause you’re believin’ a lie.”

  The first person I visited during these adventures, beginning in the mid-’50’s, was Florence Scala. She was a young housewife trying to save her rainbow-colored neighborhood from demolition by the city’s power brokers. It was here that Jane Addams had set her bucket down so many years ago. The fight was lost, but Florence experienced a sort of revelation.

  “This was when I began to lose the feeling of idolatry you have about people. I so admired those nice people on the Hull House board. They were of old, highly respected families. I was later to find out these nice people could hurt you the most. I see now we have to feel equal to anyone. It’s a feeling poor people don’t have. You must never be afraid to say something even when it’s off. Just keep at it. You’re as good as they are.”

  She ran for the city council against the machine, the Mob, and the power brokers. The nice people looked away. She lost. “Among those who backed me were some from the far right. At first, I couldn’t understand why. But there was something frustrating them. They were hurting. They felt themselves unable to count anywhere.”

  A few weeks later, on a rainy night, a cab picked me up. The name on the license up front read: Dennis Hart. Small talk led to the subject of Florence Scala; she had been in the news. “She was the greatest woman I’ve ever known. She made you feel you were really worthwhile. Working in her campaign was the greatest experience of my life—in courage.”

  That’s why he joined the John Birch Society—“to find my courage.” All his life, it had been humiliation, a sense of being nobody, and fear, a pervasive fear. “Now, I mingle with a lot of successful people. They’re saying the problem is very simple. Life is complicated enough as it is. If you complicate things further, you’re asking for trouble.

  “I’m not worried about the Bomb. I feel this is a wilderness and I’ve lived in a wilderness all my life. Atheists are those most fearful of the Bomb. A man who truly believes in God doesn’t run around worrying about these things. He knows there’s a Hereafter.”

  A flash-forward, 1988; a generation later. I am in the lobby of the Willow Creek Church,3 shortly before the first Sunday morning service begins. I run into Mike, Connie, and baby Jason. It appears they share Dennis Hart’s vision of a sweet apocalypse. He is a computer technician. She is a “stay-at-home mom.”

  “Since I became a Christian,” she says, “I don’t worry about the Bomb. It’s in God’s hands. I think there will be a nuclear war, but the events leading up to it haven’t happened yet...so why not have children?”

  A smiling David passes by. He’s in data processing. “If a nuclear war happened and my wife and I died, if we accepted the Lord as our savior, we’d be in Heaven. That’s better than being on earth.”

  Reverend Hybels’s hip sermon evokes appreciative laughter. “Next Sunday, we’ll have some cameras set up. We’ll be taping the service. Don’t dress up too much because we don’t want anybody to think this is a traditional church. So wear bare jerseys, short pants, whatever.” Much laughter.

  Roy Larson has observed this phenomenon from the year one, An ex-minister and journalist, he teaches at a midwestern university. “These programs have a lot of appeal, especially to young adults who have no sense of history. You don’t need it. It’s bland, it’s inoffensive, it’s fast food, it fills you up for a while. You’re given answers, there’s no need to reflect. The followers are what you’d call nice people, hearty, outgoing, always smiling. But the smile is not connected to the rest of the body, with feeling or thought.

  “There’s always been a prophetic strain within religion: against the grain. It’s always been a minority. But it’s the salt. The New Testament warned us about the salt that loses its savor. A religion that loses its prophetic oomph is salt-free. Bland. Tasteless.”

  Jean Gump is, in this sense, salty to a rare degree. A middle-class, suburban grandmother; mother of twelve; active in church and community; president of the PTA; League of Women Voters, one of the most respected citizens of her community.

  Being full of that scriptural salt, she did what came naturally to her, to the dismay of her neighbors. On Good Friday, 1986, “We commemorated the crucifixion of Christ by entering a missile silo in Holden, Missouri.”4

  They hung a banner on the outside of the chain-link fence that read: SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES AN ACT OF HEALING, ISAIAH 2. “You know, ‘We will pound our swords into plowshares and study war no more.’” Her casual recounting of the affair was pure Gump, whimsical, often hilarious, always heartbreaking. Especially the moment when the boy soldier, young enough to be her grandchild, descended from the armored vehicle, his gun at the ready. As she lowered her hands to reach into her purse, she said to the trembling boy, “Shoot if you must, sonny, but I’ve got to blow my nose.”

  Her husband, Joe, followed suit at another missile site. He, too, was arrested and tried. There were trials, delays, deals offered—if only there were a recantation, a simple “I’m sorry.” Considering the obstinate nature of the Gumps, none came forth. She was sentenced to a term of eight years in a federal pen. She became no. 03789-045 at the Correctional Institution for Women, Alderson, West Virginia. After serving a few years, she was released; so was Joe, from a Minnesota federal “college.” Neither appeared repentant. A contumacious couple. Talk about salt.

  Postscript: I ran into Chris Daniels, a scruffy, eighteen-year-old Clint Eastwood clone, of Appalachian stock, who had more than his share of run-ins with the cops. Apropos of nothing, he says, “I read a news story about this lady, Jean Gump. Ever heard of her? “Yeah,” I reply. “She’s in the same book you are.”5

  “Yeah? Oh, wow. We watched on TV where she went to this Minute Man missile site and beat on the thing. What turned me on to it, she’s a grandmother and she risked her future for a cause. It was like—wow—she did all this to get people thinkin’ about what’s happenin’. It was like—wow—that’s pretty strange.”

  It may be strange, at that. Jean Gump and others of those salty ones I encountered appear to be searching for some sort of vision of a society in which, to paraphrase Dorothy Day, it would be easier for people to behave decently.

  You who thought of yourself, up to that moment, as simply a number, suddenly spring to life. You have that intoxicating feeling that you can make history, that you really count.

  —NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN

  George Malley knew that he counted, but springing to life and making history were something else. He was too heavily laden. When he spoke, it was with a deliberateness, almost a reluctance, as though each word were a tooth extracted. When he drove his ancient Dodge, it was at a studied pace, much to the obvious annoyance of the other motorists. I thought of the aristocratic old lady in the Queen Mary Hat, who, in the early ’20s drove her electric car in the same fashion and at the same speed: “I have an instinctive fear. I dread the thought of what may happen.”

  I first met George Malley in the ’50s. He was a craftsman of old-world values, who sensed a new species of young, rehabbing his block, gentrifying it. He was not Ibsen’s middle-aged architect, fearing young knuckles rapping at the door; it was an awareness of a shift in our society’s values, especially among the young.

  It was not that alone which disturbed him. “My feeling about the Negro is this: I never try to think in ter
ms of his being equal to me. I don’t know and he doesn’t know. The average Negro is not. I’m not saying he won’t be and that he might surpass me someday. But I fear him. By and large, he represents violence.”

  Twenty-five years later, I paid him another visit. “During the ‘60s, I used to talk to my boys a lot. At the time, they took issue with me. I thought they were trying to turn the world as I knew it upside down. Now, strangely enough, I see a hell of a lot of what they had to say come about. But now my boys have taken the opposite stance. Now, they’re for law and order at any price. They’re for hit ’em over the head if there is no other way.

  “I guess they’ve become adults. In our society, when you become an adult, you stake your claim. They have property now. They both have homes. They’re doing fine. Once my sons called me a narrow-minded bigot. It is I who have changed most dramatically. I see things now that I didn’t see then. I’m surprised at myself. I feel I could live with black people now. Yes, I still worry about violence. But I’m sure the black man has the identical worry, even more so than I have. So we’re sharing something in common, see?

  “For the past dozen years, my most contented moments is when I’m alone. I like to get up at four o’clock in the morning and sit in this chair and just be alone with my thoughts. I have had very little formal education, but I like to think things through, to try to understand. By myself. No TV, no radio, no newspaper. Knowledge has only real value when there’s understanding. It’s tremendous, it’s exhilarating.”

  Chester Kolar, is a fellow homeowner, who, unlike the other, can’t be bothered. “Over the radio comes a bulletin: so many people killed. I mean what are they trying to fire up? This poor man that’s trying to get his eight hours to keep his family going—what does John Q. Public know what should happen? Let’s not stick our noses into something we know nothing about.”

  Eva Barnes does stick her nose into things. She is a tavern keeper in a blue-collar neighborhood; an alumna of the stockyards, where she had worked since the age of twelve. Unlike most of her patrons, she saw hope in the rebellious young of the ’60s. She was at one time arrested along with them, during an anti—Vietnam War gathering. “My mother had seven gold stars in the window. From the First World War, you know. Those poor Lithuanian boys who lived by our house. There’s death enough. I don’t like to see nobody killed. This world is beautiful to live....”

  At the end of the most extraordinary period of transformation in human affairs, old landmarks have disappeared, new ones are not yet recognized as such, and intellectual navigation across the suddenly estranged landscapes of human society becomes unusually puzzling for everyone.

  —ERIC HOBSBAWM

  Some time ago, I arrived at the airport of a large American city. I hadn’t been there in years. I didn’t recognize it at all. The old landmarks that had distinguished this metropolis from others were no longer there. I saw a Golden Arch; I saw a Red Lobster; I saw a Holiday Inn; I saw a Days Inn, more modest in price. The landscape was identical to that of the city I had just left. At my assigned hotel, I was greeted by a smiling, sweet-faced young woman, a badge on her lapel: Barbara. I had been greeted at the city I had just left by a smiling, sweet-faced young man, with a badge on his lapel: Peter. Was I on a treadmill?

  I left a wake-up call at the switchboard for 6:00 A.M. I added gratuitously, “I’ve got to be in Cleveland pretty early.” The voice responded, with some concern: “Sir, you are in Cleveland.”

  In 1969, while exploring midwestern rural towns seeking out survivors of the Great Depression, I lost my bearings in Le Mars, Iowa (population 8,276). I couldn’t find the house of a witness of a near-lynching of a judge, who, in the ’30s, had relentlessly foreclosed mortgages of desperate farmers. “Where is that street?” I asked the manager of the town’s supermart. He didn’t know. “I’m a stranger here myself.” He had recently been transferred by the company.

  Jessie Binford, Jane Addams’s old colleague, had returned to her hometown, Marshalltown, Iowa. Her father was one of its pioneers. Here, she came to die. “They’ve scattered the people. Everybody is a stranger. Even here. The human touch is going. Nothing stays the same, I know. We should have the intelligence and the courage to meet the many changes that come into the world and will always come. But what are the intrinsic values we should not give up? That’s the great challenge that faces us.”

  Rex Winship doesn’t think it’s much of a challenge. Never mind the past, he deals in futures. Rex is one of the Forbes 400 richest Americans. His estimated net worth is more that $400 million. His payroll, in cities throughout the world, runs to 1,500.

  “Nothing is forever. You always have to stay flexible, so you can change. Fast. The globalization of the communications market is going to be dramatic. You’re going to be able to sit in your office in Chicago, look up at the wall and be in touch with the world. You want to be able to move—and fast. You want to be to send a young guy to Singapore for two years, Sydney, Australia for a year, and then back to Chicago. Today, you don’t want the kid married.”

  In the trading room, where scores of young brokers are intently studying their quote machines, his public relations person, in the manner of a gracious hostess, guides me. “The turnover is tremendous. Two to five years with one firm and then out. The business just changes so fast. We affectionately call it the war room. You feel like you’re going to battle [laughs]. Yeah.” What most impressed me was the singular silence in the room.

  The old-time printer bemoans the disappearance of talk in the workplace. “Today, the composing room is as silent as the editorial room. Have you been over at the city desk of any of the newspapers lately? It used to be so wild and romantic. Now it’s like a tomb.”

  On the desks of the young reporters in the city room, as on the desks of young traders in the brokerage house, is the ubiquitous IT, through whose windows they stare in the manner of voyeurs. Each is in a private world, close by colleagues, yet planets away. It is solipsism en masse.

  W H. “Ping” Ferry, fully aware of the remarkable advances in high technology, had a bone or two to pick. “At Dartmouth, my alma mater, they got a bequest of 50 million dollars to build a new library. It’s going to be full of mainframes, the apparatus at the heart of computer activity. By the time this thing is finished, a young man or woman can walk into a room in his or her freshman year and never emerge until four years later to get the degree. He can go to all his classes by computer. He can get his grub brought in by computer. He will never have to emerge.” That was five years ago.

  Hanover, N. H.—Through a plug in his dorm room, Arthur Desrosiers, a Dartmouth College sophomore, pursues all his preoccupations of undergradute life without leaving his chair: He questions professors, fishes for dates, browses the library catalogue, orders pizza and engages in 2 A.M. bull sessions on the meaning of it all.

  Using the campus E-mail system, known as Blitzmail, he sometimes trades a series of back-and-forth messages with his two roommates—even though they are sitting just a few feet away

  —TRIP GABRIEL,

  New York Times, November 11, 1996

  Ping Ferry may not have been Nostradamus, but he came uncomfortably close. Wright Morris, thirty-five years ago, put it succinctly: “We are more and more in communications and less and less in communication.”

  Click. The image of Gary Bryner and the unimate came to mind. In 1970, I visited Lordstown, Ohio. It was the Vega plant of General Motors. Gary was the young president of Local 1112, UAW The company had introduced a unimate on the assembly line. “A unimate is a welding robot. It looks just like a praying mantis. It goes from spot to spot to spot. It releases that thing and it jumps back into position, ready for the next car. They never tire, they never sweat, they never complain, they never miss work. And they never talk.”

  Click, click. Another image. Sixty-five years ago, I was seated in the last row of the Blackstone Theatre balcony. Or was it the Harris or the Selwyn? The play was Karel Capek’s R. U.R. (Rossum’s
Universal Robots). A Theatre Guild production. Place: An island. Time: The future.

  Plot: A factory has manufactured worker-robots, “living automats, without souls, desires or feelings.” There are now millions. A physicist has secretly changed the formula and has created two humanized robots. The robots, who have been used, when needed, as soldiers, revolt. They overwhelm the few humans left. The factory builder is the only human left on earth. In the epilogue, he discovers the two humanized robots, a young man and a young woman. They have the touch of Adam and Eve.

  As the curtain falls, we have the idea that mankind may have another go at it. It is a replay of Miranda spotting Ferdinand: “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in it!”

  As for that brave, new tomorrow, Moms Mabley, in another context, professes to a doubt: “Maybe so, maybe so, baby, but I ain’t bettin’ my gold tooth on it.” Einstein expressed a similar concern, albeit in a somewhat different fashion. He worried about our twentieth-century obsession: technology über alles.6 If Moms Mabley and Albert Einstein were worried, I’m worried.

  Are we being ironically transmogrified? Having invented robots who emulate humans (i.e., the unimate), are we humans now emulating robots? Consider the young, thoroughly absorbed, staring at their terminals; the college boy impaled to his chair; the mechanized voice on the telephone increasingly replacing the human one. Will vox humana become vox automa? Are the somebodies becoming the somethings?

  Perhaps these bleak reflections are no more than a wearisome recitation of the Rime of the Ancient Luddite. Yet Jessie Binford’s challenge still holds: What are the intrinsic values we should not give up?

  My American Century is the name of this book. It is the possessive pronoun that bears emphasis. It reflects, of course, a personal point of view. In all my works, it has been so. I have tried for as much balance as possible, yet “objectivity,” so often a reprise of the doctrine of the announced idea, of the official truth, has escaped me. My turf has been the arena of unofficial truth—of the noncelebrated one on the block, who is able to articulate the thoughts of his/her neighbors, inchoate, though deeply felt. I confess to never having been privy to “highly reliable sources.”