The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  James Cameron, the nonpareil of British journalists, spoke with some authority in this matter. During the darkest days of the war in Vietnam, he had visited Hanoi, the first Western journalist to do so. On coming to the United States, he brought forth the astonishing news that the North Vietnamese were humans, not unlike ourselves. He was, as a matter of course, excoriated in all our media, especially by the most respected and prestigious. “If not downright mischievous, I was certainly ‘non-objective.’ ” He had committed the unpardonable sin of challenging official, and thus accepted, truths.

  “It never occurred to me, in such a situation, to be other than subjective, and as obviously as I could manage to be. I may not have always been satisfactorily balanced; I have always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than the truth, and that the reporter whose technique was informed by no opinion lacked a very serious dimension.”

  Amen.

  As we approach the end of the twentieth century, let David Brower, offer the valedictory. His instruction to his fellow elders who have experienced and lived out most of this century.

  “Our young haven’t lost their history. It was taken from them. We’ve stuffed them into a procrustean bed, to make them fit whatever its size or shape may be. You’ve got a file on this century, stored in your heads, that nobody else has. There’ll be nobody like you ever again [emphasis his]. Make the most of every molecule you’ve got, as long as you’ve got a second to go. That is your assignment. That is your charge.”

  NOTE

  This quasi-anthology of my eight oral journals is not arranged chronologically, that is, in the order of each book’s publication date. Thus, Division Street: America, published in 1967, appears as the fourth chapter of this volume. American Dreams: Lost and Found, published in 1980, provides the opening sequence.

  There is a chronological order of sorts. The impressions of our most telling and traumatic events are told by my elders and contemporaries who experienced them, and as I remember them.

  Beginnings; the Great Depression; World War II; postwar prosperity and the Cold War; the insistent matter of race; the computer and its revolution, altering our work, our language, and—more than we at this moment may realize—our behavior; and, inevitably, less gracefully than need be, the withered face of age.

  In the making of the eight books dealing with our time and place, I had visited about 1,000 people, largely those uncelebrated and unsung. Yet, it was their sense of anonymity and lack of self-indulgence that made them the ideal oral historians. Unfortunately, I had to choose but a few for this work, hardly more than fifty. It is with apologies that I salute those not included here, though appearing in the other volumes, and with profound gratitude to them and to those present in these pages.

  Part I

  The Dream

  American Dreams :

  Lost and Found (1980)

  INTRODUCTION

  For the nine-year-old boy, in 1921, traveling on that day coach from New York to Chicago, it was simple. And exhilarating. Though he wasn’t the proper British butler Ruggles, whose mind was boggled by images of a Wild West and equally wild Indians in multifeathered headgear, the boy envisioned a Midwest that, too, was frontier country.

  It was a twenty-four-hour journey, clickety-clacketing through the outskirts of large and middle-sized Pennsylvania cities, through the main streets of small Ohio towns, of sudden appearances in the aisles of hawkers bawling out their wares, of steaming hot coffee and homemade sandwiches, of local newspapers called The Globe, The Sun, The Star, The Planet. Yes, The Herald, too, for something terribly exciting was being heralded. It was a momentous adventure, uniquely American. Out there was more: a reservoir of untapped power and new astonishments.

  “One of my earliest memories was a trip across the country with my grandfather.” A Chicago physician reflects in 1979. He is the grandson of the late General Robert E. Wood, who was, at the glowing time, chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck and Company. “We were sitting in the engineer’s cab. It was the Great Northern. We were going through the mountains. The steam engine was a huge one. I remember thinking how big the country was and how powerful the engine. And being with someone as powerful and confident as my grandfather. It was about 1940. I was seven and optimistic.”

  The sprawl of the Chicago stockyards, whose smells on a summer night, with a stiff breeze blowing from the south, overwhelmed the boy. It was not at all unpleasant to him, for there was a sense of things happening, of propitious times ahead. The condition of those who had actually worked in The Jungle, revealed some fifteen years earlier by Upton Sinclair, had caused something of a stir, but time, benign neglect, and editorial silences had deliquesced public indignation.

  Warren Gamaliel Harding, handsome, silver-haired, genial, was our president. Hollywood couldn’t have done better. He was a cross between Francis X. Bushman and Theodore Roberts. Normalcy was on the wing, and the goose hung high. 1923. Came the first political scandal in the boy’s memory: Teapot Dome. It was, the teachers told him, an aberration. Corruption was not endemic to the American scene. Bad apples in every barrel. And our barrels, praise God, have been a fruitful lot.

  It was another story the boy heard in the lobby of his mother’s hotel. The guests were boomer firemen, journeymen carpenters, and ex-Wobblies, as well as assorted scissorbills7 and loyal company men. The cards were stacked, groused the former, between rounds of solitaire, hearts, and cribbage. If you don’t like it, go to Russia, retorted the others. Inevitably, the wild political arguments became highly personal, fueled as most were by bootleg whiskey.

  “The early part of the century was an exciting period in the life of the United States.” The ninety-five-year-old economist taps his memory. “Almost every community had a channel of expression: city clubs, trade union central bodies, forums, Cooper Union. Speakers would go from state to state, town to town, get ten dollars here, fifty dollars there. There were thousands who would come to hear Gene Debs, myself, Clarence Darrow, crowds, crowds, filling Madison Square Garden.”8

  Ed Sprague and Big Ole were the two most eloquent and hot-tempered lobby performers. The others, usually full of piss and vinegar, were unusually subdued when these two had the floor. Ed was much for words, though little for food. He dined on graveyard stew, bread broken up in a bowl of hot milk. He had no teeth: they had been knocked out by vigilantes in Seattle during the general strike of 1919. In no way did it interfere with his polemics, bellowed through snuff-stained gums. It was mortal combat between himself and the devil: big business. The boy was reminded of Billy Sunday, exorcising the devil: “I’ll stomp him, I’ll punch him, I’ll bite him and, by God, when my teeth are all gone, I’ll gum him back to hell!”

  Big Ole was Ed’s bête noire, closest at hand. He defended John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and gloried in Teddy Roosevelt’s credo of soft words and the big stick. He was Ed’s equal in decibel power. They were wrestling, not so much for the hearts and minds of the others as for the pure hell of it. Theirs was the American yawp. Every man a king. Every man a Demosthenes. It was a fouling, gouging, no-holds-barred match: Hackenschmidt versus Frank Gotch. Along with the others, the boy was enthralled, for it was, behind the wild expletives and runaway metaphors, power they were “discussing.” Of the potent few and the impotent many.

  “If you listen to any president of the United States,” says Nicholas Von Hoffman, “ ‘power’ is a word he never discusses. Senators never use that word either. It gets people thinking. Who knows where your thinking might take you? It you don’t talk about power, it’s like not lifting the hood of the automobile. You don’t know how the damn thing works.”

  Ed Sprague and Big Ole had three things in common. Each was singularly skilled with his hands, a craftsman. Each visited Gladys on Sunday mornings. She ran a crib along Orleans Street. It was Ed’s defiance of God and Ole’s show of reverence, one of the weisenheimers put it. Gladys was fond of both; she favored lively men. She favored quiet men t
oo. Gladys was an egalitarian, and a true entrepreneur. Each wrote letters to the editor with the regularity of a railroad timepiece. When, in the course of human events, the name of one or the other would appear on the editorial page, it was an occasion for celebration.

  One of the more sober and scholarly guests at the hotel turned the boy on to E. Haldeman-Julius Blue Books. They were small paperbacks, encompassing the writings of all the world’s wise men—and an occasional wise woman—from the Year One. Published in Girard, Kansas, twenty such books would come to you in return for one buck plus postage. An especially fat one would go for a dime. Aristotle, Voltaire, Fabre on the life of the mason bee, a nickel apiece. All of Shakespeare’s tragedies, a dime. Not a bad buy. These booklets, fitting neatly in the hip pocket, became his Dr. Eliot’s Five-Foot Shelf.

  It was his first acquaintance with the writings of Tom Paine. In school, he had been taught the troublemaker’s words about times that try men’s souls, but not his words that challenged men’s minds. “As America was the only spot in the political world where the principles of human reformation could begin, so also was it the best in the natural world. The scene which that country presents to the spectator has something in it which generates and enlarges great ideas. He sees his species, not with the inhuman eye of a natural enemy, but as kindred....”

  In the woods of northwest Oregon, the embattled logger neglects the breakfast the waitress has laid out before him. His thoughts are elsewhere, and his fervor. “The forest to me is an awesome and beautiful place. The young loggers were not here to see what was there before. If you’ve never known something, it’s difficult to appreciate what’s been lost. What happened to all that majestic timber? I believe that only by being in the presence of beauty and great things in the world about us can man eventually get the goddamn hatred of wanting to kill each other out of his system. The beauty is going.”

  The traveling singer from Idaho no longer experiences the ancestral pull toward her hometown. “Boise hardly exists for me any more. All the things I remember with pleasure have been torn, down and replaced by bullshit.... Downtown Boise, all covered, is like a cattle chute for customers. It used to be like a little cup of trees. Just trees and this river. Old, old houses and a sense of community. None of that’s there any more. It’s all gone.”

  In the mid sixties, while journeying through the farm states on the prowl for depression storytellers, I came upon Marcus, Iowa, along the South Dakota border. Population: 1,263. At the supermart, the three people I encountered were unaware of the man I was seeking; his father had founded the town. The checker at the counter seemingly at home, thought “the name’s familiar, but I just can’t place it.” For her, too, it was an estranged landscape.

  A few days later, in the town of Le Mars, I was walking toward a hamburger joint. It was at night. It may have been on the outskirts of town; as I recall, there was no sidewalk. A patrol car slowed down beside me. The two policemen were curious, that’s all. Nobody else was walking.

  “We began pretty well here in America, didn’t we?” Jessie Binford, Jane Addams’s old colleague, asked herself rhetorically, as she, in 1963, returned to her hometown, Marshalltown. Her father had founded it. “When you think of all the promise in this country... I don’t see how you could have found much greater promise. Or a greater beginning. Yet the commonest thing I feel in this town is fear of the unknown, of the stranger. Fear, fear. We should have the intelligence and courage to see 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 all.”

  The twenties, the time of the boy’s train ride, were neither the best of times nor the worst, though innocence, like booze, brings forth its morning-after hangover. A better world was acomin’, the boy felt. How could it miss? There was so much of it, so many frontiers. And what, with so much inequity, so much room for improvement.

  With Bob LaFollette and George Norris, senators of independent mind, ringing the bell in the night—a warning of power in fewer and fewer hands—Americans aware of sharp truths and even sharper dangers, would respond. With the certitude of a twelve-year-old, and the roaring eloquence of the hotel guests remembered, the boy was never more certain. What he did not quite understand was that infinitely lesser men were awarded much more attention, much more printer’s ink. In later years the clones of Coolidge, expertly machine-tooled and media-hyped, have done, and are doing, equally well. Ed Sprague’s thunder still rolls in the boy’s ear “Who owns these things? Who makes scrambled eggs of our brains? In their stately mansions, they rob us of our stately minds.”

  Cannot Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” be subject to transposition: the evil of banality? In 1792, Paine observed: “The mighty objects he beholds act upon the mind by enlarging it, and he partakes of the greatness he contemplates.” In 1972, the less fraudulent of our two presidential candidates, on winning the California primary, beamed over all three networks: “I can’t believe I won the whole thing.” Thus did an Alka-Seltzer commercial enrich our political vocabulary.

  Vox populi? Is that all there is to the American Dream, as celebrated in thousands of sixty-second, thirty-second, and ten-second spots each day on all channels? A mercantile language, debased, and nothing else? Is there no other language, no other dream?

  “Some people may think it’s childish of me, a poor white, to have faith in the deep yearnings of my people,” says a woman from the South. “They’re much like the people of Mexico. If a person in their midst is identified as a poet or he can draw or play an instrument, this person has stature.” (Remember the surge of pride in Pa Joad’s voice as Connie picked up the guitar and sang? “That’s my son-in-law.”)

  “It’s amazing, even in the backwoods of Alabama, there’s a classic tucked away in some country school. It’s funny, poetry has a way of molding people. There’s a buried beauty—[suddenly] Gray’s Elegy changed my life. Who knows who’s buried, who could have been what? The men in power should get all the poetry out of schools, anything that touches on real beauty. It’s dangerous.”

  The ninety-year-old Pole who came here in 1896 and worked his livelong life in the mills still hungers. “I used to attend lectures at Hull House. The things that bothered me were so many things I couldn’t understand. There was a professor from the university lecturing on relativity, Einstein. The worst of it was I didn’t understand half the words he used. I never understood relativity. I guess I got too old and too tired.”

  Kuume is the Finnish word for fever. It was the American fever. They came early in this century and at the turn. All to the land, by nature and industry blessed. To make it, of course, and to escape, as well, the razor’s edge and, in remarkably many instances, the Old Country draft. Their mothers didn’t raise their boys to be soldiers, either. The manner in which they came varied with geography and circumstance. In all cases, it was hard travelin’.

  A wooden ship across the North Sea, “with sugarloaf waves, so the boat would rock, where you just crawled into bunks,” to Liverpool, the Lucania, and on to America. Another: from Italy, by way of Marseilles, “all by myself,” on the Sardinia, hence to El Dorado, which turned out to be a Massachusetts textile mill. A third: from an Eastern European shtetl, “ten of us,” by wagon to Warsaw, by train to Hamburg, by train to Liverpool, and five weeks on a freighter to the land of milk and honey. For most, it was mal de mer most of the way. For all, it was kuume all the way.

  When in 1903—or was it ’04?—my mother and father came to the United States from the Old Country, their dream was not unique. Steady work and schooling for the boys, who were born during the following decade. He was a tailor, a quiet man. She was a seamstress, nimble of finger and mind. He was easy, seeking no more than his due. She was feverish, seeking something more. Though skilled in her craft, her spirit was the entrepreneur’s. Out there, somewhere, was the brass ring. This was, after all, America.

  When my father became ill and
was unable to work, she made the big move. Out west, to Chicago. She had a tip: a men’s hotel up for sale. 1921. It was hard work, but she toughed it out. She was an hôtelière, in business for herself. She was May Robson, Apple Annie, making it. These were no apples she was selling; she was a woman of property. They were pretty good years, the twenties. But something went wrong in ’29, something she hadn’t counted on. The men she admired, the strong, the powerful ones, the tycoons (she envisioned herself as a small-time Hetty Green), goofed up somewhere. Kerplunk went her American Dream.

  Most of her tight-fisted savings were lost with the collapse of Samuel Insull’s empire. It was a particularly bitter blow for her. He was the industrialist she had most admired, her Chicago titan. She had previously out-jousted a neighborhood banker. R. L. Chisholm insisted on the soundness of his institution, named, by some ironic God, The Reliance State Bank. Despite his oath on his mother’s grave and his expressed admiration for my mother’s thrift, she withdrew her several thousand. His bank closed the following day. Yet the utilities magnate took her, a fact for which she forgave neither him nor herself.9

  The visit to R. L. Chisholm on that day of reckoning was a memorable one. At my mother’s insistence, I accompanied her to the bank. Often, I had strolled there to the deposit window. Now came the time of the big withdrawal. The banker, a dead ringer for Edward Arnold, was astonished and deeply hurt. He had been, after all, her friend, her advisor, the keeper of her flame. Didn’t she trust him? Of course she did; her reservations, though, outweighed her trust. It was an epiphanic moment for me as I, embarrassedly, observed the two. The conversation, which had begun with firm handshakes all around, easy talk, a joke or two, and a semblance of graciousness, ended on a somewhat less friendly note. Both, the banker and my mother, were diminished. Something beyond the reach of either one had defeated both. Neither had the power over his own life worth a damn.