The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  My mother’s gods had failed her; and she, who had always believed in making it, secretly felt that she, too, had failed. Though the following years didn’t treat her too unkindly, her fires were banked. Her dreams darkened. She died a bitter, cantankerous old woman, who almost, though never quite, caught the brass ring.

  Failure was as unforgivable then as it is now. Perhaps that’s why so many of the young were never told about the depression; were, as one indignant girl put it, “denied our own history.”

  The young mechanic, driving me through the bluegrass country to eastern Kentucky, lets it out, the family skeleton. His father, a fast-talking salesman, was Willy Loman. “I always identified with Willy’s son Biff. My father’s staying with me and my wife. My brothers’ wives don’t want him around. They come right out and say so. I think he represents the horror of failure. Both my oldest brothers and my father were steeped one hundred percent in the idea of strength and supremacy, machismo, and success.”

  During the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, the St. Louis cabbie, weaving his way through traffic, was offering six-o’ clock commentary.

  “We gotta do it. We have no choice.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t be a pitiful, helpless giant. We gotta show ’em we’re number one.”

  “Are you number one?”

  A pause. “I’m number nothin’.” He recounts a litany of personal troubles, grievances, and disasters. His wife left him; his daughter is a roundheel; his boy is hooked on heroin; he loathes his job. For that matter, he’s not so crazy about himself. Wearied by this turn of conversation, he addresses the rear-view mirror: “Did you hear Bob Hope last night? He said...”

  Forfeiting their own life experience, their native intelligence, their personal pride, they allow more celebrated surrogates, whose imaginations may be no larger than theirs, to think for them, to speak for them, to be for them in the name of the greater good. Conditioned toward being “nobody,” they look toward “somebody” for the answer. It is not what the American town meeting was all about.

  Yet, something’s happening, as yet unrecorded on the social seismograph. There are signs, unmistakable, of an astonishing increase in the airing of grievances: of private wrongs and public rights. The heralds are from all sorts of precincts: a family farmer, a blue-collar wife, a whistle-blowing executive. In unexpected quarters, those hitherto quiescent, are finding voice. A long-buried American tradition may be springing back to life. In a society and time with changes so stunning and landscapes so suddenly estranged, the last communiques are not yet in. The eighties may differ from the seventies by a quantum jump.

  The capacity for change is beyond the measure of any statistician or pollster. Among those I’ve encountered in the making of this book are: an ex-Klan leader who won his state’s human relations award; the toughest girl on the block who became an extraordinary social worker; the uneducated Appalachian woman who became the poetic voice of her community; the blue-collar housewife who, after mothering nine, says: “I don’t like the word ‘dream.’ I don’t even want to specify it as American. What I’m beginning to understand is there’s a human possibility. That’s where all the excitement is. If you can be part of that, you’re aware and alive. It’s not a dream, it’s possible. It’s everyday stuff.”

  There are nascent stirrings in the neighborhood and in the field, articulated by non-celebrated people who bespeak the dreams of their fellows. It may be catching. Unfortunately, it is not covered on the six o’clock news.

  In The Uses of the Past, Herbert Muller writes: “In the incessant din of the mediocre, mean and fraudulent activities of a commercial mass society, we are apt to forget the genuine idealism of democracy, of the long painful struggle for liberty and equality.... The modern world is as revolutionary as everybody says it is. Because the paradoxes of our age are so violent, men have been violently oversimplifying them. If we want to save our world, we might better try to keep and use our heads.”

  In this book are a hundred American voices, captured by hunch, circumstance, and a rough idea. There is no pretense at statistical “truth,” nor consensus. There is, in the manner of a jazz work, an attempt, of theme and improvisation, to recount dreams, lost and found, and a recognition of possibility.

  VINE DELORIA

  As soon as we began to travel faster in this country, the importance of place got lost. I can get in an airplane in the desert, and in three hours get off in the Great Lakes. I didn’t really travel. I wasn’t aware of anything happening.

  A bleak, rainy morning at O’Hare International Airport, Chicago.

  He is a Sioux Indian, en route from Tucson to Washington, D.C. His most celebrated book is Custer Died for Your Sins. He teaches political science at the University of Arizona. He is forty-five.

  Our conversation is occasionally interrupted by an elderly waitress of salty tongue, who constantly refills our coffee cups. She has been casually eavesdropping. “American Dream? Come on, you guys.” She recounts, between her self-appointed rounds, a tale of her being cheated of thousands by a crooked lawyer. “American Dream! Are you kiddin’?”

  I know a lot of Indian stories about places in America. St. Anthony Falls was once a holy shrine of the Sioux Indians. You go there, and you’re filled with wonderment: What did it look like when we had it? What did it really look like before television and fast cars and jet airplanes?

  I often think of the Donner party. 1846. Caught in the pass, they ended up as cannibals, eating each other. I remember following the same route, going by it in my Olds 98 on the salt flats. The interstate highway, from Denver to Cheyenne. I covered those salt flats in about forty-five minutes. In the pioneer days, you had to cross those salt flats in thirty-six hours. If you wasted any more time, you’d arrive at the Sierra Nevadas at a dangerous time of the year. It took the Donners six days. I went past those flats at seventy-five miles an hour, just zap! Knowing all kinds of people died there. You begin to raise questions about the white-Indian conflict.

  None of these tribes saw enough whites at any one time to ever regard them as dangerous. If you have a tribe of five hundred sitting on a hillside and a wagon train of two hundred people goes by, that’s no threat to you. You hear a lot of stories, traditional ones, that the Indians were afraid of the whites because they thought they were crazy. You read the tremendous sacrifices the pioneers made to get across the Great Plains. You think of your own people who sat on the hillside, who knew every creek and rock for a thousand miles around. They’re looking down at these people, who are terrified because they’re in tall grass. Neither side understands the other. Perhaps the Donner party might have been saved had they been friends of the Indians, had they not been frightened of these “enemies” who knew the terrain. You have to take a new look at what you thought America was before you can figure out where it’s going.

  I grew up on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. It was about thirty-five miles from Wounded Knee. The town was about four blocks long and three blocks wide, off Main Street. It was really only about two blocks of buildings. I remember before they put the pavement in. The roads were just cow pastures. When it rained, you were there for a couple of days. Very few whites lived there.

  I went to grade school, half white and half mixed-blooded Indians. They taught us Rudyard Kipling’s world view. It was a simplistic theory that societies marched toward industry and that science was doing good for us. We’re all Americans and none of us is ever disloyal. The United States has never been on the wrong side of anything. The government has never lied to the people. The FBI is there to help you, and if you see anything suspicious, call them. There was a heavy overtone of the old British colonial attitude. Nothing about the slaves. Minority history just didn’t exist. The world somehow is the garden of the white people, and everybody else kind of fits in someplace. And it’s not demeaning to fit in,’cause that’s the way God wants it. You’re not being put down. Western civilization’s finding a place for you.
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  It was glossed-over history that Americans used to recite on Memorial Day in the twenties and thirties. I remember going as a six-year-old kid to these roundups, where the old cowboys and all the old chiefs would gather. After a big barbecue, some broken down tenor would sing “Old Faithful” and “Wagon Wheels,” and everybody would cry. They’d moan about the frontier being closed and they’d beat the drum. It takes you a long time to realize these things aren’t real.

  My father was an Episcopal missionary on the reservation. His father was too. I suppose our family was one of the first to move from the old ways to the white man’s ways. It was a weird situation, schizophrenic. My family had been religious leaders before they’d become Christians. The old Indian religion. I was not just a minister’s son. Mine was a long family tradition of medicine men. People came to my father for all sorts of things. He knew all kinds of medicine songs and stories.

  He held on to the two cultures without much conflict until the late sixties. The civil rights movement turned him off. The church put tremendous pressure on the Indians to integrate. He said: “We don’t have to. We can be what we are without getting into the melting pot.” There are thousands of Indian Christians who looked upon Christianity in the old Indian way. The message of Jesus wasn’t all that big. But a lot of the Indians were turned off and ended up with no religion. My father just gave up on Christianity.

  Maybe my generation is the last one that was affected by Indian values. I’m forty-five. Now I see people, about eight years younger, going to a meeting and starting to dominate things right away. When I was five and six, older relatives shushed me up at meetings because no one should talk unless the oldest person talks. People of my age still feel these social constraints. If you move eight years down, you find people who’ve grown up in postwar brashness. The hustler. The further down you move, the worse it gets. The younger people have taken the rat race as the real thing. It’s a thing in their heads. In my generation, it was a thing in the heart.

  The young Indian as well as the young white has no sense of history whatsoever. I think the Second World War did it. History, for a long time, was dominated by Europe. The United States came out of World War Two as the great power. All of a sudden, we had responsibility. Our history had always been parochial. We were separated by oceans, we didn’t know where we were. The anti-Communist paranoia took over: nobody’s ever gonna conquer this country, by God. If we’re destroyed, it will be self-destruction.

  An old Sioux chief, Standing Bear, once said that the white man came to this continent afraid from the very beginning. Afraid of animals and nature and earth. This fear projected itself onto the land and the animals. They became frightened of the whites. When the whites would move in, the animals would move out. I had always thought that was a clever Indian saying until I re-read de Tocqueville last year. He says: You have ten thousand Indians living in an area with animals all around. You get two or three settlers there, and the animals and Indians leave.

  You have to ask yourself: What kind of people were these that came here? They must have been absolutely frantic to set down roots. It was more than subduing the land. I mean, that’s a hell of a toll to pay for the right to live on a piece of land.

  Maybe the American Dream is in the past, understanding who you are instead of looking to the future: What are you going to be?’Cause we’ve kind of reached the future. I’m not just talking about nostalgia. I’m talking about finding familiar guideposts. Maybe this is a period of reflection.

  Last February, there was a meeting of some medicine men and some Jesuits. One of the medicine men stood up and said the whole problem with America is that everybody tries to be young. He said: “All you guys in the Indian community, you’ve got to start acting your age. You’re all trying to stay young, so there are no wise old men any more. If you’re grandfathers, you better start acting like grandfathers. If you’re fathers, you better start acting like fathers. Don’t act like white men. You can’t ever do that.”

  I think there will emerge a group of people, not a large percentage, who will somehow find a way to live meaningful lives. For the vast majority, it will be increased drudgery, with emotions sapped by institutional confines. A grayness. A lot of people are fighting back.

  Somewhere, America stalled in perpetual adolescence. But I don’t really despair. You can’t despair that you have to grow up.

  ANDY JOHNSON

  The poorest, the most miserable came here because they had no future over there. To them, the streets of America were paved in gold. They had what the Finns called kuume, the American fever.

  Aurora, Minnesota, about thirty miles from Eveleth. Population, approximately 2,500. It is iron ore country.

  We’re at the home of Bill Ojala. His wife, Dorothy, serves us all blueberry pie, homemade. Anton Antilla, ninety-one, who had worked in the mines all his American life, is here too.

  Andy Johnson, craggy-faced, appears younger than his years. “I came to the seventy-fifth anniversary of Aurora this summer to see if I could find any of my old pals. I couldn’t find a one. The place we lived in, when we came in 1906, it’s where that big hole is now in the ground.”

  I was born in Finland and came here in 1906. My father was the son of a tenant farmer. Rocky soil. He didn’t see any future in it. The Russo-Japanese War came along. He was going to be drafted in the army, so he beat it out of there as fast as he could.

  My father was a typical Christian and conservative when he came here and for a long time after. In our bedroom, we had a picture of Christ on one wall and Czar Nicholas II on the other. I remember something about the revolution of 1905 in Russia and Finland. The assassination of the governor general of Finland, appointed by the czar. Our neighbors had rifles with fixed bayonets. I didn’t understand what it was about, but I could sense a tension. I remember how they were jabbing this bayonet into the ground, trying it out.

  We started off on a wooden ship. It was built of rough oak timbers. No paint on ’em, no nothin’. It had a mast in case they ran out of steam. [Laughs.] They had a bull pen, one big room for most of’em. The women and children had smaller quarters, where you just crawled into bunks. The North Sea is always stormy. You get those sugarloaf-type waves, so the boat would rock. They got sick, all those people in one big room vomiting. Mother took salt fish from home. When we started getting seasick, you’d cut a slice of that fish and eat it.

  We went across England by train, then from Liverpool to New York City. It was a Cunard liner, Lucania. That was a big boat. When we came to New York harbor, everybody got out on deck to see the Statue of Liberty. My mother picked me up and held me so I could see it. There was a doctor at Ellis Island, and he took a spoon and shoved it in my eye, along with the others, to see if we had any illness. Those that had were returned.

  We rode on a train for days on end. We came through some beautiful country. Lotta times, I thought we should stop here, we shouldn’t go any further. [Laughs.] We came to New York Mills, Minnesota, a Finnish community. My father was working on the railroad there. He came two years before. We met him, and it was kind of emotional. Coming to America was like being transferred from one century to another. The change was so great.

  They bought a bunch of bananas, which I hadn’t seen before. I ate too many of ’em and I got sick. I swore off bananas. I didn’t eat one for at least ten years. [Laughs.]

  I saw the first black man in my life on the platform at the Union Station in Duluth. I couldn’t figure out why his face was black. I thought he didn’t wash it or something. It didn’t dawn on me at that time that people were different. I remember at my grandfather’s place reading about Africa and the missionaries. The only literature we had was the Bible and a missionary magazine. In this magazine there was a picture of black people tied together by their hands, one to the other with chains, and there was a big husky white man with a horsewhip. I didn’t like the looks of that picture. I asked my aunt: “Why are those people chained?” She said they’re slaves
, but she didn’t explain much further.

  As soon as we got settled, my folks bought a Bible. They didn’t bring it from the Old Country like a lotta other people did. So I started to read the Bible and learned to read Finnish. I got interested in it, but the stories were so wild and frightening to me.

  When I was about thirteen, I got in contact with lumberjacks who had different ideas from my father’s. I began to think about things, and my father did the same. He began to read the Finnish paper Tyomies. It was left-wing. When somebody first brought it to him, he took a stick from the wood box and carried the paper with that stick and put it in the stove. Soon after World War One started, he was reading it himself, and his views began to change.

  Father got a job at the Miller mine. He’d come directly home with his mining clothes. Mother didn’t like it at all. She didn’t like the surroundings, the strange people. Most of the timber had been cut and everything was a mess. Iron ore on the roads, instead of gravel. When it rained, the stuff would splatter all over.

  Father quit his job and got a job at Mohawk mine. I was supposed to start school, but something happened. He either got fired or quit, and he went to Adriatic mine. At the Adriatic, you had Slovenians and Italians and Finns. They all spoke a strange language, they couldn’t understand each other. The company liked it that way. Some houses were company-owned, some privately. When we first came here, they were about six feet high, made out of poles stuck in the ground and boxboards nailed to the posts, and tarpaper over that. I don’t think they had any floor.