by Studs Terkel
I didn’t react in any belligerent way until little kids came knocking at the door, asking me to attend a meeting. That’s where the thing got off the ground. It was exciting to see that meeting, the way people felt and the way they talked and the way—they hurt—to hear our Italian priest, who had just become an American. This was in February, we had just celebrated Lincoln’s birthday. He had just become a citizen, he couldn’t understand.
Though we called the Mayor our enemy, we didn’t know he was serving others. It was a faceless thing. I think he’d just as soon have had the University elsewhere. But the pressures were on. We felt it as soon as our protests began.
A member of the Hull House Board took me to lunch a couple of times at the University Club. The University Club—lunch—me! My husband said, go, go, have a free lunch and see what it is she wants. What she wanted to do, really, was to dissuade me from protesting. There was no hope, no chance, she said. I had had a high regard for her. I’ve been thinking she’s probably one of those on the Board who would have fought the people’s end. But she was elected to convince me not to go on. The first time I went, I thought this was a friend through whom we could work. But I could see, you know, that she allowed me to be just so friendly, and there was a place beyond which I couldn’t go. There was a difference now. I stayed in my place, but I said what I wanted to say. There was a place beyond which she couldn’t go, either. See? I was glad to experience it anyway.
I think I understand her. She had strong ties with old Hull House and she was really a good person who ought not have allowed this to happen and she knew it. When the lunches failed to bring anything off, I had no more contact with any of them on that level. We reached the letter-writing stage. We no longer used the phone.
I shall never forget one board meeting. It hurt Miss Binford more than all the others. That afternoon, we came with a committee, five of us, and with a plea. We reminded them of the past, what we meant to each other. From the moment we entered the room to the time we left, not one board member said a word to us. No one got up to greet Miss Binford nor to speak to her. No one asked her a question. The chairman came forward, he was a gentleman, and showed us where to sit.
Miss Binford was in her late eighties, you know. Small, birdlike in appearance. She sat there listening to our plea and then she reminded them of what Hull House meant. She went back and talked, not in a sentimental way, about principles that must never waver. No one answered her. Or acknowledged her. Or in any way showed any recognition of what she was talking about. It’s as though we were talking to a stone wall, a mountain.
It was pouring rain and we walked out of the room the way people walk out who feel defeat. I mean we walked out trying to appear secure, but we didn’t have much to say to each other. Miss Binford could hardly speak at all. The shock of not being able to have any conversation with the board members never really left her. She felt completely rejected. She knew then there would be no help anywhere. In the past, whenever there was a serious problem in the juvenile courts, she could walk into the Mayor’s office and have a talk with him, whoever he was. Kelly, for instance, or Kennelly, or Cermak. And never fail to get a commitment from him. Never. But she knew after this meeting, she’d never find that kind of response again. And sure enough, to test herself, she made the rounds. Of all the people who had any influence in town, with whom she had real contact, not one responded. They expressed sympathy, but it was hands off. Something was crushed inside her. The Chicago she knew had died.
I don’t think we realized the stakes involved in this whole urban renewal system. The money it brings in, the clout necessary to condemn land...a new Catholic Church was demolished, too. It had opened in ’59, built near Hull House with the city’s approval. The Church was encouraged to go ahead and build, so as to form the nucleus for the new environment, see? It cost the people of the area a half million dollars. The Archdiocese lends the parish money, but the parish has to repay. It’s a real business arrangement.
Now the people of the area have learned a good deal, but it was a bitter education. The politicians’ actions didn’t bother us as much. We hated it, we argued about it, we screamed about it out loud. Daley gave the orders and the alderman followed it. This kind of thing we could understand. But we could never understand the silence of the others. A group wanted to picket the Archdiocese, but I felt it was wrong, because we were put into a position of fighting education, the University being built, you know.
Here we were in a big Roman Catholic city, we’d be looked upon as a bunch of fanatics. As I think back on it now, the instinctive responses of the people, who are thought of as being uneducated, were better than my own. I was very anxious we should not be looked upon as people from the slums, many of us Italians and Mexicans. We had to proceed in an orderly manner. We overdid that. We should have picketed the Archdiocese. We should have been tough with Hull House. We should have spoken the truth from the beginning.
Most of the people who left the area were deeply embittered. They said never again will they ever become involved about anything in their city. They’d had it. This was a natural kind of thing because it was a pretty brutal two and a half years. But I don’t know now. This is a big question to ask: whether that experience gave any meaning to their lives? If they turn their backs on it, it’s been a failure as far as I’m concerned. There’s a danger of their becoming extremists in the self-indulgent sense. They’ll be concerned with themselves and their own safety and nothing else. It has happened with some of them.
I don’t believe so much any more. I don’t believe so much in people as I used to. I believe in some people but not in all people any more. I feel I have to be careful about this business of believing in all people. That’s the number one change, I think. And I’ve found there are certain kinds of liberals who’ll sell you out, who make life miserable for great numbers of people when they will not see beyond their narrow views. I’m thinking of Urban Renewal, and the huge Negro ghettos that have sprung up and have your heart break at the kind of overcrowding and rotten environment that’s developed. It’s an evil thing the liberal community does: it wants to see the slums cleared but doesn’t fight to see housing for lower-income groups built first. It reinforces all the terrible things we’re talking about in the big cities. Segregates the poor people, particularly the Negro people, and this goes on and on.
In an area like ours, the uprooting is of another kind. I lived on the same block for over forty-five years; my father was there before me. It takes away a kind of stability big cities need. Lots of the people have moved into housing no better than the kind they lived in. Some have moved into public housing. The old people have really had it worse. Some have moved into “nicer” neighborhoods, but they’re terribly unhappy, those I’ve spoken with. Here, downtown in the Loop, everything is clearing and building and going up. And the social workers in this town, boy! I can hardly look at them with respect any more. The way they’ve knuckled down to the system themselves, because everybody wants a Federal grant or something. They don’t want to be counted out. I’m sick of the whole mess and I don’t know which way to go.
There are the little blessings that come out of struggle. I never knew Jessie Binford as a kid at Hull House. I used to see her walking through the rooms. She had such dignity, she just strode through the rooms and we were all kind of scared of her. In the past four or five years, we became close friends. I really knew the woman. It meant something to her, too. She began to know the people in the way she knew them when she first came to Hull House as a young girl. It really gave her life, this fight. It made clear to her that all the things she really believed in, she believed in all the more. Honor among people and honor between government and people. All that the teacher tells the kids in school. And beauty.
There was a Japanese elm in the courtyard that came up to Miss Binford’s window. It used to blossom in the springtime. They were destroying that tree, the wrecking crew. We saw it together. She asked the man whether it co
uld be saved. No, he had a job to do and was doing it. I screamed and cried out. The old janitor, Joe, was standing out there crying to himself. Those trees were beautiful trees that had shaded the courtyard and sheltered the birds. At night the sparrows used to roost in those trees and it was something to hear, the singing of those sparrows. All that was soft and beautiful was destroyed. You saw no meaning in anything any more. There’s a college campus on the site now. It will perform a needed function in our life. Yet there is nothing quite beautiful about the thing. They’ll plant trees there, sure, but it’s walled off from the community. You can’t get in. The kids, the students, will have to make a big effort to leave the campus and walk down the streets of the area. Another kind of walling off...
To keep us out. To keep the kids out who might be vandals. I don’t see that as such a problem, you know. It wasn’t the way Jane Addams saw it, either. She believed in a neighborhood with all kinds of people, who lived together with some little hostility, sure, but nevertheless lived together. In peace. She wondered if this couldn’t be extended to the world. Either Jane Addams brought something to Chicago and the world or she didn’t.
POSTSCRIPT
In 1964, Florence Scala ran as an Independent for Alderman of the First Ward against a candidate who had the support of both major parties. She received 3,600 votes against her opponent’s 8,600. As she recalls: “There were people from all over Chicago campaigning for me, some people I never saw before nor have I seen since. A small number from the community had the courage to come out. And it took guts in a neighborhood like that, where clout is so important. But really it was...students, older people, the Independent Voters of Illinois... just a lot of people from all over, expressing their indignation not only about happenings in the First Ward but about the city as a whole. I think they were expressing support of what seemed to be an individual yelling out, you know, and they wanted to help. They weren’t always people I see eye to eye with. There were some far to the right and I couldn’t understand what it was in me they wanted to support. But there was something. I have a kind of sympathy for whatever it was that was frustrating them. I really do, because they felt themselves unable to count somewhere. And there were people way over on the left. But I feel most of them were moderates, who were responding to this thing.”
DENNIS HART
“Did you see Lord Jim?” he asked. He’s a cabdriver, working the night shift. He has an insect-exterminator business on the side. He has a wife and two children. He identified himself with Conrad’s hero because it was about “a man finding courage. The most important thing in life.”
He had known abject poverty in Chicago, where he was born, and on an Arkansas farm, where his family had spent several years. “I found an old potato in the back yard, I ate it like an animal. There was just nothing else.” Poverty was crushing his spirit: “I lost face. I lost composure.” His teeth are bad because of the Milky Way and Snickers bar dinners he had so often as a newsboy in the city. When the family had returned to Chicago, the slight southern accent he had picked up led to ridicule by his classmates and to fights: “It was a matter of saving face. I lost more fights than I won, but you couldn’t back down.”
His father, whom he greatly admires, had left home at twelve, lived in hobo jungles, came up the hard way: “He didn’t look rugged. He had that young determined look about him, about to gain a piece of life, a place for himself.” What he finds most admirable in his father is his courage: he had worked as an FBI informer. “I was never very close to him. I don’t think I ever panned out to be what he wanted.” His two younger brothers were Golden Gloves fighters; he wasn’t as good. “But I know he’s proud of me today.”
“I don’t think you can ever stop proving yourself to your father. More than that, you have to prove to yourself what you really are inside you: whether you’re willing to die for what you believe. If the cause is great enough, you’d be willing to die.”
In the last five years, I’ve become a Republican precinct captain. I also went on to become chairman of the Goldwater campaign in my ward. It was because I was trying to be somebody. I had these doubts about myself as to whether I had any courage in me at all or was I just gonna be a plant instead of a man.
If I die, I don’t want to die a natural death that most people succumb, say at sixty years old. If I could die on some battlefield someplace, doing something good, I feel my life would be worthwhile. I want my death to be worth something. If the time comes, I want to die with some pride. I want to die like a man, not like an animal.
When I read Goldwater’s book, I identified with my own experiences in life. Because he spoke of the hardship of the individual, things he endured. He himself didn’t, he’s more of an aristocratic family, but he seemed to understand me. An individual should stand for more than a handout. This is the way America is. You fight for what you get, and once you get it, you hold on to it: your pride, your bread and butter, and what not.
If they dropped the Bomb today, the man who would succeed most is not the man with the brawn but the man with the brains. I feel if this was a wilderness, I could make out quite amply—if I knew a little bit about everything. I’m not worried about them dropping the Bomb. I’ve lived in a wilderness all my life. Atheists are those most fearful of the Bomb. A man who is truly religious and believes in God doesn’t run around worrying about these things. He knows there’s a Hereafter.
Freedom is the most important thing in your life. We’re facing an enemy today that’s gonna annihilate us unless we retaliate in one way or another. We have to face up to it, Bomb or no Bomb. Otherwise, we’re a bunch of cowards.
I am now a member of the John Birch Society. It is a great society, one I believe in and one I would fight for. The more it was criticized, it made me all the more want to become a John Bircher. I was hoping somebody would invite me to a meeting and sure enough it took place. I’ve never been prouder to join an organization in my whole life.
It was an image I saw in these people. When they speak, they speak sense. My grandfather never had much of an education, but he was strong enough to know right from wrong. These people are putting their cards on the table and calling an ace an ace and a king a king and saying exactly what they think. They’re saying the whole problem is very simple. Life is complicated enough without saying it’s more complicated than it is. The sooner we try to uncomplicate our lives...if you complicate things, you are only asking for trouble. But if you try to simplify things, you find solutions will come much easier.
Has this helped you overcome your self-doubts, your fears?
A man has to find himself. What caused my fears was the fact that we moved around so much. I never seemed to have found a home—until now. I used to be very scared. I’ve been saved three times. I fell into a dam once, when I was going to a Y camp. I was scared and I was saved. One time, out here on Lake Michigan, the undertow got me. And I had to be saved that time. At school, I was swimming, we were taking a test, and all of a sudden I tightened up. I got scared. I’m a three-time loser and I came through this. I can’t fail again.
For the last five years, I had to take my family to the beach and go swimming. Every Sunday I had to lick this fear. I think I have. Boxing has given me a little bit of composure. I’ve been over to the Joe Louis Gym, I’ve been over at CYO. I’ve boxed a lot with my brothers. Boxing to me is the greatest thing in the world for composure—to lick one’s fear and to go right to it. A lot of people think the important thing is knocking the other guy down. The important thing is to keep yourself from getting hurt.
You’ve been hurt a good deal?
Definitely. I got to the point when I found I was becoming very cold and this bothered me. I was afraid to see others be hurt around me and I was becoming very calloused to their feelings, to their wants, to their needs. More than anything else, beside my fear, this bothered me. I’d seen people cry and I felt no feeling for them. I didn’t know what was going wrong with me.
I guess maybe it�
��s growing old and realizing you’re gonna meet your Maker sooner or later. You have to feel something for other people. There was a time in my early twenties, I’d see people bleed, I’d see people cry. I didn’t feel anything. I began to hate myself. Now I feel I’ve conquered this also. Crying with this man when he’s hit, I feel the punch. It keeps you young. Old people become calloused. A conservative feels pain for other people because a conservative is closer to God.
I think really what changed me was working as a guard in the County Jail. So many of the things are so unnecessary. You hear the train whistle coming through at three in the morning. Why are these guys here? They’re so young. One fella said, “What time is it?” And I said, “Why? Are you gonna catch a plane or something?” After I said it, after I made the punch on the clock, I realized I made a damn fool of myself. I went back and I actually apologized to this guy in a roundabout way. A guard is not supposed to give in in any way whatsoever. You’re supposed to stay above these guys. But I felt like a damn jackass. I think it was the human thing to do.
As I sat down, I had to think of a way to apologize. I didn’t come out and say to this man, “I’m sorry for what I said.” But I went back and paid a little more attention to him and he understood that I was sorry and I felt I was forgiven.
Do you ever cry?
Yes. I feel better any time I cry. I saw my grandfather cry, he was the most kindhearted and warm person I ever knew. He would rock me for hours on a rocking chair. I felt if crying is good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. I don’t feel one cries in the open, unless you’re around friends, unless it’s death or sickness in the family. Recently my grandmother was taken to the hospital and I cried like a baby in front of the nurses and everything. In order to be a man, I have to have a heart also. This is part of his composure. Every time I cry, I feel more like a man later on.