The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  We had this fire down the block. A Puerto Rican social club. The captain, the lieutenant, and the other firemen took the ladder up and saved two people. But downstairs there was a guy tryin’ to get out the door. They had bolts on the door. He was burnt dead. Know what the lieutenant said? “We lost a guy, we lost a guy.” I said “You saved two people. How would you know at six in the morning a guy’s in the social club sleeping on a pool table?” He said, “Yeah, but we lost a guy.” And the lieutenant’s a conservative guy.

  You get guys that talk about niggers, spies, and they’re the first guys into the fire to save ’em. Of course we got guys with long hair and beards. One guy’s an artist. His brother got killed in Vietnam, that’s why he’s against the war. And these guys are all super firemen. It’s you that takes the beating and you won’t give up. Everybody dies...

  My wife sees television, guys get killed. She tells me, “Be careful.” Sometimes she’ll call up the firehouse. I tell her we had a bad job, sometimes I don’t...They got a saying in the firehouse. “Tonight could be the night.” But nobody thinks of dying. You can’t take it seriously, because you’d get sick. We had some fires, I said, “We’re not gettin’ out of this.” Like I say, everybody dies.

  A lotta guys wanna be firemen. It’s like kids. Guys forty years old are kids. They try to be a hard guy. There’s no big thing when you leave boyhood for manhood. It seems like I talked the same at fifteen as I talk now. Everybody’s still a kid. They just lose their hair or they don’t fuck that much.

  When I was a kid I was scared of heights. In the fire department you gotta go up a five-story building with a rope around you. You gotta jump off a building. You know the rope can hold sixteen hundred pounds. As long as you got confidence in your body and you know the guy’s holding you, you got nothing to be scared of. I think you perform with people lookin’ at you. You’re in the limelight. You’re out there with the people and kids. Kids wave at you. When I was a kid we waved at firemen. It’s like a place in the sun.

  Last month there was a second alarm. I was off duty. I ran over there. I’m a bystander. I see these firemen on the roof, with the smoke pouring out around them, and the flames, and they go in. It fascinated me. Jesus Christ, that’s what I do! I was fascinated by the people’s faces. You could see the pride that they were seein’. The fuckin’ world’s so fucked up, the country’s fucked up. But the firemen, you actually see them produce. You see them put out a fire. You see them come out with babies in their hands. You see them give mouth-to-mouth when a guy’s dying. You can’t get around that shit. That’s real. To me, that’s what I want to be.

  I worked in a bank. You know, it’s just paper. It’s not real. Nine to five and it’s shit. You’re lookin’ at numbers. But I can look back and say, “I helped put out a fire. I helped save somebody.” It shows something I did on this earth.

  Part III

  The Divide

  The Great Divide

  (1988)

  INTRODUCTION

  In the making of this book (and even while considering it), I w burdened with doubts far more disturbing than any I had ex experienced earlier. In undertaking this self-assigned and at tin perverse task, I was aware of an attribute lacking in the 1980s th had been throbbingly present in the earlier decades, even in t silent 1950s: memory.

  It isn’t that the gift of remembering was any richer then thai is now. I encountered in survivors of the Great Depression a World War Two egregious lapses, blockages, and forgetteri Nonetheless, they remembered core truths about themselves a the world around them. They remembered enough of their yest days to tell us what it was like to live in those times. Today, am sia is much easier to come by.

  As technology has become more hyperactive, we, the people ha become more laid-back; as the deposits in its memory banks ha become more fat, the deposits in man’s memory bank have beco more lean. Like Harold Pinter’s servant, the machine has assun the responsibilities that were once the master’s. The latter 1 become the shell of a once thoughtful, though indolent, being. I the Law of Diminishing Enlightenment at work.

  Ironically enough, Jacob Bronowski observed, the average pers today knows far more facts about the world than Isaac Newton e did, though considerably less truth. Certainly we know more fa overwhelmingly trivial though they be, than any of our antecede But as for knowing the truth about ourselves and others...

  A TV wunderkind explains: “In the last ten years we’ve shifted to faster communication. We depend on these little bursts, these little sound bites. All good politicians as well as good advertisers lay out their programs in something that will play in ten to twelve seconds on the nightly news.” In an old burlesque skit, the second banana, a Dutch comic in baggy pants, challenges the first: “Qvick, vat’s your philosophy of life in fife seconds?” The baldheads, potbellies, and pimply faces in the audience (I was one) roar at the randy though succinct riposte. Today’s TV anchorperson asks the same thing of the expert (fifteen seconds is the usual allotment). It is deadly solemn in the asking, equally so in the response, and duly acknowledged by the audience. Nobody’s laughing.

  Still, in my prowlings and stalkings during these past three years, I’ve come across individuals, surprising in number though diffident in demeanor, who are challenging the doctrine of the official idea.

  Repeated often enough and authoritatively enough, on televised Sunday mornings, by pundits of familiar face and equally familiar cabinet members and the even more familiar elder statesman, Doctor K. (who evokes startling memories of the Dutch comic), the announced idea becomes official. Yet something unofficial is happening “out there.”

  Consider the market research man, the up-and-coming father, the archetypal Middle American. He had been foreman of a jury that acquitted four odd birds (including a Catholic nun) who had in the spirit of Isaiah committed an act of civil disobedience. He, a fervent believer in law and order, experienced something of a small epiphany.

  “We are quiet people,” he said, “quiet in our disturbance. But once confronted with facts, they’re really hard to let go of. You start asking yourself, What can I begin to do?

  “We see on the news today something happened. A week later, something else is presented just as important. It’s got the same kind of emphasis in the speaker’s voice. All of a sudden, last week is gone behind us. A year ago is even further gone. How we blow up things that aren’t important and never talk about things that are important.”

  In dealing with time past, whether it concerns the Great Depression, its lessons apparently forgotten, or World War Two, often misremembered, 62 the storyteller’s memory is tapped and recollections pour forth as through a ruptured floodgate.

  In dealing with time present, memory is absent, stunningly so, among the young. “I am struck by the basic absence of historical memory in this year‘s—or any year’s—college freshmen. These young students are not the children but rather the grandchildren of the atomic age, born almost a quarter of a century after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They have never known a time when nuclear weapons did not exist. As my freshmen might ask: ‘Why bother?’ ”63

  An elderly maverick I ran into whimsically asked a college assembly, “Why should the FBI investigate a man who had once been chairman of Young Republicans for Herbert Hoover?” There was a dead silence. When he had explained that Herbert Hoover had been president during the Depression, there was a roar of laughter.

  Could Henry Ford have been right after all? “History is bunk,” he declared.

  Despite such bleak communiques from the academic front, a subtle change of climate may be detected as we approach the 1990s. Courses on Vietnam and its history are among the most popular in a surprising number of colleges. A professor of Russian history and literature at a large Midwestern university tells me that his classes are standing room only. John Kenneth Galbraith maintains that his students today are the brightest he’s ever had.

  Although I’ve come across depressingly many eighteen-year-olds who admire J.
R. Ewing because “he kicks butts,” a young instructor in journalism discovers that his students insist on asking about professional ethics: “This year nobody in class asked me what I make.” The majority of recent graduates at a college in the Northwest accepted a pledge “to take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job opportunity I consider.”

  Don’t bet the farm on it (if there is any farm left to bet), but there does appear to be a new kid on the block. This one is not a sixties remainder nor an eighties automaton; not as stormy as the first nor as air-conditioned as the second. He or she is more ambivalent perhaps, yet possibly more reflective.

  I encountered a couple of these new ones. He’s fifteen, she’s nineteen. Their family backgrounds are planets apart: his, middle-class; hers, blue-collar. Each is unaware of the other’s existence. He, a short Holden Caulfield, muses: “It’s amazing how cynical you can get by age fifteen. Yet sometimes you really get a surge of idealism and want to go out and participate.” She, born in the year of the tempest, 1968, appears tranquil in nature, yet a spirited independence manifests itself. “My parents tend to go along with things as they are. But I began to wonder why are these things happening today. You look back in history and see what caused these things...”

  To intimate that they are the future would, unfortunately, be far off the mark. They are a baby-faced Gideon’s army, considerably outnumbered by their peers who cheer on Rambo and disparage wimps. Yet the two may reflect something in the others, something unfashionable for the moment and thus hidden away, something “fearful”: compassion. Or something even more to abjure: hope.

  At an extension college in Little Rock, the students damned the victims of AIDS—“They deserve to die.” Yet on seeing a documentary film about those they damned, they wept softly. Their teacher attributed the overt absence of generous heart to their thoughts of eventual Armageddon: “With absence of hope, I found absence of generosity. Why bother?” But why did they weep?

  Of all my experiences during the past three years, it is this image that most haunts me. These young, who wept for those they damned, may offer the challenge as yet unrecognized. In a wholly different context, Tom Paine remarked on it: the nature of infidelity to oneself, professing to believe what one does not believe. Could this be “our dirty little secret”?

  There was no absence of hope in those early 1920s. Certainly it was a time of great expectations. Was I eight or nine that Saturday matinee when I saw the silent film Get Rich Quick Wallingford? It was a forgettable movie with an unforgettable theme: making it. Fast. The market was bellowingly bullish, the goose hung higher than high, and all things on the Street looked handsome. And who was more handsome than our president, Warren Gamaliel Harding?

  With the Crash of ’29, another eight-year-old boy, Johnny, had the curtain line of a play: “I’m not mentioning any names, pa, but something’s wrong somewhere.” William Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands had an unforgettable theme, too: the Great Depression.

  There’s no point in mentioning any names, though Herbert Hoover’s was most frequently invoked. “Most people cussed him up one side and down the other,” recalls an Appalachian survivor. “I’m not saying he’s blameless, but I’m not saying either it was all his fault. Our system doesn’t run by just one man and it doesn’t fall by one man either.”

  Some fifty-eight years after that Black October day, while a new generation of Wallingfords was making it fast, came another black October day, the nineteenth. Again from the temple of wisdom came an explanation: “It’s a correction.”

  Correction of what? I hadn’t the heart to ask anybody.

  If April is the cruelest month, October may be the most revelatory. It may provide a metaphor for the eighties and, hopefully, for this book.

  The poorest one-tenth of Americans will pay 20 percent more of their earnings in federal taxes next year than they did in 1977 and the richest will pay almost 20 percent less, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.64

  Just before the stock market crashed, Forbes magazine announced that the number of billionaires in America had doubled in the past year. Just before the stock market crashed, Shasta County, California, closed its entire library system for lack of money.

  Is there any question that something has gone wrong in America? 65

  After half a century, eight-year-old Johnny’s question still reverberates. Something is indubitably wrong somewhere. Then, a president was ’buked and scorned and sudden acres of shacks bore his name: Hoovervilles. Today, the most popular president since FDR is faulted only by odd birds. Since the Irangate scandal and Black Monday, there has been a diminishing of delight in his incumbency; yet, unlike the Great Engineer, he is not personally held responsible. Nor, despite homeless millions, is there any record of a tent city named Reaganville.

  Circumstances in much of our land are the same as in the thirties: ghost towns, where smokestacks once belched forth; family farms going, going, gone; and the homeless.

  Two young journalists of the Sacramento Bee hit the road to find out for themselves.66 They rode the freights; they walked the highways; they hitchhiked; they hunkered down in big cities and small towns; they spent nights in missions; they saw as much of our country’s underside as Woody Guthrie Bound For Glory in the thirties.

  In boxcars, old-time hoboes complained bitterly of the greenhorns who in the last few years have taken over. Talk about overcrowding. Fifteen years ago, there were four to a boxcar; now there are thirty, thirty-five. A new class of bums; an old class of Middle Americans.

  Of the 22 million hungry reported by the Harvard School of Public Health (an old figure by now), the sources were churches, social agencies, soup kitchens, and sallies. 67 “Half the people we met on the road don’t go near those places,” said the two hard travelers. Double the Harvard figures and you’ve got yourself a pretty safe bet.

  They had studied the photographs of the thirties, of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White. They saw the same faces. “When people are down and out, they always look the same.”

  The new nomads have come from the Rust Belt, the abandoned farms, the small failed businesses. Many of them had voted for Reagan because “he made us feel good.” They resent being called losers, though that is what they are called. In the thirties (at least in retrospect), they were called victims. If there is a core difference between Then and Now, it is in language. It is more than semantics; it is attitude. Then, the words of the winners reflected discomfort in the presence of the more unlucky. Now, they reflect a mild contempt. And fear.

  “It scares me sometimes thinkin’ people are never goin’ to learn,” says the West Virginia truckdriver. “There’s no trust in anybody. Used to be hitchhikin’, you’d get a ride. Now they’re afraid to pick you up. They’re afraid they’ll be robbed, but people has always been robbed all their life.”

  In 1934, Sherwood Anderson took a trip across much of the country. Puzzled America, he called his book. Yet the hitchhikers he picked up in his jalopy were less puzzled than their nomadic descendants. At least, they made a stab at unraveling it.68 Anderson found “a hunger for belief, a determination to believe in one another, in the leadership we’re likely to get out of democracy.”

  A hunger for belief is certainly no less today than it was then. It is the nature of belief that may have changed. In the time lapse, new phenomena have taken over our lives and psyches: the cold war, the sanctity of the military, union-busting beyond precedent (encouraged by the cravenness of labor’s pooh-bahs), along with televised sound bites69 offered with the regularity of a cuckoo clock and a press that has assiduously followed the dictum of Sam Rayburn: To get along, go along. As a result, reflective conversations concerning these matters have become suspect, or at best, the avocation of odd birds, vestigial remainders of a long-gone past.

  A daughter of Appalachia may have put her finger on it. “We’ve gotten away from our imaginations. The reason we’re image-struck is because we don�
�t like who we are. The more we get over this fake stuff, the more chance we’ve got to keep our sanity and self-respect.”

  LONG LIVE IMAGINATION. It was a banner carried by the students of Paris during the tempestuous year 1968. It was an idea that crossed the waters, undoubtedly misused and abused in some quarters. Nonetheless, it was a banner of strange and exhilarating device, not unlike the one borne by Longfellow’s youth: EXCELSIOR.

  With all passion spent in the twenty years that followed, we’ve experienced 1987’s best-selling work of nonfiction upbrading the young of that epoch as a barbaric lot. 70, Written by an academician, it may have more closely approached in temper William Claude Dukenfieldt71 than Alfred North Whitehead.

  Another sort of banner appeared on national television in 1987. During the football players’ strike, at a game played by strikebreakers, a bare-chested band of youths unfurled a flag: WE LOVE OUR SCABS. What’s even worse, the game was awful.

  Never in all the bitter history of labor-management battles has strikebreaking been so unashamedly espoused. Always, in the past, scabs were shadows who entered the workplace through back doors. Just as the letter A was Hester Prynne’s mark of shame, so was the letter S for those who crossed the picket line. Until now.

  “I’m a professional strikebreaker,” said a genial acquaintance. I thought he was kidding until I came across his profile in the Wall Street Journal. He’s not a club-wielding goon; he’s a prep school and Ivy League alumnus. “It’s exciting.” His pride is manifest in these pages.