The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  Of course, there are changes necessary in our vocabulary. When I went over some of my early writings, I was embarrassed. I was using “man,” “his,” “son,” “father” all the way through. I can understand women being tired of that by now. Those changes were easy to make.

  My wife appreciates the need. We were both editors at the University of California Press. She never forgot how abrupt I was with her. She was already working there. I passed her by and went to the guy instead. I was paid more than she was even though she’d been there for some time. That was fifty years ago, 1941, and she still remembers. Annoyed as she justifiably is, she says, “Feminists should be concentrating not on sisterhood but on being human beings, and maybe men will catch on.” I’d like that as a goal, women’s rights rather than watching the pronouns.

  Women. Youth. Old age. All are connected in my mind. And memory. I remember when I was a battalion intelligence officer in World War II, in northern Italy. We were the mountain troops, the ski troops. Our first battle was in the Northern Apennines. The next, across the Po River valley. Our third took us into the Alps, as the war ended.

  We were passing through these little old towns. The houses weren’t big but all the generations were there. The old weren’t put out to pasture. They were our best means of communication. They were what civilization is about: human history, work, generations. Old ones, grandparents, even great-grandparents, talked to the little ones, and fascinated them. It was the oral tradition, generation after generation. Instead of watching television, the child listened to the old one, learning his history of dreams and wonder.

  Our young haven’t lost their history, it was taken from them. We’ve stuffed them into a procrustean bed. Remember him? Procustes? If the guest didn’t fit, he’d cut him or stretch him. That’s what we’re doing to our young, making them fit.

  Here is a child, born with a sense of wonder, ready to admire and love what is seen and experienced. We say, “Watch it now, a little bit less, cool it, cool it,” until this extraordinary sense of wonder is reduced to nothing.

  I’m very fortunate to be working with young people. That’s a big reason I haven’t burned out. I keep getting recharged by these people. They’re somebody to pass the torch on to. You don’t hold on to it, that’s no good. You have to pass it on.

  In the Sierra Club, what bothered me was seeing the average age rising each year. There wasn’t an influx of young ones. I work with a new group, Earth Island, which has a lot of younger people. You can’t grow old as an organization without losing your effectiveness. You need that flow.

  If the old person can’t listen anymore, he perpetuates the errors of his ancestors. You don’t need him. You need to say, “All right, Grandpa, when did you last change your mind about anything? When did you last get a new idea? Can I help you change your mind while you help me change mine? Considering that what has governed your behavior through your lifetime has gotten this world into one hell of a mess, have you got something new going on in your head?” That’s what we need, your experience. That’s what corporate boards should be about.

  I like to collect rocks. The history of the earth is there. Finer forms are in the quarry than ever Michelangelo evoked. I think it’s a quote from somewhere. As an old person, when I look at young people it charges me. Here, in effect, is a quarry. Something within this stone can be shaped. It’s in somebody’s imagination.

  A student I once had at Stanford, where I taught for one quarter, told the class she had planted a garden, and one day they saw the seeds had sprouted and the first shoots were appearing and they applauded. They experienced a sense of wonder. It hadn’t been squelched out of them yet. They were enjoying something that we all are forgetting how to enjoy: how the world works and the beauty of it. It still moves me. That’s why I’m constantly challenging Operation Squelch.

  My oldest son says I’m going through the “gee whiz” phase. But it is a sense of wonder. I know I’m not so young anymore, but I’m trying to get my damn knee to work better so I can get back to my rock climbing. I’ve got to lose some weight and get the right shoes. Listen, I’m not going to go very high.

  For the next decade—what am I saying?—for the next century, we’ve got to put together what we so carelessly tore apart with so little concern for those who were gonna follow us. This sounds preachy and that’s exactly what it is. I’m a preacher and I make no apologies. You’ve got to sound off. The older you are, the freer you are, as long as you last.

  Also by Studs Terkel

  American Dreams

  Lost and Found

  978-1-56584-545-9

  “Here is the raw material for one thousand

  novels . . . incomparable.” -Margaret Atwood

  And They All Sang

  Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey

  978-1-59558-118-1

  “A riveting collection ... Just about every interview has a revelation.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Division Street

  America

  978-1-59558-072-6

  Terkel’s first book of oral history, establishing his reputation as America’s foremost oral historian.

  “The Good War”

  An Oral History of WW II

  978-1-56584-343-1

  “Tremendously compelling, somehow dramatic and intimate at the same time.”

  -The New York Times Book Review

  Hard Times

  An Oral History of the Great Depression

  978-1-56584-656-2

  “A huge anthem in praise of the American spirit.”

  -Saturday Review

  Hope Dies Last

  Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times

  978-1-56584-937-2

  “If you’re looking for a reason to act and dream again, you’ll find it in the pages of this book.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Race

  How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the

  American Obsession

  978-1-56584-989-1

  The immediate bestseller about how people in

  America truly feel about race.

  Working

  People Talk About What They Do All Day

  and How They Feel About What They Do

  978-1-56584-342-4

  “The timeless snapshot of people’s feelings about their working lives.”

  -The New York Times Book Review

  1 Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here, (The Sun Dial Press, 1935).

  2 James Ridgeway, Village Voice, April, 1995.

  3 “It is among the largest and fastest-growing congregations in Chicago, offering its well-scrubbed and youthful adherents an energetic blend of religious pop music, morality plays, and plain-spoken sermons by the church’s founder and pastor, Bill Hybels.

  “The church has a profound appeal to upwardly mobile young professionals, who faithfully negotiate their turbocharged foreign automobiles through the monumental congestion in Willow Creek’s 1400-car parking lot on Sundays for a low-key taste of ‘biblical principles’ before lunch.”

  —Bruce Buursma, religion editor, Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1985.

  4 Her fellow trespassers were four fellow Catholics, “young enough to be my children.” They were members of Silo Plowshares. It hardly made the news.

  5 The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream.

  6 Our entire much praised technological progress...could be compared to an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

  —Albert Einstein from The Other Einstein by Albrecht Fölsins (Viking).

  7 A scissorbill was the pejorative ascribed to the workingman who was pro-boss and anti-foreigner. A turn-of-the-century piece of doggerel was perversely dedicated to him.

  You’re working for an Englishman

  You room with a French Canuck

  You board in a Swedish home

  Where a Dutchman cooks your chuck.

  You buy your clothes from a German Jew

 
You buy your shoes from a Russian Pole

  You place your hopes on a dago Pope

  To save your Irish soul.

  8 Scott Nearing, in his nineties, reflecting at his home, Harborside, Maine.

  9 Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970).

  10 A public-housing project, all black, on Chicago’s South Side. It’s the largest in the world.

  11 John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York, Viking Press, 1939), p.261.

  12 Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (New York, David McKay Co., 1965).

  13 It was “on the house.”

  14 “Thirteen public aid families squatted in a vacant building...they defied the police to evict them. Most were victims of a recent fire. The others decided to abandon their sub-standard housing in favor of the three-story building...‘ Man, we’re going to stake out those apartments just like the early settlers when they took it away from the Indians,’ announced Mrs. Pearl Moore, a Tenants’ Union representative.” (Chicago Daily News, February 21,1969).

  15 The Salvation Army.

  16 He was candidate for Governor of California. EPIC was his symbol and credo: End Poverty In California.

  17 A blackjack.

  18 The refrigerator car.

  19 He has an administrative job with UNICEF.

  20 A Boston financier of the twenties. His “empire” crashed, many people were ruined. He went to prison.

  21 “Selling short is selling something you don’t have and buying it back in order to cover it. You think a stock is not worth what it’s selling for, say its listed as $100. You sell a hundred shares of it, though you haven’t got the stock. If you are right, and it goes down to $85, you buy it at that price, and deliver it to the fellow to whom you sold it for $100. You sell what you don’t have.” Obviously, if the stock rises in value, selling short is ruinous.... Ben Smith sold short during the Crash and made “a fortune.”

  22 Securities and Exchange Commission.

  23 Another renowned gambler of the time.

  24 William Hale Thompson, three-term mayor of Chicago.

  25 A gambler and fixer of reknown. He was involved in the Black Sox scandal of 1919.

  26 Smith & Wesson, revolver manufacturers.

  27 It was alleged that he was one of Capone’s executioners in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. He was killed in a bowling alley in 1936, on the eve of St. Valentine’s Day.

  28 Her older sister.

  29 A Chicago area in which many of the southern white émigrés live; furnished flats in most instances.

  30 Studs Terkel, “Introduction: We Still See Their Faces,” from The Grapes of Wrath (1989).

  31 Robert J. DeMott, Working Days: The Grapes of Wrath Journal (New York: Viking, 1989).

  32 Jackson J. Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1984).

  33 Alexander had succeeded the maligned Rexford Tugwell as director of the Resettlement Administration. It was Tugwell, a member of Roosevelt’s Brains Trust, who had conceived the idea of migratory labor camps, run by the migrants themselves: a lesson in participatory democracy.

  34 Lewis H. Lapham, “America’s Foreign Policy: A Rake’s Progress,” Harper’s, March 1979.

  35 A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He and other black leaders were planning a march urging the administration to pass a fair employment practices act.

  36 MacLeish’s piece of 1949, “The Conquest of America,” was reprinted in the Atlantic Monthly, March 1980.

  37 Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1981.

  38 Jun Kurose, a Nisei internee from Seattle: “When we were told to evacuate, the American Friends Service Committee said: ‘Don’t go, we will help you.’...Some of the Japanese were saying: ‘Stay out of this, you’re making it rougher for us.’ If we’d listened to the Friends, we might have been able to avert much suffering. We went willingly we really did.” (From American Dreams: Lost and Found [New York: Pantheon Books, 1980], p. 168.)

  39 A movement for redress of grievances has come into being on behalf of Japanese Americans who were interned during the war years.

  40 Jessie Binford, a colleague of Jane Addams, had lived at Hull House from 1906 until the day of its demolition in 1965. For many years she was director of the Juvenile Protective Association, which she helped found.

  41 Several years ago, a Negro family, having bought a home in Trumbull Park, was stoned out of the neighborhood.

  42 Clout: a Chicago idiom for “drag,” “pull,” “political power.”

  43 Chicago’s celebrated open market area.

  44 Donald Parillo: Florence Scala’s victorious machine-backed opponent in the aldermanic election of ’64. The two women met during this campaign.

  45 Reputedly a leader of the Syndicate.

  46 “Bathhouse John” Coughlan and Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna ruled Chicagro’s First Ward from 1892 for almost fifty years. This was the city’s most celebrated vice district. The annual First Ward Ball was the social event of the season, attended by pimps, prostitutes, madams, political and social leaders—all the celebrities of the era. Tribute, material as well as spiritual, was paid to Bathhouse John and Hinky Dink on this occasion. There was reciprocity, of course: a wide-open area the year round.

  47 Terence Ignatus Boyle. He appears in the complete edition of Division Street: America.

  48 From American Dreams: Lost and Found. (He died before I began working on Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession.)

  49 The area known as Bridgeport. Mayor Daley has lived there all his life.

  50 A distinguished physician conducting research in heart disease for the Chicago Board of Health, who was cited for contempt by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

  51 During 1965, two Negro prostitutes were found slain. An accusation was made of police involvement. The case is unsolved.

  52 E. P Thompson and Eileen Yeo, The Unknown Mayhew (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).

  53 E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, The Unknown Mayhew.

  54 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957).

  55 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W W Norton and Co., 1962).

  56 New York Times, June 10, 1973.

  57 Ibid.

  58 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy.

  59 “Today, because of our struggles, the pay is up to two dollars an hour. Yet we know that is not enough.”

  60 “Since we started organizing, this camp has been destroyed. They started building housing on it.”

  61 “You go on false alarms, especially two or three in the afternoon, kids comin’ home from school. And four in the morning when the bars are closed. Drunks. Sometimes I get mad. It’s ten, eleven at night and you see ten, twenty teenagers on the corner and there’s a false alarm on that corner, you know one of ’em pulled it. The kids say, ‘What’s the matter, man? What’re ya doin’ here?’ and they laugh. You wanna say, ’You stupid fuck, you might have a fire in your house and it could be your mother.’ ”

  62 About half of the hundred or so college graduates I encountered thought the Soviet Union was our enemy in World War Two. Several were astonished to learn that the Russians had taken any part in it at all. For the record, most had majored in business administration and engineering.

  63 Joe Patrick Dean, assistant professor of history at Concordia Lutheran College, Austin, Texas (New York Times, op-ed page, September 13, 1986).

  64 A sidebar on one of the back pages of the Chicago Sun-Times, November 11, 1987. The front-page headline concerned the Chicago Bears.

  65 Lead editorial, Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1987.

  66 Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, in Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (New York: Doubleday, 1985).

  67 Salvation Army missions.

  68 Sherwood Anderson, by Kim Townsend (Bosto
n: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

  69 Some months ago, a Cincinnati TV anchorman suggested, “How about a bite?” I immediately accepted his invitation. I envisioned roast duck and red cabbage in one of the city’s celebrated German restaurants. To my grievous disappointment, he had something else in mind: a sound bite in a TV studio.

  70 The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

  71 A.k.a. W. C. Fields.

  72 “Duncan and Brady” was, in time past, a favorite barroom ballad of baritones and basses.

  73 Division Street: America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967).

  74 Republic of Korea.

  75 Chicago Transit Authority.