by Studs Terkel
She reflects on the double standard we follow in judging people.
“Talk about the city, how people are separated from each other. How we judge only by appearance. I remember an article I read in Psychology Today. They did an experiment. They had a well-dressed man with an expensive briefcase and all the trappings of the upper middle class stand on a street corner and go across the street against the light. People followed him. Then they had a man who was dressed very poorly, old, dirty, and he walked against the light. No one followed him. The people were very angry at him. They made nasty remarks about him not obeying the laws. When I read that article it frightened me because I realized how far we have gone for images. Both of these men came from the same background, but it was the way they looked. They wouldn’t follow the man who was poorly dressed and was a little dirty, but the man who looked ‘respectable’ they followed. This is frightening and I see it’s just part of the city.
“In Alabama I picked cotton, chopped, hoed. In the next field over there were black people but they had absolutely nothing to do with me. They were doing the same kind of work for the same pay; everything was exactly the same except they were niggers and I was white. It made all the difference in the world. Didn’t really, of course. When we went to the valley of Texas, we worked as migrant workers. I worked mainly with people from Mexico who came across the border, some legally, some illegally—whatever illegal is. I hate these lines, international lines, state lines. I hope to see the day when all those lines are done away with. They don’t mean anything, not really, not when people know each other. It’s another way they have of separating us.
“We were picking grapefruit, oranges, limes, lemons, and we sat down to eat our lunch, which consisted of a jug of lukewarm water and biscuits made early in the morning. And I was sitting there eating, and I saw this little Mexican boy reach over to a bush and pick a berry, and I thought, well, with biscuits something should liven it up, just biscuits and water. So, I reached over to a bush and picked one. Well, my God, it was like liquid fire; it was just horrible. And he started laughing he was rolling on the ground, just laughing. Then he realized I was in pain and he went to the grapefruit tree and picked one off and tore it apart with his hands and gave it to me and told me to suck on the grapefruit. And my mouth was burned so badly that I had water blisters, like a fever sore blister, and he thought that was so funny. So we got in this conversation, about Anglos and food. I didn’t know what an Anglo was. He thought it was so funny that Anglos couldn’t eat the berries and he could, and this made him very important. You see, he felt very good about that and I felt very put down. We got to be good friends and it helped a great deal toward my understanding. I was still leery of the grown people, but I began to like the children.”
At one point in the conversation Peggy Terry was talking about sense of personal worth and the regulations and the sense of living in a huge city and wondering how much of it you own.
“When you figure who you are, suddenly you’re very proud and you know those streets belong to you, and you say, Damn appearance! I pay taxes; these streets were built with my money. No matter how poor you are. In fact, the poorer you are, the more taxes you pay.”
She has thoughts concerning urban renewal and the mayor’s Model Cities program.
“I once saw a band marching down State Street celebrating Model Cities. I thought of it as a death dirge. It shows how little communication there is. What is Model Cities? It is Mayor Daley’s plan to get rid of poor people. Where the Circle Campus sits today was a beautiful neighborhood, and a very beautiful and strong woman, Florence Scala, fought a battle there to try and stop that. She and the neighborhood lost. What they’re trying to do is get poor people out of Chicago. I think that they suddenly discovered that we can control the cities. They’ve awakened to this. The way they’re doing urban renewal in our neighborhood—we call it ‘poor people removal.’
“They’re not doing it like they did in other neighborhoods. Then they went in with bulldozers and there was ways you could fight that. You could put sugar in the tanks of the bulldozers, like people fight the strip mines in Appalachia. You could lay down in front of them; there were various things that were done and could have been done but weren’t.”
You sound like Muley Graves trying to fight the Caterpillar in Grapes of Wrath when the homes were tractored out.
“It’s the same. It’s all part of the same. But in our neighborhood they’re burning the place down at night. Winos come to us because we’ve helped them. They come to us and they tell us who paid them to set fire to a certain building. We run one of the free clinics in Chicago, the Young Patriots Clinic. They come to us and they tell us that they set fire to buildings. They burned one of our children, who came to the clinic on Saturday. Saturdays are set aside for children, and they burned one of our children to death. How can you fight this? You wake up in the middle of the night and your building is on fire, and all you can do is flee. You live in absolute constant terror. Not only of the police, but of fire, of your children getting strung out on dope. A ghetto is a ghetto, and color has nothing to do with it.
“They don’t talk very much about a white ghetto. I haven’t met ten people who would admit knowing, and they probably don’t know, of a white ghetto. Until just the last three years, I think the estimate was seventy-five thousand poor southern whites in Uptown. It’s known as a port of entry for poor southern whites, but nobody talks about it. When we try to raise money we run into this: ‘You’re white, and you can make it.’
“We went to a church. The minister invited us. I went with two black women. The black women could say anything they wanted to those people, to explain the plight of poor people in general. The more the black women put them down, the more they loved it. But the minute I opened my mouth, they started putting me down. They didn’t want to hear it from a white. I lost my temper and I said, ‘You are afraid of the wrong people. I can go to a beauty shop, get my hair done, put on a nice dress, a hat, white gloves, and I can come out here and burn you down. I’m not saying I’m going to—I don’t believe in that kind of thing—but I’m saying I could. You’re so uptight about black people and afraid of them that you hand money to them. You’re more racist than I am, much, much more. You sit out here and you go to Selma. Well, I came from the Selma.’ They were mad at me because when Selma happened they said, ‘Are you going to Selma?’ And I said, ‘Why should I go to Selma? I know Selma and I’m going to stay and fight in Chicago.’ Well, Chicago isn’t anything like Alabama! I said, ‘Well, Brother Malcolm said the Mason-Dixon Line begins at the Canadian border.’
“This is our turf. And if we call the United States our turf, we should talk about Sitting Bull; talk about Custer, who died for our sins.”
We hear and read a great deal about violence in the streets of the city.
“I’d say hunger is as violent a thing as possible for there to be. I remember a speech I made at one of the universities. The women in the audience kept saying, ‘Why do kids in your neighborhood throw bricks through store windows?’ The only answer I had for them was ‘Have you ever been hungry?’ Hunger is a very violent thing. If you’ve ever been hungry and had cramps from it, you know how violent it is.”
She has strong feelings on the double standard of justice. She once told me: “As far as the authorities are concerned, you live in a middle class, a ‘sir’ neighborhood. I live in a ‘hey, you’ neighborhood.”
“Everything I’ve learned came out of experience. A motorcycle in our neighborhood, on the corner of Sunnyside and Clifton, caught fire, and someone called the fire department. So, they came and put out the fire, and a kid in the neighborhood took one of the firemen’s hats. They called the cops. All at once there were at least fifty police cars there, paddy wagons, all kinds of cops, plainclothes cops, uniformed cops, and they were running through buildings with their guns out in their hands, rushing in and out of people’s apartments, opening the door if it wasn’t locked, and walking i
n. Everybody was angry, because here is violence committed against people in the ghetto. The firemen got alarmed at so many policemen running around with guns in their hands, so they took a bicycle, a brand-new bicycle that one of the kids was on, because they definitely knew who had taken the hat. They put the bicycle on the fire truck and said, “All right, we’re going to settle it. We’ll keep the bicycle until we get the fireman’s hat back.’ Everyone thought that was fair, fair enough. So then everyone got involved in finding the fireman’s hat, which really wasn’t very hard to find. That settled that question apparently. But then they wouldn’t give the bike back. They put kids—they were under twelve years old—into a squad car and they took off. This isn’t fair. If you get the hat back, you give the bicycle back, and that’s the end of it. But that isn’t the way it turns out. It never turns out that way in a ‘hey, you’ neighborhood. The firemen, they put a young hillbilly friend of mine into the paddy wagon. And we said, ‘Man, it ain’t never gonna happen.’ We started rocking the paddy wagon back and forth. We said ‘Let him out; you’re not leaving with him.’ So they kept yelling ‘Hey, you’ at us. ‘Hey, YYou!’ ‘Hey, YYYou!’ So I walked up to them and I said, ‘I’m not “Hey, you”! I’m Peggy Terry and that’s Thomas Maleer in the paddy wagon and this is Nancy Maleer. And you’re going to let him out before you get out of here.’ I said, ‘Do you call the people in Winnetka “Hey, you”? You call them “Sir.” All poor people live in a ‘hey, you’ neighborhood. They have no names. It isn’t just black people who have no names; it’s poor whites also. Poor whites have become the invisible people. Blacks, through their own efforts, have made themselves very visible.
“I think of the countryside, where there’s stripping going on, ruining mountains that it took Mother Nature millions of years to produce, spoiling the water, creeks, with the drinking water, and the fish; the acid from the runoff causing the creeks to be so bad that the fish actually will jump out on the banks. The conditions that we’ve talked about in the cities, not just Chicago, but all cities I’ve been in—the same thing is going on. Expressways are splitting people away from each other, alienating people. This is part of the ‘divide and conquer.’ The only hope I see—and I don’t know if I can hope because I know they won’t do it—is for the politicians to realize that we, the people, are the boss. They are our employees. We pay them. They are not the boss. By us sitting back for so long and not saying anything, they have taken power that belongs to the people. And the only way that any change is going to come about is for the people to get that power back.
“That’s by organizing. I’d like to do that gently, because I truly loved and respected the Reverend Martin Luther King. I truly believed in his philosophy. But I don’t believe they’re going to let us do it like that. I think his death proves they’re not going to let us do it like that. I don’t want violence because I know who gets the worst end of it. We do. So, when they say that people want violence they’re telling a damn lie, because you know who gets the violence: we do. I say, all power to the people, and that means people who are for human beings instead of buildings that say no, no, and schools that tell you you’re an ignorant hillbilly, you’re a nigger, you’re a spic. We need schools that tell us to love life and above all love yourself. Because you can’t love anybody else if you hate yourself. I think that’s where racism comes from—hating yourself. You hate yourself so desperately that you grab onto something else to hate.
“Better times must come, but they can only come if we become aware of our inalienable rights as human beings. And fight for them. I hope these changes will come easy, but I doubt it. How do you say it? ‘Take it easy, but take it.’ ”
I first heard the phrase “Take it easy, but take it” used by Woody Guthrie in the thirties. He told me it is an old piece of American folksay.
Part Three
E. Y. “YIP” HARBURG, 1978
One of America’s original contributions to the world of art—you might say the world of entertainment, but more than entertainment—is musical theater, musical comedy.
One of the most deft of lyricists, but more than that, one of the most nimble witted—and lyrics often, almost always, were the point, something called residue—is Yip Harburg, E. Y. Harburg. You know of him, of course, mostly from “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” that bitter anthem of the Depression days, and the one from The Wizard of Oz, of course, “Over the Rainbow.” But those remarkable musicals Finian’s Rainbow as well as Bloomer Girl—it’s remarkable to me how they are so contemporary now, even more than when they were written. It seems to me that Yip Harburg was prescient as well as gifted at the time, and is now as well.
Of his two books, one is available now, At This Point in Rhyme. It’s a matter of verse that brings back memories of those glorious days of verse writing with bite and wit. He will be reading some and I will be reading some; we’ll hear some of his songs as well, but more than that, we’ll hear what is the hallmark of a good lyricist.
[The program opens with “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”]
AND THE PREVAILING GREETING at that time on every block that you passed was some poor guy coming up and saying, “Can you spare a dime?” Or “Can you spare a dime for a cup of coffee?” Now it would be about two dollars. At that time you could have gotten a double boiler and made your own coffee for a long time to come. But a dime did the trick. It was a cup of coffee and probably more, a bun.
All that “Brother, can you spare a dime?” finally hit you on every block and every street. And I thought that would be a wonderful title if I could only work it out by telling people through the song: It isn’t just a man asking for a dime, saying I’m having hard luck. This is a man who says, “I built the railroads. I built that tower. I fought your wars. I was the kid with the drum. I was the guy in khaki. Why the hell should I be standing in line now? Why? What happened to all this wealth that I’ve created?” And I think that’s what made the song live. . . . Of course, together with idea and conception and meaningfulness, a song must also have poetry; it must have the phrase that rings a bell, and that makes an impact so that it’s lyrical and it isn’t just prose.
And there, again, with the difference between what kids are saying now or what the young songwriters are doing now . . . I mean, it’s instant writing; it’s instant lyrics. They’ve had absolutely no foundation for it. They don’t read; they don’t have the background of years and years of training in classics and so on that goes into the process of writing poetry, as it would if you were a scientist. [He sighs.] Anyhow . . .
I think with that sigh right there . . . Yip is my guest here. This was a comment made by Yip Harburg when I was working on Hard Times. I was visiting his apartment in New York about ten years ago. It’s funny . . . Here you are now. We heard the chorus of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” and then your comments. There are about three or four aspects involved. First the idea—we’ll come to the young in a moment—that song was not a beggar’s song.
It was trying to expound, really, a social theory, that theory that our whole system of capitalism and free enterprise is based on a rather illogical and unscientific groundwork: that we each exploit each other, we each get as much out of the wealth of the world that our ruthlessness, and our chutzpah, and ability to step over others, gives us permission to enjoy. And most people who don’t have that kind of power are left penniless, even though they do most of the producing.
Writing is life. Writing should be social awareness. And one thing that I deplore about the writing today is that instead of social awareness, it’s social complaint; it’s self-pity; it’s bewailing the fact that things are bad, rather than exposing what’s bad about them.
I was brought up at a time when we all had a background of history, and political science, and we knew that the world was constructed on certain lines that had to be reformed. And there was a great reform movement on. I mean, the movement during Roosevelt’s time was formidable. We knew what we were after. We knew that we could h
ave Social Security, which we didn’t have. We knew that we could have Medicaid for the poor. We knew we could have unemployment insurance. We fought for it.
Not simply is it a matter of no substance in the songs, but the style, too. In your case, style and substance are interrelated, are they not? You could tell it’s a Cole Porter song by the lyric. You could tell it’s a Larry Hart song by the lyric, or an Ira Gershwin song. That is so, isn’t it? You wrote “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” thinking as you do, and from the standpoint of this guy, this ex–World War I vet, who is now broke and out of things. If Cole Porter had done it, he’d have done it very deftly, of course, but his would have been the guy who’s being asked for the dime, wouldn’t it?
That’s right. Well, Cole Porter belonged to a so-called smart set. He was born into great inheritances, in fact, four inheritances. He had a chateau in Venice, he had one in France, and he was living a different kind of life, and it was a very interesting kind of life. It was the kind of life we all aspired to. It was the kind of life where “I Get a Kick Out of You.” . . . It was a champagne-bubble feeling in the air.
