by Studs Terkel
Certain writers of fiction were not alone in their desire to explore so-called plain folk. In particular, mid-eighteenth-century England was graced with a master of social observation and writing, Henry Mayhew. His newspaper articles, in their sum, amounted to an enormously thorough and suggestive investigation, London Labour and the London Poor. He gave careful, considerate attention to a great capital city’s shopworkers and needlewomen, its tailors and boot and shoe makers, its tanners and milliners and toy makers and woodworkers and weavers and hatters and brewery workers, its carpenters and merchant seamen, and not least, those who hawked wares, sold food, ran errands, hustled their way through long and marginally lived days. “As a class,” he once observed, “I must say that the work people that I have seen appear remarkably truthful, patient, and generous; indeed, every day teaches me that their virtues are wholly unknown to the world.” He continues in that reflective vein at some length (echoes of the older Tolstoy, of George Eliot in Middlemarch, of Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure)—a compassionate witness to the struggles of those he has come to know, but also a writer anxious that his readers begin to question their own assumptions even as they learn about those that inform the lives of others with whom they share a nationality and a residence in a particular city, if little else.
Although Mayhew was careful to give us, now and then, the actual voices of those he met and to offer the substance of conversations he had with various men and women, he is, inevitably, the main character in his journalism. Put differently, his London people come to us through his narrative voice; he uses the third person to chronicle their stories, to describe their work. Novelists, of course, “make up” their stories; though surely Dickens or Eliot called upon their powers of attention, perception, memory, worked into their fictional explorations of urban or rural nineteenth-century England words and ways of behavior heard and seen in “real life,” thereby turning the imagined reality of a short story or a longer piece of fiction into its very own distillation of truth.
Today, we have the tape recorder, so it is easier for someone of Henry Mayhew’s ambition, energy, and sensibility (and Studs Terkel is our twentieth-century Mayhew) to do the kind of work that was done over one hundred years ago in such a way that our era’s various men and women—met, watched, assessed, and heard—can speak for themselves. Now, hours and hours of conversations can be recorded, transcribed, edited, made available to those who want to read (or, yes, themselves listen). Yet, over ninety years ago, in 1906, a book appeared in which autobiographies alone figure, under the title of The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves: first-person accounts of how it went in turn-of-the-century America for people still identified by their country of origin—“The Life Story of a Lithuanian” and similar accounts of “a Greek Reader,” “a Polish Sweatshop Girl,” “an Italian Bootblack,” “an Irish Cook,” or others identified as a “Florida Sponge Fisherman,” “a Southern White Woman,” “a Southern Colored Woman,” “a Farmer’s Wife,” “an Itinerant Minister.” All those stories were originally sought by Hamilton Holt, the editor of the Independent, a journal published in New York City in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early years of this one. Some of those accounts were self-initiated by men and women who felt they had something to say and wanted to do so; others were the result of interviews, which were written up by reporters and then shown to the person who had told the story.
The editors of the Independent obviously did not just stumble into these hard-pressed, uneducated, newly arrived Americans. A search had to be made, and before that, an idea entertained, honed down to its essentials, handed over to reporters and writers for implementation. In a sense, the reporters or interviewers had to learn to get along with, understand, and earn the trust of those whose lives were to be self-described, as it were—a microcosm, those two individuals, of the larger kind of human connection and insight that publication in a newspaper or magazine is meant to further. When readers of the Independent felt themselves newly awakened and informed, courtesy of the stories offered by the magazine, they had not only the individuals “behind” the printed autobiographies to thank but those “behind” them, so to speak, even as Studs Terkel has made us privy to so many lives courtesy of the gifts of his own life put to such persistent and accomplished use. If other efforts to tell how it goes for the hurt and the troubled, the ordinary and the successful, the lucky and the unlucky, have preceded those of Studs Terkel, it is fair to say that his reach has been uniquely broad and deep, an achievement that has required a lifetime to realize.
We have, of course, had access to the “voices” of Americans who lived in past centuries through their diaries, letters, sermons. Moreover, novelists such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and in our time, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford have used fiction to explore various kinds of American marginalities. And in a class by itself, we have the work of the poet and novelist James Agee, whose collaboration with a photographer, Walker Evans, gave us the memorable Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Before Chicago gave us Terkel, it gave us the sociologist W I. Thomas, whose Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1920) and, later, The Unadjusted Girl (1923) rendered a kind of social science—vivid, gripping, plainly spoken, yet convincingly eloquent—that is sorely missing today. Contemporaries of Terkel’s have also done his kind of work in other countries, notably Ronald Blythe in his “Portrait of an English Village”: a mix of authorial commentary and the voices of a community in East Anglia—a thatcher, a schoolteacher, a nurse, a gravedigger, a farmhand. In France, the novelist John Berger, working with the photographer Jean Mohr, gave us a sense of how Europe’s post—World War II migrant workers live, though mostly in a third-person narration, and similarly with the social historian Charles Van Onselen, whose dramatically titled New Babylon and New Nineveh tell of the human side of the industrialization of South Africa in the early years of this century (after the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand). His tales of liquor sellers and cab drivers and prostitutes and domestic servants and Afrikaner workers trying to hold on to decent jobs, not to mention the blacks endlessly recruited to do the hardest work for the most meager of wages, are also about various kinds of people, rather than a compilation of their own stories, whether spoken to another or written by themselves, handed to another.
To be sure, nowadays, the tape recorder is an almost sacrosanct part of both journalism and social science; and so reporters on a local beat carry their slim pocket-size Sonys, as do anthropologists in Africa or Asia. None of the latter, though, have equaled Oscar Lewis’s exceptionally knowing use of that machine. The issue eventually becomes not the machine or even the matter of who is approached for conversation and information, but the person who comes armed with an enabling technology. Studs Terkel has done tape-recorded interviews for decades, but he has also uniquely brought to the individuals whose first-person narratives he seeks a particular mind’s intentions and aspirations, its resolve, its moral energy, its mix of emotional candor and soulfulness. His has been an unflagging resourcefulness put at the service of a social conscience, not to mention a quick-witted, penetrating interest in sizing up what truly counts, in getting to the heart of things, in deferring to the opinions of others rather than mobilizing them in the service of an observer’s expression.
Who else has roamed more broadly across a nation’s lines of social, economic, educational, racial, cultural division, separation, and done so for so long and with such clear and striking success? What follows is, indeed, an American century as told to a devoted listener, a seeker of life’s truths as they have been discovered in lives and as they are revealed in conversations at once pointed and relaxed, freewheeling and utterly precise, concentrated and to the point. Here Terkel’s masterly ability to win the confidence of others ought be mentioned and saluted. A whole cohort of reporters or social scientists or essayists in search of a project or a book could ag
ree upon a given “population” to pursue or questions to pose, even on the individuals who would best respond to such an investigation—but that is a mere beginning. Soon enough, the critical matter is at hand: Who is able to sit with whom, saying and asking what, in which manner? How well I remember Erik H. Erikson telling a group of us in a seminar (“The Study of Lives”) that even as each psychoanalyst elicits somewhat different responses than those that would be offered to his or her colleagues, so it goes in other human situations. The truism, then, that we are different things to different people becomes of enormous importance as we contemplate the range of these interviews, their complexity and subtlety and candor, their directness, their instructive blend, so often, of a tone properly reserved, yet utterly forthcoming. We surely begin to realize, after a while, that these individuals, in their generous responsiveness to an extraordinarily inviting interviewer, have granted him the right to be proprietary in this book’s title. Those he has met over the decades have given him what he has quite distinctively been able to invite of them.
Anyone who has heard Studs Terkel’s voice, never mind met him, knows the vitality of this man, the liveliness, the humor and the largeness of spirit, the thoroughgoing attentiveness he can bring to bear on an occasion or subject matter, and needless to say, the connection he makes with a person whom he is covering. His conscientious regard for matters small and large, his inviting charm, his worldly savvy that in no way banishes from sight an almost shy, introspective side of his personality, his intellect—all of that makes him someone one wants to know, to speak with readily, honestly. In his substantial integrity and his yearning for the substantive (the details that will become in their gradual accumulation a broad and telling canvas), he becomes much more than an effective radio host or an able, astute biographical explorer who, courtesy of a machine, can capture word for word an extended spell of declarations, reservations, thoughts, and second thoughts. In truth, he is the almost magically summoning “other” of philosophy’s long existentialist discussions, the one whose wholly evident interest in us makes for our moments of self-avowal: With you I will look boldly within, and to you I will say what I have learned. How else to account for what so many in the pages ahead have said (and about so much)?
In his great lyrical examination of Paterson, where the first factory in America was built, William Carlos Williams exhorted himself, let alone the rest of us, with: “outside/outside myself/there is a world,/he rumbled, subject to my incursions/—a world/(to me) at rest,/which I approach/concretely.” So it has also gone with Studs Terkel. He has most certainly approached our contemporary world “concretely,” enabled to do so by his quite exceptional humanity. When back in his study, of course, he has kept himself very much in touch with that world, populated by his informants, his teachers, his fellow human beings with whom he shares an American citizenship—hence the wise and gracious and magnanimous nature of his editing. These stories owe their convincing impact to the shrewd and skilled shaping of them at the hands of someone who knows how to make the words of others soar in their intent, in their deliverance of this or that message, opinion, concern, conviction. What for some would be the heavy burden of hours and hours of tapes becomes for Studs Terkel, our foremost documentarian, our leading student of American variousness as it gets embodied in human particularity, a grand opportunity. Hence his books that have, in essence, presented us to ourselves, and hence this collection of vintage moments from these books: yet another chance for us to look back at this hugely eventful century of our national life through the memories of those who lived in it and made it, in their respective ways, what it has turned out to be.
—ROBERT COLES
[The following appeared in the original edition of this book, which was first published in 1997 under the title My American Century.]
INTRODUCTION
In 1936, a lowly civil servant ($1,260 per annum), I occasionally appeared as an actor at the Washington Civic Theatre. My glory moment came in the role of Shad Ledue, a hired man who became the gauleiter of a New England town. The play was an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s novel, It Can’t Happen Here. It was a fantasy: home-grown fascism taking over.
During this time, Hitler was on the rise in Europe; there was a Great Depression here as well as there, with millions on breadlines; there was a profound discontent in the air and a nameless fear. There were dark thoughts in unexpected quarters. There were movements, too.
There were William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirts; Father Coughlin and his fulminatory Sunday evening sermons, reaching radio’s multitudes; and there was Huey Long’s warning of fascism appearing in the name of 100 percent Americanism. Ersatz populism was on the wing. And the one whose heart and mind they all courted was Shad Ledue—working like a dog, he felt, and getting nowhere. He had grievances, you bet.
Shad loathed his employer, Doremus Jessup, the town’s newspaper editor and publisher. Shad was surly, a bully, a semiliterate, a loose-jawed brute. Jessup was kindly, enlightened, somewhere between a moderate conservative and the warmest kind of liberal. His way with Shad was that of a forbearing master with a sometimes unruly mutt. “I tell myself I’m doing something of a social experiment,” Jessup explained, “trying to train him to be as gracious as the average Neanderthal man. Or perhaps, I’m scared of him—he’s the kind of vindictive peasant that sets fire to barns.”1 Jessup, you see, had a great sense of humor.
I remember that one exhilarating instant, during the dress rehearsal, when my Corpo uniform fit so snugly, so naturally. It became me. I no longer slouched. I was ramrod straight, my hands on my hips in the manner of General MacArthur, glowering past the darkened house toward the last row of the theater in the Wardman Park Hotel. I looked beyond. Shad was miraculously somebody.
Sixty years later, shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, a spiritual kinsman of Shad Ledue, Mark Koernke, in his uniform of mottled fatigues, declared the bombing a government plot. Koernke, something of an independent contractor, had broken away from the Michigan Militia and formed his own. On his nationwide shortwave radio program, he offered a suggestion: “I did some basic math the other day, using the old-style math. You can get about four politicians for about 120 feet of rope. Remember when using this stuff always try to find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer.”2
At night, he spoke his piece. During the day, he was, like Shad, a hired man at the University of Michigan. A maintenance man, he was called. As he occasionally visited the honors class to screw in a lightbulb or fix a lock on the door, was his presence ever noticed, let alone acknowledged by the distinguished professor? Perhaps these two were born-agains: one, as Shad Ledue; the other, as Doremus Jessup.
How did Shad Ledue come to be? Or Mark of Michigan, as he called himself? Was he born, like Markham’s man with the hoe, “dead to rapture and despair”? There’s a question seldom asked: “Whose breath blew out the light within his brain?”
Mark and his fellow militiamen had their moment of celebrity, dubious though it was, on the six o’clock news. What I have found remarkable is that there has seldom, if ever, been such commemoration of other lives, who may have had the same beginnings, the same bitterness, the same twisted longings—and yet experienced a transfiguration. They were not struck by any blinding light on the road to their Damascus. It was over a long haul of daily trials and small revelations that led to a sort of redemption and transcendence. They had discovered where the body was buried and who did what to whom.
It is these faces in the crowd that have most attracted me during my searchings.
Consider C. P Ellis.
Some years ago, I came across a small sidebar on page twenty-something of the daily newspaper. It concerned the former Exalted Cyclops of The Ku Klux Klan, Durham, North Carolina. He had become a fervent civil rights advocate and the spokesman for a trade union, overwhelmingly black. How come? I had to track him down.
A poor white: father dead of cotton dust; sole support of mother and sister at
13; married, four kids, one blind and retarded; dead-end jobs; barely subsisting. “They say abide by the law, go to church, do right and live for the Lord and everything’ll work out.” It didn’t. Seven days a week, twelve, fourteen hours a day. Heart attack. Dead broke. “I didn’t know who to blame. I had to hate somebody. Hatin’ America is too hard to do because you can’t see it to hate it. I blamed it on the black people because that was easy.” He joined the Klan. It was easy.
“First night was the most thrilling time of my life. Here’s a guy who struggled all his life to be somethin’ and here’s the moment. I’ll never forget it.” The white robe, the hood, the illuminated cross, the oath, the applause. “For this one little ol’ person, C. P Ellis.” He was somebody.
A time of the civil rights movement; busting picket lines with guns, billy clubs; congratulatory phone calls from the town’s Respectables. However, a funny thing happened. “One day, I was walkin’ downtown and a city council member saw me comin’. I had expected him to shake my hand because I had been to his home and last night he was on the phone. He crossed the street. Oh shit, I began to think, there’s somethin’ wrong here. That’s when I began to do some serious thinkin’.”
One revelatory moment after another. And now he’s “butting heads with professional union busters who are college graduates. Imagine! Me and those wonderful black women, we hold our own with ’em. We’re not inferior! Oh, I got a taste of it and I can’t quit.” Talk about being somebody.
