by Studs Terkel
Same thing with Martin Luther King. They asked the opinion of our great President, Harry Truman, and he said this guy was strictly a troublemaker, period. I thought Truman was marvelous. Because he was a guy that come up in the capitalistic system of politics from nothing to a giant. And this is the way our system works. From Daley here, from Kelly before him, from Nash before him...from the two Irishmen, Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John.46 Boss Tweed in New York and what’s his name in Boston—Curley. These were the giants that built the cities. These are the guys that built our country. They elect presidents. All these guys came up the hard way...shoeshine guys and bust-out crapshooters...shoot a shot against blackjack. These are the guys we need in our country. Who needs educated mooches?
The greatest man in the twentieth century in my opinion—and I hope I don’t offend anybody—is Mau Too Sung. He did something the world could never do. He feeds the multitudes. It’s amazing about Peking. Like myself, the average-layman in business for himself in a hot-dog business, I’m always in trouble with flies. An ordinary fly who’s a pest. Now Mau Too Sung has come up with a chemical. They’ve come up with somethin’ which even us, the capitalistic system, does not have. There are no flies in Peking. He’s a guy who’s come up so hard.
You admire Harry Truman and Mao Tse-Tung and Momo Giancana.
And Daley. He’s the greatest mayor Chicago ever had. Here’s a man dedicated to civilizing the city. He takes his paycheck and sits home trying to think how to do something for the city. He was smart enough and I believe intelligent enough and he fell into I must say luck, though qualified when called upon. Most of his competitors died off and he knew when to seize power. I’m for him a hundred percent. When my mother died eight years ago, I got a condolence telegram from the mayor. It was humble of him to do that, very humble indeed. For the mayor of the second largest city of the world’s greatest country to send such a telegram to an ex-prize fighter without a high-school diploma with the element that I’m in, my God, I should say yes.
Was he acquainted with you or your mother?
Of course not. My friend, Terry Boyle,47 probably encouraged him.
I’m a Democrat at heart anyway. I take the less of the two evils. Look at Chicago. There’s all the sky rises and new roads and so forth. Qualified authorities tell me that a group of real-estate men control this urban renewal. I believe in slum clearance but this isn’t the way to do it. All the benefits, no matter if it goes up, down, or sideways, they wind up with all the money. They all cut the pot together. They condemn the property they want to condemn and they throw in the high rises. They do it legally. I wish it was me.
There’s a song I love. I never forgot it. “A man with a dream, a mighty man is he. For dreams make the man, the man he wants to be.” You can be anything in this world you want to be, if you dream hard enough, long enough.
TOM KEARNEY
An apartment in a high-rise complex on the Near South Side of the city, adjacent to Michael Reese Hospital. A well-thumbed copy of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was on the coffee table.
I’ve been a policeman for twenty-three hard years. You have to work odd hours, often long hours. Yesterday I was assigned to the parade, the astronauts, White and McDivitt. We reported for duty at six-thirty in the morning and weren’t released until five o’clock in the evening. That was without any time off at all. No lunch period or anything.
I worked as a patrolman and a detective. Then I was promoted to a detective sergeant and from there I went to the traffic division. So I’ve covered all bases so far.
Sometimes you’re disenchanted, you’re disillusioned, you’re cynical. When people attempt to offer a bribe. I know I’ve been negligent in my duty because I should have arrested the person. At the same time, that’s universal, everywhere. I turn it down. I told him, you know, “No harm trying. But I just don’t go that way.” [Laughs sadly.] It’s a corrupt society.
You think you’re a wise guy until you run into situations where you shoulda known better and didn’t. The night before I went on my vacation, I was out in the squad car, and you travel alone, you know. The radio signaled for a police officer. They needed help on a 10-1. So over the air came this signal, a couple of blocks from where I was. I got there and found an officer struggling with two young men and they were giving him a pretty good battle. So I joined in. At fifty-three, when you take those blows, you absorb them, you know. You just don’t shake them off. I went on my vacation the next day with bruises. Shins all beat up. But there’s nothing else I can do, you see?
I was born in Chicago, my father was born in Chicago, and my grandfather was born here. His father came to America to dig the Sag Canal. They were promised they could have farmland where they could grow anything. In the winter, they’d dig the canal. Unfortunately, it was all rocks. So they wound up with a rock farm.
There’s something you gotta understand about the Irish Catholics in Chicago. Until recently, being a policeman was a wonderful thing. ’Cause he had a steady job and he knew he was gonna get a pension and they seemed to think it was better than being a truck driver, although a truck driver earns far more than a policeman today.
Someone had to be police, you know? They sacrificed anything. They just knew that so-and-so in the family would be. It was another step out of the mud. You figured at least you’d have some security. They felt they no longer worked with their hands. They weren’t laborers any more.
If the Depression hadn’t come along, my father would have been able to do more educational-wise for us. He couldn’t provide. There was no money for two years. At that time, the firemen and policemen weren’t paid. My father was a fireman for forty years. They were the only ones who didn’t get their back pay. Whoever could work and earn anything at all...that’s what kept us going.
I recall the hunger marches. I remember the police at that time, they had mounted police. I had a job at Madison and Canal, and they were marching, trying to get into the Downtown area, from the west to the east. The police charged them. Whether they were right or wrong, I didn’t know then. I was too much concerned with my own self. ’Cause things were rather brutal and you expected that, you know.
I remember at Blue Island and Ashland—there’s a lumber company there now—that was a big transient camp. I remember the food lines. I also remember getting off the Elevated and men waiting in line for the newspaper. If you were through reading it, they’d take it. They had a little code among themselves. After you got your newspaper, you moved away from the line. What they used them for was probably to sleep on....
There’s no colored there [Bridgeport]. A mixture of white—different ethnic groups: Polish, Slavic, Irish, Italian, anything and everything. A few Jewish families. In the old days, it was all Irish. The streets, the names were Irish. The street my grandmother lived on was named after one of my father’s sisters who died very young.
We moved farther south, to Roseland. My father was assigned there. It was a community begun by people who had left Pullman. They had rebelled against the company by moving out. If you worked for him you had to live in one of his Company houses. You bought from the Company store. If profits fell below a certain level, wages were cut. The rents weren’t lowered, the rents remained the same. Now, of course, there’s nothing much over there.
My father was one of the radicals. Even though he had status, you know, being a fireman and the fact he got a pension, he used to say, “Why should I get a pension when the fellow next door doesn’t get one?” He was a good Irish Catholic, so he wasn’t a Commie, but at the same time he used to say, “You know, maybe they got something over there that we should know about, because they keep on talking about how bad it is over there.”
My family wasn’t devout. Certain things my mother, of course, insisted upon. On Good Fridays, you had to sit in a chair in the kitchen. In those days they didn’t have any foam rubber seats. It was hard wood. And you had to sit there till about five minutes to twelve. Don’t laugh and don’t talk. You
sat for three hours. She had some of an idea that it helped you spiritually. But I don’t think we were deeply religious.
I find myself at odds with the Church at various times. I knew the nuns taught me some things that weren’t true. At the same time, I realized they themselves didn’t know whether they were true or not. They were simple women, you know. You say you’d rather have your son go to a public school because he’s gonna have to get along with those people and he might as well start young. The same as going to school with the colored. You’re going to have to get along with them. They’re here, so you might as well go to school with them and get along with them.
How do you feel about young nuns and priests taking part in street demonstrations?
They have every right to do so, although not to violate the law. I’m not saying that because I’m a policeman, but simply because having been in parochial school all my life, all I ever heard was: “Don’t do anything wrong.” Respect for authority.
Today things are changing. If one married outside the religion I remember this: “Oooh, tear out all my hair. I can’t face my friends, we gotta move.” Oooh, terrible, terrible. And what happened? I have five brothers and one sister. Of the brothers, one is a bachelor. The rest of us married Protestants. My sister married a Protestant. My older brother had two daughters. They raised one a Catholic and one a Protestant. The girl raised a Catholic married a Protestant and the one raised a Protestant married a Catholic. Today, for convenience’s sake, my brother and his wife go to the Catholic Church. She hasn’t been converted, but just goes for convenience’s sake. It isn’t any big deal any more.
It’s changing rapidly. Look at the city. Of course, everyone resists change, good or bad. Even if it’s good for them, they resist it. Take the color situation today. The whites, they’re only fighting a rear-guard action. The walls are coming down, that’s all. The tragedy is that the program of the colored is still negative. There’s no reason to lead a march or sit in the streets any more, as I see it. Because they’ve won, there’s no question about it. They’ve got to find a way to have the whites accept them.
Unfortunately, the colored man came to the industrial North just too late. He came after there were so few jobs to begin with. The Caucasian immigrants came with nothing but their hands and they worked in steel mills and maybe they were snapping cinders, which is one of the most difficult jobs and the lowest paid. They watched another fellow do a job and they learned his job and climbed up. Well, the colored man didn’t have that opportunity after the wave of migration from the South. There were so few labor jobs that he could start out from and learn how to get up. The machine took care of that. They didn’t need him any more. One man can do the work of ten today.
What do you think the objective of the colored is?
The same as mine, the same as mine. Everything best for him and his family that he can possibly have. I can see where they’d want to move away from a completely colored neighborhood and integrate. I can understand that. He also understands that his family is gonna have to live with whites and if he doesn’t live with the whites he can’t understand them either. The colored man says: “Well, you don’t know us.” Naturally we don’t. They don’t know the white either.
I think people are intelligent enough to accept integration. We’ve done one thing, it’s a bad thing, but I can’t think of anything better. The quota. It’s bad because you have to exclude someone sometimes, but the whites wouldn’t have any fear of being overwhelmed. And the colored wouldn’t have any fear that the white would run. This high-rise complex I live in now works on a quota. It’s highly controlled.
Most of urban renewal is bad in a sense. People were displaced. Yet it had to be done. Where we’re sitting now was one of the foulest slums in America. It was worse than Calcutta, believe me. I’ve been in here as a police officer on many occasions. Right across the street, they had a fence to protect the institution there. It must have been eighteen feet in the air, with barbed wire.
Actually it’s not really integrated now because there’s no community life here at all. You don’t know the fella next door usually. Your wife may meet them or something like that, but you yourself come and go, that’s all. There’s no way for people to know one another. You at least vote together, you know, at election time. Well, each building is its own precinct. So people just go in and out. There isn’t any standing outside like you do normally at an election. There’s no church in the immediate vicinity. Most people, they have to go several blocks to an known place. And these complexes have very few children. An adult population, more or less concerned with their own problems. When we first moved in here, I thought I’d go insane, being cooped in and actually nowhere to go, because the neighborhood is sterile. It’s not a neighborhood at all.
People don’t want to become involved. Most people have had some dealings with court, like traffic courts. People have sat for long periods of time, waiting for their case to be called. In criminal court, they’ve found themselves returning there and then continuances being granted after continuances. This man, he loses his day’s pay from work. If it’s a woman, she becomes frightened, that they might retaliate in some way. The fear. Like many cabdrivers that don’t report a robbery, ’cause normally they might not have eight or ten dollars when he’s held up. He won’t report it because he’d lose a day’s work if they finally apprehended the offender and the loss is a loss.
This fear of involvement. I wondered why there were so few colored in the crowd greeting the astronauts yesterday. Most of the fellows said, “They don’t care if anybody went to the moon. They don’t have any feeling about it.” I said, I don’t think that’s true. We were briefed to search for colored people who might be a threat, you know. It was the week of demonstrations. The average colored person is just like you and I. If there was a great crowd some place and there was a threat to all people wearing blue shirts, you certainly wouldn’t go down there in a blue shirt.
Do you have any colored friends?
Oh yes. Yes. [Pause.] I say colored friends and I think colored friends...but actually I really don’t know.
You don’t know what they think of you?
Not really. I can understand that. Because if I were colored, I’d be bitter, too. I think I’d try to control myself, try to be rational about it. I remember one night, a colored schoolteacher I know, we’re at a party, an interracial party, very nice. She forgot the potency of martinis and I was sitting talking to her and suddenly she looked at me very hard and said, “You’re my Caucasian enemy.” Very indignantly. Of course, I realized, you know... I mean, she just didn’t realize how potent a martini was. So you really don’t know.
Some guys that I know, colored, we talk and discuss the family and how things are going, and how their wives are and things like that, but I don’t think I know. [Pause.] I don’t think I know.
My son, a twenty-two-year-old boy, who’s been going to college, I really don’t think I know him. I think he knows me better than I know him. That’s one thing he really doesn’t like. I think he’d like it the other way around. The younger generation doesn’t think too highly of us. They think we made a mess of things, which we did. We seem to lead disorganized lives. Most of us dislike the work we’re doing. Most of us are anxious to go someplace else, thinking we could leave our troubles behind. They love us, our sons and daughters. But at the same time, they don’t think we did things correctly. They’re critical of us. They discuss things far more intelligently than we do. They think for themselves.
One day he brought up a charming little blond girl, not overly dressed, but not ragged or beatnik type. She was going down South to teach in one of the Freedom schools. Very much enthused about it. And she seemed to have a good idea why she was doing it. I mean she wasn’t looking for publicity or anything like that. She really thought she should be doing this. And then again, he met a colored girl, a beautiful creature, who also had a brilliant mind, you know, straight A student, one of those types. And sh
e had absolutely no interest in civil rights. None. Couldn’t mean less to her, although she identifies with the colored people. She makes no attempt to pass, ’cause she could very easily. And then he has a friend whose sister and mother are both active in the civil rights movement. The sister was arrested twice in the last week.
Did you have to arrest her?
No, I... [Laughs.] It woulda really been funny, you know. I asked her, “Now what is this about police brutality?” And she said, the way some policeman talk, you know, and then I suppose holler at them at some degree or another, I mean to keep them in control and get them in the wagon or something. But I said, “What happened to you?” I mean, the voice means nothing, I mean, I holler at people, too, you know—stand back, or something. Well, she said, “When the policeman arrested me, he said, ‘Now come along, honey, step up in the wagon.’ ” [Laughs.] That was police brutality.
