by Studs Terkel
Most that disturbs me today is when I talk to some of my neighbors, none of them, they don’t like this Vietnam going on, but here’s where they say: “What’s the use? Who are we? We can’t say nothing. We have no word. We got the President. We elected him. We got congressmen in there. They’re responsible. Let them worry. Why should I worry about it?” It’s already pounded into them, you’re just a little guy, you vote and you’re through, it won’t do no good anyhow.
I think different. I think, like they say, that if I’m a voter, I should have a say-so in this. In everything...But anything good for the people is never given easy. Never given easy.
I saw coal miners come out the coal mines all crushed. I saw in the First World War. My mother had seven young boys come from Europe to stay with us, worked a little while in the coal mines and they were drafted into the American Army. They were young boys, I think, twenty, twenty-one years old and they never came back. My mother had seven stars in her window. Instead of saying they came from Lithuania, they said they came from Ledford, Illinois. So they sent the stars to my mother, and whatever little belongings they had, little chains or something.... Just enough, there is death enough. I don’t like to see nobody get killed. I don’t like to see nobody get hurt. This world is beautiful to live....
POSTSCRIPT
I asked her about that one phone call she was allowed while in jail: “About two or three o‘clock in the morning, the matron come up to me and asked me if I was gonna have that phone call made. I said, ‘Yes, make it.’ ‘Well, who you want us to call?’ I said, ‘Call my son.’ She says, ‘You want us to tell that he should come and bail you out?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want him to come bail me out.’ I said, ‘Tell him to take the beans off the stove, because they’re gonna get spoiled.’ It was hot that day.”
Working:
People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1972)
INTRODUCTION
This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence—to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. Tb survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
The scars, psychic as well as physical, brought home to the supper table and the TV set, may have touched, malignantly, the soul of our society. More or less. (“More or less,” that most ambiguous of phrases, pervades many of the conversations that comprise this book, reflecting, perhaps, an ambiguity of attitude toward The Job. Something more than Orwellian acceptance, something less than Luddite sabotage. Often the two impulses are fused in the same person.)
It is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying. Perhaps immortality, too, is part of the quest. To be remembered was the wish, spoken and unspoken, of the heroes and heroines of this book.
There are, of course, the happy few who find a savor in their daily job: the Indiana stonemason, who looks upon his work and sees that it is good; the Chicago piano tuner, who seeks and finds the sound that delights; the bookbinder, who saves a piece of history; the Brooklyn fireman, who saves a piece of life...But don’t these satisfactions, like Jude’s hunger for knowledge, tell us more about the person than about his task? Perhaps. Nonetheless, there is a common attribute here: a meaning to their work well over and beyond the reward of the paycheck.
For the many, there is a hardly concealed discontent. The blue-collar blues is no more bitterly sung than the white-collar moan. “I’m a machine,” says the spot-welder. “I’m caged,” says the bank teller, and echoes the hotel clerk. “I’m a mule,” says the steelworker. “A monkey can do what I do,” says the receptionist. “I’m less than a farm implement,” says the migrant worker. “I’m an object,” says the high-fashion model. Blue collar and white call upon the identical phrase: “I’m a robot.” “There is nothing to talk about,” the young accountant despairingly enunciates. It was some time ago that John Henry sang, “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man.” The hard, unromantic fact is: he died with his hammer in his hand, while the machine pumped on. Nonetheless, he found immortality. He is remembered.
As the automated pace of our daily jobs wipes out name and face—and, in many instances, feeling—there is a sacrilegeous question being asked these days. To earn one’s bread by the sweat of one’s brow has always been the lot of mankind. At least, ever since Eden’s slothful couple was served with an eviction notice. The scriptural precept was never doubted, not out loud. No matter how demeaning the task, no matter how it dulls the senses and breaks the spirit, one must work. Or else.
Lately there has been a questioning of this “work ethic,” especially by the young. Strangely enough, it has touched off profound grievances in others, hitherto devout, silent, and anonymous. Unexpected precincts are being heard from in a show of discontent. Communiques from the assembly line are frequent and alarming: absenteeism. On the evening bus, the tense, pinched faces of young file clerks and elderly secretaries tell us more than we care to know. On the expressways, middle management men pose without grace behind their wheels as they flee city and job.
There are other means of showing it, too. Inchoately, sullenly, it appears in slovenly work, in the put-down of craftsmanship. A farm equipment worker in Moline complains that the careless worker who turns out more that is bad is better regarded than the careful craftsman who turns out less that is good. The first is an ally of the Gross National Product. The other is a threat to it, a kook—and the sooner he is penalized the better. Why, in these circumstances, should a man work with care? Pride does indeed precede the fall.
Others, more articulate—at times, visionary—murmur of a hunger for “beauty,” “a meaning,” “a sense of pride.” A veteran car hiker sings out, “I could drive any car like a baby, like a woman changes her baby’s diaper. Lots of customers say, ‘How you do this?’ I’d say, ‘Just the way you bake a cake, miss.’ When I was younger, I could swing with that car. They called me Lovin’ Al the Wizard.”
Dolores Dante graphically describes the trials of a waitress in a fashionable restaurant. They are compounded by her refusal to be demeaned. Yet pride in her skills helps her make it through the night. “When I put the plate down, you don’t hear a sound. When I pick up a glass, I want it to be just right. When someone says, ‘How come you’re just a waitress?’ I say, ‘Don’t you think you deserve being served by me?’ ”
Peggy Terry has her own sense of grace and beauty. Her jobs have varied with geography, climate, and the ever-felt pinch of circumstance. “What I hated worst was being a waitress. The way you’re treated. One guy said, ‘You don’t have to smile; I’m gonna give you a tip anyway.’ I said. ‘Keep it. I wasn’t smiling for a tip.’ Tipping should be done away with. It’s like throwing a dog a bone. It makes you feel small.”
In all instances, there is felt more than a slight ache. In all instances, there dangles the impertinent question: Ought not there be an increment, earned though not yet received, from one’s daily work—an acknowledgement of man’s being?
An American President is fortunate—or, perhaps, unfortunate—that, offering his Labor Day homily, he didn’t encounter Maggie Holmes, the domestic, or Phil Stallings, the spot-welder, or Louis Hayward, the washroom attendant. Or especially, Grace Clements, the felter at the luggage factory, whose daily chore reveals to us in a terrible light that Charles Dickens’s London is not so far away nor long ago.
Obtuseness in “respectable” quarters is not a new phenomenon. In 1850 Henry Mayhew, digging deep into London’s laboring lives and evoking from the invisible people themselves the wretched truth of their lot, astonished and horrified readers of the Morning Chronicle. His letters ran six full columns and averaged 10,500 words. It i
s inconceivable that Thomas Carlyle was unaware of Mayhew’s findings. Yet, in his usual acerbic—and, in this instance, unusually mindless—manner, he blimped, “No needlewoman, distressed or other, can be procured in London by any housewife to give, for fair wages, fair help in sewing. Ask any thrifty housemother. No real needlewoman, ‘distressed’ or other, has been found attainable in any of the houses I frequent. Imaginary needlewomen, who demand considerable wages, and have a deepish appetite for beer and viands, I hear of everywhere....”52 A familiar ring?
Smug respectability, like the poor, we’ve had with us always. Today, however, and what few decades remain of the twentieth century, such obtuseness is an indulgence we can no longer afford. The computer, nuclear energy for better or worse, and sudden, simultaneous influences flashed upon everybody’s TV screen have raised the ante and the risk considerably. Possibilities of another way, discerned by only a few before, are thought of—if only for a brief moment, in the haze of idle conjecture—by many today.
The drones are no longer invisible nor mute. Nor are they exclusively of one class. Markham’s Man with the Hoe may be Ma Bell’s girl with the headset. (And can it be safely said, she is “dead to rapture and despair”? Is she really “a thing that grieves not and that never hopes”?) They’re in the office as well as the warehouse; at the manager’s desk as well as the assembly line; at some estranged company’s computer as well as some estranged woman’s kitchen floor.
Bob Cratchit may still be hanging on (though his time is fast running out, as did his feather pen long ago), but Scrooge has been replaced by the conglomerate. Hardly a chance for Christmas spirit here. Who knows Bob’s name in this outfit—let alone his lame child’s? (“The last place I worked for, I was let go,53 recalls the bank teller. “One of my friends stopped by and asked where I was at. They said, ‘She’s no longer with us.’ That’s all. I vanished.”) It’s nothing personal, really. Dickens’s people have been replaced by Beckett’s.
Many old working class women have an habitual gesture which illuminates the years of their life behind. D. H. Lawrence remarked it in his mother: my grandmother’s was a repeated tapping which accompanied an endless working out of something in her head; she had years of making out for a large number on very little. In others, you see a rhythmic smoothing out of the hand down the chair arm, as though to smooth everything out and make it workable; in others, there is a working of the lips or a steady rocking. None of these could be called neurotic gestures, nor are they symptoms of acute fear; they help the constant calculation.54
In my mother’s case, I remember the illuminating gesture associated with work or enterprise. She was a small entrepreneur, a Mother Courage fighting her Thirty Years’ War, daily. I remember her constant feeling of the tablecloth, as though assessing its quality, and her squinting of the eye, as though calculating its worth.
Perhaps it was myopia, but I rarely saw such signs among the people I visited during this adventure. True, in that dark hollow in Eastern Kentucky I did see Susie Haynes, the black lung miner’s wife, posed in the doorway of the shack, constantly touching the woodwork, “as though to smooth everything out and make it all workable.” It was a rare gesture, what once had been commonplace. Those who did signify—Ned Williams, the old stock chaser, Hobart Foote, the utility man—did so in the manner of the machines to which they were bound. Among the many, though the words and phrases came, some heatedly, others coolly, the hands were at rest, motionless. Their eyes were something else again. As they talked of their jobs, it was as though it had little to do with their felt lives. It was an alien matter. At times I imagined I was on the estate of Dr. Caligari and the guests poured out fantasies.
To maintain a sense of self, these heroes and heroines play occasional games. The middle-aged switchboard operator, when things are dead at night, cheerily responds to the caller, “Marriott Inn,” instead of identifying the motel chain she works for. “Just for a lark,” she explains bewilderedly. “I really don’t know what made me do it.” The young gas meter reader startles the young suburban housewife sunning out on the patio in her bikini, loose-bra’d, and sees more things than he would otherwise see. “Just to make the day go faster.” The auto worker from the Deep South will “tease one guy ’cause he’s real short and his old lady left him.” Why? “Oh, just to break the monotony. You want quittin’ time so bad.”
The waitress, who moves by the tables with the grace of a ballerina, pretends she’s forever on stage. “I feel like Carmen. It’s like a gypsy holding out a tambourine and they throw the coin.” It helps her fight humiliation as well as arthritis. The interstate truck-driver, bearing down the expressway with a load of seventy-three thousand pounds, battling pollution, noise, an ulcer, and kidneys that act up, “fantasizes something tremendous.” They all, in some manner, perform astonishingly to survive the day. These are not yet automata.
The time study men of the General Motors Assembly Division made this discomfiting discovery in Lordstown. Gary Bryner, the young union leader, explains it. “Occasionally one of the guys will let a car go by. At that point, he’s made a decision ‘Aw, fuck it. It’s only a car.’ It’s more important to just stand there and rap. With us, it becomes a human thing. It’s the most enjoyable part of my job, that moment. I love it!” John Henry hardly envisioned that way of fighting the machine—which may explain why he died in his prime.
There are cases where the job possesses the man even after quitting time. Aside from occupational ticks of hourly workers and the fitful sleep of salaried ones, there are instances of a man’s singular preoccupation with work. It may affect his attitude toward all of life. And art.
Geraldine Page, the actress, recalls the critique of a backstage visitor during her run in Sweet Bird Of Youth. He was a dentist. “I was sitting in the front row and looking up. Most of the time I was studying the fillings in your mouth. I’m curious to know who’s been doing your dental work.” It was not that he loved theater less, but that he loved dentistry more.
At the public unveiling of a celebrated statue in Chicago, a lawyer, after deep study, mused, “I accept Mr. Picasso in good faith. But if you look at the height of the slope on top and the propensity of children who will play on it, I have a feeling that some child may fall and be hurt and the county may be sued....”
In my own case, while putting together this book, I found myself possessed by the mystique of work. During a time out, I saw the film Last Tango in Paris. Though Freud said lieben und arbeiten are the two moving impulses of man, it was the latter that, at the moment, consumed me. Thus, I saw on the screen a study not of redemption nor of self-discovery nor whatever perceptive critics may have seen. During that preoccupied moment I saw a study of an actor at work. He was performing brilliantly in a darkened theater (apartment), as his audience (the young actress) responded with enthusiasm. I interpreted her moans, cries, and whimpers as bravos, huzzahs, and olés. In short, I saw the film as a source of a possible profile for this book. Such is the impact of work on some people.
A further personal note. I find some delight in my job as a radio broadcaster. I’m able to set my own pace, my own standards, and determine for myself the substance of each program. Some days are more sunny than others, some hours less astonishing than I’d hoped for; my occasional slovenliness infuriates me...but it is, for better or worse, in my hands. I’d like to believe I’m the old-time cobbler, making the whole shoe. Though my weekends go by soon enough, I look toward Monday without a sigh.
The danger of complacency is somewhat tempered by my awareness of what might have been. Chance encounters with old schoolmates are sobering experiences. Memories are dredged up of three traumatic years at law school. They were vaguely, though profoundly, unhappy times for me. I felt more than a slight ache. Were it not for a fortuitous set of circumstances, I might have become a lawyer—a determinedly failed one, I suspect. (I flunked my first bar examination. Ninety percent passed, I was told.)
During the Depression I was a some
time member of the Federal Writers’ Project, as well as a sometime actor in radio soap operas. I was usually cast as a gangster and just as usually came to a violent and well-deserved end. It was always sudden. My tenure was as uncertain as that of a radical college professor. It was during these moments—though I was unaware of it at the time—that the surreal nature of my work made itself felt. With script in hand, I read lines of stunning banality. The more such scripts an actor read, the more he was considered a success. Thus the phrase “Show Business” took on an added significance. It was, indeed, a business, a busyness. But what was its meaning?
If Freud is right—“his work at least gives him a secure place in a portion of reality, in the human community”55—was what I did in those studios really work? It certainly wasn’t play. The sales charts of Proctor & Gamble and General Mills made that quite clear. It was considered work. All my colleagues were serious about it, deadly so. Perhaps my experience in making life difficult for Ma Perkins and Mary Marlin may have provided me with a metaphor for the experiences of the great many, who fail to find in their work their “portion of reality.” Let alone, a secure place “in the human community.”
Is it any wonder that in such surreal circumstances, status rather than the work itself becomes important? Thus the prevalence of euphemisms in work as well as in war. The janitor is a building engineer; the garbage man, a sanitary engineer; the man at the rendering plant, a factory mechanic; the gravedigger, a caretaker. They are not themselves ashamed of their work, but society, they feel, looks upon them as a lesser species. So they call upon promiscuously used language to match the “respectability” of others, whose jobs may have less social worth than their own.
