The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  Sure, my body has slackened off, but my interest hasn’t diminished. People who’ve lived through a great, great thing like that strike of 1937, people who called each other brother and sister and meant it, people who would give things to other families’ kids because it was needed—when you saw that kind of loyalty to a person in the same boat as you, you can never forget, and I hope that feeling will come back one day.

  I can’t become cynical. I still hope we’ll see a decent society, without greed, without plundering other nations, without war, and with the salvation of the earth, for crying out loud. [Slight pause, a sigh. ] I better take that pill now.

  She died a few months after this conversation.

  JACOB LAWRENCE, 76

  We’re in his studio on the second floor of his frame house in Seattle, where he lives with his wife, Gwen, also a painter. On the walls are some of his works in progress. On the tables are hand tools: hammer, chisel, plane, brushes. There is an impromptu, easy touch here; not at all precisely arranged. Everything he may need appears to be comfortably at hand.

  He retired from teaching at the University of Washington nine years ago.

  This is what my day is like. I sit here, I’m looking at my works, I’m reading, I’ll go back to my drawing table, do some drawing. That’s more or less it. Of course we go shopping because we have to eat. But this is my place, this is where I work.

  I work constantly. I look at my tools here. I’m not a cabinetmaker, but I use them. I love to look at hand tools. They’re beautiful to see, to feel. They’re a symbol of working, of building. I use them that way.

  The tool is an extension of the hand. The hand is a very beautiful instrument. Think of what we can do with the hand, its dexterity. It’s been with us hundreds of years. You look at works of art and the tool hasn’t changed. It maintains its beauty. It’s like a work of sculpture. I like to pick it up, look it, turn it. I use them in my paintings as I would in a still life. To me, these tools are alive.

  About a year ago, his series of panels—moments in the lives of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass—were on exhibition in a number of American museums. At the Chicago Art Institute, he was a gracious guide as we strolled past each painting. It was something of a promenade: Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition came to my mind’s ear. “It is the spirit of our country. The largeness of spirits of our country. The largeness of spirits like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln is what made our country what it is.”

  How I became an artist? In elementary school, we were given crayons, poster paint, and were encouraged to put down color. In the great 1930s, I heard stories from older people. They’d talked about heros and heroines of an earlier day. They’d talk about Marcus Garvey, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. I’d walk the streets of Harlem and hear corner orators talk about these people. It inspired me. I realized I couldn’t tell their lives in one story, so I painted a series of their lives.

  It is ironic that people like myself benefited from the Great Depression. The Roosevelt administration established programs where people of all ages could receive lessons in these art centers in whatever field attracted us: dance, music, theater, painting, sculpture. It lasted about five years, a wonderful, wonderful period.

  I went into one of these federal art centers as a youngster. I was about sixteen. I didn’t have the means of going to college, but at these centers I was encouraged and taught by elders. Librarians, teachers, the YMCA, the church—they all took an interest in us. There was a spirit of uplift. Too bad a depression had to come along to do this, but it was wonderful for people my age, some of them now renowned. Even today, in post offices, you’ll see some of their murals.91

  It’s too bad we don’t have more of that today—government support of the arts. In schools, the first programs cut back are music, dance, the arts. If we don’t realize how much these things contribute to the quality of life, we’ll lose it. I see these youngsters on the street, never exposed to this experience—they’ve lost it, their chance at that life.

  When I was growing up, everybody took an interest in us kids. The neighborhood was very tight. You’d go out on the street, you’d know just about everybody around, even if you didn’t know them by name. There was a great pride in that. We were poor, but we had so much in another way: the love of the community.

  If it weren’t for these federal programs, I probably would have been lost and drifting like so many young people were, without any sense of belonging. I dread to think what would have happened to me. Today I go out on the street and I look at these children, twelve, thirteen years old. Where will they be five years from now? Our society today doesn’t recognize what potential may be in them.

  What happened to me was a sense of appreciation of the human being. This feeling was developed in me, a sense of the worthiness of the person. This is what I try to get in my work. That’s why I grasp the tools so much. What Walt Whitman put into words, I try to do with my tools as a painter.

  I grew up in a big city, New York, with all those tall buildings. The spirit of the times encouraged an appreciation of color, of form, of texture, of just the beauty of looking at things. I heard hammering, people calling out to one another, people building. I became conscious of hearing the jackhammer, hearing a nail being driven in, hearing people walking the streets. 92

  I was hearing and trying to visualize these sounds. The sense of being acute to these sounds has remained with me to this day.

  I haven’t changed. I’m afraid our society has. Today there seems to be a lack of communication. We don’t touch. There is a coldness. I don’t come in contact with you, you don’t with me. I just don’t know what it means.

  In the 1930s, there was something going on, a human kind of communication. Words meant something. Today we’re ashamed to express these feelings. A few years ago, the kids in school started a program called Touch. They were looking for something. That meant there was something lacking. We didn’t have to think of such a program. It was just a natural kind of thing.

  The young today are timid about expressing any kind of feeling. They’re afraid to bare themselves. They’re afraid they might be considered soft.

  How can you explain why people have become the way they are? Maybe technology running wild has something to do with it. Everything has become so mechanical. It’s frustrating, the telelphone. I hesitate. You don’t hear a person. It’s a machine. Maybe to a young person, it is natural—to me, it is not.93 I’m not averse to technology, but not, if in developing it, we lose something else. We must become aware of this other thing we’re sacrificing.

  Some students feel good about not coming into contact with a canvas or with paper. It’s done by machine. They say: “My hand never touched it.” This is a plus, the way they think. They don’t feel the paper, they don’t feel the canvas. It’s all machine. They plug something in and they can do a portrait by computer. A student can come back that same day and bring you a portrait of yourself, without his having laid a finger on the brush, canvas, or paper. He hasn’t seen you breathing, blinking, nothing like that. The air all around you is not there. There’s no space. Throughout our history, these have been important factors in making a work of art.

  Hammer? Chisel? Feel of the hairs of a brush? They don’t want to be accused by their peers of succumbing to this human thing: touch. They’d be ashamed. Distance has become a plus to their peers and to themselves.

  Maybe one day we’ll live in a world of robots, a world of mechanical devices. Fortunately, I won’t be alive. I feel this way more now than I did a few years ago. I feel this drawing back.

  I’m retired now. I retired from teaching at the University of Washington in 1984. I loved working with the students, but you get to the point where you leave it to the younger people. I didn’t retire from painting. I never will.

  In school, young students want young professors. They want someone closer to their own age. That the older person may offer so much i
n experience doesn’t matter that much to them. I’ve heard my students say they don’t want old professors. They mean somebody forty, fifty. They turn their backs to them.

  If you get to be forty, fifty, you’re old. The students show their disdain. It’s not always meant to be cruel, it’s not always absolute, but you get it. When they say they want someone closer to their own age, they mean someone two years older. You get it in all of our advertisements, too. Insurance companies don’t want to insure you. You’ve outlived your time. It’s the attitude that we’re living too long—the resources can’t support us. I definitely feel this generation gap. The irony is that we have worked and contributed to the young people all of our lives.

  I feel there should be more emphasis on the humanities in the home as well as in the school. The importance of the church, too. I didn’t just go to church on Sunday. I went to church two or three times a week. I was taught certain values which have remained with me to this day. You don’t do certain things, even though you thought you could get away with it.

  When I was a youngster growing up, a person would never attack an older person, a weaker person, because of the fear of God. Now the older person is vulnerable because of something lost, a sense of morality, of ethics. How can we have that in the streets if we don’t have it in the higher places? Look at our leaders, committing all sorts of crimes, then going free. Roosevelt’s people weren’t all saints, but there was a quality there, a feeling we don’t get today.

  Are we about to give up that which we have as human beings? Are we losing it little by little. What price are we paying? Maybe there are people talking and thinking the way we are right now. Maybe we can prevent this. Maybe we can mantain the quality that we might be losing.

  I’m not pessimistic. I think about these things. I talk about them. I feel as long as there’s one person or two people who are aware of this quality, of our capacity to think and feel, we’re on pretty sound ground. I hope so.

  DAVID BROWER, 79

  A leading apostle of the modern environmental movement. His fervor, as well as his vigor, is apparent. His young companions are obviously fond of him and get a kick out of his perorations and spirit of bonhomie. He lives in San Francisco.

  What do I think about age? I think I’ve learned to accept it. I never expected to get this old. With no effort on my part, I’m now about to be eighty and an elder. I find a certain freedom in this.

  I was in Prescott, Arizona, for the first day of the Dave Foreman 94 trial and I spoke out. The Earth Firsters were on the griddle. They’d been infiltrated by the FBI, some of them, and coaxed to do a certain act of violence on behalf of the earth—to try to knock down some power towers in Arizona. That was entrapment. I was at the trial with about two hundred others. Old as I was, I took on the FBI, who had infiltrated the audience. I said, “You should investigate those who are tearing the earth apart rather than those who are trying to save it. I invite the FBI to join our organization.”

  If I’m on the telephone and I know my line is tapped, I’ll interrupt my conversation and say, “I have the following message for you eavesdroppers: For God’s sake, we don’t need you to entrap us. We need you to join us.” There’s never any response on the other end. [Laughs.]

  At my age, they can’t do much to hurt me. I have a new freedom. They can’t change my career, I’ve got it made. If I go to jail or am executed, it doesn’t matter—though I’d rather stick around. I’d rather be out of jail than in, but not at the expense of this newfound freedom.

  Young people don’t have this liberty. They’ve got years ahead of them, families, need for income. They can’t alienate themselves too much from the system. I say to people my age, “You have this freedom. Please use it. You’ve had a role in whatever’s happened to the earth, and it hasn’t been that good. You now have a role in doing something about it. If you’re going to die, make sure your boots are on. There are so many of us. More and more of us.

  “You’re not going to be around that much longer and you know it. Get into the fight, it gets your juices flowing. Maybe like me, you’ll have a double martini because you’re not sure you’ll be around to order the next one. [He is, at this moment, having one.] Or maybe you hate phone mail and you’re not sure you’ll be around to answer all your calls.

  “You should be impatient with the slow pace of reform. You should resent having been put out to pasture, because no other species ever does that. You should fight against being put on the fringe of the herd. There is so much potential, you have so much to offer. There is so much information stored in you. At eighty, I’ve got this important file in my head. I’m not always able to find exactly what I want when I want it, but I can do so much better with my mind than with what’s on—paper. I haven’t reached for a single note, have I?

  “Think of what’s stored in an eighty- or a ninety-year-old mind. Just marvel at it. Think of these visual images stored in your head—your own videotapes. You can see the faces of people you’ve met throughout your life. You remember the places you’ve been to. If you’re a concert pianist, where the hell did you store all those notes and in what order are they supposed to come, at what volume, at what pace? It’s not going to be there much longer. Let’s get with it.

  “You’ve got to get out this information, this knowledge, because you’ve got something to pass on. You’ve got a file that nobody else has. There’ll be nobody like you ever again. Make the most of every molecule you’ve got as long as you’ve got a second to go. That’s the charge. That is your assignment.”

  I was forced out of the Sierra Club staff in 1969. I was just a kid of fifty-seven. Russell Train, who is the finest Republican conservationist—a contradiction in terms—we’ve ever had, said to John McPhee, “Thank God for David Brower because he makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable.” I enjoyed that. Eight years later, I retorted, “Thank God for Russ Train because he makes it so easy for the rest of us to be outrageous.”

  I don’t like to reason with the people who are determined to get rid of what makes us possible: the realists. Richard Barnett says that we march toward annihilation under the banner of realism.

  It’s fun to rock the boat—particularly if you become unreasonable because within five years or so, your heresy becomes old hat. Maybe I started something that was worth starting. I’ve had a lot of delights. I didn’t know where I was going, but I was going somewhere.

  I wish that Earth Firsters were unnecessary, but they are necessary. After I left the Sierra Club, I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Now we need an organization that will make Dave Foreman look reasonable.

  One night, as we were closing a bar in Ann Arbor, I said, “Hey, Dave, there’s already an organization that makes you look reasonable: Earth Last. It’s got a big membership—the Fortune 500. What they’re doing to the earth makes what you’re doing look more reasonable than anything else going on.”

  Everybody else says you’re bad, you’re getting in the way of everything, you’re costing jobs, you’re nasty, get lost. I’ve been called “cantankerous,” “abrasive,” a “troublemaker.” All true. It all adds up to being really reasonable keeping the life support system alive. We all use it. We’re trashing it and we should cut that out. This isn’t what’s getting across, so I say that the people who are trashing the earth’s life support system are the unreasonables, the bad guys. We’re trying to say, “The earth is not a bad place, people are not that bad, life is not that bad.”

  We have to have a sense of the future. The only thing that is real is Now. The Nows to come are going to be as real for the people living in the next year, the next century, the next millennium as the Now of this moment. The indigenous people were thinking seven generations ahead. They were too conservative. They didn’t know the capability of the human species to damage their stamping ground the way we do. So we have to think further ahead. What is the earth going to be like a thousand years from now? What do we do with the nucl
ear stuff? What do we do for the new child or the new fawn or the new baby seal pup that’s born a thousand years from now, so that it opens its eyes on a beautiful, livable planet? I don’t know your answer. I have a pretty good idea of my answer.

  This is no time to relax. They say you’ve reached the retirement age, but if you’re this old, damn well, there’s no real reason to retire and to be put on the shelf and forget what you’ve spent all this time learning. If you were in an indigenous culture, you would be an elder, and admitted, even required, to advise. And you’d be heeded. Don’t demand that they pay that much attention to you. But just, hey, give us a little attention.

  The old ones should try very hard not to be boring, not to talk endlessly, which I do constantly. In most other cultures—say, Native American—older women have a great deal of power. They determine who the chief will be. This is something we’ve got to learn again. It doesn’t take very long to fertilize an egg, but it takes quite a while to mature that egg until it’s ready to emerge and become an individual—and to help that individual into maturity. Decisions should be predominantly made by the people who do the nurturing, not by those who pass by quickly at the inception.

  I’m leery of the feminists who say, “We cannot allow you to quote Robinson Jeffers’s ‘Man apart.’” It should be “person apart” or “people apart.” The poet in him required one syllable. If they would worry less about nouns and pronouns and worry more about getting their rights back, we’d all be better off.