“People must have a sense of power and not feel worthless because some big shot says so. Dissent is a duty in an open society.”
Studs Terkel
Stabbing the air with the chewed stump of what was once a cigar, Studs Terkel looks and sounds like an Edward G. Robinson-style gangster. But despite his machine-gun speech, the sixty-two-year-old author/announcer has never come closer to the underworld than a role as criminal Butch Malone in the Ma Perkins radio serial. Studs Terkel believes that “common” men and women can make a better world if allowed control over their own lives. On his Chicago radio show, in the pages of the best-selling Division Street: America, Hard Times, and Working, at rallies for citizens groups and political victims, Terkel’s life and work radiate what has been called a “feeling tone,” a concern with people’s thoughts and emotions so obviously genuine that it elicits truths astounding even to those who voice them.
Terkel’s last three books (he also wrote a children’s work called Giants of Jazz in the 1950’s) have defined a new genre, the “oral history.” Each has been a series of interviews in which everyday people spoke their minds on an American concern: city life, the Great Depression, their work. Each unearthed an individualized side of history often ignored in tomes and textbooks, each presaged national interest in ethnicity, economic austerity, and the blue (and white) collar blues. But Working, the latest, is Terkel’s magnum opus. The book (published by Pantheon) took three years of talking, as the subtitle puts it, about what people “do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Prompted by Terkel’s stage whispers, a hundred-odd voices vibrate with flesh-and-blood visions of hope and despair. One worker loves his job, another burns rubber to leave the plant behind. A prostitute and a corporate executive both describe their work as “hustling.” Young Turks and old mules face off at the generation gap — with surprising defections in both camps. And though Terkel restricts his analysis to an eloquent preface, the result is an affirmation of what labor organizer Bill Talcott said into Terkel’s tape recorder: “History’s a hell of a lot of little people getting together and deciding they want a better life for themselves and their kids.”
Terkel’s own work history could fill several resumes. Born Louis Terkel in New York in 1912, he moved to Chicago as a boy and seemed programmed for a “normal” career even after deciding that he would never use the law degree he earned at the Chicago Law School in 1934. But a civil service job counting veterans’ bonuses almost drove him bananas, and soon Louis became Studs, namesake of James T. Farrell’s fictional Chicago youth hero, Studs Lanigan — who was also born in 1912. The Thirties found him acting, writing, and radicalizing the Forties saw him announcing a series of radio shows that mixed social realism and plain fun, and the dawn of the Fifties put him on the verge of stardom as the host of “Stud’s Place,” a Chicago-based TV show so informal that people would stop him on the street to offer advice on how he should run “his” restaurant. But the influence of men like Joseph McCarthy and young Richard Nixon was afoot. and Terkel soon found himself losing job after job because of his political affinities. Yet his vocational ostracism had a paradoxical effect, removing him from television just as it was becoming a formulized medium, setting him on a track which has led to the worker’s dream: success in one’s chosen field.
Though the words in Terkel’s books are almost always those of other people, the secret of these oral histories is the unique sensibility of the man behind the microphone. Terkel’s world view fuses both academic and popular wisdom and he is equally at home quoting poetry or cursing a blown foul shot. Neither a conservative nor a liberal, he judges people on their responses to the issues and, as a confirmed populist, he cautions against the search for political father figures. Terkel prefers the average Joe to some sparkling celebrity. “With celebrities,” he notes, “all you get is a routine, a litany. But if you’re talking to the non-celebrated, then you feel like you are Columbus hitting a new territory…. Once you cut through the crap in their lives, you find fantastic dreams and extra-ordinary thoughts.”
Seemingly unchanged by such amenities as a huge advance toward the paperback publication of Working and an upcoming series on work for the ABC radio network, Terkel continues to work harder than ever. In addition to doing radio shows with swamis and labor officials, writing articles for the monthly Chicago Guide, appearing on ABC-TV’s “America,” and planning appearances in benefit plays and at radical rallies, he is considering a book on the subject of power. “It’ll be the toughest book of all,” he says, “because it deals with inside. The others were about outside events — the Depression, what it was like; your work, what it’s like; a city, what it’s like. This is inside, so this is a tough one. I may do it, or I may not.” But whatever the task at hand, Terkel is always ready with that feeling tone, the special sense of fellowship that the Germans call gemutlichkeit and we might label “good vibes.”
This exclusive Penthouse interview was conducted by Abe Peck.
How do people feel about their jobs?
Terkel: A great many people feel low about their jobs. And there’s a reason for it: work is essential. As Freud says, work and love are the two prime impulses of the human being. Work has to be an extension of a person’s being. It has to be what the trumpet was to Louis Armstrong, what the trombone was to Jack Teagarten, what the band was to Duke Ellington. Work has to be for people, men and women, an extension of themselves. But when a guy is holding a sixty-pound welding gun, shooting the same welds onto cars moving along the assembly line, he doesn’t know what the end result is going to be. How can he enjoy what he’s doing, not even knowing the end product? How can people really enjoy anything if they know what they are making is needless? So if work is an essential impulse of man, then the person making a needless thing feels needless as a person.
Is this search for meaning a new development among working people?
Terkel: Maybe it’s been with them for centuries without being articulated. The idea of oral history is to get your anonymous, common people to tell what their lives are like. This is Mike LeFevre’s point in the beginning of Working, when he says, “Somebody built the pyramids.” Who built the pyramids? It wasn’t the pharaoh, it was the anonymous slaves. And so Brecht asked his poetic questions: “Who built the seven towers of Thebes? In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished where did the masons go?” And he wrote: “When the Spanish Armada sank, we read that King Philip wept. Were there no other tears?” Who was on that boat? Who were the widows? We read about the Norman Conquest — OK, how was the life of a Saxon peasant altered? We don’t really know.
This break with continuity is one of the horrors of our own time. Young people don’t know about the Depression because they haven’t been offered history. Young labor guys don’t know how they got their minimum wages. In Hard Times, I described one guy in Flint, Michigan, standing near a building where the workers took over the plant for forty-four days in 1937, and this guy, who’s talking about protests, says they ought to shoot those goddamned hippies, those troublemakers, for sitting in and being violent. I said, “Sitting in the buildings! Do you know what happened in that building in 1937?” He said, “No.” “No!” I said. “How the fuck do you think you got your minimum wages? Because Ford loves you? Because GM loves you?” It’s the same across the board — kids think Bob Dylan began folk music — but the Depression is a dramatic case because even the parents didn’t want to talk about it. You know why? They never really discussed the humiliation of waiting in lines for jobs or going on “relief” because they felt personally guilty. They felt, “I’m not working. Something must be wrong with me.” So they never questioned their work — they still don’t. Do anything to get that bread, gather things so the kids will not suffer humiliation. And when the kids ask about it, the parents give them a scolding: “Look at the food you’re wasting after what I went through.” But they never say what they really went through.
Your opening remark in Working is: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence.” What kind of violence?
Terkel: The violence to the spirit. Aside from the obvious physical violence of the factory, there’s the psychic violence of meaninglessness and boredom. A receptionist working at my radio station said: “A monkey could do what I’m doing. The only time I feel free is when I take off my headset at five minutes to five on Friday.” A great many people feel that way.
So can we consider workers as a group, as a “working class”?
Terkel: You know, “working class” is a phrase that Americans have hardly used. Europeans use it, but here everybody except radicals says “lower middle class.” We’ve been conditioned by bourgeois values to be ashamed of manual, blue-collar work, so we say “lower middle class.” But what ties all workers together — the manual workers, the service workers, the white-collar workers, the teachers, those who work in the bureaucracies — is that they are used by the very nature of their work. Almost everybody is used by their work, instead of the other way around. Even members of what we might call the “management class” suffer. In Working, I interviewed a top-level executive. He’d become a machine, dictating letters all day, driving himself until he experienced strains that showed he wasn’t quite the powerful man he’d thought he was. So we come to the question of why people feel badly about what they do all day, and in most cases I’d say it’s because the work they do is not commensurate with the possibilities they have. The jobs are not big enough for their spirits.
Where does this lead?
Terkel: I think we are by and large a death-oriented society. We basically say a man is good for what he has, not what he is. And to me this is death. Death is inanimate; you are inanimate when you are dead. As the saying goes: “Alive and kicking.” So why judge people by their inanimate objects?
To be a life-oriented society. we have to change our whole value system. We have to redistribute wealth, of course, but really I’m talking about the redistribution of power. Power is vital, but it has to be the kind of power that makes people grow from its use.
I’ll give you an example: there’s a woman in Chicago named Wolff, a mother of nine kids, who thought she was nothing. Then she got in with a group called the Citizens Action Project and began fighting an expressway that was coming through the neighborhoods. One thing led to another, and she started saying things like “Wait a minute! Together we have a little power!” Then, one day at City Hall, an alderman said to her: “Why don’t you go back where you belong?” When an alderman said that in the past, somebody like Mary Lou would have gone home, but this time she said: “Hold on! You are my servant! I’m not your servant! I am paying you! Now you get the hell in there and serve me, not some phony real estate guy who’s gypping us all.”
Are you saying that we have to take control of our lives in both our work and our power relationships?
Terkel: Now we come to it. The great number of people don’t enjoy their work because they have no decision-making power in what they do. And it comes down to the question of who the best judge is. Who’s a better judge of asbestiosis than a guy who works in the asbestos plant? Who’s the better judge of the illnesses of miners than the guy who’s got black lung? That’s what we’re talking about, consulting the ones who are affected.
You subtitled Working with the phrase, “People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” How does what you call “a feeling tone” fit into all this?
Terkel: “Feeling” is the key word. Feeling is one of the things that’s missing in almost every aspect of our lives today. In film today, there are great technicians, but the aspect of feeling isn’t even there. A movie like Altman’s Thieves Like Us is a study of a period that isn’t a study of a period at all. Was the Depression just Bonnie and Clyde and the boy and girl and the two killer friends in Thieves Like Us? We should be told something about the inner lives of people. Who were this couple? What made that guy tick? And the books we read about sex are not about sex, not about love, but are “how-to” books. We’re a “how-to” country.
With Working, the original subtitle was “What people do all day and what they think about what they do.” Then somebody said “How about feel?” And I said, “That’s it, you’ve got it.” Because when you talk to people, you listen not to the words so much as to the sound of the voice. Sometimes there’s a hurt tone or a laugh. Many black people laugh at strange things when they’re discussing a moment of the most profound humiliation, and you hear that laugh and know it’s important as a safety valve, as the old blues feeling of laughing on the outside, and crying — no, raging — on the inside. You want to come back to it, and when you do, you find that the true feeling is different than the words. I remember interviewing a middle-aged lady, a motel switchboard operator, and she said: “Oh, I like my work, I wouldn’t do my work if I didn’t like it.” But as she talked she spoke more and more about her indignations: “They take us for granted,” she said. She works for Holiday Inn and at two o’clock one night she answered the phone “Marriott Inn.” I said, “Why did you answer that way?” And she told me, “I wanted to make the night go faster. Just for a lark.” Then came the clincher: “What I’d like to do sometime is take all those plugs out and mix them up. Then they’d know we’re around.” Remember — she said, “I like my work.”
Anatole Broyard, who reviewed Working for the daily edition of the New York Times, seemed to think that you put too much trust in the thoughts and feelings of working people. What do you think of his objections?
Terkel: He wrote: “Were they — the workers — telling the truth? Did they know the truth themselves? Is Working an accurate picture, or one more instance of the intellectual’s tendency to translate the ordinary American into a tragic figure trapped by fate?” He’s asking how I know they’re speaking the truth. Well, I don’t know for sure. I try, and as they talk, they say, “Gee, I never realized I felt that way before.” Which is beautiful for me and for them.
I don’t consider myself an intellectual, but you’ve got to consider Anatole Broyard. Anatole Broyard is a very strange guy. It’s unusual for a book to be reviewed over two days, and I was flattered because he liked the writing in the preface, and that’s a question in my mind, a personal thing — can I write? Now Broyard says, “Yes, this guy’s a hell of a writer, but why does he waste his time with these worth less people.” He doesn’t have contempt for me — he’s putting me in his league — but he’s asking why I’m doing this unnecessary thing. Again, I’m torn because he likes me as a writer at the same time that he’s denying my books. And once upon a time Anatole Broyard was a very promising writer, but he was with an ad agency for many years, and he’s a very bitter guy. So here’s this poor guy living in a vacuum, who doesn’t even know these people, who has contempt for these people, and he’s saying that only big shots are worth writing about.
What do you think the more enthusiastic reviewer for the Sunday Times meant when he called you “the ablest spokesman and visionary of the popular front”?
Terkel: If he meant that I represent a humanistic force from the various strata of society, then I’m flattered. That’s what I’m trying to do. Each person is different, each individual is different, but there is a common humanity. I don’t believe in ersatz egalitarianism — that’s a lot of crap — but each person should have a right to fulfill whatever possibilities are within them.
It also means that I’m not a liberal or a conservative. Those words have no meaning for me. Who’s a “liberal”? Humphrey, for Christ’s sake? Who’s a “conservative”? Buckley? What I call myself is a conservative radical. Now, a conservative is, for me, someone who wants to conserve the Bi II of Rights, to keep the First Amendment, to conserve the goodness of nature from those fucking predators with the snowmobiles and the polluted factories and the military poisons. That’s a conservative. A radical is one who goes to the roots of things. Unless we go to the roots, we’re not going to get at the ailment. And the ailment is a cancer, not a boil. It’s a cancer, and it needs the scalpel, and not a goddamned bit of salve or an aspirin.
If it is a cancer, then we’re in a life-and-death struggle. Do Cathleen Moran and Carl Bates, two of the people you interviewed in Working, embody this conflict?
Terkel: We’ve got to break this down a bit. Cathy Moran is a young girl who is ambivalent. She’s a hospital worker who says she doesn’t give a damn whether the patients live or die. She says this, but at the same time she works like hell to be a good hospital aide. She says this, but while we’re talking she offers me a pillow to make me more comfortable. So her rhetoric denies her humanity, but her humanity still comes forth. Now, I met Carl Bates in a tavern near the Ohio River, in Newburg, Indiana. He said: “I like what I do cause I see it. There’s not a house in this country that I haven’t buiIt that I don’t look at every time I go by. And if there’s one rock, one stone out of place, I’ll never forget it.” And now we come to what I think is one of the keys. Carl Bates said: “You know, there’s something called Bedford limestone, and it erodes one-sixteenth of an inch every hundred years. That’s gettin’ awful close to immortality.” And he’s right, because immortality represents a mark. We leave a mark, or else we’re unique snowflakes that melt after a short life.
You think of yourself as a worker. What would be your mark?
Terkel: I have a craft in which I hope I have a sense of pride. I’m lucky in that I control my hour a day on the radio. I read a short story or play jazz or interview a writer or some other interesting person. I do the whole hour, it’s mine. Nobody tells me what to do, nobody gives me a script to read. Sometimes days are lousy, but I always have that decision-making power. But I don’t know what my mark will be.
I hope that my books will be remembered, I hope the tapes have a meaning. I’m not saying that they do; that’s just my hope. When I get a letter now and then from a man or woman, from a young girl or a young guy, that says, “You’ve affected my life, you’ve opened a window for me,” that’s pretty good. That’s a mark.
You could have been famous many years ago: you had a hit TV show in Chicago in the early Fifties. But then you were blacklisted for supposed Communist affiliations. What happened?
Terkel: I signed petitions to end Jim Crow, to end the poll tax, to end discrimination, that were also signed by many Communist party members. So they said: “Look who you signed with.” I said, “So what? I’d sign if a right-wing guy had signed it. The important thing is what it says.” And I refused to apologize for supporting some good things. The blacklist in Chicago was not like the blacklist in New York or Hollywood. There were only a couple of guys here — I called us the Chicago Two. There was also a clown named Ed Clamage, who ran a flower shop and was head of an Americanism committee for the American Legion. His one mission in life was to plaster visiting actors who had signed things he didn’t like and get the local radicals. I lived here, so I was his favorite pigeon. Whenever an item appeared in the paper saying that I was going to appear somewhere, he’d call the place up and try to cost me the job. So once some group which had asked me to introduce Count Basie at a country club for a hundred bucks — I could use all the dough I could get then — called and said, “Hey, Studs, are you … ?” I said, “Am I what?” They asked, “Are you or have you ever been?” I finally said, “I’m not going to answer your questions, and I’ll tell you why. It demeans you and it demeans me. You want me to talk about jazz, I’ll talk about jazz — but nothing else.” So I got paid the hundred, and the next day I wrote to Clamage and said, “Clamage, I owe you ten bucks. Let me explain. Because you complained, those people gave me $200 instead. So you get a 10 percent commission of the extra $100.” That drove him crazy.
But I was one of the lucky ones. I lost a lot of jobs through the blacklisting, but I got along. Other writers and actors and many anonymous working people we know nothing about had their lives destroyed by it. Talent is fragile, and people were destroyed by not being able to work. But because I didn’t work on TV, I wrote a kids’ book called Giants of Jazz, went to the radio, and got a chance to do these books. If not for the blacklist, I might have been the emcee of a show like “Tonight” or “Tomorrow” or “Today” — but not for long. I couldn’t have. I might have died of bleeding ulcers and whatnot. But the blacklist was not a good thing. My success is a case of the perversity of fate.
You don’t seem to think very much of being a celebrity.
Terkel: There’s all too much concern with celebrities. What’s a celebrity? A celebrity is someone who is known. And people look up to him and say, “Hey, can I have your autograph?” So all of a sudden I find myself in this league, and so I say, “I want your signature, too. Give me your signature.” Charles Manson is a celebrity. Charles Manson killed people; he made headlines. If William Calley came into a restaurant he’d get the best table. He’s a celebrity. So is Sinatra, so was Einstein. It’s value-free. There’s a clown book called The Celebrity Register, and I did a review of it for the Nation, and my point was that it’s a very funny book. They have Richard Daley and Lewis Mumford, they have Heinrich Boll — who won the Nobel Prize — and Pat Boone. They’re all celebrities, united only by fame.
Your television show — “Stud’s Place” — was so casual that people thought you really ran the restaurant in which it was set.
Terkel: Oh yeah! “Stud’s Place” was precisely the opposite of “All in the Family.” “All in the Family” is funny, but it’s all cheap shots. It’s the stereotype of a bigot — the merry, happy, genial bigot. On “Stud’s Place” we never played down to people. I remember one show dealt with cutting out smoking — way before cancer became widely talked about — and during our rehearsal some guy came up to tempt me with a cigar and I said, “Oh no! I’m going to be Ulysses, pin me to the mast, I’m passing the Isle of Circe.” And somebody said, “You can’t do that on the air. Nobody will know what the heil you’re talking about.” But I said, “It’s OK. If we wanted to quote James Joyce, that’s OK, because the point is not to underestimate the intelligence of people. If a reference is too arcane, let it go. They’ll get the idea.” And we did it.
Yeah, people thought it was a real restaurant. It was a marvelous feeling. The four people on the show would be sitting in a coffee shop figuring out a plot and some dialogue and the waitress would come up and say to our waitress, “Look, you don’t have to take that from him.” Even though some blue-collar people know me from the books and to a certain extent from the radio, “Stud’s Place” was a TV show that cut through every stratum of society. We’d hear from the college professor and a scrub-woman signing with an X, from a tavern owner or a truckdriver, somebody writing on embossed stationery from a wealthy suburb, somebody from a bungalow or a tenement in a black neighborhood. And all because we never played down to people.
But I’ll tell you something. “Stud’s Place” would have been dropped even without the blacklist — as Dave Garraway and Kukla, Fran and Ollie were dropped — because the improvisatory, free, Chicago-style TV gave way to TV as a sales medium. The agency guys were taking over, the salesmen were taking over. These were not formula programs, so they had to go.
Did it bother you when somebody came up to you and said: “We used to like you, Studs, but now you’re with the hippies and the colored”?
Terkel: I remember that incident. There was a group of women pickets who were anti-integration, and someone from the group noticed that they had the word “busing” with two s’s instead of one. Somebody said to me, “You see, our schools aren’t any good.’’ And I said, “I know that the schools are lousy. But busing isn’t the key issue. Anyway, I want to hear you out.” And a lady said, “Nah, you’re with them. You don’t like us anymore.” And I said, “I do, very much.” Because they were real people, not “All in the Family” stereotypes.
You’ve been described as “Chicago-style”: tough, opinionated, yet sentimental and big-hearted. How do your beliefs fit into the reality of life in Chicago?
Terkel: Nelson Algren, in his beautiful, great book Chicago: City on the Make, said that Chicago is the city of Jane Addams and the city of Big Bill Thompson, the city of John Altgeld and the city of Al Capone. Chicago, the two aspects of the city, could be a metaphor for the two aspects of our society because Chicago is the big daddy of corrupt cities. Is Chicago more corrupt than other cities? No, but it’s more dramatic in its corruption. It’s older, it’s more experienced. There are two parts; which will be the city? Thus far it’s been in the hands of the predators. Daley represents this predatory aspect, the guy on the make who will rise in the traditional, corrupt way. But the others are there, fighting all the time. You have to, they have to.
What keeps you in Chicago?
Terkel: Again, roots. Radicalism is going to the roots of things. Chicago is where I live, Chicago is where my sense of continuity is. It’s the city I know, and again I quote Nelson Algren: “Living in Chicago is like being married to a woman with a broken nose. There may be lovelier lovelies but never a lovely so real.” My past is part of its past, and there’s always something new happening.
Did Adlai Stevenson mean anything special to you?
Terkel: Not to me. I guess here’s where I fall into the category of non-liberal. Stevenson to me was a nice charming guy, a man of decency, but not a strong person. Compare him with Estes Kefauver; it’s no contest. The intellectuals — I’m sounding like Agnew now — the intellectuals used to laugh at Kefauver, but Kefauver was the stronger man. He never signed that segregationist Southern Manifesto the way Fulbright did. And he fought for a civilized foreign policy that was against the cold war.
I guess what made me less than enthusiastic about Stevenson was his conduct on the eve of the Bay of Pigs. He was our UN representative, right, and he was ridiculing Dorticos, the president of Cuba. He was very good as far as speeches and words, and he made this guy who was talking about an American invasion look like a fool. And the next day they tried it — the Bay of Pigs — and there’s Stevenson pie right on his face. They never even told him. He didn’t resign in indignation to become leader of the opposition. He didn’t, he continued — and that wasn’t the act of a statesman in an open society.
What statesmen do you look to?
Terkel: Oh, Bob LaFollette, but he’s been dead for fifty years. Today I don’t know. Maybe it shouldn’t be a statesman in the traditional sense, maybe it should be a guy like Nader. Maybe Julian Bond. I like former attorney general Ramsey Clark very much; I think he’s grown tremendously. I like the former governor of Oregon, Tom McCall, and former Oklahoma senator Fred Harris, who says, “Let’s take the rich off welfare.” Harris says that the welfare bum is Ronald Reagan, the welfare bum is John Wayne, the welfare bum is Jim Eastland, the welfare bum is the Pentagon, Boeing, Howard Hughes. The welfare bum isn’t the woman with kids who gets nothing compared to these guys. The big money goes to the military and in the tax depletions.
But again, even the individuals — I should have named women, too — are less important than the grass-roots, populist movements. Change has to be from the bottom up. People in the low or middle parts of society have got to find self-esteem.
You’d think that Watergate would liberate us from this myth that the guy up there is necessarily worthier or more honest or smarter than us. Just kicking Nixon out hasn’t made a basic change — we got Gerry Ford. In 1976, we may get Scoop Jackson, God help us, or George Wallace. Can you imagine a working man voting for George Wallace, who has the worst labor record of any governor in the States? Here again it’s a break in continuity and a lack of knowledge and awareness. Labor doesn’t have a break in Alabama; the big shots get the big tax rake-offs in Alabama. Yet the workingman says: “He’s my man,” because he doesn’t know the history.
Wallace! Wallace is as much of a lickspittle to the big boys as Nixon was, so how can he be a friend of the little guy? He’s never attacked a big company by name, he loves the Pentagon, one of the biggest spenders in the world. When this little phony was beaten by John Patterson in his first run for governor, he said, “I’ll never be outnigged again. I’ll never be outsegged again!” Wallace will be anything he has to, and yet he’s nothing.
It all comes back to the big point: people must have a sense of power and self, and not feel worthless because some big shot says they are. If we’re an open society, this non-questioning of “authority” has got to go. Dissent is a duty in an open society.
In line with not being a traditional liberal, you’ve recently argued with Reverend Jesse Jackson of Operation PUSH and Sam Evett, the head of a large Midwestern steel local whose election was voided after claims of voting irregularities. What did you fight about?
Terkel: I feel that all movements have operators. Now Operation PUSH paid tribute to a moonlighting, black Chicago policeman who “gave away” five gallons of gas to black people at his gas station if they paid $10 for a rabbit’s foot and a will form. Very cute; will forms cost fifteen cents, which means he was charging his own people two dollars a gallon. And he was being honored for leading a fight against the big oil interests. No doubt black station operators were discriminated against by the oil companies, but imagine honoring this guy! So I wrote an open letter in the Chicago Tribune. Is this what Martin Luther King died for? Is that what Harriet Tubman led the underground railway for? I called the piece “Son of Shaft,” and the next week Jesse Jackson answered with an attack on “sick pseudo-liberals.” He didn’t answer me, he just went on to attack oi I companies as if I hadn’t. I felt sad in writing my letter because I thought a black guy or woman should have. But none did.
Now the Evett thing is funny. There’s a guy named Ed Sadlowsky, a young rank-and-file guy whom I admire for his knowledge of labor history and his energy. Ed just won the local steelworker’s union presidency. He worked in the mills all his life, and he needed some dough because the International gave all the union money to Evett. So there was a party, and I emceed some rallies for him, and I gave some dough. So Sam Evett said, “Limousine liberal Terkel, millionaire, best-selling book.” I don’t know what a limousine is. I can’t even drive a car. He thought that charge would convince steel workers more than the reality of what their lives are like in the mill.
Has your money changed your life at all?
Terkel: No. I give away dough here and there to things I believe in: to save Chileans who are trying to escape the junta, or to whatever might be worth supporting. Otherwise, things are the same for me.
You’re thinking of doing a book on the subject of power. What would you want to cover?
Terkel: I haven’t figured it out yet. Not just Rockefeller or Daley or congressmen, but a headwaiter and the wife of a college dean. Power — a spoiled child, a cop at a speed-trap, a high school principal, the head of a foundation that grants money. A sense of power. Certain people you meet have that drive — it’s in all of us to some extent, but in some it’s the great need.
What would you ask Nixon if you interviewed him?
Terkel: Oh, God, wouldn’t it be something? You’d have to start with the boy in Whittier. What would he want if he had three wishes, if he’s Aladdin rubbing that lamp? And then I’d try to learn what makes us choose men like him. See, it’s hard for me to believe that the ordinary hard-working guy did not know that Nixon was a phony when he made those speeches about Checkers and the cloth coat. The average guy’s not that stupid. But when someone like McGovern — not that McGovern was all that good — talked about taxing the rich, the working man said “No!”— because he hopes his kid will be rich instead of questioning what his life is really like and how it can be improved. But again, we think we’re no good, so we choose a guy who’s no good. Self-deception.
What about your personal sense of power? What compromises have you had to face in your life?
Terkel: I don’t know. The other day a big beer company called from New York. They wanted to do a beer commercial around me. They have Mickey Mantle doing one, Whitey Ford doing one, Mickey Spillaine doing one, and they wanted me to do one. I said, “No, I can’t do it.” The guy said that it meant a lot of money, but I still said no. The guy couldn’t believe it. but I was telling the truth. I just can’t do it. But I know that it’s a luxury in which I can indulge. If I had a wife and three kids and a mortgage on my house, I probably would have done it. A lot of friends of mine are actors and writers in commercials, and I want to avoid a holier-than-thou attitude. It’s just that I’m me. and I’ve had breaks in a strange way. Maybe I’ve compromised without realizing it, but I don’t re member yielding on any basic issues.
Is that your greatest personal strength?
Terkel: I don’t know what my strength is. I guess I have a certain kind of curiosity and appetite for life, but maybe that’s saying too much. Hubris, trying to play God, is probably my greatest flaw. That’s probably the most egotistical of all things, the pursuit of the grail. Everyone is a Parsifal, and my Holy Grail is that I think I can alter things.
Aren’t you concerned that “playing God” forces you to tamper with peoples’ lives?
Terkel: Yes. Tommy Patrick, who ends Working, is this fantastic Brooklyn fireman. He said, “When I save a baby, it’s real. I used to work in a bank. You know, it’s just paper. It’s not real. Nine to five and it’s shit. But I can look back and say, ‘I helped save somebody’ It shows something I did on this earth.” So Tommy said this to me, and I’ve got to leave to interview this clerk in the hotel where I’m staying! And Tommy said, “You’re leaving just like that? You mean we’re not going to have supper at the Italian joint, get some spaghetti, get some beer. You get my life on tape and you leave just like that? That won’t be nice. ” Tommy and I had our supper, but I got this feeling that I’d been walking off with people’s lives.
You forget. You go on tour for the book, and you get tired, and when you get tired you forget. I was in Dayton, on a TV show. A lot of working people from the factories around there were in the audience, and I started stereotyping them and the silly questions they were going to ask. And then they started talking, and they asked questions, and I was very deeply moved. And then I realized — “Holy Christ, I’ve forgotten what I discovered in my book, that each of these people is different, and that once you cut through the crap in their lives you find fantastic dreams and extraordinary thoughts.”
How do you think your working life has turned out? What would you change if you had it to live over?
Terkel: I want to avoid smugness, but I kind of like the openness of my life. I don’t think I would do anything different. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but I’m sure they’re my mistakes.
When I went to law school, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. My dream was to have a civil service job, read the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic, and see plays and movies. I got a civil service job keeping statistics on a veterans’ bonus called Baby Bonds, and I just went crazy from it. Little did I dream that I would turn out to be this kind of bum.
What about the future?
Terkel: I wish I knew. I might tackle that book, I’ll do my daily program. But I won’t retire. Some people think their work is so terrible that they look out for retirement. Maybe they’re right, but for me retirement would be equivalent to saying “goodbye to all that.” When I say goodbye, I hope I go like the one-horse shay — last to a hundred and then just fall apart.
Standing up for what you believe in can be a painful experience — and cost you a lot in some cases. It all comes down to what version of yourself you are willing to see in the mirror, and Studs Terkel demonstrates that decision better than most. Without putting too fine of a point on/at our current political situation, perhaps many of us could benefit from reading his “Hard Times” and gain some wisdom — or, y’know, fear.
