Posts
Illustration: Some photos of Studs Terkel.
We have a few things to take care of first. I’ve been hearing how violent, misogynistic, and anti-police Rap or Hip Hop (makes me think of the Easter Bunny) music is. Never anything about how lousy it is as music. I mean, they amplify the bass so much that they don’t even need ears – just feel the beat, literally. KaBOOM, Ka BOOM BOOM BOOM, KA, etc. Anyway, I suppose that is a matter of taste. However, for those who think the attributes of the lyrics are unique and have a desire for them but do not care to vibrate while listening, I’ve attached a sample of an early style. Sorry, but I can’t get it up on the blog, so it is only available to the mailing list.
And now, just a couple of days after I posted the article by Studs, he appeared on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and he hasn’t changed a bit except, at 95, his diction is not quite what it used to be. You also have to remember his background in the 30s. When these people talk, you have to listen as they tend to verbally footnote much of what they say as parentheses and sometimes you can get lost if you are distracted or try to read too fast.
He went to the University of Chicago for his Law Degree, got it, eventually passed the bar exam as he played Mr. Concise for the benefit of the graders. That was when Clarence Darrow was around. Next to Studs, the University of Chicago’s most well-known graduate is John Aschroft. Studs never practiced as he wanted to be in entertainment.
I had mentioned that I had dropped in on him a few times at WFMT during the late 50s and early 60s when the station was still at the Lasalle-Wacker Building from where he did his daily show. The station grew to be more influential, it’s frequency more desireable (98.7, FM – they actually knew its frequency out to at least 6 or 7 digits), and its attitude stiffer. It is now in Sears Tower and I was delighted to learn that Amy interviewed him at WFMT as she mentions in the transcript.
Here’s Studs:
Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org
Legendary Radio Broadcaster and Oral Historian Studs Terkel on the
Iraq War, NSA Domestic Spy Program, Mahalia Jackson, James Baldwin,
the Labor Movement and His New Memoir "Touch and Go"
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl’sid=07/11/13/1423258
We are broadcasting from Chicago, the hometown of our very special guest
for the hour -- broadcaster, author, social historian, American legend,
Studs Terkel. Today, at the age of 95, Terkel is still speaking out. Two
weeks ago, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times criticizing
the Bush administration's warrantless spy. And he has just come out with
his long-awaited memoir. It's called ‘Touch and Go." Studs Terkel joins
us for the hour. [includes rush transcript]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are broadcasting from Chicago, the hometown of our very special guest
for the hour -- broadcaster, author, social historian, American legend,
Studs Terkel. Born in 1912 in New York City, Studs Terkel moved with his
family to Chicago at the age of ten, where he spent most of his life.
Over the years he has worked as an activist, a civil servant, a labor
organizer, a radio DJ and a television actor. But he is best known as a
Chicago radio personality and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
For forty-five years, Studs Terkel spent an hour each weekday on his
nationally syndicated radio show interviewing the famous and the
not-so-famous. With his unique style, he created portraits of everyday
life in America. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book
Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the
George Polk Career Award and the presidential National Humanities Medal.
Today, at the age of 95, Studs Terkel is still speaking out. Two weeks
ago, Studs wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times criticizing the
Bush administration's warrantless spy program and congressional efforts
to immunize the large telecom companies that took part. And he has just
come out with his long-awaited memoir. It's called ‘Touch and Go." Studs
Terkel joins me for the hour here from Chicago.
* *Studs Terkel*, legendary radio broadcaster, oral historian and
author. He is the author of more than a dozen books. His
long-awaited memoir, "Touch and Go," has just been published. He
is 95 years old.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
*AMY GOODMAN: *We are broadcasting from Chicago, the hometown of our
special guest today for the hour: broadcaster, author, social historian,
American legend, Studs Terkel. Born in 1912 in New York City, Studs
Terkel moved with his family to Chicago at the age of ten, where he
spent most of his life. Over the years he has worked as an activist, a
civil servant, a labor organizer, a radio DJ and a television actor. But
he is best known as a Chicago radio personality, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning author.
For forty-five years, Studs Terkel spent an hour each weekday on his
nationally syndicated radio show interviewing the famous and the
not-so-famous. With his unique style, he created portraits of everyday
life in America. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book
Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the
George Polk Career Award and the presidential National Humanities Medal.
Today, at the age of ninety-five, Studs Terkel is still speaking out.
Two weeks ago, Studs wrote an opinion piece for the /New York Times/
criticizing the Bush administration's warrantless spy program and
congressional efforts to immunize the large telecom companies that took
part. And he has just come out with his long-awaited memoir. It's called
/Touch and Go/.
Studs Terkel joins me for the hour here from Chicago. Welcome to
/Democracy now!/, Studs.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be with you. When you
speak to me as legendary, there’s a joke to the whole thing. I am very
inept with mechanical things. I’m of another millennium, the books of
the nineteenth century. From the Depression on -- the Depression, the
war, the Cold War -- the greatest generation being the ‘60s and not
World War II. It was in the ‘60s, there was the Civil Rights Movement,
flourished, at least for a time, and [inaudible]; the rise, resurgence
of feminism; the gays and lesbians coming out as free people. So that’s
the generation, I think the greatest.
The important thing about that article was: they are un-American. We
never called people with tapped phones with the opinion of the
government on their side. People disagree with them. Thomas Paine, the
most eloquent visionary of the American Revolution, speak of this
country in which a commoner can look at a king and say ‘Bugger off!’ And
I was telling them to bugger off. I’ve known this before, because my
phone was tapped in the days when the keyword was ‘Commie.’
‘Commie’ today, the word is ‘liberal.’ Our language is being perverted,
as well as our thoughts. ‘Say, I’m not a liberal,’ says John Kerry, who
was on -- he was a guest on our program with [inaudible] officers
against the Vietnam War. He was wonderful! He has denied he’s a liberal.
A liberal means what’ The right to speak your opinion and to defend even
those who disagree with you. We’ve made that -- what’s the next word’ --
‘terrorist.’ We misuse the word, going to the center. What does moving
to the center mean’ It means moving to the right. You never hear anybody
moving to the left called going to the center. You see, that’s how we’ve
gone, to pervert our language.
But the big thing that bothers me -- I’m glad if I wrote that piece, but
the big thing that bothers me is our own lack of background. ‘Not our
fault.’ Do we know about the twentieth century’ Do you know about the
Depression, how it came about and how it was stemmed by the New Deal by
government’
We just heard that Greenspan retired. Greenspan, a Federal Reserve man
and wise man, his idol was Ayn Rand. It even embarrasses me to say this.
Ayn Rand’s biographer, whom I got to interview for perverse reasons -- I
have an imp of the perverse in me -- and she said, ‘Oh, I believe every
man on the top deserves to be there who has the guts. And if you’re
there with your hat in your hand, you deserve to be down there.’ And she
used the word "collective others." So this is the guy we’re honoring as
he’s disappearing.
I remember his opposite number, when I was working on the Great
Depression book -- that was the Great Depression, and the crash took
place October 1929. And a guy like Greenspan -- only didn’t read Ayn
Rand -- he said, ‘I didn’t know what to do. We didn’t know what to do.
Things went down, stocks went down.’ The World War I guys were
tear-gassed, went to Washington for the bonus, and they pleaded with the
government -- they, members of the new religion we have: the free
market. I thought of my alma mater, University of Chicago. Most of the
free marketers have won the Nobel Prize, didn’t know what to do.
/Variety/, the trade paper, said, ‘Wall Street lays an egg.’
So, finally, the government came through with agencies to help those who
have, as well as the have-nots. And so, their kids, of their
granddaddies, who were saved by a benign federal government, are saying,
‘Too much government,’ as Molly Ivins -- we miss so badly -- used to do
it in kidding him. So we have an insult to our intelligence.
I know we’ve been barbarically assaulted, 9/11. There’s another insult.
That’s to our common sense of decency, to our common sense of
intelligence. This is there, I know it, and it changes. It must be from
‘them,’ the anonymous people, who form more and more groups, as the
government and others like those grow more and more insane. A good case
in point -- may I go on’
*AMY GOODMAN: *You may.
*STUDS TERKEL: *A good case in point, I said I’m a nut mechanically. So
I’m interviewing this woman. I hear about people. A friend of mine tells
me about somebody. I run into somebody by accident, whom I find
interesting. And she lives in a housing project with three, four kids.
Now, I suppose someone from on high, Olympus, /60 Minutes/, or Barbara
Walters, or whoever it is might come and see them, you behave
differently. When someone, a guy like me, who goofed up -- I got my tape
recorder, and I’m pressing a wrong button -- and she, this woman in the
housing project, says, ‘Look, you pressed the wrong button.’ I said,
‘Oh, I did.’ And that moment is a key moment. She feels needed. To feel
needed is an attribute necessary for all human beings. She counts. That
word, "counts." And so, we have a great many people who are unaware of
their own strength, provided they join these groups. And so, she’s
listening. Finally, we go on. And toward the end of the interview, she
hears herself for the first time. She says, ‘I didn’t know I felt that
way before.’ That’s a sensational moment. And those are the moments I
admire very much.
*AMY GOODMAN: *We’re talking to Studs Terkel. We're going to break, and
we’ll be back with him. We’re here in Chicago for the hour.
[break]
*AMY GOODMAN: *’Turn! Turn! Turn!’ Pete Seeger singing, that American
legend, as well. We’re joined in studio here in Chicago in the home town
of Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, journalist,
raconteur. He has just written his own biography, his autobiography,
called /Touch and Go/. Studs, talk a little about Pete Seeger.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Pete Seeger, I’ve known ever since the ‘40s, when he was
with a group called the Almanac Singers: Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Woody
Guthrie, and a guy named Millard Lampell. And they traveled by jalopy
across the country helping the CIO, Congress of Industrial
Organizations, come into being. You know, they’re the CIO and the AFL.
AFL are craft unions. So in a factory, the tool and dye makers can go on
strike, but the others are there. But with the CIO, the whole factory
goes on strike. So Pete’s been in all that.
He was in the South, and he was tomatoed and egged in the Henry Wallace
campaign, which is a marvelous story, a tragic story, a great story. And
Peter has been in every one of these interviews, these programs, and
he’s the greatest choral director ever. He can lead an audience into
music, and you know, as he sings to Woody Guthrie's song, he and Arlo,
Woody’s kid, ‘This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land.’ And Pete’s
an example of what Thomas Paine had in mind when he spoke of the
thoughtful American feeling free -- and never want such a government.
Pete represents what is the very best in us.
*AMY GOODMAN: *I want to go back, Studs, in your life. You came here to
Chicago when you were ten years old.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Eight years old.
*AMY GOODMAN: *Eight years old. Tell us about this city we’re in. Tell
us about Chicago.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Chicago can only be described by Chicagoans. We had a
columnist, Mike Royko, who was wonderful. We have the writer whom
Hemingway said is the best young one. I realize that our friend Norman
Mailer, who died recently, was a great talent, tremendous talent, very
colorful. But Hemingway said, ‘The man who succeeds me is Nelson
Algren,’ who became a [inaudible] friend of mine. Nelson described the
life behind the billboards, but he gave it a lyric quality.
In Chicago, you had a mayor named Big Bill Thompson and had millions in
his safe. He’s the one who said, ‘Take away your hammer. Blow your
horn.’ And, of course, there was politics and crookedness in Chicago. In
fact, the election of Abe Lincoln, nomination, first Republican Party,
was in Chicago, 1860, at a place called the Wigwam. And there were deals
worked out, because Abe was a good politician, too. And they beat the
New York guy, Stuart, who didn’t know what hit him. He’s in Chicago.
So Chicago was built. Carl Sandburg, Louis Sullivan -- Frank Lloyd
Wright described Louis Sullivan as the ‘Lieber Meister.’ The skyscraper
came out of Chicago. Chicago -- every architect in the world pictures
Chicago as the Athens of architecture, so that in everything Chicago is
a two-headed god, Janus: Jane Addams on one side, Al Capone on the
other, let’s say, or someone worse than Al Capone, crooked politician.
The city was so exciting to me. The rooming house my father was too sick
to run, and we used to listen to crystal sets. In 1925, we heard part of
the ‘Monkey Trial’ in Dayton, Ohio, young professor of biology. John
Scopes was on trial. He violated Tennessee law about not teaching
Darwin. That’s a remarkable tale. And even among the people, the
creationists, are hard-working people whose life is one of woe, and
therefore there’s the other world, there’s the Armageddon, there’s the
Second Coming, because their own life is so miserable. Every -- every
part of our society is affected by the ersatz president and his toadies
down through these last several years.
*AMY GOODMAN: *Studs, what do you make of, at one Republican debate, the
candidates were asked how many did not believe in evolution. Three of
them raised their hands.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Well, there it is. See, you have this problem, and then,
put together, deeper than that, because Jim Wallace has a magazine,
/Sojourner/. Jim is a thoughtful guy, because we have to understand what
makes them come into being. I have the experience. The book /Working/,
my most popular book, /Working/, was banned in a city called Girard,
Pennsylvania, a working-class town, much poverty. The teacher I
suggested for class, and they said no. And there was a big gathering. I
went down there. It’s impossible to lose, author defending book.
And here come the enemy. The enemy were about a half a dozen people. And
I saw that woman, and her hands were gnarled. Her husband was studying
his knuckles, hard, calloused. And they had this crazy kid who was just
throwing biblical quotes at me that were non-sequiturs, nothing to do.
And she says to the kid, ‘Shhh, be quiet! Listen to what this man says,’
said this woman who was leader of opposition to the book. And I felt, in
her, there’s a tremendous possibility.
And there was another guy, a guy I knew who was a circuit rider. A
circuit rider are guys who are preachers who go to churches, black or
white, where there’s nobody there. And this guy used the Bible as a
working man's book: Jesus the carpenter, the poor, the rich. And this
old woman, who’s leading these tobacco workers who are on strike, says,
‘First time I had the Bible talk about three squares a day.’ And so,
that woman, Sister Blake, is in this woman who was attacking me but
wasn’t. There are possibilities.
How could it be at the end of World War II, we were the most honored
powerful nation in the world’ "Honored" is the key word. Today we’re the
most despised and feared. How come’ Because the American public itself
has no memory of past. You know, Gore Vidal used a phrase, ‘the United
States of Amnesia.’ I say the United States of Alzheimer's. We forgot
what happened yesterday. We know all about Paris Hilton. We know about
that. But what do we know about -- why are we there in Iraq’ And they
say, when you attack our policy, you’re attacking the boys. On the
contrary, we’re defending those boys. We want them back home with their
families, doing their work and not a war that we know is built upon an
obscene lie. We know that now. And so, it’s this lack of history that’s
been denied us, just as the case of this guy who was told the government
saved them during the Great Depression.
*AMY GOODMAN: *Studs, I wanted to talk about some of the interviews you
have done over time.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Alright.
*AMY GOODMAN: *This, on your one-hour daily broadcast on WFMT here in
Chicago. Several dozen are compiled in a six-CD set called /Voices of
Our Time/. This is from your 1963 interview that you did with the gospel
singer Mahalia Jackson.
*MAHALIA JACKSON: *I don’t know. This thing, it’s peculiar. When
I’m on the stage and on television and working with white people,
they just hug me and love me and say I’m so wonderful and I’m so
great. And then, when I’m walking down the street like an ordinary
citizen, they don’t recognize me. And when I go into the
department store in the South, I can’t get a sandwich, I can’t get
a bottle of pop. I gotta stay -- I can’t even get a cab. And I’m
just the Mahalia Jackson that they got through saying how
wonderful I am. What I don’t understand is what makes people act
like that’
*STUDS TERKEL: *Well, this is the big question, Mahalia, this
split in people.
*MAHALIA JACKSON: *I do want to -- I want to see my people be
respected. You know, it’s the most distasteful thing to hear a
white man call your man, your husband or your brother a "boy,"
like he’s -- he’s no boy; he’s a man like anybody. That’s
disrespect. That’s the height of ignorance, complete ignorance,
for people to treat people like that. It’s awful. It just hurts
me. And I’m so hurt about it, it keeps me praying, you know, for
the Lord not to let hate get in my heart. This world will make you
think -- I tell ya -- it’ll make you think, because if you don’t,
you’ll go down the drain in despair, and I don’t believe in
letting nothing get down in my soul. I speak it out so I can be
free, because if it stay inside, well, my god, I’ll become a
hateful woman. And I don’t want to hate. I want to love.
*AMY GOODMAN: *Mahalia Jackson, the great gospel singer. That, an
excerpt of an interview that Studs Terkel did with her in [1963]. Studs,
you had a long relationship with Mahalia Jackson.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Oh, my god! I was the first white disc jockey to play
her. And to this day, I’m stopped by elderly black people who say,
‘Studs , you made Mahalia come alive.’ It’s untrue. She was known to the
black population, but the whites didn’t. I’ve played her a lot. And her
songs were so powerful.
We’d have comment sessions, when she’d say -- I hear you. Mahalia -- I
was the emcee of her program later on, after I was blacklisted from a
very popular show called /Studs’ Place/, which along with /Kukla, Fran
and Ollie/, which is a puppet show that was marvelous, with a genius
named Burr Tillstrom and with Dave Garroway, who was the first face ever
seen in the daytime. And so, Mahalia would say -- I’d say, ‘Mahalia, you
almost got me going, singing that song.’ ‘Studs, if I can move you, that
would be it.’
One day she calls up and says, ‘Ralph Abernathy, right-hand man of Dr.
King, started the bus boycott in Montgomery, and they asked me to come
down and sing.’ She was Dr. King's favorite singer. And they say, ‘How
much will you charge’’ She said, ‘I don’t charge the working people,’
because the people worked, they bussed. But Mahalia always affected me.
She defended me after I was blacklisted from that show /Studs’ Place/. I
came on her program as her host over at CBS, on the network. And one day
a guy comes in from New York and says, ‘Will you sign this’’ I look at
it; it says, ‘I am not and never have been’’ I throw that away. I know
I’m an American. I don’t need my flag. I like Obama for that, by the
way, for saying -- ‘Why aren’t you wearing the flag’’ It’s like a
[inaudible] saying, ‘My name is Barbara.’ I know your name is Barbara. I
know you’re an American. You don’t have to tell me, ‘I’m an American.’
So, no, we don’t need that.
So, in any event, Mahalia heard this guy coming to me in the middle of a
rehearsal, and he said, ‘Would you’ -- I said no. And he said, well, the
big one’s name, the big shot at CBS. It’s on the network. And he says,
‘Is that what it’s about, baby’’ She knows about me and my troubles. She
says, ‘You’ve got such a big mouth, Studs. You should have been a
preacher.’ Anyway, she says, ‘If you fire Studs, find another Mahalia.’
And you know what happened’ Nothing! You’ve got to face them down.
You mentioned James Baldwin. I got to remark here that I was the first
one to interview Baldwin on the radio when he returned from an exile in
the Swiss Alps. He wrote /Nobody Knows My Name/. And here's what the
book -- my book -- is all about. This is Baldwin. I got my googs on for
this. ‘History does not refer merely [‘] to the past. On the contrary,
the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it,’ the
past, with us. And we’re ‘unconsciously controlled’ in so many ways,
that history, the past, is present now in all we do. And that’s the key
to the book.
*AMY GOODMAN: *Studs, I wanted to play an excerpt of James Baldwin. We
played Mahalia Jackson. That tape, by the way, was from 1963. Well,
James Baldwin, the great novelist, great playwright, great civil rights
activist, you interviewed him in 1961.
*JAMES BALDWIN: *Every Negro in this country is really just, as
[inaudible] has said it very well, really never to be looked at.
And what white people see when they look at you is not you.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Invisible.
*JAMES BALDWIN: *You’re invisible. What they do see when they look
at you is what they’ve invested you with. And what they’ve
invested you with is all the agony and the pain and the danger and
the passion and the torment, you know, sin, death and hell, at
which everyone in this country is terrified. You represent a level
of experience which Americans deny. And I think you can see in the
life of the country, not only in the South, what a terrible price
the country has paid for this effort to keep a distance between
themselves and black people. And what Americans today don’t know
about the rest of the world, like Cuba or Africa, is what they
don’t know about me. An incoherent, totally incoherent foreign
policy of this country is a reflection of the incoherence of the
private lives here.
*STUDS TERKEL: *So we don’t even know our own names.
*JAMES BALDWIN: *No, we don’t. That’s the whole point. And I
suggest this, I suggest this, that in order to learn your name,
you're going to have to learn mine. You know, in a way, the key to
this country -- the American Negro is the key figure in this
country. And if we don’t face him, we will never face anything.
*AMY GOODMAN: *James Baldwin, 1961, interviewed by Studs Terkel. We’re
going to break, and then we’ll be back with the legendary American
journalist, raconteur, Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Stay with us.
[break]
*AMY GOODMAN: *Mahalia Jackson, singing ‘Precious Lord.’ This is
/Democracy Now!/ democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. I’m Amy
Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Studs Terkel's hometown of Chicago.
‘Precious Lord,’ Studs, Mahalia Jackson.
*STUDS TERKEL: *’Precious Lord’ was written by Jimmy Dorsey, James
Dorsey, who was a famous writer of gospel songs, especially with
Mahalia. It was Martin Luther King's favorite song. That’s when she sang
it down in Montgomery, and she sang it at the great 1963 gathering. I
was on the train when Martin Luther King made his "I Have a Dream"
speech on the Lincoln Memorial. And on that train, there was Tim Black,
who says he was the Quartermaster Corps in World War I, World War II,
and they were the first American troops in Paris after the liberation.
And he says this is like that, a liberation day.
And there was this guy Lawrence Landry saying his father was a Pullman
car porter. Pullman car porters, with their blue pants and white
stripes, would bring the news of the North to the South for the /Chicago
Defender/. And they came into the barber shop, whoever it was, and they
were the messengers. And they were key figures. And that march was
fantastic.
*AMY GOODMAN: *You talk about E.D. Nixon in your book, in /Touch and Go/.
*STUDS TERKEL: *E.D. Nixon was an ex-Pullman car porter, who was head of
the NAACP in Montgomery. Working for him was Rosa Parks, and let’s --
let me say this -- I hope I’m not going to get in trouble: Rosa Parks
did not come out of a vacuum, this straight wonderful woman who did what
she was -- and she was a great wonderful woman -- there were other
people behind. And one was E.D. Nixon, and the other’s a white couple,
Virginia and --
*AMY GOODMAN: *Clifford Durr
*STUDS TERKEL: *-- and her husband Clifford Durr. Virginia was a white
Southerner, and her seamstress was Rosa Parks. She urged her to go to a
school called Highlander Folk School. It was the only integrated school
in the country. A man named Myles Horton was the teacher. And it was
burned down by the Klan. But she went there. All this played a role in
her one day refusing to stand up and do it. So it was never one person;
remember that. It’s a combination of many people, many forces.
You mentioned John Henry Faulk. He was a great Texas storyteller, was
getting a bigger and bigger audience on CBS, and then he was fired as a
Red. That could be anything. And later on -- he interviewed like Mark
Twain. And later on, he sued, and he won this suit against CBS. And
he’s, they call, the man who broke the blacklist. At the same time, CBS
had the nerve to play the story of John Henry Faulk, by that actor who
always plays Bobby Kennedy, doing the role. And they said -- and the ads
do not mention John Henry Faulk's name. He was great.
*AMY GOODMAN: *You write about -- in /Touch and Go/, you write about
meeting a kind of yuppy couple, before there was the word ‘yuppy.’
*STUDS TERKEL: *Oh, yeah. But before the yuppy couple, I -- you
mentioned notable people. I won -- me and my buddy, the engineer,
announcer, Jimmy Unrath -- the Prix Italia award. This is very special.
Very few Americans win it. The Italy of Rome, the Italy of Italy, they
have this Prix Italia in radio and TV. It’s what the Nobel is to written
literature. And so, I get to see Bertrand Russell up in North Wales. And
things are going great.
Here’s my ineptitude. And he says, ‘You know my friend. I understand you
saw him, Mr. Neal.’ Neal was an old progressive educator, as Russell
was. And I played the tape for him. He said, ‘That’s great.’ Now I’m
putting on the tape recorder. The new tape is on. And if I did it
without stopping, I would have destroyed them both, and I would have put
my head in the oven. I’m that inept. But this couple --
*AMY GOODMAN: *Wait, wait. Before you go to the couple, I want to play a
little bit of the tape, that -- the interview that you did with Bertrand
Russell. It was 1962. You interviewed the British philosopher at his
home in North Wales. This is an excerpt.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Why do people, the great majority of people the
world over, feel as helpless as they do, they feel as impotent as
they do’ This seems to be in the air, I’m sure, all over the
world, feeling that the individual, I, John Smith, John Doe, says,
‘I can’t do anything about it.’
*BERTRAND RUSSELL: *That’s just [inaudible]. They can. I mean, an
individual, if he has the pluck and the independence of mind, can
do a very great deal. Actually, here we sit, no organization, none
whatever, and simply by expressing an opinion which is known to be
unbiased, an individual can effect a very great deal. And this
powerlessness of the individual is a form of cowardice; it’s a
pretense, an alibi for doing nothing.
*AMY GOODMAN: *That was Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher. Studs
Terkel, it was in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Right there. I’ll never forget that. He was very strong.
He said he sent cablegrams to Khrushchev, to Nehru and to Kennedy. He
said, ‘I heard from two of them: Khrushchev and Nehru. Didn’t hear from
your president.’ I said, ‘Well, I think you proved a boner.’
But after Russell, you’ve named several notable people. I run into
people at the bus stop. 1:46 every morning, when I worked for this radio
station, when I became an eclectic disc jockey. ‘Eclectic’ means played
everything -- Caruso records, Louis Armstrong’s ‘West End Blues,’ Woody
Guthrie, and that’s it. So I’m the gregarious old guy. I got a case of
logorrhea. I’m always talking, getting into --
But this one couple ignores me. Very handsome, he’s -- and this is
before the word "yuppy" came into being. Brooks Brothers, Gucci shoes,
/Wall Street Journal/ under his arm. And she is a looker, she’s a
stunner. Bloomingdale's, Neiman Marcus, /Vanity Fair/ under her arm. And
I want to make conversation. The bus is late in coming, so I say to
them, ‘Labor Day is coming up.’ That’s the worst thing I could say. He
turns toward me. He’s no coward. Flicking a bug off his cup, he says,
‘We despise unions.’ I say, ‘Oh. I got a pigeon here.’
The bus is late, so I walk up to them, and I say -- I’m now the ancient
mariner. I’m fixing him with my glittering eye. I say, ‘How many hours a
day do you work’’ He says, ‘Eight.’ ‘How come you don’t work eighteen
hours a day, like your great-great-grandparents did’ You know why you
work eight hours a day’ Because in Chicago, four guys got hanged
fighting for the eight-hour day for you.’
I’m talking about the Haymarket case back in 1886, of which they know
nothing. It was a time of a gathering, fighting for the eight-hour day.
There were speakers there, anarchists and Americans. And then there was
a rain, and the speakers went home, and that’s when somebody threw a
bomb -- nobody knows who -- and several cops were killed, as well as
civilians. And the papers were hysterical: ‘Get ‘em!’ But in the
meantime, they have this trial, and four guys, including someone named
Albert Parsons, an old American Civil War soldier, were about to be hanged.
And there was a group of Chicago industrialists who were very
enlightened -- Lyman Gage, others -- listened to the cries of the world:
Bernard Shaw, John Ruskin, Tolstoy, all these people. And so, they said,
‘Commute the sentence.’ But it was Marshall Field I, with that mustache
turned upward, who said, ‘Hang the bastards!’ And they did.
And so, ‘They did it for you, these guys!’ I got them pinned against the
mailbox now. This old nut. The train is -- the bus is still late. When
Christmas time comes around, I thought remember that guy. And so, I say,
‘How many days a week do you work’’ And they say, ‘Forty,’ and they want
to get away from me now, and they hop on the bus. ‘You know why you work
forty’ Because the New Deal days, of which you know nothing, and you
should.’ The workers for the forty-hour day [/sic/].
And to this day, I’m sure, they live in a condominium, way upscale, that
faces the bus stop. And from the fifteenth floor, or whatever floor it
is, she’s looking out every morning, and he says, ‘Is that old nut still
down there’’ I’m not blaming him. What do we know about our history’ We
don’t. It’s been denied, and that’s what James Baldwin meant, too, when
he spoke of our past is with us. And ‘with us’ means, as it was during
the American Revolution, bottom -- never spokesmen, of course, because
it was bottom-up, because half the country was Tory anyway.
*AMY GOODMAN: *Studs, as we come to the end of this program -- you are a
man of history, also a visionary, but tell us about being ninety-five.
*STUDS TERKEL: *About what’
*AMY GOODMAN: *About being ninety-five years old.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Well, it’s there, as you probably see. From the cover,
you see a cover of a guy that looks like George Clooney. That’s me! And
now, look at me now, and not aging too much, Paris Hilton. Now, it’s --
as you grow older, death, a few other things, [inaudible]. Robert
Browning said, ‘Come and grow old with me, the best is yet to be.’ Lying
through his teeth! But the one thing you can retain is memory. And my
book, I hope, is a memory of the events of the last millennium -- not
the last century -- the last millennium. And that’s what it’s about.
The hero of the book is also the villain of the book: Albert Einstein. I
call him villain, because a guy described him as a man of the future who
came to us too soon. We weren’t ready for him. Out of Einstein's mind
came all these thoughts that led eventually to some of the advances in
medicine, but also led to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because he convinced
Roosevelt to do it, the only one. And so, Einstein, to me, is the hero
of the last millennium. And now we’re faced with what he said. He didn’t
know what the weapons of World War III will be, but the weapons of World
War IV are going to be sticks and stones. And we can end with this.
And this is a question to ask the audience: which road American people
should take’ Einstein -- you know, I lived fifty years more than my two
brothers and my father. They died in their fifties. I have the same
genetic difficulty. I lived fifty years longer because advances in the
heart. At the same time --
*AMY GOODMAN: *We have ten seconds.
*STUDS TERKEL: *The same, the human being -- the same time, the human
being -- Mark Twain wrote the damn human race, he meant something that’s a knock-off, 75,000 --
*AMY GOODMAN: *Studs Terkel, I want to thank you for being with us. I
look forward to our interview next year, as well.
*STUDS TERKEL: *Thank you very much.
*AMY GOODMAN: *I’m Amy Goodman, with Studs Terkel. We’re broadcasting
from Chicago.
www.democracynow.org
