Studs Terkel was more than a guy in red socks
Studs Terkel was such a colorful character, with the red socks and the checkered shirt, it’s easy to overlook what he actually did and why he did it. In tributes leading up to the centennial of his birth Wednesday, he’s been portrayed as a rumpled man with a load of books under his arm, on the bus, in a bar, on the radio. Chicago’s version of Peter Falk in “Columbo,” shambling around the city, asking questions, beloved.
All true. But not the reason we’re remembering him. It isn’t the socks. It’s the books, and his view of the world, and it’s no accident if the latter gets almost completely overlooked. Studs was an old-school Lefty, who had been blacklisted during the 1950s, and not only did he use a tape recorder to make common folk into a font of history, but he turned out bestsellers that were slyly subversive kicks at American capitalism. All of the NATO protests this weekend put together won’t nudge society toward focusing on the concerns of ordinary people anywhere near as effectively as the best of Studs Terkel’s books did.
His book that really rattled my windows was his oral history of World War II. Until then, for me, the war had been the standard self-flattering Greatest Generation pieties. Studs put the era under a microscope, talking to interned Japanese Americans and female factory workers who enjoyed their moment of war-duty freedom before being booted back to the kitchen. Revisionist histories of WWII are common now. Studs was 25 years ahead of the curve.
I was invited to a number of Studs tributes but skipped them all. The best honor I could bestow on Studs was to read his stuff, and there was no question which book I most wanted to re-read:
Published in 1974, is just as fascinating and poetic, haunting and heartbreaking as I remember. From grave digger to movie actor, lawyer to librarian, 133 people talk about their jobs. Just how much society has changed in 40 years pops out in sharp relief. Terry Mason, airline stewardess, might as well have been a Meiji geisha. “They like girls that have a nice personality and that are pleasant to look at,” she says. “If a woman has a problem with blemishes, they take her off. Until the appearance counselor thinks she’s ready to go back on.”
Stewardess are gone, and the book is a testament to lost or devastated professions and industries: steel plants, automobile factories, and the lesser trades.
“The whole thing is obsolete,” says a hotel bathroom attendant. “It’s on its way out. This work isn’t necessary in the first place. It’s so superfluous. It was never necessary.”
Problems that very shortly would soon blindside America are laid out plain as day.
“Proud of my work?” asks a spot welder. “How can I feel pride on a job where I call a foreman’s attention to a mistake, a bad piece of equipment, and he’ll ignore it.”
Because he taped his interviews and let his subjects simply speak, some tend to minimize Studs’ art. But he asked the questions, then edited and arranged the results.
“I usually end up crying,” copy chief John Fortune says. Studs’ gift was that he could make a cynical, jaded ad man talk about his dreams. Nor was Studs an apologist. “What do you think would happen in this country if, for one year, they experimented and gave everybody a 20-hour week?” a steelworker asks. “How do they know that the guy who digs [bigot George] Wallace today doesn’t try to resurrect Hitler tomorrow?... You can become a fanatic if you had the time. The whole thing is time. That is, I think, one reason rich kids tend to be fanatic about politics: they have time.”
It’s hard to read that and not think of the NATO Summit protests. The Occupy movement foot soldiers, while not necessarily rich, don’t seem encumbered by the demands of work either, and the abstraction of their blizzard of causes — protesters storming the Obama headquarters Monday were calling, in part, for a return to the barter system — lets the city focus on the inconvenience of the protests. America has lots of problems, but NATO isn’t one of them.
Still, Studs would approve. He was keen on marches, on condemning the system’s unfairness. But he struck his blow for justice, not by demanding that others do something, but by doing it himself. Those flocking to Chicago to decry the basic structure of society (the barter system? should, when this is over, avail themselves to Studs Terkel’s books, and listen to the voices in them. You’re demanding that people listen to you; why not try listening to them a little?