America's storyteller

Legendary oral historian Studs Terkel, still going strong at 91, sings the praises of rebels with a cause.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Nov 27, 2003 | Studs Terkel didn't invent the oral history, but as far as modern journalism is concerned, he might as well have. His 11 books of interviews with people from all classes and all walks of life -- about subjects ranging from race to religious faith to World War II, the Great Depression and the world of work -- when considered together, make up one of the greatest documentary projects about American life of the last century.

Terkel is certainly most famous for "Working," in which he interviewed gravediggers, designers, schoolteachers, washroom attendants, truck drivers, dentists, switchboard operators and countless others about "what they do all day and how they feel about what they do." The idea for the book (as for most of his books) was so simple that its most extraordinary aspect was the fact that nobody had ever done it before.

As influential -- and as eye-opening, often hilarious and sometimes devastating -- as "Working" was, all Terkel's books are remarkable explorations of the lives of "ordinary" people (he doesn't like the word). "'The Good War'" offers a compelling account of World War II, both from a grunt's-eye view and on the home front. "Hard Times" may be the most compelling and convincing single book about the Great Depression of the 1930s. But many readers consider "American Dreams: Lost and Found" to be his greatest work. In that book, he interviews people both legendary and obscure, from immigrant farm workers, embittered beauty queens and Ku Klux Klan members to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Joan Crawford and Ted Turner. The novelist Margaret Atwood wrote that it contained "raw material for 1,000 novels in one medium-sized book!"

Terkel was born in 1912 in Chicago (as he puts it, "the Titanic went down and I came up") and has spent most of his 91 years of life in what Carl Sandburg immortally called the "City of the Big Shoulders." His view of the world is unashamedly proletarian, proudly left-wing and small-D democratic (he has his doubts about the Democratic Party at this point), profoundly Chicago-centric.

Yet Terkel's work only sounds like it's going to be p.c. and dull when you haven't read it. He is never afraid to engage those whose views differ from his own and he's a delightful natural storyteller who is always more interested in people than in ideas. His new book, "Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times," is probably his most abstract work and at the same time his most personal.

Ostensibly, "Hope Dies Last" is a book about dedicated political activists, the "prophetic minority" who Terkel says are capable of imbuing their society with hope and moving it, ever so slowly and gradually, in the direction of justice and decency. It also feels like a summing-up, a tour of Terkel's great preoccupations: the labor movement, race, economic injustice, the generations who emerged from the great turmoils of the '40s and the '60s. It's full of inspirational tales -- Terkel is never ashamed of his agenda, and he's trying to convince his readers that social change is still possible -- but is never saccharine.

Terkel talks to Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democrat (and current presidential candidate), whose family lived briefly in a Packard automobile when he was a child, and to Rep. Dan Burton, the Indiana Republican, who has horrific memories of his father beating his mother before his eyes. He interviews retired Adm. Gene LaRoque, a persistent critic of the Pentagon, and also retired Gen. Paul Tibbets, who personally dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and has no regrets.

Terkel's other interviewees in "Hope Dies Last" range from Chicago schoolteachers to activist Southern preachers to food writer Frances Moore Lappé, Oakland, Calif. mayor (and former California governor) Jerry Brown and legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith -- at 94, the one person in the book older than Terkel. The vision of hope that emerges from the book is never easy and always constrained by painful circumstance, but far more real, and more affecting, because of those limitations.

When Terkel interviews Leroy Orange, a man who spent 19 years on death row for a murder he did not commit before being pardoned in 2001 by Illinois Gov. George Ryan, Orange actually says he is grateful for the whole experience. His experience with the justice system, he says, had brought him close to hopelessness and given him a "racist attitude"; he believed a poor, black defendant like him had no chance. When white activist lawyers began to work on his case, he didn't trust them at first, but eventually realized that "just like there are white people who fight for the wrong causes, there are just as many who fight for the right causes." He might never have learned that without going to prison in the first place, he suggests, and "it makes you feel something good about mankind." Hope dies last, indeed.

I caught up with Terkel by telephone in his New York hotel room amid a whirlwind book tour. Our conversation is presented here Terkel-style, without interpolated questions or comments. There's another reason for that besides paying tribute to his method: Terkel is such a raconteur he barely lets you get a word in edgewise (and you don't want to). The only thing I clearly remember saying to him was that it was a little intimidating to interview such a famous interviewer. "Who, me?" he said. "I'm just a goofball doing the best I can."

Except for his hearing loss (which he frequently bemoans), his manner is that of a man 30 years younger. He said he was sorry we hadn't met in person so he could act out various of his anecdotes. So when this titan of American journalism -- and this "ham actor," as he calls himself -- says he thinks he may only have one more book in him, one has reason to hope he's wrong. There's that word again.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Let me put this old hearing aid on, I'm as deaf as a post. I'm a Luddite, yet I'm a slave to technology!

Now I think I hear you. I know about your Web site, my son tells me about it. And the Internet has a marvelous democratic possibility. I'm aware of all that, but I haven't the vaguest idea. I'm just learning the wonders of the electric typewriter. It's fantastic!

My new book is called "Hope Dies Last." I must have been crazy to try it. But something just occurred to me and I had to do it. Years ago, in an earlier book, "American Dreams Lost and Found," I interviewed an old Mexican farm worker, Jessie de la Cruz, who was one of the first women to work with Cesar Chavez. And she said there's a saying in Spanish when times are bleak or bewildering: La esperanza muere última. "Hope dies last." And somehow the damn thing stuck with me.

Remember, all the other books have dealt with visceral experience, something you could put your hand on. The Great Depression: What was it like to be a little kid, 10 years old, who sees her old man come home with his toolbox on his shoulder, a good carpenter, and then he doesn't work for the next five or six years? Until the government comes along, the New Deal! When free enterprise -- it's called the free market today, the new religion -- fell on its ass completely, and fell on its knees and begged the government to save it.

The irony is, the very ones whose daddies and granddaddies' butts were saved are those who most condemn "big gummint," as Molly Ivins would put it. Health, education, welfare. Not the Pentagon, of course! That's what I call the national Alzheimer's disease: There's no memory of it, it didn't happen really. All my books you might call memory books, trying to recreate a memory of what it was like to be that ordinary person -- a phrase I don't like, by the way; it's patronizing -- a non-celebrated person.

Next Page: A book celebrating hope when things seem hopeless

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