Shaking out

Studs Terkel is one of the great social historians of our time, but prefers to call himself a guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder.

Born in 1912 in New York City, Terkel moved with his family to Chicago at the age of 10 where he spent most of his life. Over the years he has worked as an activist, a civil servant, a labor organizer, a radio deejay and a television actor. But he is best known as a Chicago radio personality and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

For 45 years, Terkel spent an hour each weekday on his nationally syndicated radio show interviewing both the famous and the not-so-famous. With a unique style, he created portraits of everyday life in America and chronicled the changing times of the 20th century.

The Chicago Historical Society is now creating The Studs Terkel Center for Oral History, where people will be able to listen to more than 5,000 hours of taped interviews. For a taste, visit www.studsterkel.org.

In 1956, Terkel published his first book, “The Giants of Jazz.” Since then he has written many more, including his famed “Working” and “The Good War,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

His latest book, just published, is titled “And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey.” It is a collection of interviews with a wide range of legendary American musicians from Leonard Bernstein to Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong.

Terkel recently underwent open heart surgery, and, at 93 years old, his surgeon says he is the oldest person he knows to have successfully undergone the risky procedure.

The following is an excerpt of a recent interview with Terkel for Pacifica Radio’s “Democracy Now!”:

STUDS TERKEL: Well, I’m so delighted, Amy, just to be with you, and in an old firehouse. As you were reading the news, I thought of one thing: a burlesque house. Burlesque. The hotel in which I was raised during my young manhood in Chicago had several burlesque houses around, first and second bananas. And George Bush is a perfect second banana. The second banana is the one who is fed this stuff and who is a natural foil for the first banana, who would be Karl Rove. But they're not as funny as the burlesque shows I saw.

I think people who were considered idols in our society — Ronald Reagan, for example, was voted the greatest leader this country has ever had by 4.5 million people on the Discovery Channel. You start thinking, and where did Lincoln figure? And where did FDR, Franklin Roosevelt, figure? Lagging tenth. You start thinking of something: There’s no past. We’re suffering from a national Alzheimer’s disease, so if there's no remembrance of yesterday, as will be the case, how can they remember something that happened 70 years ago?

For example, the disaster, the catastrophe, Katrina in New Orleans, we know now that the government was unprepared for it. We could see a movie right now, a documentary that was filmed during the New Deal — it’s called “The River” — and it was the government stepping in to prevent floods, and the Tennessee Valley Authority came out of it.

Studs, speaking about the kind of guy you are, just physically, your doctors saying you are the oldest person to successfully undergo this heart operation ...

Now, things are going along OK. I'm getting along, when five weeks ago — no, what is this, Oct. 5? — about six weeks ago, I was told by the cardiologist, my family doctor — who, by the way, is a leading advocate of national health — and the surgeon that unless I had a new valve put in, I'm gone in about three, four months. And I said, “To hell with it. Okay, I might as well. I’m 93.”

But then curiosity got the best of it. And my curiosity is what saw me through. What would the world be like, or will there be a world? And so, that's my epitaph. I have it all set. Curiosity did not kill this cat. And it’s curiosity, I think, that has saved me thus far.

The first few lines of your book, “And They All Sang”: “1945, early autumn, a month before the World War II had ended with a flash and a bang, four Sundays later, I began as host of a one-hour weekly radio program of recorded music called ‘The Wax Museum.’ The phrase ‘disc jockey’ had not yet entered our working vocabulary. In effect, though, that is what I was,” you write. “Wax Museum,” because?

Well, the records were shellac and there was a waxen base. You drop it, and they crack. I still have a lot of 78s at home, and who was the figure who really created the record industry? There was one artist, Enrico Caruso. See, every immigrant family, not just Italian, of course, or Jewish families, but every immigrant family of Eastern Europe all would buy a Caruso record. It was two bucks apiece. It would be equivalent to about 50 bucks today. And they’d listen.

And so, in a way, I’d go from Caruso — the word is eclectic disc jockey — Caruso, say, to Louis Armstrong's “West End Blues,” my favorite jazz record, with Earl Hines playing a trumpet-style piano. And from there I would go to Woody Guthrie doing “Tom Joad.” In six minutes, two sides of a ten-inch record, he covered “The Grapes of Wrath.” I mean, he covered the novel of John Steinbeck, didn't miss a bit, when it came to the highlights, when he says goodbye to his mother at the end: “She’ll know where I am. You’ll know where I am. Wherever kids are hungry, I'll be there. Wherever guys are beaten up, I'll be there.” And Woody did that. Then I go into another recording, opera it might be, or something else.

And one of the reasons I did that, I didn't realize it until now, is because classical music, for a lot of working people, is considered beyond them. See, they read the tabloid or they maybe see first-night women with tiaras and guys with gloves and cane, and so they thought maybe it's for them. Maybe Mahler and Bach are for them. But there's one guy in a book called “Akenfield,” a wonderful novel — not a novel, it's sort of an oral history of a small town near London. And this working man says, “It’s not for me, really. It’s beyond me.” One day, to get out of the rain, he wanders into this hall, it could be in Manchester, and he hears music. And it’s Mozart. And he listens. And he listens. He said, “I like this. I like this. It is — I am good enough for it.”

And so, in a sense, that’s what it’s about, too, the possibilities that we have for the better angels to take over. And we do have those. You know, you call it the Pollyanna, because you still have hope. That's what one of the books said, isn’t it? What was it called? “Hope Dies Last.” That's a book earlier. “Hope Dies Last” is about …

Keeping the faith in troubled times …

People such as yourself. I call them part of the prescient minority, the prophetic minority. They were there during the Jefferson-Adams fight, Alien Sedition Acts. Eleven years after the French Revolution, they were called Jacobins. And during slavery days, they were called abolitionists. And they paid their dues, and they got their lumps. And during World War I, Eugene V. Debs went to prison because he was against the war. It was a Democratic president put him in, Woodrow Wilson. Do you know who pardoned him? Warren Gamaliel Harding. Would you believe it? Sometimes it’s the individual himself/herself, who might be it.

I want to ask you about Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. How do you compare the times of then and times of today?
Well, times of today are probably a little worse than then. Then, you knew —after all, finally Ed Murrow got at Joe McCarthy. There’s an excellent movie coming out, by the way, about Ed Murrow [“Good Night, and Good Luck”].
But today, ever since Ronald Reagan’s day, quite frankly, the change took place.

We have a burlesque of Reagan in George Bush, but as soon as the phrase “Reagan Democrats” came into being, you knew that race was the base with one of them. And people — this is ironic — that “middle class” became the word for everything. The word “working class” became an alien word, almost subversive word. No one is working class. We're all middle class. Gore versus Bush did that, as well as Kerry versus Bush. And so it makes it a little more difficult now than it was then.

At the same time, we do know there’s a paradox here. We do know a contradiction in itself, that [Bush’s] popularity has gone down, down, down with the war and with the economy itself. So, that’s a sign, just as toward the end of the Vietnam War. Remember, kids were beaten up by the jocks, and the jocks finally joined them, too. And that’s when LBJ said, “I do not choose to run anymore.” And so, we have that going on at the same time. And that's why those people I call “the prescient minority” — of which by the way, you as a broadcaster are one, if you don't mind my saying so — have always been there, have always been a minority. The majority, I'm not going to romanticize the majority. There are certain people in the community who are able to speak articulately. They’re the same economic stratum, the same religion, the same beliefs, but that woman or that guy is able to articulate what the others may feel.

What do you make of the people like Bill O'Reilly of Fox and Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of world leaders?

Well, what can I say about that? It’s burlesque, but no longer funny. It isn't funny. Can you imagine someone calling for the assassination of the president, someone foreign? Why, we would have troops there immediately, bombing the hell out of whatever town it is that harbored those people. So, it’s twice now. I didn't know the recent one [O’Reilly on Syria’s Bashar al-Assad]. I knew the one about Pat Robertson, man of God [calling for the assassination of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez]. Man of God, a man who represents Jesus Christ. If ever there were an agitator, a labor agitator, it was Jesus Christ, who spoke of — well, we know what he spoke about, rich men and going, you know, having as much chance to get to heaven as a camel through a needle's eye, and here is a guy …

I'll never forget, there’s a preacher I once knew named Claude Williams in the South. He was a marvelous circuit rider, meaning he is a preacher who would go from church to church. And he was organizing a tobacco worker’s union. This was a white union. And this woman, who had a raggedy blanket around her, started — his word was “touched cadence.” She touched cadence. She swung, and with Jesus as a labor organizer.

And so, you have Pat Robertson, who is very un-Christian, by the way, in the true sense of the word, to speak of that. So what is to be said that we accept it? I mean, instead of saying, “Let’s dump this guy, and dump the reverend thing immediately,” we go on.

So, we live in a strange moment. At the same time, we know the popularity of Reagan is gone. When I said Reagan, that’s interesting. That’s a Freudian slip, but nonetheless, this guy is a takeoff on Reagan. He makes Reagan sound like Abraham Lincoln, you know? So, the times are — I'm not going to be a Pollyanna. It’s this prescient minority that always must speak out, no matter what the dues may be.

As you write about him in “And They All Sang,” talk about Louis Armstrong.

Well, if ever there were a favorite jazz recording of mine, it’s “West End Blues” with the Hot Seven. He did several versions of it, one including his first wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong. It’s quite marvelous. In the book, she speaks of making Louis proud of himself. He came from the orphanage in New Orleans to Chicago. His mentor was King Oliver, whom he worshipped. And she said, “Worship yourself.”

And then you — then I might go [on the radio] to spirituals and blues and folk, and a 22-year-old kid named Bob Dylan, in what may have been one of his earliest radio interviews. And there was a song he wrote, and it was called “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” And he said every line could be the subject of a song, but there’s one line that knocked me for a loop: “The executioner’s face is always well hidden.” And you start thinking about that, the hangman and the mask around his face; the guillotine, of course, and the executioner’s face.

We have today executioners whose faces are not hidden, but they’re distant from it. They may be high officials of a civilized society. And so that line, at first I thought he meant atomic rain, hard rain. He said, “No, no. I mean just rain’s a-gonna fall.” And it was an interesting interview with this 22-year-old kid at the time.

Jazz fed you a great deal. As you look at New Orleans now, your first book, “The Giants of Jazz,” and so many from New Orleans, what do you think about who will get to rebuild New Orleans? The French Quarter certainly will be there, but what about the communities that feed it?

Who knows? That's just the point. There was no preparation at all. We know that now. A guy named Brownie, doing a “heck of a job,” says the clown to him, the second banana says to — this guy is the third banana. It’s a burlesque show, really, but it's not funny. I don’t know what, I mean, there has to be a government — has to be a benign one in this case, to step in fully. You think of all of the dough that goes into the wreckage that is Iraq today, the immediate billions and billions, how much of that could be used, just a portion of that, could be used — could have been used — to prevent it.

Of course, it’s — all disasters are preventable, provided there is governmental activity that calls the shot. In the case of New Deal, Henry Wallace, who was the heart and soul, was Secretary of Agriculture during two terms of Roosevelt, and then he was the vice president, was a remarkable figure. One of the most attacked and assaulted figures in our history. It was during the Cold War. And I would say the three great Americans of our century: Martin Luther King, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Henry Wallace. I put him up there.

When Tom Joad says to Ma Joad, remember at the end of “Grapes of Wrath”? And they’re bullied by the vigilantes and the big growers and the legionnaires, they come to a government camp, and it says Farm Security Administration, a subsidiary of the Department of Agriculture. And the director of that camp, who is made up to look like FDR, by the way, wears pince-nez glasses. I remember the small things. The actor’s name was Grant Mitchell. Isn't that funny? I remember the little things. He says, “This camp is yours” to the Joad family and to others, to the emigres. “This camp is yours, your decision to be made. You do it; we’ll help you find jobs.” So that was the government that is being dismantled, every aspect of the New Deal.

So, what gives you hope today?

Well, just hope itself. Remember the book called “Hope Dies Last,” the book previous to this one about music? It was Jessie De La Cruz, who was retired as a farm worker in a mobile home in Fresno, and she worked with Cesar Chavez. She would have a saying in Spanish, when things go bleak: “La esperanza muere al ultimo.” Hope dies last.

Without hope, you become just a cynic, and that’s a dime a dozen.

I have faith in the innate decency and the innate intelligence of the American people that is under unprecedented assault today. That’s the biggest assault I know.