When Studs Terkel Spoke Truth To Power In A Sullen World -A Tribute From NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source”
Link to Christopher Lydon's Open Source program on the late "people's journalist" Studs Terkel
http://radioopensource.org/sound-of-studs-terkel/
By Si Lannon
It was probably Studs Terkel via a series of book reviews of his interviews trying to get a feel for the soul of the American from Sam Lowell that I first heard the expression “speaking truth to power.” Spoke that message to a sullen world then. Unfortunately since that time the world had not gotten less sullen. Nor has the need to speak truth to power dissipated since Studs passed from this mortal coil of a world that he did so much to give ear and eye to. The problem, the real problem is that we in America no longer produce that pied piper, that guy who will tell the tale the way it has to be told. Something about those gals and guys who waded through the Great Depression, saw firsthand in the closed South Side Chicago factories that something was desperately wrong with the way society operated and slogged through World War II and didn’t go face down in the post-war dead ass could war night spoke of grit and of a feeling that the gritty would not let you down when the deal went down. When Mister (Peabody, James Crow, Robber Baron you name it) called the bluff and you stood there naked and raw.
Fellow Chicagoan writer Nelson Algren (he of The Man With The Golden Arm and Walk On The Wild Side) put the kind of gals and guys Studs looked around for in gritty urban sinkhole lyrical form but Studs is the guy who found the gritty unwashed masses to sing of. (It is not surprising that when Algren went into decline, wrote less lucid prose Stud grabbed him by the lapels and did a big time boost on one of his endless radio talks to let a candid world know that they missing a guy who know how to give voice to the voiceless, the people with small voices who are still getting the raw end of the deal, getting fucked over if you really want to nitty-gritty truth to power). So check this show out to see what it was like when writers and journalists went down in the mud to get to the spine of society.
Click On Title To Link To Studs Terkel’s Web Page.
BOOK REVIEW
Coming Of Age, Studs Terkel, The New Press, New York, 1995
As I have done on other occasion when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments here, where they are pertinent, as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his “The Good War”: an Oral History of World War II.
Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. In the present case the review of "Coming Of Age" serves a dual purpose- to reflect on the working lives of working people (mainly) after they have made their mark and moved out of the work force and as a reflection of one of Studs’ preoccupations- the fate of his generation- the so-called “greatest generation”.
Probably Terkel’s most famous oral history is his “Working” which chronicles the thoughts of working people and others, circa 1980, about their lives their aspirations and their inspirations. That book was weighted a bit toward the experiences of those who came of age in the Great Depression of the 1930’s , fought World War II and gained a measure of security in the dizziness of the post World War II Cold War. His “The Good War”, of necessity, takes dead aim at that population. Here we have those same recollections (in some case literally as previous interviewees get to have their say once again), circa 1995, from the perspective of “retirement”. Some of the material is interesting but, frankly, as I know from personal experience running through a litany of life’s physical, mental and social ailments gets a little thin on the ground after a while.
Moreover, while I found "Working" to be very interesting as a sociological study and as a means of giving voice to the preoccupations of “working stiffs” this present volume “does not speak to me”. As a member of the generation after the above-mentioned one, "the Generation of ’68", my preoccupations are not the same and so those experiences expressed here of retirement and the “great awakening” do not feel right. In short, this book turns solely as a last homage by Studs to the so-called “greatest generation”, his generation. While I am painfully aware of the shortcomings of my own "Generation of ’68" as a catalyst for social change I have long argued that the World War II generation, my parents’ generation, sold its heritage out for a mess of pottage. So that feeling has to be factored in here, as well.
Studs personal fate as a victim of the “red scare” in the 1950’s is only the most vivid example at hand for my belief that his generation sold out for a security blanket- and not a very good one. The virtual “civil war” between the generations during most of the Vietnam period of the 1960's and beyond (remember those Reagan Democrats of the 1980’s were, for the most part, those self-same ‘greatest generation’ types) graphically speaks to that difference in values. Nevertheless read Studs’ take on his generation's swansong here and read all of Studs’ oral histories, good, bad or indifference to get a snapshot of what America, and Americans liked, disliked or didn’t know a thing about in the 20th century. Kudos, Brother Terkel.
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