When Studs Terkel Spoke Truth To Power In A Sullen World
-A Tribute From NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source”
A link to NPR's Christopher Lydon's Open Source show on the late Studs Terkel:
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.” Maybe I am
off a bit and it was not Studs but if it was not him then it was certainly the
way that he conducted himself in the world, in the attempt to give what Si
Lannon always has called “giving voice to the voiceless,” the small everyday
people who filled Studs’ ears. Spoke that message to a sullen world then, back
in the day when people would queue up to have their say (and mostly although
not always in a civilized manner, especially around race the bedrock on which
America was founded and has not found a way to get away from except to attempt
to flee from it at every opportunity). 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 when
people lusted to work but were unceremoniously shut out that something was
desperately wrong with the way society operated. Then 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, you alone maybe with family but not more, 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 were 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). Check this Open Source
link with Christopher Lydon out to see what it was like when writers and journalists
went down in the mud, went deep into the recesses to get to the spine of
society.
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