Hope Dies Last

Studs Terkel's Enduring Conversation With America

Web special. Listen to a three-minute excerpt of the unedited Studs Terkel interview.

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In the late seventies, as a teenager growing up in a sheltered suburb of San Francisco, I stumbled upon a paperback that introduced me to people I’d rarely read about. The book’s title, Working (New Press), was inscribed diagonally in bold black letters across a scarlet cover, and inside were interviews with a hundred hardworking people, from a footsore waitress to a gas-meter reader dodging canines. The compassionate interviewer, Louis “Studs” Terkel, somehow got thick-skinned and bristly workers to reveal their inner feelings about their jobs.

Terkel was in his sixties and seemed impossibly old to me then, a relic from the bygone age of Wobblies, the Great Depression, and union battles. Now ninety-four, Studs (his nickname comes from his resemblance to the fictional character Studs Lonigan, from the novels of James T. Farrell) is still working and living in Chicago, near the shore of Lake Michigan. In 2005 he published And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey (New Press), a collection of archival interviews conducted during his forty-five years as a Chicago disc jockey. Just released in paperback, it includes conversations with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, jazz legend Louis Armstrong, and a young Bob Dylan. On his radio show, Terkel mixed jazz, opera, folk, gospel, and blues. He’d become enamored of the blues during the Depression, when he first heard Big Bill Broonzy and other artists who brought the music of the deep South to the cities. Terkel remains partial to Big Bill’s definition of the blues: “Ain’t nothing but a good man feeling bad.”

In the 1960s, calling himself “a guerrilla journalist with a tape recorder,” Terkel began interviewing ordinary people and compiling their stories into books. His first, Division Street: America (New Press), published in 1967, was a groundbreaking look at the lives of Chicagoans, rich and poor, black and white. He followed it with another book in the same format, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (Norton). In 1984 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War (New Press), in which he talked to those who’d participated in World War ii. Terkel often edits out his questions, letting the interviewee do the talking, but his presence can always be felt. Compassionate and curious, he never judges his subjects, which is one reason why people open up to him so readily. He’s proud of helping readers understand the lives of people like waitress Dolores Dante, whom he interviewed for Working. “I’m never going to speak to a waitress again the way I did before,” a reader once told Terkel.

In his 2001 book about death and dying, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (Ballantine Books), he writes of his own experience with death: During the research for that book, Terkel’s wife and companion of sixty years, Ida, died at the age of eighty-seven. Not long afterward, a friend, trying to help Studs get over his grief, told him he should be happy, because he’d had so many good years with her. “Bullshit” was Studs’s response. He is grateful for his time with Ida, he writes, but he doesn’t believe grief should have a timetable.

Circle was published on the eve of Terkel’s ninetieth birthday, and many believed it would be his final book, a fitting coda to a career that had spanned more than half a century. But in 2003 the irrepressible oral historian followed it with Hope Dies Last (New Press), in which he urges readers to “keep the faith in difficult times.” Mixed in among the interviews with ordinary Americans are a few conversations with well-known figures, including folk singers Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, and politicians Tom Hayden and Dennis Kucinich. Whether Terkel is interviewing laborers who weathered the Depression or left-wing activists who are fighting the Bush administration, the central theme of his work is hope. To listen to some of his interviews online, visit www.studsterkel.org.

I met Terkel on a brisk and sunny November afternoon at his home on Chicago’s North Side. He’d recently spent seven weeks in the hospital after a fall that had broken his neck but possibly saved his life: while he’d been hospitalized, doctors had detected a heart condition that was remedied with surgery. He appeared frail due to his recent medical troubles, but his voice remained fierce, and he spoke in staccato bursts about his political and artistic passions. We talked for two and a half hours, at the end of which he offered me “a touch of Scotch.” I offered him a gourmet chocolate bar that I’d brought with me from San Francisco. The chocolate was so tightly wrapped we had trouble opening it. “I can’t open half the things today,” he groused. Sensing another affront to the common man, he added, “It’s deliberate!”

Shapiro: [Setting up the recording equipment.] Have you ever lost an interview because of a technical problem?

Terkel: Sure. I’m known for my ineptitude. That’s the irony of the whole thing: they call me the “master of the tape recorder,” but I haven’t the faintest idea what I’m doing. I’m just learning the electric typewriter. And I don’t know what a computer is. You’ve got neocons and neoliberals: I’m a neo-Neanderthal. But my ingratitude to technology is the real irony, because were it not for technology, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now. Eight weeks ago, at the age of ninety-three, I was in the hospital with a broken neck. While I’m there, my personal doctor and my cardiologist say, “Your whole valve is shot, and you’ve got about three months to live.” I’m ninety-three, so I say, “What the hell. Ninety-three. Let the damned thing ride.” But they say the odds are a little better than they were nine years ago, when I had a quintuple bypass. So I say, “OK, I’ll do it,” because I’m curious. My ego wants to know: what’s the world going to be like? It may be in terrible shape, but I want to be around . . . sort of.

So my ego got the best of me. And the next thing I know I wake up, and they’re pulling me out on a gurney, and the surgeon says, “It’s all over.” I say, “You mean I’m dead?” He says, “No, no, you’ve got about four more years.” Four more years. I’m ninety-three — I don’t need four more years! It sounds so Nixonian: four more years. Two! I’ll settle for two.

The other irony is, the same race — human, that is — that made those machines that extend life also did Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and God knows what else. And the great mind, the great heart of the twentieth century, Albert Einstein, is responsible for this; that’s the greatest irony of all. He found that E = mc squared. Niels Bohr in Denmark took it up, and then Enrico Fermi split the atom, and then it went to J. Robert Oppenheimer in Los Alamos, and then to Paul Tibbetts flying that plane bearing his mother’s name: the Enola Gay. And then Sunday morning, August 6, 1945, a nice, sweet morning in Hiroshima, bang! And three days later, just to prove they were right, bang! Nagasaki. Well, Einstein tore his hair. He’d never dreamed the bomb would be dropped on someplace inhabited. His secretary thought he said, “Oh way.” She was not Jewish. “Oy vey” — that’s what he was saying.

If you drive across the country — I never drove a car in my life, by the way — and pass through, say, Missouri, you see these little hillocks, these little mounds, and they’re missile silos by the hundreds. And you know what’s in each one of them: enough to knock off Nagasaki and Hiroshima put together.

James Cameron — not the director but the journalist — chose the word refugee as the defining word of the last half of the twentieth century. Now, we had that word during the Depression. [Folk singer] Woody Guthrie sang of “Dust Bowl refugees.” But war to us was always elsewhere. We Americans were an exception. In World War II , the Axis and the Allied countries — every one of them was either bombed or occupied. But not the U.S. And then come these loonies in 2001. All fundamentalists are loonies, by the way, whether they be Islamic, Christian, or Judaic; if they have that belief that “my God is it, and no other,” then they’re loonies.

That day, September 11, we saw refugees in Brooks Brothers suits, in Gucci shoes, in fashionable Levi’s. The buildings were all empty. The skies were emptied, and the people went back and forth like the refugees in Bangladesh. My son and I were going to a law firm in Chicago. There were just four of us on the whole floor of the skyscraper where the lawyer had his office; every door of every office was open, and nobody was there. We still haven’t gotten over that. We can’t believe that anyone would dare do this. We do it elsewhere — but that’s another thing entirely, because we’re special people.

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