Shapiro: Let’s talk about your literary career, starting with Division Street: America in 1967.

Terkel: Well, way back in 1957 I did a book for children, Giants of Jazz (New Press). But the first of the interview books was Division Street: America.

Shapiro: You went out into the streets and interviewed the common people: not the politicians, not the authors, not the celebrities.

Terkel: That, of course, was the point. You know how that happened? My publisher, André Schiffrin, called me up; he had just finished a book, Report from a Chinese Village, by Jan Myrdal, describing the changes in a small village in China as a result of the Maoist revolution. So André said, “How about you do an American village during its own revolution: the civil-rights movement?” He meant, of course, Chicago. I said, “Are you out of your mind?” But I did it, and it turned out just right. It fell naturally into place.

And then about six months later Schiffrin called and said, “How about a book about the Great Depression? The young know nothing about this.” I said, “Are you out of your mind?” But I did the Depression book. And that’s how it started.

Shapiro: When you started work on Division Street, you were looking for a single street where you could find white and black, rich and poor. Did that street exist?

Terkel: There is a Division Street in Chicago, but I meant the title metaphorically. We’re on Division Street in this country; we’re split.

Shapiro: Are we more divided now than forty years ago?

Terkel: The answer is a paradox, a contradiction. We have more integration to some extent: the new black middle class. But as far as the greater black population, it’s probably worse than ever. The anti-affirmative-action people say to minorities, “You’ve had your chance.” Minorities can go into restaurants that they couldn’t go into before, but they haven’t got the dough to buy a meal. And we know what’s happening in New Orleans, obviously.

But are we more divided? That’s an interesting question. Yes and no. I think of the loneliness, the greed, the overwhelming arrogance of this administration and its stupidity, not knowing when to quit. They’ve won the game. Ninety-five percent of the pie is theirs; but they want a hundred. And that’s where they flopped it up: they didn’t know when to quit.

You wonder: How stupid are the American people? Are my books a hoax? Because the books say there’s a basic decency in the American people, and a basic honesty, and a basic intelligence. Am I wrong? No, because the cards have been stacked against the people from the beginning.

We talk about “assaults” these days. We talk about the “9/11 assault.” The most egregious assault right now is on our intelligence. Public TV is a big offender — look who’s been on there the longest: [conservative commentator] Bill Buckley. And who else has been on? John McLaughlin and Robert Novak and Mort Kondracke [all conservatives].

Shapiro: And meanwhile the liberal Bill Moyers —

Terkel: — was forced out of public tv. They say he’s too biased. And so you have to think that the American people can be pretty stupid. Or is it that we’re suffering from a national Alzheimer’s disease? We cannot remember yesterday, let alone what happened fifty years ago. In the thirties we saw the Great Depression bucked by the New Deal; of course the war played a role, but it was bucked mostly by the New Deal, by the government stepping in benignly. And now we have the catastrophe in New Orleans. Nothing was prepared, and there was no dough because it’s all going to Iraq and the war. The country has been betrayed by politicians ever since Reagan, and certainly with Bill Clinton and the “centrifying” of the Democrats — meaning castrating them. And the castrators are Bill Clinton and [Democratic senators] Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. They’ve got to go. Hope has to come from some candidate who says, “I am for withdrawal from Iraq now. We’ve blown it, and let’s see if we can recover peace and sanity in the world.”

Getting back to the national Alzheimer’s disease: Social Security — privatize it, and half my friends would be buried in potter’s field. If it wasn’t for Social Security, my God, I’d be in trouble, quite frankly. My books do ok, but healthcare costs . . .

Think about this. We are the only industrialized nation in the world that does not have universal healthcare. We are also the only industrialized nation in the world that still has the death penalty. In these two cases, we seem to favor death more than life.

Shapiro: Especially those who say they are “pro-life.”

Terkel: As though we are anti-life. Are they pro-life for the boy who’s in Iraq? Are they pro his life, or do they want to keep on having these kids die?

The big shock for me was Ronald Reagan. It really began with him. What is the first big thing he did after being elected? In 1981 he broke the air-traffic controllers’ strike and blacklisted eleven thousand seasoned air-traffic controllers. That union was the most conservative union in the country. They backed Ronald Reagan 80 percent in the election. Now, what was the issue that caused the strike? They were striking for more psychiatric care, more counseling, because the work would wear them down. They also wanted more r & r. In the hands of one air-traffic controller rest the lives of thousands of passengers each day. In short, they were striking for more passenger safety. So they were striking on behalf of us. And guess what the poll result was: a majority of Americans applauded Reagan for showing up those guys.

So that tells me that we’re a dumb bunch of schmucks here, really, voting against ourselves. Or is there something else? If you’re fed banality and you’re fed trivia and you’re fed all the schlock — the sex and the crime and the overdose of food and everything else — something is bound to happen. It isn’t just people being dumb. The cards are stacked; the dice are loaded.

And yet, despite that, you always have this prescient minority that becomes the majority. The kids who protested the Vietnam War at the beginning had the crap beaten out of them by the jocks. Then the jocks finally discovered, “Hey, they were doing it for me.”

I’ll tell you a story about [peace activist] Dave Dellinger. Remember the Chicago Eight trial, with Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden?

Shapiro: You mean the Chicago Seven?

Terkel: Chicago Eight — the eighth guy was [African American activist] Bobby Seale. The oldest one, the strongest one was Dave Dellinger. He was a conscientious objector from World War ii, and Dave Dellinger’s father was an ultraconservative lawyer in Worcester, Massachusetts. Dave’s father was just destroyed by Dave’s antiwar activities in the sixties. But Dave noticed one thing about his father: The family went out to dinner to celebrate a birthday, and the waitress was nervous and spilled soup on Dave’s mother’s dress. Dave’s father said, “Oh, no, it’s not your fault; it’s my fault.” He wasn’t within a hundred feet of her, but he took the blame. He never abused the people who were serving him. And so at the very end, as Dave’s father was dying, he said, “You know, Dave, about the Vietnam War: I think you were right; you were right all along that the decent thing was to oppose it.” And Dave said, “Dad, I learned about decency from you.”

And that’s the point I’m making in this book on music. Good music, no matter what it is — jazz and spirituals and blues as well as classical — if people hear it, they get it. But if, day after day after day, you hear schlock, it becomes your language.

Shapiro: You’ve called the Bush administration “a burlesque show, but not a funny one.”

Terkel: Well, it is. The burlesque show began with Ronnie Reagan. Not just that he was a class-z actor, but there wasn’t anybody there. His stuff was written out for him on cards. They say, “Oh, he was brilliant.” What was brilliant about him? He read the gags that were given to him. You know he was voted — on the Discovery Channel, by two and a half million people — as the greatest leader we’ve ever had, over Abraham Lincoln! FDR was tenth. Tenth! He was below Oprah Winfrey. There you have it. That tells you right there we can condition people to believe anything.

Shapiro: The thing that strikes me about your work is that you get your subjects to share so much of their intimate life, their history, their feelings, their passions. How do you get people to be so forthcoming?

Terkel: I don’t know. There’s nothing mysterious about it. I spoke earlier of my ineptitude with mechanical things: I can’t drive a car. I can’t ride a bike. And I press the wrong buttons sometimes. I lost an interview with [choreographer] Martha Graham. I lost [English actor] Michael Redgrave. And I almost lost [philosopher] Bertrand Russell during the Cuban Missile Crisis in ’63. If I had lost that one, I would have put my head in the oven.

So I’ll be sitting there, and this person I’m interviewing says, “Hey, the tape recorder’s not working.” At that moment that person feels my equal, certainly; my superior, probably. But most important, that person feels needed. To feel needed is what every person wants, and they feel I need them because I’m inept. And I don’t do this as a gag. You know who Mike Royko was?

Shapiro: Sure, the Chicago columnist.

Terkel: Mike accused me of deliberately doing that. He said, “You son of a bitch, you deliberately . . .” But later on he discovered that I really am inept. He said, “You know what? It’s true. You are hopeless.”

The other thing I do is keep it simple: “What do you do? What is your day like?” Here’s a good example: a gas-meter reader in Working. I ask, “What is the day of a gas-meter reader like?” He says, “Well, it’s dogs and women.” And I say, “Dogs and women?” And then I realize the first is the reality, the second the fantasy. You’ve got to know that. “Well, let’s talk about the dogs first.”

“I don’t care for a pit bull,” he says. “I’ve got my flashlight ready. I don’t mind a wolfhound. It’s those little poodles, those Pekingese pups, I hate them. They gnaw at my legs.”

“Now, what about the women?”

“Oh, nothing’s happened. It’s just sometimes it’s summertime, and it’s hot, and a woman is kind of good-looking, and she’s lying there in the backyard on her stomach on the blanket, and she’s in a bikini. She’s getting the sun on her back, and she’s got the bra unfastened. So what I do is I creep up very slowly, very softly, and when I’m right near her, I holler: ‘Gas man!’ And she turns around. You know what, I’m bawled out an awful lot, but it makes the day go faster.”

A great moment for me was when I was interviewing this woman years ago. The housing projects were still new, and this was an integrated one. Poverty was the only common denominator among the residents. The woman had three little kids and was very pretty. She had bad teeth — no money for the dentist — but pretty. And I got out the mike — the mike wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is today — and the kids were jumping up and down. They’re five, six years old. So I say to the kids, “You be quiet, and I’ll play back your mommy’s voice.” I’m playing back her voice, and she’s listening, and suddenly she says: “Oh, my God, I never knew I felt that way before.” Well, that’s a big moment. That’s what I call a “bingo moment” — for her and for me.

So how do I do it? There is no one way. I sit down with a guy, and he might give me a cup of coffee, and I start talking. I sometimes mention something about myself as I’m talking to them. I’m just a guy who’s asking questions, and they forget about the mike.

Shapiro: You have interviewed celebrities like Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan, and also so many ordinary people. Who has made the greatest impression on you? 

Terkel: There isn’t any one in particular. Well, there was the ex-Klansman C.P. Ellis [who became a civil-rights activist and trade-union organizer]. His growth was phenomenal, his development and his epiphanies. He’s as good as anybody, I would say.

Shapiro: One of my favorite books of yours is Will the Circle Be Unbroken? What did you learn from working on that book about the process of death?

Terkel: I wrote that shortly after my wife died, but I’d started work on the book before she had become ill. I respect those who believe in the hereafter. I envy them. I don’t know if I wish there were a hereafter. I don’t believe there is; I must admit that. I think we’re ashes, and I’ll have my ashes and my wife’s ashes together. Those are her ashes there [pointing to an urn]. I’ll have my sons spread them and mine at Bughouse Square, next to Newberry Library [in Chicago]. And if it violates the ordinance, tough! What are you going to do about it? Dig it up?

I am very moved by people who speak of out-of-body experiences. These are good, decent people, and they may have had some adventure. I had an adventure, quite frankly, when I broke my neck. I was in the hospital for seven weeks, and I had these dreams. To this day I ask my son, “Are you sure such-and-such didn’t happen?” I thought all this was real stuff, but it wasn’t. It was my imagination. So these people who speak of leaving the body — I don’t laugh at them. It’s their belief. If it gives anybody solace, I say let it go. If you say, “Naw, there ain’t no such thing,” you break their hearts, especially people who have had a hard life.

It’s their right; it’s their life. If I want the plug pulled, it’s my right. I’m pro-choice when it comes to death, just as I’m pro-choice when it comes to life. Quite frankly, they’re connected.

So basically that book is about life. I can’t talk about death unless I talk about life. Death is when life comes to an end. Now, we all want to live life. But I would just as soon kick off in a year. Why ninety-four? Winston Churchill is given credit for a lot of quotes, and this is one: “Who would want to live to be ninety? Everybody who’s eighty-nine.” That’s basically true.

Shapiro: Just one last question: Are you still hopeful about this country?

Terkel: You know what, whether I want to be or not, I have to be. It’s as simple as that.

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