Studs Terkel
From Philosopedia
(Louis) Studs Terkel (16 May 1912 - 31 October 2008 )
Terkel, a writer, oral historian, interviewer, broadcaster, and actor, was born in New York City but moved with his family to Chicago when he was ten. Samuel, his father, was a tailor. Anna (Finkel), his mother, was a seamstress. They, with their four sons, ran a rooming house, during which time Terkel met many varieties of human beings, the good, the bad, the intriguing.
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Early Life
He received his law degree in 1934 from the University of Chicago, and in 1939 married Ida Goldberg, who died in 1999 but with whom they had one son.
In the 1930's he worked with The Works Progress Administration's Federal Writers' Project, announcing news and sports, writing radio scripts, voicing soap opera productions.
As for his nickname, he was given the name by a director in a play in which he was acting, one in which another actor named Louis appeared. It is taken from the protagonist in James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, a work he was reading at the time.
Between 1952 and 1997, his one-hour Studs Terkel Program aired on 98.7 WFMT Chicago, upon which he interviewed pianist-composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, symphony conductor Alexander Frey, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, journalist Dorothy Parker, dramatist Tennessee Williams, and an estimated 9,000 others from all walks of life. For 40 years, his radio show ran on Radio WFMT, allowing him to interview an estimated 9,000 people. Allen Ginsberg read his entire Howl on one of the shows, a program still available on CD.
Terkel had always been known for signing petitions for causes he likes and against those he does not like, his signature standing out like that of John Hancock's. He has signed petitions for price and rent controls, against Jim Crow laws, against lynching, and for seeking friendship with the Soviet Union instead of spending billions on a cold war between the two nations. For this, his network cancelled his program and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated him. When he refused to cooperate, he was blacklisted from television. Promising to steer clear of political topics, he was employed as a columnist for the Chicago Times.
In 1956, his Giants of Jazz was followed by other books about American history and oral history.
Hard Times, the 1970 work that assembled recollections of the Depression from across a wide spectrum of society, is Terkel's best-known book.
The 1980s and the Pulitzer Prize
In 1985 he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Good War, a controversial work that challenged the view that, unlike the Vietnam War era, World War II was a time when Americans supported the conflict wholeheartedly. The book is an oral history, filled with interviews of individuals who had experienced Pearl Harbor to Victory-in-Europe days. Only a small number of those interviewed claimed they would have been better off without the experience of partaking in a struggle during which 400,000 Americans perished. Excerpts included the following:
- "We were in a tribal sort of situation [in the army], where we could help each other without fear. I realized that it was the absence of phony standards that created the thing I loved about the army."
- "This neighbor told me that what we needed was a damn good war, and we'd solve our agricultural problems. And I said, 'Yes, but I'd hate to pay for it with my son. Which we did.' He weeps. 'It's too much of a price to pay.'"
- "The war was fun for America. I'm not talking about the poor souls who lost sons and daughters. But for the rest of us, the war was a hell of a good time."
- "The war changed our whole idea of how we wanted to live when we got back. We set our sights pretty high. All of us wanted better levels of living."
- "Ours was the only country among the combatants in World War Two that was neither invaded not bombed. Ours were the only cities not blasted to rubble."
- "World War Two has warped our view of how we look at things today. We see things in terms of that war, which in a sense was a good war. But the twisted memory of it encourages the men of my generation to be willing, almost eager, to use military force anywhere in the world."
- "It was one war that many who would have resisted 'your other wars' supported enthusiastically. It was a 'just war,' if there is any such animal. In a time of nuclear weaponry, it is the language of a lunatic."
In 1988, he played the movie role of newspaper reporter Hugh Fullerton in Eight Men Out, a sports film about the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which eight Chicago White Sox baseballers conspired with gamblers to lose the World Series.
Later Life
In 2004, Terkel received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award that honors a member of the newspaper profession as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Colby College.
In August 2005, Terkel underwent successful open-heart surgery. At 93 years old, he was one of the oldest people to undergo this form of surgery and doctors reported his recovery to be remarkable for someone of his advanced age.
On 22 May 2006, Terkel, along with other plaintiffs, filed a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop the telecommunications carrier from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order:
- Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans. When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far.
The suit was dismissed by Judge Matthew F. Kennelly on 26 July 2006, citing a "state secrets privilege" designed to protect national security from being harmed by lawsuits.
Books
- Giants of Jazz - 1956
- Division Street: America by Studs Terkel - 1967
- Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel - 1970
- Working - 1974
- The Good War - 1984
- Chicago - 1986
- The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream - 1988
- Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession - 1992
- Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who’ve Lived It - 1995
- My American Century - 1997
- The Spectator: Talk About Movies and Plays With Those Who Make Them - 1999
- Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith - 2001
- Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times - 2003
- And They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disc Jockey - 2005
- Touch and Go - 2007
Later Life
In 1997 Terkel was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ever controversial, he has attacked the George W. Bush administration, likening its "war on terror" to the war on witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. He laments the "national Alzheimer's disease" in which Americans have forgotten their past history and believe lies told to them by politicians in Washington.
In 1996, Terkel underwent a quadruple-bypass operation, one of the oldest to have had the successful operation. In 2004, he broke his neck when he tripped over a pile of his own books.
"He is physically frail to the point that the last of his beloved Romeo y Julieta cigars has long since been smoked," Robert Chalmers found when interviewing him for The Independenton 21 October 2007. In Terkel's house in Chicago, near the shore of Lake Michigan, Chalmers found that "age has not extinguished his mental alertness or mischievous energy. He is wearing the red-and-white gingham shirt and red cotton socks that have been his uniform since the 1950s. Terkel, who can manage a few steps using a cane, apologises repeatedly for not being strong enough to take me downtown for dry Martinis."
From an early age, Terkel was not turned on by the various organized religions. Asked his religion, he has told secular humanist organizations and members of the Bertrand Russell Society that he has none, that he is an atheist and an admirer of Thomas Paine.
Terkel's wife died in 1999, at which time he reportedly began working on a book about death, eventually called Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.
"It's about life," Terkel said in 2000 when asked about the project. "How can one talk about life without saying sometime it's going to end? It makes the value of life all the more precious."
(See the Times obituary, in which Terkel described his life as "an accretion of accidents"; "Tribute to Studs Terkel, Voice of the Underdog"; and an Economist obituary in which Terkel was described as one who "rarely made time for intellectuals. Their eloquence, he said, came too easy. He preferred the 'inchoate thought' of people who were never heard.
