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Review by Roger Bishop
How did "real people," not public figures, experience the Great Depression and World War II?
What do people on the street think about race, aging, and other public policy issues?
For 40 years, Studs Terkel has sought the memories, the reflections, the insights of unsung Americans who have important, sometimes extraordinary, tales to tell. These people, like most of us, will not be remembered in history books. Yet their accounts of their lives, through Terkel's "oral history" approach, offer personal and sometimes profoundly moving accounts of what has happened in this century.
As Terkel celebrates his eighty-fifth birthday and his induction this year into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, his publisher has just released an anthology of 45 or so of the best interviews or conversations from his eight previous books or "oral journals" as he calls them. "My American Century" also includes the Terkel introductions for each book, which give us a helpful overview of the primary focus of each one. These range from "Division Street," published in 1967, through "Coming of Age," a national bestseller in 1995. Three of the most absorbing and powerful are "The Good War," about World War II, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, "Hard Times" (1970), about the Depression, and "Working" (1972), in which people discuss what they do for a living. A special bonus is one introduction Terkel wrote for the fiftieth anniversary of "The Grapes of Wrath."
What has Terkel achieved? In a splendid introduction, Robert Coles explains that Terkel "has demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to place us, as it were, to help us locate where we are in our country's (social, economic, political, racial) scheme of things . . ." Coles salutes him as "our foremost documentarian, our leading student of American variousness." For Coles, Terkel is a twentieth-century Henry Mayhew, the mid-eighteenth-century British journalist whose social observation brought London workers and the poor to life.
How does Terkel do it? "I realized quite early in this adventure," he writes, "that interviews, conventionally conducted were meaningless. Conditioned cliches were sure to come. . . . It was simply a case of making conversation. And listening."
On the role of his technical helper: " . . . a tape recorder, with microphone in hand, on the table or the arm of the chair or on the grass, can transform both the visitor and the host. On one occasion, during the play-back, my companion murmured in wonder, 'I never realized I felt that way.' And I was filled with wonder, too."
Terkel makes us keenly aware of the human cost of events and social forces, whether it is victory in war or improvement in working conditions. The experiences related in this book are varied. A World War II veteran reflects on the violence of war; a migrant worker recounts his job's toll on his family; a social activist remembers her experience during the first sit-down strike of 1937; and an African American insurance broker shares his thoughts on race.
Although Terkel offers his own opinions in the introductions, he says that in all his works he has tried for as much balance as possible, "yet 'objectivity,' so often a reprise of the announced idea, of the official truth," has escaped him. "My turf has been the arena of unofficial truth -- of the non-celebrated one on the block who is able to articulate the thoughts of his/her neighbors, inchoate, though deeply felt." We thank Studs Terkel for enlarging our circle of acquaintances and our insights into life in this century.
Roger Bishop is contributing editor to this publication.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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