Thoughts on Life

A truly great man passes

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• Sunday 2nd November 2008

Studs Terkel died a few days ago at 96.

A pioneer in the field of popular oral histories, his talent for sympathetic listening and patiently interviewing everyone from the great to the completely unknown (especially the unknown) made his many books gems of revelation.

The first book of Terkel’s that I read was the oral history of the 1930′s depression in the U.S., Hard Times. It blew my mind. I vaguely recall my history classes in high school glossing over this period in a matter of minutes; “There was the Roaring Twenties when we had Prohibition, then the Depression when we had breadlines, and then came WWII. Any questions?” Maybe it wasn’t quite that superficial, but it seemed so. And when I dug into Hard Times in college, it rocked me thoroughly.

There was poverty and desperation unknown in American history; people starved to death in the streets while the Republican administration (as bad then as now) proclaimed that unemployed people deserved to die. Vast crowds of jobless people roamed the country via road and rail desperately searching for work. Politically, capitalism was holding on by its fingernails, overseen by FDR and his crew of the best and the brightest.

Terkel’s other fine works cover topics like WWII, race relations in America, work, the American Dream, aging, the death of hope in a Republican world, and his own personal history as an actor, author, DJ, and radical.

A special treat: his own website offers excerpts from the recordings of interviews he used in his books. Real people speaking with depth and conviction about their lives and feelings. Stunning.

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And just to make sure that posterity wasn’t going to be too kind to Terkel, the NY Times kindly went out and found someone to write the revisionist right-wing version of Terkel’s life, citing the menacing liberal attitudes of the interviews as well as Terkel’s creeping Marxist philosophy; apparently he wore something RED every day to show his identification with the working class. Watch out, yo.

I trust Terkel is chuckling into his heavenly martini over this.

On the other hand, the Times ran – a few weeks later – this reminiscence by Adam Cohen.