For an idea of just what we lost when writer and broadcaster Studs Terkel passed on October 31, leaf through a copy of My American Century (1997), which cherry-picks the best bits from such earlier volumes as The “Good” War, Race, and Hard Times. Better still, pick up the originals, and read those.
Why? Well, Terkel’s talent–whether as a writer, or during his many years in radio–wasn’t so much in what he said, or wrote. His gift wasn’t in making grand pronouncements or connections that ended up saying more about him than his subjects; instead, he was a great listener, always seeming to find the right question, and then having the good sense to get out of the way to see what his subject had to say. And those subjects, from big names like Bob Dylan or Louis Armstrong to others who would otherwise have been lost to history–riveters, sharecroppers, hoboes, office workers, shop girls and others of that ilk–had plenty to say.
History, it’s repeated ad nauseam, is written by the victors. Terkel was more interested, it seemed, in the minutiae of history, the hundreds of thousands of stories that percolated just beneath the surface of the grand narrative that most of us think of when we think, or talk, about “History.” In telling their stories, these individuals have a lot to tell us not only about their own lives, but about ours as well. We can begin to make sense of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the myths we’ve woven as a people (hence the quotation marks: The “Good” War).
Terkel’s willingness to listen to everyday people–perhaps an outgrowth of his earlier involvement in the Federal Writer’s Project, perhaps something just deeply rooted in his personality–would, in turn, allow other writers to take another look at history. I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to say that books like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and others of its ilk would be nearly unthinkable if not for Terkel’s efforts.
Like so much else in American life, history is often politicized, and the word “revisionism” is tossed around like a football when someone tries to bring events, and voices, into the narrative that weren’t there before. Some revisionism is corrosive (Holocaust deniers, for instance); but some revisionism is quite necessary to take into account the parts that were left out, or that someone got utterly wrong, in the first draft (does anyone still believe, for instance, that slavery was a benevolent institution for those enslaved?). Here, at least and at last, we had a revisionist in the latter mold, someone who realized the value, and uncommon-ness, of common people. We haven’t just lost a talented writer, broadcaster, and actor; in a very real sense Studs Terkel tried, I think, to help America make sense of itself.
Postscript: Studs Terkel on the web:
Official Website
Wikipedia Entry
Studs Terkel on Barack Obama, 10/23/2008
BBC News Obituary
Roger Ebert on Studs Terkel