American Dreams: Lost and Found
Terkel, Studs
AMERICAN DREAMS: LOST AND FOUND Studs Terkel / Pantheon Books / $14.95 Mark Lilla I've never thought much of "oral history" before. Whenever I've taken a look at anything that claims to belong to...
...Four years later he was followed by Father Domingo Lain who issued a manifesto calling upon Colombians "to prepare themselves for the final struggle...
...Terkel's America is that of John Dos Passos, Ring Lard-ner, and James T. Farrell, not that of of professional voyeurs Robert Alt-man or Pete Seeger...
...On April 10, 1981, there was held the founding meeting of the Institute of Religion and Democracy, an interdenominational organization whose board members include Peter Ber-ger, Carl Henry, Richard Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and Edward Robb...
...Ed Sadlowski, the renegade Chicago union leader who unsuccessfully tried to unseat the corrupt leadership of the United Steel Workers, put it well: "I place my faith in the working stiff, regardless of his hangups...
...The theology of revolution has a distinctly anti-American cast, not least of all because, as Edward Norman has observed, much of what is believed to be characteristic of Latin American liberation theology is the work of North American and other foreign missionaries and priests...
...But that was before the war...
...The exit option warns of trouble as sales dip or membership falls off...
...ISAAC (continued from page 11) The United Church of Christ had the distinction of receiving a $10,000 award from the People's Bicentennial Commission, a radical and bitterly anti-business group formed in opposition to the official bicentennial celebrations...
...The AFSC has not only instituted affirmative action for women and minorities (40 percent women and 20 percent minorities on all staffs and committees), but has mandated "goals" of one "open gay" in each region and five "open gays" in the national office...
...Typically, the United Presbyterian Church has sought to stem the exodus by amending its constitution to require that all property held by individual churches be held in trust for the whole denomination...
...Undaunted, Mr.'Matejkowski did some meticulous market research and found out that he could probably sell his book in paperback...
...But thanks largely to the intellectual transformation of Reinhold Niebuhr, a leading proponent of the Social Gospel, many of its followers overcame their illusions that pacifism was an answer to Hitler, or that the Soviet Union was "the millenial hope of the ages...
...On the subject of black rioting in U.S...
...Precisely because loyalty is in few areas so high as it is toward religious affiliation, one would expect the option of voice to be exercised with particular determination and resourcefulness...
...The more violent the group the greater the injustice from which it must be suffering, and so the more it compels support...
...It was a pleasure to read precisely because it makes no pretense of being "history," and whatever political purposes the author had in choosing the interview subjects are obscured by the diversity of their dreams...
...Since the subject of the interviews is the American dream, a good number of them center on success and failure in business and work...
...A new prayer book and the ordination of women have produced defections by Episcopal churches, and the compulsory appointment of women elders has precipitated defections by Presbyterian churches...
...In many denominations members have voted with their feet, and entire churches have seceded from the central bodies with which they were affiliated...
...There are many perhaps too many, stones about working people who got fed up with their bosses and the conditions under which they worked, and organized a union to protect themselves...
...Indeed, you can see that the same enthusiasm for the American prospect that led men and women to work, invent, and organize earlier in the century makes supply-siders draw curves on napkins today...
...In contradistinction to the possibility of a perfect society held out by Marxism, Niebuhr argued in Moral Man and Immoral Society that a truly moral social order is an impossibility...
...Marx opposed any attempt to describe post-revolutionary society on the grounds that to do so would detract from the revolutionary struggle itself...
...Their conviction has been set aside, and Chavis now heads the Washington office of the Church's Commission for Racial Justice...
...Tiny's a long way of bein' out of the pocket, but just like an ant, I'm wigglin' hard...
...He then lined up a vanity publisher in Chicago, had the book published, and proceeded to sell it, store-to-store, by taking boxes of the books to store managers...
...If the emphasis here has been on Protestant churches rather than on synagogues or the Catholic Church, it is not because Jewish and Catholic leaders have been impervious to revolutionary enthusiasm...
...On the other hand, the newly launched Soviet experiment, with its stated goal of absolute equality and human brotherhood, seemed closer in spirit to the Christian vision of an ideal economic order...
...S.B...
...All novel writing is twenty-five percent what you yourself have seen, envisioned, and seventy-five percent is kielbasa.'' By putting together such a marvelous gallery of Americans and leaving them with their dignity intact, Mr...
...Bur in the case of totalitarian North Korea the Committee professes itself unable to pass judgment, "since the political and legal system, in fact the whole structure, are very different from our own...
...But this self-conception of American churchmen-that their role was to hold American society to its promises- was replaced by one which paralleled the attitude of the German theologians toward the role of the church in the rise of Nazism...
...In fact, a recent National Council of Churches study has revealed that the rank and file of member denominations are more conservative than Protestants of denominations not affiliated with the Council, Catholics, Jews, and those without any religious affiliation...
...Even after time brought knowledge of purges and mass deaths, many in the forefront of the ecumenical movement continued to judge the Soviet Union leniently...
...Few have had it easy...
...In an imperfect world, the choice between the lesser of two evils-the use of force or the victory of Nazism -was clear...
...Vernon Jarrett, columnist for the Chicago Tribune, tells of his black father, a child of an ex-slave who spent his whole life being called "boy," but who lived to see his son get a master's degree in a college auditorium he helped build in 1893...
...Chavis has been speaking all over the United States as co-chairman of the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression...
...Yet this same Committee identifies with and promotes the cause of terrorist groups in Africa, Asia, and Latin America...
...others grew up in the mountains of Appalachia...
...That's my American Dream...
...What the dream means to me is for my children to be able to live anywhere they want to, even be able to come back home where they were born and raised, and get a good job, hold their head high...
...Mat-ejkowski is a 54-year-old patent attorney living in Connecticut who got it into his head he could write fiction...
...This book lets you get away from the ideological fracas and submerge yourself in all the heroism, tragedy, and outright goofiness that is America...
...criminal justice system, an overwhelming 81.5 percent of the rank and file believe that the courts have been insufficiently harsh in dealing with crime...
...And in a perverse way, for groups like the Quakers, violence has become the identifying mark of the worthy cause...
...Rather, they have heightened conviction and lead to redoubling of effort, for they have shown how sorely needed is the "prophetic mission" of the Council...
...This combination of pacifism and anti-capitalism led many Social Gospel advocates to accept isolationism...
...According to Presbyterian theologian Richard Shaull, only at the center of the revolution can man "perceive what God is doing.'' Not surprisingly, this perspective has driven priests literally into the center of the revolution...
...A theology of liberation transforms key symbols like incarnation, revelation, and resurrection, so that they do not refer to a divine event in the past but to political liberation in the present...
...Why should Marxism exert any attraction at all for churchmen when antipathy to religion is one of Marxism's best-known characteristics...
...Catholic priest Camilo Torres declared "only violent revolution could put properly oriented decision-makers into positions of power'' and took to the hills where he and his band met death at the hands of Colombian government forces...
...It was enthusiasm for this country which drove all these people to work and invest to better their condition, and it was enthusiasm (mostly) that made others organize unions or support the New Deal as well...
...Now she can respect herself...
...Stephen Chapman, former staff journalist for the New Republic, conducted a series of interviews with AFSC staff and reported that not once did he ever hear anything critical of a Communist government...
...His novel, "about a twelve-year-old Picasso-like Huck Finn growing up in New England in 1937," was rejected by all the major publishing houses for the peculiar reason that "it stinks...
...Jim Bristol, head of the AFSC Peace Education Program in Southern Africa, professes to disagree with the claim that thoroughgoing change "can be done only by armed violence...
...Terkel's America and the America of President Reagan's inaugural address...
...And then there are the oddballs, the assorted American zanies...
...cities, the National Council in 1969 announced that "there [is] an ethical difference between the violence used by the oppressed and that used by the oppressor.'' Said the Council: "Each use of violence is to be viewed on its own merits...
...And the churches most zealous for revolution today are those which were most active in, support of the Social Gospel: the Methodists, United Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregational-ists (now part of the United Church of Christ...
...Both are necessary, for without the option of exit, voice is not effective...
...Nevertheless, we have seen that this option has been exercised, not merely by those for whom the option is relatively easy (their exit is chronicled in the large numbers of lost members the mainline churches report each year), but in the departure of whole churches made up of those most committed to the traditional rituals, theology, and forms of governance of their churches...
...The answers lie in the political traditions of American Protestantism...
...The United States, by contrast, was condemned for the gap between its ideals and institutions...
...Our strident young conservatives may blanch at American Dreams, but President Reagan would probably love it...
...A steady diet of political reading and writing is bad for the mind-it dulls you, makes you cranky, and lets you forget all the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in "the American dream...
...If there is one thing which characterizes the older people in American Dreams, it is enthusiasm and optimism about the future (an attitude strangely lacking in the spoiled young people interviewed...
...It was bestowed upon the Church for '' evidence likely to lead to the arrest and imprisonment of the chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company...
...But while the roots of the attitudes prevalent in the National Council go back to the Federal Council, there have been important changes since World War II, and especially in the last twenty years...
...The voice option also makes dissatisfaction obvious as complaints are made...
...And of course there is plenty of anti-business sentiment here (which, like it or not, is as American as Wonder Bread...
...But even more influential among American church radicals have been the theologians of what has variously been called "revolution," "hope," and "liberation...
...The list was compiled by yet another United Church of Christ member, the Reverend Ben Chavis, then in jail as one of the Wilmington 10...
...AFSC brochures criticize South Korea for political repression, for limitations on labor unions, and for its economic system...
...But to my surprise, Terkel's book turned out to be a humorous, interesting, and fair snapshot album of 20th-century America...
...You know I'm there...
...This confirms the Christian radical in his faith in the possibility of a post-revolutionary Christian future, and facilitates his interpretation of the traditional Marxist attack on religion as a vilification of churchly establishments that had made their peace with an oppressive order...
...The imprecision of the Marxist vision of the post-revolutionary future is attractive to the churches because it provides a rationale for cooperation with Marxists without committing churchmen to scientific materialism...
...The modern Christian Left combines millenarian temperament with a social and political analysis and action program which is hardly distinguishable from Marxism-Leninism...
...It was with trepidation, then, that I picked up Studs Terkel's American Dreams: Lost and Found, a book of 100 interviews on "the American dream" put together by a man with clear socialist sympathies...
...Niebuhr's growing pessimism, which extended to the possibility of "moral man" as well, led to a growing willingness to confront Nazism with force and to recognize the totalitarian nature of Soviet society...
...They're making it...
...The AFSC is to do business only with those "who share our affirmative action standards...
...By Raz-1937 can now be purchased at your nearest Marshall Field or K-Mart...
...Thus far we have not addressed the most interesting question: Why...
...we're going to march...
...What is more, Niebuhr's justification of the use of violence against Nazism made it easier for these churchmen to draw from their perception of America as a fascist state, a justification for anti-American violence...
...In Exit, Voice and Loyalty, political economist Albert O. Hirschman identifies what he calls an exit option and a voice option for individuals concerned with the deterioration of product or organizational performance...
...Hirschman does not specifically deal with churches, for he recognizes them as institutions where the individual is not likely to exercise the option of exit...
...The Church was promised another $15,000 if Mobil's head should actually go to jail...
...political prisoners based solely on the criterion that if jailed criminals had committed politically motivated crimes, they are political prisoners...
...In the years between World Wars I and II, the Federal Council of Churches-the predecessor of the National Council of Churches-became a center of what was known as the "Social Gospel...
...Why are the massive human rights violations of Marxist regimes exempt from criticism...
...The task for the Christian is to identify with-and to support actively-the oppressed of both the geographical and the metaphorical Third World...
...The Kingdom of God and the Christianization of the social order were to occur through love and not through class warfare...
...In a logical progression, revolutionary change in the United States becomes essential if this country is to be eliminated, in Professor Bennett's words, "as a counterrevolutionary force from the backs of the third world countries.'' The ' 'Third World'' takes on a metaphorical meaning and includes U.S...
...They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European anymore...
...Today, Niebuhr's anti-utopian realism has been swept aside...
...The Maryknoll order in the United States is an outstanding example...
...Even violence is explicitly justified...
...Despite the hardships, millions of immigrants still come to fulfill their dreams...
...Bennett believes not only that "Marxism has been the bearer of a true revolutionary imperative," but that "its anti-religious stance is a judgment upon the churches...
...Not given something because they're black, and not something taken away from them because they're lack...
...The absurdity of this analogy aside, it was nevertheless enhanced when Niemoller and Barth became increasingly and-American...
...I always find it depressing to meet politically minded young people who can't seem to understand how decent everyday people could have been leftists earlier in this century (or, alternatively, how older people can possibly believe that there is economic opportunity here...
...To urge nonviolence "on Third World people or on minority groups at home'' [italics added] is irresponsible...
...Previously, American society had been deeply appreciated by Protestant churchmen-one historian has noted it was their "deep expectations about the special qualities of American society" that had impelled and "allowed them to criticize in the first place...
...When I finished the book, I was struck by the resemblance between Mr...
...This radicalism, abetted by the increased legitimacy of violence, has been based on a burgeoning willingness to believe the worst about the United States...
...The large Ward United Presbyterian Church in Livonia, Michigan, seceded even though it had women elders...
...They live in the store...
...In an homage to liberation theology, the 1968 Uppsala Assembly of the World Council of Churches declared that "at times 'law and order' may be a form of violence" and that the "covert violence of those with power may at times have to be overcome by the overt violence of those who are their victims...
...That fringe groups within the churches should be caught up in the cultural eddies of the broader society is not surprising, but why should the leadership of mainline churches support revolutionary groups...
...In 1979, Dr...
...Yet potentially effective as voice is in the churches, it has thus far not been so, and the silence of most church members has been deafening...
...Although this theology, as historian Guenter Lewy has pointed out, is so ecumenical that it cannot be attributed to specific denominations, its impact has been especially felt in Catholic Latin America, where it has become wedded to Marxism...
...To cite one example: Whereas the National Council has officially denounced the harshness of the U.S...
...There is Wallace Rasmussen, former chairman of Beatrice Foods, who tells how he worked himself up from Depression poverty in Nebraska to the executive suite because "my only ambition in life was to be just a little bit better off the next day than I was the day before...
...It was argued that the difficulty inherent in transforming man and society is so overwhelming, that mistakes are bound to occur...
...But now some of the most distinguished clergy and laymen who have blazed the trail of voice are setting out to blaze a new trail-of voice backed by organization...
...Whenever I've taken a look at anything that claims to belong to this genre it has struck me as a pathetic excuse for proper scholarly history or a pretentious way to package a political tract...
...role in the world...
...It objects to human rights violations only by governments it defines as "right-wing...
...In American Dreams she tells of growing up in Chicago, learning English, taking a job with a cigar maker, and forming a union...
...For Hirschman, ideally, these are mechanisms of recuperation...
...There is Erma "Tiny" Motton, a black mother of five in rural Missouri, who felt so demeaned by welfare that she took two jobs to put herself through high school, then college...
...But to really appreciate this collection the reader must put aside his Manichean razor and just listen to America talking, talking about how American dreams, not fantasies, can come true...
...Barth actually claimed it was a religious duty to support the Vietcong...
...Worse than romanticizing lower-class life, "oral history" can put ordinary working people into an academic zoo and rob them of whatever dignity they may have managed to retain in their struggle to make a better life for themselves and their children...
...Capitalism is contrary to the teaching of Christ that the human personality is sacred, that brotherhood is the proper relationship between men, that cooperation and not greed should guide men's actions, and that social behavior should be guided by "loving service...
...The fundamental tenet of the Quaker American Friends Service Committee denies that "violence can ever be right...
...The American Friends Service Committee suffers from the same curious double vision that impairs the leadership of major denominations...
...Dora Rosensweig was born in a Russian shtetlm 1885 and, when life became unbearable for her parents, was smuggled through Germany and Britain to the United States when she was six years old...
...It might also be noted that not all command posts in Protestantism have fallen...
...The Church had turned over to the Commission documents obtained from an avowedly Communist (white) group in the Union of South Africa allegedly demonstrating that Mobil Oil had supplied fuel to Rhodesia in spite of the trade sanctions then in force...
...The dislike of capitalism and the attraction to Marxism is old-the hatred of the United States is new...
...As for the Catholic Church, it need simply be said that most of its command posts have not yet been captured by radical churchmen...
...In 1978 the United Church of Christ responded to the allegations of then UN Ambassador Andrew Young (himself a United Church of Christ minister) that there were political prisoners in the United States, by producing a list of U.S...
...She was married before World War I, moved by stagecoach to South Dakota when it was still accepting "settlers," and learned to cook and sleep outdoors...
...But given something because they're a man and they deserved it...
...Predictably enough, in John C. Bennett's view, "the dialogue and collaboration between Christians and Marxists in the Third World and especially in Latin America may have a transforming effect on Christian understanding of the U.S...
...If the church takes away our freedom on one issue, they might take it away on another...
...The yearning for social transformation is old-the acceptance of violence is new...
...Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American...
...director of immigration and the son of a Mexican immigrant, put it well: The old dream is still dreamt...
...And this could scarcely be more foreign to most church members...
...Why are such regimes praised, and their support groups given financial aid...
...Robert McAfee Brown took this logic a step beyond the exoneration of violence to an attack on nonviolence, when he averred that although nonviolence can be useful as a technique, it is dangerous as an ideology...
...Journals like the Christian Challenge, the Presbyterian Layman, and the New Oxford Review and individuals like David Jessup have raised their voices in sustained and eloquent condemnation of the radical politics of their churches...
...Such revelations have had little impact on the Council...
...To condemn violence in its conventional sense is to take account only of the symptoms when it is necessary to deal with the cause...
...Capitalism treats people as tools...
...Terkel interviewed many immigrants, some who have just arrived and some who have been here for decades, but all of whom came here because the rest of the world recognizes what we often forget: There is tremendous economic opportunity in America...
...But perhaps the most unlikely supporters of violent- revolution are the peace churches...
...Even peace churches condone violence once the act itself is redefined to include the righteous motives that drive men to violence...
...It looked like a set-up...
...The insistence on violent revolution, however, prevented the majority of Social Gospel leaders from adopting the Marxist critique in toto...
...Capitalism glorifies competition...
...Terkel has done his readers a favor...
...With similar curious judgment, the Committee describes Vietnam as a new society based on "justice and equality...
...its minister Bartlett Hess explained: "It's the principle of freedom we're greatly concerned about...
...Today she lives in a comfortable bungalow in Los Angeles and has a washing machine...
...Sound familiar...
...But he is not going to insist that those who believe differently should adhere to this view: Others, however, and in particular the oppressed who are engaged in the struggle for their own freedom, see violence as the only alternative to continued exploitation and oppression, and whereas I am unable in my own conscience to support that violent struggle, I certainly do not feel that I should argue with them against it, especially when it is my own nation and my own privileged society which is involved in the oppression under which they suffer...
...Matejkowski's secret...
...The vanguard of the Social Gospel opposed violence...
...Fuller, a 79-year-old black businessman, born of a sharecropper, who made and lost a fortune in his lifetime, discourses on the importance of initiative and the way in which welfare can stifle it in young people...
...Leonel Castillo, former U.S...
...Why is this leadership so critical of American economic, social, and political institutions...
...What is refreshing about hearing these people talk is that they don't use the language of the professional or academic socialist-they are merely reacting, sensibly or not, to what they have seen and lived, and most still like America and have faith in its future...
...The witness borne against the Nazis by a courageous band of German theologians-Bon-hoeffer, Niemoller, and Barth-became identical in the minds of some American churchmen with the witness borne by radicals against the policies of the American government...
...Southern Baptists and Lutherans, for example, have remained relatively immune...
...The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around...
...Worse, it can degenerate into the most unseemly kind of academic slumming- the young upper-middle class female graduate student, clad in overalls and babushka, harassing some poor working joe or farmer with a shining new Sony cassette recorder, sticking the microphone into his face and begging that he spill his guts out about the most important and painful moments in his life, but to do it ever so quickly so she can get back to campus and finish her dissertation...
...If the oppressed turn to violence, Christians must support them in that decision...
...But organized Judaism remains relatively impermeable to the allure of radical politics because hostility toward Israel has become a virtual touchstone of the revolutionary passion...
...We're going to tear this system down...
...The very loftiness of Soviet goals was enough to excuse performance...
...The Social Gospel first received prominence within the Federal Council in the Council's 1920 report entitled The Church and Industrial Reconstruction...
...Capitalism produces stunted personalities...
...This sort of thing differs from Communist tracts only in an occasional use of religious phraseology...
...But most rise above their circumstances to become genuine American heroes...
...I do believe something's stirring...
...Terkel interviewed disaffected "community organizers," psycho-babbling residents of Hollywood, an "unemployed humanist,'' and a woman who spent her entire life savings to put out a magazine commemorating the death of Elvis Presley...
...He's still the most reliable guy on the street when push comes to shove...
...And voice has been raised by those congregations which ultimately exited and by those which have remained to work from within...
...The report was a scathing attack on capitalism: Capitalism depends on the conflict between capital and labor...
...His fellow chairman is Angela Davis, most recently candidate for Vice President on the Communist party ticket in the 1980 elections...
...In the words of John C. Bennett, a longtime Social Gospel spokesman: ' 'The forward-looking social activism of the Social Gospel is with us again, but in a much more radical form...
...The intertwining of cultural and religious radicalism is evident among Friends...
...Denouncing the draft at a February 1980 rally of the National March against the Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, Chavis announced, "If we're going to fight, we're going to fight right here in the U.S.," and then promised, "We're going to march...
...In addition, the Social Gospel leaders preferred cooperative ownership of productive resources to centralization and state-controlled public ownership...
...support group for the PLO...
...Many don't make it, of course, either because they haven't got what it takes or they are beaten back by private injustices, misfortune, or their own ignorance...
...My favorite character is Matt Matejkowski...
...blacks, Spanish-Americans, and American Indians as honorary members...
...The Institute will provide the services, information, and resources that will help Christians to make actual the enormous potential for restoration that exists in the voices of millions of Christians...
...Today both men are on different sides of the political spectrum but I don't think they would differ too strongly on what the spirit of this country consists in...
...In fact, the Jewish Reform movement is a member of the Methodist-created Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, despite the fact that its human-rights working group includes the chief U.S...
...Capitalism relies on self-interest and the profit motive...
...By 1978 the United Church of Christ had poured $425,000 from church coffers into the defense of Chavis and his cohorts...
...Though I've never read Terkel's other books of interviews, the manner in which he lets all his subjects reminisce at length makes it evident that he has a better feel for Americans-, and a greater love for them, than others who sell themselves as observers of American culture and history...
...According to one description, in "every part of the world the inner contradictions . . . have given rise to struggles within and against the established order" and that order has reached "the End of the Road...
...The Catholic Church has seen both the radicalism of the Berrigan brothers and the international radicalism of the Maryknoll order...
...You get the impression that, politics apart, Terkel really likes the rhythm of American life, he likes our idiosyncracies and tastes-all rather unusual today...
...What socialism will be we just don't know," said Lenin...
...Some were immigrants who brought union socialism with them from Europe...
...The average person buying a hardcover novel today is either quite rich, doesn't care about money, or is a darn fool...
...A minimum of two "open gays" are required per committee...
...The manifesto, with its dateline "from the mountains," was published in full by the North American Congress on Latin America, one of the recipients of Methodist funds...
...The traditional conflict between Marxism and Christianity is increasingly presented as the fault of the churches...
...Nor surprisingly, the depression of the thirties made that gap seem all the more indefensible...
...The church can then take seceding congregations to court over their buildings and property...
...Man can choose only the relative good-the absolute good is a chimera...
Vol. 14 • May 1981 • No. 5
