A Steelworker Speaks
Terkel, Studs
Mike Fitzgerald lives in a two-flat dwelling, somewhere in Cicero, on the outskirts of Chicago. He is 37 years old, works in a steel mill. On occasion his wife, Carol, works as a waitress in a...
...No matter what I do...
...You've used the word "mule" a couple of times now...
...I grabbed his arm and flung him against the wall...
...Something inside him...
...Oh, man...
...How the hell am I gonna hate the colored fella when he's sweatin' and I'm sweatin...
...Mike, I'm old and tired all the time...
...Ever since I can remember...
...He's 25 years old, he's a college graduate...
...He said, "All these dummies...
...I work so damn hard and want to come home and sit down and lie around...
...I wish somebody would explain that to me (laughs) . That's where I couldn't buy Communism...
...If the earth can't swallow you up, all you can do is go around it and look for its mouth...
...All the flag-waving in World War II is coming back to haunt the liberals now, because they did too good a job...
...And you got your nose in a book...
...If he's an 18-, 19-year-old kid and he's using it as a portable bed, God bless him...
...Sighs heavily) Yeah...
...I said, "What's your pleasure...
...He walked away from me...
...This guy who said he was his brother took a swing at me with a garrison belt...
...Sighs heavily) I can't really hate the colored fella that's working with me all day...
...I haven't asked since...
...So this builds up inside you...
...Sports car...
...I went out drinking with one guy, oh, a long time ago, and the bouncer came over...
...It could be midnight, could be ten o'clock, could be nine thirty...
...Potential Einsteins don't have to be white...
...You play with the kids...
...You want to explode, baby...
...What does an actor do when he's got a bad movie...
...And that's the way I felt about it...
...The people in power fear the leisure man...
...To be able to .. . just have the kind of job where...
...I don't even need the alarm clock to get up in the morning...
...Cause I gave him my opinion of college kids...
...Machines can either liberate man or enslave him, because they're pretty neutral...
...This is his time to relax...
...That makes me feel good...
...This was an everyday occurrence...
...Sighs) When you get a little older, you exchange words...
...You could come in dressed however you pleased...
...But I was single then...
...Blow up computers...
...But I'd buy her things again...
...What kind of persons do you call intellectuals...
...That's natural...
...During the weekends you have to take care of the family...
...They might write nice articles in the Times or in the New York Review of Books, but if you actually told them to get a little grease on their hands, they wouldn't...
...Me and the colored fella are working every day, every day, every day...
...He found out they deserted CathoA STEELWORKER SPEAKS licism for Communism...
...He said, "Mike, you're a good worker, but you have a bad attitude...
...Or the guy who is mildly disturbed about pollution doesn't decide to go to General Motors and shit on the guy's desk...
...He just can't be bothered...
...Continuum...
...When Kennedy—I'm talking about John F. Kennedy and I'm not gonna be a hypocrite, the guy was not my idol— when he went to West Virginia, he said it A STEELWORKER SPEAKS was the first time he had ever seen a kid without milk...
...He came over and said something to me again...
...You think Wallace represents democracy...
...If I left work with my hands full of grease, full of dirty paint, if Bobby Kennedy were along the way, and I reached out and he looked at my hand and saw how fuckin' dirty it was, he'd grab it...
...Know what I mean...
...If you stay in that damn cave and you bring up your son in it...
...I wandered all over the country...
...Blow up 18 computers (laughs...
...You worked just enough to get a poke, you know, money in your pocket...
...Very seldom...
...Who's to say...
...You know what I'd like to do for one year...
...He's gone...
...I been to the IWW headquarters...
...There was a college boy working where I work now...
...Let's face it, what McCarthy said about his people is true: "Only the educated will vote for me...
...There was a feeling you had before he even touched you...
...If a carpenter built a cabin for poets, I think the least the poets owe the carpenter is just three or four one-liners on the wall...
...Why all this application shit...
...But they're not...
...When I was single, I used to go into hillbilly bars, get in a lot of brawls...
...There are some people in factories just by force of circumstance...
...That's why it amazed me to find out, years ago—I read Jack London's "Martin Eden" —can you imagine working people at a picnic discussing De Leon and Marx and all that...
...In his forties...
...If you're under 18, you go to an orphan home...
...No, not really...
...Believe me, the only thing that turns me off on Wallace is the black thing...
...He went there also because he wanted to get his son out of the cave...
...I got just outside the door, and one of these guys jumped on me and grabbed me around the neck...
...Let's say a whole building is nothing but red bricks...
...I'll put it this way...
...I'd love to...
...Who do you think has that power today...
...Oh sure...
...I got a thing on the arm here (indicates scar), I got slapped with a bicycle chain...
...Who needs it...
...What led to your interest in reading...
...About 1 percent of the people make decisions, about 5 percent of the people give us our culture and political stand in general...
...I was a zombie...
...I don't know...
...I think I've worked harder than Picasso, and what can I point to...
...For one thing, you're doing this manual labor and you know that technology can do it (laughs...
...I would expect a spit or a sneer...
...Neither statement is true...
...Now he's got all these young kids that he can talk to and he can get a sounding board...
...Hell, no...
...They can go to the moon and do scientific tricks, and yet I still have to go to the steel mill...
...Time, that's the important thing...
...That's the last thing I remember...
...Unless I like the guy and he likes me...
...My arms are tired at 7:30 and they're tired at 3:00.1 hope to God I never get broke in, because I always want my arms to be tired at 7:30 and 3:00 12 (laughs...
...Hell, yes...
...You'd work a week, two weeks...
...They're kind of making him appear stupid, like in the movie Joe...
...Maybe another 15 percent give us our drama, our TV, etcetera...
...Till midnight...
...They're never gonna get at 'em, baby, uh-uh...
...I can stand it Sunday afternoon at three o'clock, when I'm rested, sitting back having a cold beer, and I don't have a hard day's work behind me...
...He tells her, No...
...and he'll say, "No, I drive a truck...
...It's a continuum...
...trails off) I worked on a truck dock one time when I was single...
...Pure loneliness...
...STUDS TERKEL See the people who've got the money...
...laughs) . Uneducated slob...
...Cold beer right away...
...Marijuana...
...I picked up some books on chess one time...
...It's also degrading to say just a laborer...
...You know...
...You can't sock General Motors, you can't sock anybody in Washington, you can't sock a system...
...He didn't know it, but he was about two seconds and two feet away from a hospital...
...Oddly enough, it's the liberals who've brainwashed him...
...I said, "Stay away from me...
...A mule, an old mule...
...I got chewed out by my foreman once...
...How did you take to the reading habit...
...I think they change in smoke-filled rooms...
...Park Avenue...
...What...
...To say a woman is just a housewife is degrading, right...
...That's it...
...That's what the guys at the plant call it—homework (laughs...
...How you gonna pick Wall Street out as the enemy today...
...I know how to play the game, the rudiments of it...
...He did something physical...
...The institutions for children are grab bags...
...I know a guy 57 years old...
...But I gotta get it out...
...Hit it with a hammer...
...A writer can point to a book...
...Do you think I'm going to lift weights in my spare time, loading and unloading 40,000 pounds every day...
...I stood on top of the dock and I told him...
...Yeah...
...How are you gonna get excited when you're tired and want to sit down...
...Depends how it's applied...
...Cause that's when I know that there's a beginning and that there's an end...
...If my kid ever goes to college, I just want him to realize that when I tell him somebody has to do it, I just want him to have a little bit of respect, to realize that his dad is one of those somebodies...
...February in Miami...
...I don't want to go to bed angry...
...Hell, if you whip a damn mule he might kick you...
...Or he got laid or he didn't get laid...
...You could become a fanatic if you had the time...
...If I were to put you in front of a dock and I pulled up a skid in front of you with 50 hundred-pound sacks of potatoes, and there are 50 more skids just like it, and this is what you're gonna do all day, what would you think about—potatoes...
...Yeah, anything, anything...
...So it's the sameness of your work, the routine that makes you feel trapped...
...But if McCarthy were elected president, I woulda' bought a gun...
...A lot of times you'll find out that unions only inform you about issues when elections come up...
...I told him, "I really can't be bothered...
...Live like a college kid...
...The guy that tried to cross over the hill fell down the hill...
...I put on a smile...
...The World War II vet tends to be overwhelmed by the thing...
...I'm sure the guy that discovered fire got burned...
...Who's keeping you doing what you're doing and the guys you work with—not making what they should be making...
...And you do have nuts...
...The hours differ...
...I'd like to sit down and read a book...
...He built it and he was proud of it...
...The most that'll happen there is the bartender will bar us from the tavern...
...I say hello to everybody but my boss...
...What sort of work do you do...
...Manual labor...
...Any way you want...
...That's the difference...
...You put 500 kids together, whattaya got...
...It depends what the guy wants to talk about...
...This was in the '30s, I think...
...I would like to have a place where college kids and steelworkers could come and sit down and talk...
...You get me the guy who can make the black and white workingman stick together, and he's my president...
...The point is: they might have voted for Humphrey, but you'd be surprised how many of them, their hearts, belong to George W. Why do they belong to Wallace...
...Now leave me alone...
...When I come home, know what I do for the first 20 minutes...
...Lake Shore Drive...
...If my kid wants to work in a factory, I am going to kick the hell out of 10 him...
...So from that time on it was labor...
...This country needs somebody like Wallace...
...Or if Leonardo Da Vinci had to draw his anatomical charts thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety, a hundred times a day...
...I lost my job when I punched that foreman off the dock...
...Oh, wow...
...You ever read Ullman's biography of Rimbaud, The Day On Fire...
...Way back in the conversation, you mentioned automation...
...How do you think I feel if I go into a place where, let's say, if I were to quote Walt Whitman's poem—that thing he has about the labor people, how he sees carpenters and he sees blacksmiths...
...That's why most of your weight lifters are office workers (laughs...
...I sure am (laughs...
...He fell only four or five feet, didn't hurt himself...
...I wouldn't be interested in the guy's past...
...Is the work you're doing dangerous, do you have bruises...
...Because my kid's gonna be a thoroughbred...
...After that, they don't get tired any more, until maybe about the last half hour, at the end of the day...
...To me, from the age of 17 going back, it's B.C...
...I was invited by some kid to go on a college campus...
...What do you sense about the guys you work with, their feelings...
...But if I worked a 20-hour week, I could do both...
...God bless her...
...I know a lot more people like that...
...It's now about ten thirty at night...
...I gotta get the inside out...
...She's a hellraiser...
...Deliberately fuck up...
...hired hand...
...I don't own a gun, 'cause if you own a gun, you could shoot somebody (laughs...
...There used to be a pope who had what he called worker priests...
...I'll be goddammed if a computer's gonna eat before I do...
...It amounts to about $10 a week...
...He slapped my friend on the head with a blackjack...
...I want to be able to turn around to somebody and say, "Hey, fuck you...
...Have you noticed the difference between the labor agitator of the '20s as opposed to—let's say, agitator, period...
...The guy made a homosexual advance at me and I stabbed him with a knife...
...I enjoyed boxing, fighting, the whole thing...
...Do you feel you're in a cave right now .. . the work you're doing...
...Somebody's gonna build something...
...Oh, definitely...
...Your whole system is paralyzed and you give all the appearance of death...
...That's one thing you learn when you're raised in institutions...
...And he tells me, too...
...The media then—TV, the press—are putting down guys like you...
...A thing like that I read on the weekend...
...That I'm not brainwashed...
...But if he's an 18- or 19-year-old kid who's using it to go to some radical meeting, then, no...
...Don't you think that would even bore Da Vinci...
...I was going to come out of the service and go into professional boxing...
...We take things off the hook...
...That would've been fun...
...but we stayed till closing time...
...My attitude is that I don't get excited about my job...
...Everybody's jockeying for position...
...Shows black and blue marks, burns) I'm 37 years old...
...He said he was gonna prove me wrong...
...When Roosevelt attacked them they did have the power, they were—I wish there was another word beside reactionary...
...This really pisses me off: why is it when you walk into a place and a guy looks at you and sees you are healthy and can do the work, why should he care whether you're an ex-con, what your politics are, how many other jobs you've had...
...I looked at him...
...That's the difference...
...Laughs) The guy sitting next to me on the bus, too...
...They were praying for a strong wind to blow his house down...
...But I would walk a mile to find out if they left me any money (laughs...
...I came here to work, I didn't come here to crawl...
...Next Sunday...
...They became just as corporate as the corporations they were fighting...
...Seen all of the United States...
...I don't feel like it...
...How do they know that the guy who digs Wallace today doesn't try to resurrect Hitler tomorrow...
...It was summertime...
...Oh yeah...
...He's punching me and I'm punching him, because we actually want to punch somebody else...
...A zombie...
...Living-it up...
...On occasion his wife, Carol, works as a waitress in a neighborhood restaurant...
...I couldn't get mad at him...
...He's got these sideburns...
...And I say, Work...
...I think that's why I didn't even give him my name...
...It's man who has the bias to put a thing one place or another...
...The guy called his brother over...
...And I tell myself, that's why I'm working...
...It's sort of funny, in between I don't even try to think...
...Let me put it this way: I think, God invented the dodo bird...
...Continuum...
...Yet you want your kid to be an effete snob...
...Sometimes I bring my lunch and sometimes I have a couple of beers...
...No, no, no...
...A bum they grab off the street and tell him to tell kids what to do...
...There's an old Arab proverb: the enemy of my enemy is my friend...
...I think I can outwork the average 18-year-old kid...
...Don't form any friendships, because they are too transitory...
...It's a fact that a machine can do the work of a man, otherwise they would not have space probes...
...For the same reason they used to belong to Roosevelt...
...I got a kid three-and-ahalf years old...
...I don't know what happened...
...They actually look at a white guy, sweatin' and bustin' his back just as hard as they are, and yet they still look at that white guy as the white establishment...
...Laborer...
...How old was he when he saw that...
...I got a bad movie every day...
...Not just the United States...
...No thanks...
...This is why even on (muses)— yeah, I guess, sure—on the black thing...
...Otherwise, I like the guy...
...Because the workingman today—in the '20s and '30s, the Marxists glorified the workingman to ridiculous proportions, you know...
...There's an old IWW slogan: Bread and Roses, too...
...To go there to improve his life or somebody else's...
...I have no identity crisis because I couldn't care less...
...I'll put it this way: personal violence, yeah, in a minute...
...Except he had a different past than I did...
...I picked up a full quart of Jim Beam, cracked him in the head with it...
...No, the intellectual wouldn't say that...
...You might as well go back to the cave and stay there...
...They were supposed to go in there to turn the working class toward religion, but they got souped up themselves...
...But he always manages to say something nice about them in some weird magazine...
...You put yourself in their category...
...It's an ingrown clock...
...Huey Long, Gerald L. K. Smith, they were all populists...
...I work in a steel mill...
...Laughs) I have one answer for that guy, Go see Rockefeller...
...jagoff...
...See Harriman...
...I know a guy who's a truck driver...
...The difference is when I was single I could quit, just split...
...Put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off...
...So I find a guy in a tavern...
...If I were building a house and Eugene McCarthy walked by, I don't think I'd look over my shoulder...
...It's hard to take pride This article is part of a forthcoming book by Studs Terkel, copyright © 1972 by Studs Terkel, and to be published by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc...
...The guy comes over and smiles at me...
...They're behind the enemy lines, somewhere in Spain, and she's pregnant...
...manual labor until today...
...But at work, you lose your job...
...I kid around with them...
...I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him...
...That differs...
...Mmm...
...Russia's the same way...
...There's a line in one of Hemingway's books, I think it's from For Whom The Bell Tolls...
...You spoke of tiredness...
...I want my kid to feel comfortable there...
...Yes, sir...
...The whole thing is time...
...I don't think of Monday...
...In a steel mill, forget it...
...You're at the tavern...
...He says, If you die, I die —knowing he's gonna die—But if you go, I go...
...Every time I see a young guy walk by with a shirt and tie and dressed up real sharp, I'm lookin' at my kid, you know...
...How long have you been doing this work...
...It frightens me if it puts me out in the street...
...Now they all had that bad part about them, like either being anti-Semitic or antiblack or what all...
...There's hard work behind it...
...You know what I mean...
...It's one of the studies from Washington...
...I would say he's a populist...
...He just looked at me...
...Well, it's true, isn't it...
...Way back, you spoke of the guys who built the pyramids, not the Pharaohs, but the unknowns...
...Daddy can be a mule (laughs...
...Everybody should have something to point to...
...People will bug you...
...They're pretty well safe from the backlash...
...Laughs) He said, "My pleasure's to kick your ass...
...it starts...
...It isn't that the average working guy is dumb...
...I've been in brawls...
...Cause all day I wanted to tell my foreman...
...Cause I would have to be part of it, you know...
...I hate to make the liberals happy, but the average working guy does not like Nixon, and is a Democrat...
...Mmmm...
...Laughs) It's a sort-of death, more or less...
...The first thing happens: when the arms start moving, the brain stops...
...Do you know the potential...
...If I'd a' been single, I'd a' grabbed his head...
...It's a thing you just get used to...
...It's a whole circle of things...
...They'll be discussing, say, automation...
...I got no use for the black militant who's gonna scream about 300 years of slavery to me while I'm busting my back...
...Not while lifting heavy things...
...No thoughts at all—between 7:30 a.m and 3:00 p.m...
...I say hello to a couple of guys I like...
...I don't do that much reading from Monday through Friday...
...Yes...
...Malcolm X said, "No, they weren't...
...But when I turn on my TV, I see him as a black militant saying, "I'm gonna get all you Hunkies...
...This kid was telling me all this bullshit about violence this and violence that...
...What do you think would happen in this country if, for one year, they experimented and gave everybody a 20-hour week...
...I think he would look at that hand and say: redneck...
...I'd be a damn nut if I wasn't jealous...
...But you can't pay attention to a book...
...Not perpetual sleep...
...What's your feeling when you see a young guy in a sports car go by...
...I don't think Eugene McCarthy would...
...I would like to see a building, say the Empire State, I would like to see one side of it, a foot-long strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names...
...Forget it...
...I'm happy for those old men that the young kids are being radical...
...Don't you think that would even dull Michelangelo's mind...
...Do you talk with some of the guys...
...He'll point out something, say, the value of work as opposed to the value of money...
...He said, "Everybody else reads the sports pages around here...
...Go out drinking with the guys at night...
...Maybe we come to blows...
...I was fascinated, sittin' down, talkin' with this guy, and he was telling me about Spain in the '30s...
...We may live apart, but we have to work together every day...
...Get to know my kids better, my wife better...
...If he creates this thing one day—let's say, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel...
...otherwise she's at home, caring for their two small children, a girl and a boy...
...I'm getting older (laughs...
...I went once to the Playboy Club...
...So just don't bug me (laughs...
...That thing lay in a drawer for two or three weeks because during the week days, you're too tired...
...Do you feel looked down upon by others...
...I think automation can open some of those roads...
...I'm sure the first caveman who went over the hill to see what was on the other side—didn't go there wholly out of curiosity...
...I generally don't bother...
...I work from 7:00 to 3:30...
...You don't see where nothing goes...
...You once used a phrase about your job —"mind-dulling...
...I'm sure they have things that can lay bricks, too...
...There is a productive entanglement that can be used...
...They had four or five old men in that little office...
...When I went into the service, I automatically assumed when a guy came over to me and said something that I ought to punch him in the mouth...
...They take the metal, they wash it, they dip it in a paint solution and we take it off...
...There's one Kennedy I did like...
...A STEELWORKER SPEAKS If you were single, you'd have socked him...
...This is why I'd like a book store, a tavern, and a boxing ring in the back...
...But I don't think they believe it...
...I blew up...
...After work, I usually stop off at the tavern...
...Sure...
...He said, "Mike, you're all wrong...
...The 20-hour week is a possibility today...
...It's how they're gonna use the computer...
...No, not really...
...Imagine a man can live over 40 years and all of a sudden get concerned...
...One of the committees they're always appointing...
...Yes, yes, definitely...
...Can you carry on conversation with the guys while on the job...
...I said, "What do you mean, I read...
...You take a chance with discovery...
...Do you daydream, fantasize...
...I think of the head of the union the way I think of the head of my company...
...It can be done right now...
...No applications, nothing...
...You better believe it...
...There's always dangers...
...That's pretty well the way I feel...
...Oh yes, oh yes...
...Who'll the kids sock then, their fathers...
...This is why I work...
...Whispers) Wow...
...When the intellectuals start running this fucking world—(a long pause)—right now, I think I'm a mule...
...The radical kid in the sports car is the bishop in the limousine, the bishop in robes...
...No, I'm a laborer...
...It depends...
...Unless the guy's a nut...
...There the guys talk about such and such a friend who went out and got drunk the other night...
...The white intellectual I got no use for...
...I grabbed him here (indicates throat) and jiggled his head against the wall quite a few times...
...My fantasy was to get lost, really...
...They don't change by violence...
...And on the boxing squad...
...They're singing about how they love the factory...
...Stay out of my way, that's all...
...You know what I mean...
...No matter how you cut it, it's still togetherness...
...What made you do it...
...If my kid destroyed any one of 'em, I'd spank her...
...Let's say, the workingman who voted for Wallace...
...I'm just like the colored people...
...What do you think of then...
...And there's a difference...
...They would say to me, "What do you do for a living...
...That's stupid...
...You get a synopsis of issues on the news, but you don't have the time to analyze things...
...deliberately, to see if it'll get by, just so I can say I did it...
...He saw a book in my back pocket one time and was amazed...
...Why is it that the Communists always say they're for the workingman, and as soon as they set up a country, you got guys singing to tractors...
...They can give me all the intellectual jazz they want, and I can think about it...
...A lot of them are closed...
...I said, "What do you mean, all these dummies...
...What was it Malcolm X said one time...
...He does work a 20-year-old-guy should be doing...
...What do I think of on a Sunday night...
...You better believe it...
...I put on my hard hat, change into my safety shoes, put my safety glasses on, go to the bonderizer...
...He kind of slid down a little bit...
...I could've told her I'd been in Disneyland...
...You can't take pride anymore...
...I don't even watch the news that much, I watch Jackie Gleason...
...I fought about 70 percent of the guys in my company...
...I want him to be able to quote Walt Whitman, to be proud of it...
...If you're over 21, you go to a state pen...
...Drink beer, read a book...
...When I hear a college kid say, "I'm oppressed," I don't believe him...
...At the time of the first visit, a statuette of Mother and Child was on the floor, head severed from body...
...They are bastards, they are juvenile delinquents, they are half insane...
...That's small, that's very tiny...
...He walked up to me and he said, "You read...
...No trade...
...Why one and not the other...
...I don't care if it's a labor leader or I don't care if it's a politician...
...Unless it's a horny book...
...My arms get tired about the first half hour...
...The liberals, the intellectuals, they always say there are potential Lord Byrons, Walt Whitmans, Roosevelts, Picassos working in construction or steel mills or factories...
...I can remember when I was 15 years old, stabbing a prefect...
...Oh yeah...
...You know what soups me up about Wallace...
...Warm weather, a place to lie in...
...Know what he tells me...
...If McCarthy or anybody like him gets to be president of the United States, then I'd know I'm a mule...
...She said it was none of my business...
...Next day, I seen him at work...
...and He'd say, "Sure...
...I can understand the liberals wanting to move the United States Left, Right, whatever you want to call it...
...This is gonna sound square, but my kid is my freedom...
...At 7:00 A.M...
...It's always the rich white people who are screaming about racism...
...Uh huh...
...The day I get excited about my job is the day I go to a head shrinker...
...They're against Nixon...
...You ever notice it's always: go get the Klansman, go get the Hunkies, go get that Polack...
...You know what I heard from more than one guy at work...
...The foreman came over and he grabbed my shoulder like that, you know, just my shoulder and kind of gave me a shove...
...Otherwise, we'd be back in the cave...
...I told him, you know, about orgies (laughs...
...And that's a big difference, and, baby, I'm gonna buck...
...What would you do if you had a 20-hour work week...
...When I was a young kid, I was strong, hearty, animalistic...
...I think there are people who are schizophrenic, who are terribly sensitive and terribly violent, too, I would like to give that kind of guy the opportunity...
...It's still me and a black guy walking on a picket line, right...
...Robert Kennedy...
...All that hot steel, that heavy steel, and then go to a gym...
...I got pissed off at the kid right away...
...You weren't ambitious...
...Fighting every day is a natural state of affairs in the orphan home...
...I look for any alternative to the ten o'clock news...
...A mistake, mine...
...Who you gonna sock...
...But I want milk for my kids and beer for me...
...This guy does hard work...
...To buy these things...
...Pick it up, put it down, pick it up, put it down...
...Sometimes she says, Daddy, where've you been...
...Maybe the economy a little bit, like things are rough...
...Everything...
...Does it frighten you...
...Wholly separate...
...I would like to have just the black one or the white one or the purple one...
...They want to open it, broaden it, make it more democratic...
...I cannot picture myself singing to a tractor, I just can't (laughs...
...Some guy there, I didn't know him from Adam, he said: "You think you're smart...
...This is the same in every country in the world...
...The difference is he thinks the reason he sweats is because of a white establishment...
...Whereas, (muses...
...See, I could respect a bishop or a priest, who takes all the finery off and lives like a workingman, but I cannot respect that priest who drives by in a limousine and says, Oh you poor, enslaved...
...I've heard Vietnam discussed a few times...
...Why one and not the other...
...I look at that colored television, I look at that hi-fi, I look at that clock on the wall...
...I can go out drinking all night, fall asleep at four, and barn...
...What is this `yes, sir' bullshit...
...I had confidence in my boxing but I didn't think I was that good...
...I think the top 20 percent are scared shitless that there's 80 percent out there that might disagree with them...
...I don't know if they would say that or not, I really don't...
...It'll be, like I say, the intellectuals running the country...
...There are generally two attitudes...
...Or close to any layoff, they talk union...
...Between orphanages, jails, military prisons, etcetera...
...And something else...
...Maybe it's mind-dulling that I do think that way, ever thought of that...
...Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things don't just happen...
...He said: "Whatta ya mean, yeah, yeah, yeah...
...This is, I think, one reason rich kids tend to be fanatic about politics: they have time...
...It's the thing I work on...
...I worked for a trucker one time...
...Just the same way that I want to send my kid to college...
...The work I do is part of a dying kind...
...At least, I could see the truck depart loaded...
...I don't think the average college boy could handle it...
...For one thing, they don't change...
...I mean, you'd never recognize him on the weekend...
...I would be tempted to get in there and kick the carpenter in the ass (laughs) and take the saw away from him...
...All the way through Peking, through Cuba, through South America, through Mexico...
...I'll give you an example...
...The mystics call it the brass bowl...
...Why did you get in those brawls...
...Kids are born innocent of everything but birth...
...Don't you think with that extra 20 hours, people could really expand...
...But what if he had to create this Sistine Chapel a thousand times a year...
...Soon as possible (laughs...
...We're in the same cotton field...
...Don't you think the opportunity is open, it's been passed by, of the black and white workingman working together...
...And I'm impulsive and so's my wife...
...Otherwise life isn't worth a thing...
...in a bridge you're never gonna cross, in a door you're never gonna open...
...My thoughts are: at 3:30, I get off work...
...There is a class of people in this country who are ashamed to turn a hand...
...Why aren't they using that, okay, forced togetherness...
...I just reached my hand up and grabbed his finger and just put it back in his pocket...
...Or singing to steel...
...Where a workingman would not be ashamed to quote Walt Whitman and where a college professor would not be ashamed that he painted his house over the weekend...
...Go to movies...
...Just to cut loose...
...Don't knock a man who's paying somebody else's way through college...
...I know guys that are 50 years old and do my job...
...It doesn't frighten me if it shortens my work week...
...Oh, I argue with my wife a little bit...
...Just a housewife...
...He wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty...
...He was chewing me out...
...I would rather work my ass off for eight hours a day with nobody watching me than work five minutes with a guy watching me...
...Violence In America...
...I grabbed his finger because I'm married...
...This might be the type of Marxist who finds himself uncomfortable among the laboring masses (laughs...
...You know what a prefect is...
...Look...
...It was near closing time and we stayed...
...Are you a professor...
...Laura is three-and-a-half, Danny is about six months...
...He had me in the office...
...I'm looking around for my junior Stalin (laughs), who loves violence and everything...
...Yeah...
...And I got this tiny satisfaction when I loaded a truck...
...You're massproducing things and you never see the end result of it...
...I do the work but I don't say whoopee-doo...
...It always comes back to your work . . Somebody built the pyramids...
...Are you jealous...
...Whatever you got, you want to make it better...
...He said, "What're you, chicken...
...It's a half hour...
...This guy told me he's gone to parties where the average person there would be in advertising or in the media...
...Yeah...
...I want my kid to look at me and say, "Dad, you're a nice guy, but you're a dummy...
...It's hard to correlate being worn out physically with A STEELWORKER SPEAKS mental work...
...So when the guy walked by, he could take his son and say: "See, that's me over there on the 45th floor...
...trails off) . You feel there's another way you could be living, another kind of work you could be doing...
...Maybe if Eugene McCarthy, his type, would stop that kind of shit, who knows...
...It's very funny...
...All I would ask a man is a handshake, see you in the morning...
...Then what do you want...
...We're both working hard...
...We handle manually, I'd say, between 40,000 and 50,000 pounds of steel a day...
...That's the closest guy I can identify with...
...How'd that come about...
...When I was 12 years old, I asked the social worker at the orphanage who my parents were...
...He's met reporters...
...He sent them into the factories in France...
...To tell him that...
...Very seldom politics...
...Most of your day, though, is a blank...
...Yeah, oh yeah...
...Mike Fitzgerald lives in a two-flat dwelling, somewhere in Cicero, on the outskirts of Chicago...
...They could be in cotton fields, they could be in factories...
...When you were a little kid did you have a dream of what you'd like to be...
...Now it's different...
...We could have left, but when you go into a place to have a beer and a guy challenges you—if you expect to go into that place again, you don't leave...
...Fake it...
...I want my kid to be an effete snob...
...But don't touch me, baby, 'cause my name is Prince John Lindsay...
...Strictly muscle work...
...I'm sure guys like Clarence Darrow or Debs or Big Bill Heywood never looked down at working guys...
...And his work is as noble as ours...
...Laura, wow...
...This is why you go to the tavern...
...They were praying for the master to live...
...I saw a picture of him living in a chicken shack...
...But somebody who is visible out there...
...So there has to be another reason...
...Really...
...Turn on TV, get mad at the news (laughs...
...Suppose tomorrow were Monday...
...Yes, I want my signature on 'em, too...
...Or, "I put the steel beam in...
...But when people talk about someone's potential, it's kind of like all roads are open...
...Most people on Wall Street, they're the liberals...
...For all your tiredness, there's this curiosity...
...Let's put it this way...
...Today, they are ridiculing him to the same proportions...
...The athletes are office workers...
...He used to have these little radio chats and used to pick out enemies like Wall Street...
...Back to lunch: you have an hour...
...Oh, you have to...
...He invited me there on a Saturday...
...If you spend 17 years in orphanages, four years in the service, and out of those four years damn near two of them in stockades 16 —and Korea wasn't a picnic—and then you got out and spent a year in the city jail, you've had 22 years of tight control over your life...
...Just knocked the wind out of him and I think maybe put a knot in his head...
...I'm up at six...
...People who are actually afraid—oh shit, I sound like Wallace—people who are actually afraid of democracy...
...One guy says good morning to you and you say good morning...
...That's more important to me...
...I can outpunch him, too...
...I got broke down to a lower grade and lost 25¢ an hour, which is a hell of a lot...
...He traveled all over the world...
...I said: "I'm prepared to jump on you, too...
...I was saying: yeah, yeah, yeah...
...The heaviest thing he wants is what his wife has to tell him...
...My dodo bird...
...They like Agnew a little bit...
...Laughs) I'd like to make my imprint...
...If you can't improve yourself, you improve your posterity...
...You know what I'm thinking about on Sunday night...
...Like an unfinished painting, an unfinished poem...
...You might say I'm broken in...
...But don't hit a man with anything heavy at five o'clock...
...Lord, I wish I could do something else for a living...
...It appears here with the kind permission of Pantheon Books...
...The black intellectual I got no respect for...
...I joined the navy at 17 and ended up in the brig...
...For sure...
...Quite a bit...
...I don't know what they'll feed it (laughs...
...it took him a long time to finish this beautiful work of art...
...It's funny...
...What happens during your lunch break...
...This one foreman I've got, he's a kid...
...A liberal made it, I'm positive of that...
...This college boy wanted to leave...
...20 STUDS TERKEL...
...You fend it off as much as you can with your mouth and when you can't you punch the guy out...
...A little plaque: "Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands...
...And he sees me on TV saying, "I'm gonna kill the niggers and the hippies...
...I was a loner...
...Do you still have that feeling...
...I'd try to find out their first names, their last names, keep the company as small as possible, so I could personalize the whole thing...
...Mm-hmmm (laughs...
...Just to explode...
...I don't know how the damn thing started...
...You blocked it all out...
...I would not walk across the street to find out who my mother and father is...
...But you don't make a country more democratic by hating one class over another...
...I said, "No, I just don't want to be bothered...
...Laughs) I know this is hard to believe—from 400 pounds down to threeand four-pound pieces...
...You try to make it blank...
...Always preaching to me about how you need violence to change the system and all that garbage...
...I said, "I don't beat women, drunks, or fools...
...I don't know who the guy is who said there is nothing sweeter than an unfinished symphony...
...I'd like to run a footrace with him, New York to New York, circular...
...Fitzgerald laughed softly as he nodded toward his three-year-old daughter: "She Doctor Spock'd it...
...Sometimes my wife works on Saturday and I drink beer...
...But they do on a man...
...If you work real hard, you think of a perpetual vacation...
...This is why I honestly believe if Wallace could get that black thing out of his system, the race thing, he'd be fantastic...
...Because that would have been to me a sign that the intellectuals are taking the country over...
...Atomic energy or what all...
...They would look at him as if he was a freak...
...He's tired, that's all...
...Laughs) Wild, sexy broads...
...Let me put it this way: someone who the media hates, who they make fun of...
...Would I think of Monday...
...14 What time do you hit the pad...
...Know what I mean...
...Sometimes my wife wants to do something crazy like play fivehundred rummy or put a puzzle together...
...But during the week days, gee—I just thought about it...
...When you're living on green apples, you want to give your kid red ones whenever you can...
...Nobody ever checks the pedigree on a mule, do they...
...I'd say one out of a hundred will actually get excited about work...
...You know what I mean...
...Working is bad enough, don't try bugging me...
...Now I'm married and I got two kids...
...I'm saying there should be something to drag a guy down to a union hall...
...We went into a hillbilly joint...
...You're either gonna be a champion or end up chasing trolley cars...
...I said, "I don't know what you're talking about...
...O yeah, sure...
...Cold beer...
...Can you picture walking up to a mule and saying, I'd like to know who his granddaddy was...
...He was about to say something and was pointing his finger...
...The intellectual would assume that God in His benevolence to poets (laughs) sprung up the cabin...
...Sometimes, out of pure meanness, when I make something, I put a little dent in it...
...It's the intellectuals' utopia, not mine...
...Maybe the guy who tried to cross the river STUDS TERKEL drowned...
...But this country today, baby, it's waitin'—and not for somebody to crawl out from under a rock...
...For whatever's over the hill, really...
...A STEELWORKER SPEAKS I call him Dan...
...Why isn't somebody making that productive...
...You don't take it out on your wife either...
...What's work to a three-year-old kid...
...Your muscles get used to certain kinds of work...
...He thinks he's better than everybody else...
...I'll read it at work and go home and do my homework (laughs...
...Does anger get you, bitterness...
...Not dumb, tired...
...Today, forget it...
...If I were hiring people to work, I'd try naturally to pay them a decent wage...
...Never about work...
...Picasso can point to a painting...
...The type of person who thinks just because he's got a little bit of education and can use bigger words—Agnew, forgive me (laughs) —because he can quote a little poetry, and I'm not knocking poetry—or he can appear urbane or sophisticated—that he's better than a guy who works with his hands...
...Why did you like him...
...Why can we send a rocket ship that's unmanned and yet send a man in the steel mill to do a mule's work...
...You don't want to sit there and the kid comes up, Daddy, can I go to the park...
...There's nothing automated about it, you just pick it up, put it down...
...About an hour or so...
...During the whole—what do the kids call it, plastic?—setup, I felt uncomfortable...
...To another guy you say fuck you...
...You want to release it there rather than do it at home...
...One word led to another and I lost...
...hillbilly...
...He came over to me—after breaking me down...
...He just missed and hit the wall...
...I'll put it this way: he was a 19-year-old effete snob...
...Not a Muskie, because Muskie is too tied in with the whole Administration thing...
...Somebody has to do it...
...I fantasize about a sexy blonde in Miami who's got my union dues (laughs...
...Leave me alone, I'm doing my work, just stay away from me, just don't give me with-the-hands business...
...Why would you know you're a mule then...
...The difference is that a man goes out and maybe gets smashed...
...When a strike comes, I carry a picket sign, he carries a picket sign...
...No, not really...
...I was putting him on a little, too...
...It's hard to take pride when you work for a large steel company...
...This college boy that was with me, he came nudging STUDS TERKEL my arm, "Mike, let's get out of here...
...Oh man, he could get deep in this junk...
...Split (laughs...
...Laughs) This isn't unusual...
...You want to take your kids out...
...Do you feel these people—the ones you call intellectuals—are looking down at you...
...Sing-songs) Oh whoopdeedoo, I'm at the bonderizer, oh, how I love this heavy steel...
...It's like slavery...
...he's a baby...
...I think they're afraid of the potential Hitters and Stalins that are there, too...
...He goes to plays with his wife, he reads, a real intellectual-type guy...
...You got two choices...
...What are you doing with a book...
...Quickly) No, I'll never be broken in...
...I think what happened was the people who organized the workingman forgot the spirit and paid more attention to the organization...
...You read that little thing: what are you going to do when this computer replaces you...
...You remember when a guy could point to a house he built, tell how many logs he stacked...
...How are you gonna get excited about pulling steel...
...Oh yeah, I fantasize...
...See that one...
...Really...
...You stay there, put up with what you have to...
...Maybe about baseball or something like that...
...It's strange, but it feels good to do a thing like that...
...I just wanted to explode...
...What happens when you get home...
...All of a sudden, they'll say, "What do you do for a living...
...Just for one year...
...I would like to see that whole dichotomy broken down...
...What changed my mind about pro boxing more than anything else was—I seen some kids ring a bell in front of an old man and I seen the old man punching out in the air...
...I said, "What are you worried about...
...Let's face it...
...I like to STUDS TERKEL do something to make it really unique...
...I punch in about ten minutes to seven in the morning...
...Same thing...
...Labor, wandering, yeah...
...You feel, very soon, this work can be done by a machine...
...Hell, yes...
...It doesn't need Wallace, but somebody like him...
...What do you do on weekends...
...I don't really think I could be proud if a contractor built a home for me...
...Out of the orphan home into the service, out of the service in '54...
...Just to show you the difference between rhetoric and what actually happens...
...When I see a black militant with that mental block, I might try for a day or two to break it, but when I can't, I simply say: some fellows at work I can talk to and some I can't...
...Let's face it, if I have a choice of taking my wife and kids to a picnic or going to a college campus, it's gonna be the picnic...
...I told him, "Who the hell are you, Hitler...
...I don't want an autistic child...
...When you're younger, you exchange the blows...
...but I can't...
...I was hoping he'd prove me right (laughs...
...No pretensions...
...If I feel bad, I can't take it out on the kid...
...You mean with a piece of steel...
...But political violence, violence against establishments, institutions, no...
...You feel these possibilities are there...
...I don't call him Mike...
...She wants to stay with him...
...He was GI Joe in 1944 and he can't get it through his head that Vietnam isn't GI Joe...
...If you have to fight the guy, you fight...
...So when we get up there, we could tell Him, "Don't you ever make mistakes...
...I'd like to run a combination book store and tavern (laughs...
...I punched him and knocked him off the dock...
...I want my kid to tell me that he's not gonna be like me...
...I never seen Lindsay in a chicken shack...
...Are you a supervisor...
...What do you think would happen if they would listen to me—assuming I'll be dressed—and I said I like Walt Whitman...
...STUDS TERKEL It's the nonrecognition by other people...
...Don't bother me...
...Well, it's happened to me, so I know what I'm talking about...
...that guy's your friend...
...They had me talk to a head shrinker and he told me that I was lying...
Vol. 19 • January 1972 • No. 1
