THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW
Barsamian, David
THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW by David Barsamian Studs Terkel Louis Terkel, universally known as Studs, was born in the Bronx in 1912. He got his moniker after the title character in James Farrell's...
...It means I'm a nonacademic, really...
...That's a fink...
...I say, "Yes...
...He was depicted in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible...
...But there was a guy in town, a legionnaire, who was a one-man Americanism committee...
...Sy Hersh certainly has done an excellent job...
...Terkel: I improvise...
...Martin wants to talk to you...
...It annoys him that Ashcroft, like Studs himself, graduated from the University of Chicago Law School...
...He says, "Oh, but Miss Jackson," and he's very diffident, "Mr...
...He acted in Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock...
...I find the Chicago Tribune has changed considerably since the Colonel's day [referring to Robert R. McCormick, the newspaper's longtime rightwing owner.] It's still a conservative paper, but I think it's a more honest paper than The New York Times...
...He worked the front desk, and he hung out with the guests...
...I said, "I know your time is limited, Doctor...
...She said, "Is that what I think it is, baby...
...Nothing happened...
...But would I condemn Ralph Nader...
...After Shaw, I think, Mark Twain and Tom Paine...
...So-and-So that if they fire Studs Terkel, to find another Mahalia Jackson...
...Q: If you were able to go back into time, who would you like to interview...
...Terkel: Standards were set thousands and thousands of years ago...
...After his father died, his mother ran a boarding house in the Loop...
...I was an innkeeper's boy...
...He dislikes the Cubs...
...The emperor had no clothes...
...John Ashcroft...
...And she said, "I'll do it on one condition, that Studs is the host ofthe program...
...You know what Red Channels was...
...He got his moniker after the title character in James Farrell's popular Studs Lonigan trilogy of the early 1930s...
...Q: What do you read...
...Q: What about the media...
...He says, "Without laughter we're lost, the laughter of adversity...
...For the work he's done...
...I've interviewed all sorts of artists: opera singers and composers, jazz musicians, and, of course, folk singers...
...he asks...
...It's time we call it quits, time we find a way out...
...I have no idea what that means...
...I'm called an oral historian...
...Q: You're not too thrilled with Kerry...
...Vote for Kerry...
...He's rooting for Oakland and cursing the manager for changing pitchers...
...If Bush is not ousted, then we're in for a huge something or other...
...The media are covering trivia...
...Everything OK...
...You would think that Noam Chomsky is on every night, the way they speak of it...
...That's not a bad trinity...
...It's the joke of jokes, isn't it...
...Q: How did you start doing interviews and oral histories...
...Studs Terkel: Of course, you've got to beat Bush...
...It's called They All Sang: Adventures of an Eclectic Disk Jockey...
...He's got the Cubs game on...
...Vote against Bush...
...He never acknowledged my check...
...All the black people in the country knew it...
...That is, they may go through Mexico into our country...
...One day in June, there's the legend himself bounding out of his house near the lake in Chicago to meet my taxi...
...You know what I attribute that to...
...Never...
...He helped form the Labour Party, which was not the same as the Labour Party of Tony Blair...
...Terkel: A kid named Tom Frank, who just did What's the Matter with Kansas...
...Terkel: I read all kinds of stuff...
...It's going to be a rollercoaster...
...I hope I get to finish it...
...He even had a code name...
...None of the whites knew it...
...Who's that...
...Last year, he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle...
...She gets far more space than Einstein ever did...
...We never heard of Grenada until Ronnie said Grenada was our enemy...
...He never even heard of me...
...It was a lie, and I defy it now...
...Terkel: I got into interviewing accidentally...
...I thought Grenada was the name ofa Spanish song that you heard played at folk festivals by Pete Seeger...
...Young journalists on alternative papers...
...I would play, say, "Umbra mai fu," a Caruso aria from Handel's Xerxes and then go into Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues," and, after that, a Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl ballad...
...Q: What sources of information do you depend on for your news...
...She used to say, "Studs, you've got such a big mouth, you should have been a preacher...
...On the air in Chicago for more than forty-five years on WFMT, he probably holds the record for the number of interviews...
...I realized it was a lie, and I came back against it...
...His latest is Hope Dies Last...
...Reagan warned us that the Sandinistas were a threat to the U.S...
...I watch baseball games a lot, of course...
...We reach the end of the two-hour tape...
...He would write these warning letters to the local women's clubs not to have me...
...He's 300-plus years old...
...He was part of the Salem witch hunt...
...Terkel: George Bernard Shaw, of course...
...As well as an author, Studs is also a radio personality...
...Then Ronald Reagan broke the air controllers' strike of 1981...
...No, I don't...
...Moyers is the one exception, and that's it...
...His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress and factory worker...
...War...
...She says, "OK, let's rehearse...
...His father got a job on the WPA during the Depression...
...I wrote the legionnaire a letter, and I sent him a $10 check with a note saying, "Here's your agent's fee for the extra 100 bucks...
...I hate dogs," he tells me...
...And nobody laughed...
...Nothing...
...Mahalia says, "Look, I've got no time for this...
...She was elegant, aristocratic, old, old money, Brahminesque...
...You tell Mr...
...Take Reagan...
...I don't believe in that...
...He's a big White Sox fan...
...You know the brethren...
...I asked him about the role of laughter...
...If I were in New York or Hollywood, I would have been dead meat...
...I get more out of the Chicago Tribune than I do The New York Times...
...I like Bill Greider...
...The family moved to Chicago around 1920...
...His latest book is a collection of interviews from The Progressive, "Louder Than Bombs...
...He's perhaps the worst President until now we've had, a man who knocked the hell out of the very thing, the New Deal, that saved his ass and that of his father in Dixon, Illinois...
...And four out of five Americans applauded Ronnie...
...At ninety-two, Studs is still a gregarious man, full of life...
...That was his first major act in office...
...When I was a Senator, I believed my President about the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, and I voted for it...
...Q: Do you listen to National Public Radio...
...And all sorts of people were on it: Arthur Miller, Zero Mostel, Lillian Hellman...
...And you know what happened...
...The guy accused her of carrying pornographic material...
...He was president of the Screen Actors Guild at the same time he was informing regularly to the FBI on his own members he considered un-American or subversive...
...No, of course not...
...I'm sorry...
...Wexler is eighty-two...
...Now almost everyone is younger than he is...
...And then there was Grenada...
...Where is me...
...That reminds me of Adolph Menjou, the mustachioed actor who was the leading friendly witness for the HUAC...
...And Shaw wrote some of the best, most witty, most thoughtful plays...
...For example, I never made Red Channels...
...Think of what he did...
...And he misses such great Chicago writers as Nelson Algren and Mike Royko, friends both...
...But he badly misses his late wife, Ida, who died in 1999...
...I don't think he will be that much of a factor in this campaign, quite frankly...
...Q: What are you working on now...
...Terkel: I wrote a letter to The Nation urging Ralph not to run...
...Red Channels was the bible, the scripture, put out by a couple of political thugs, listing people that were considered un-American...
...Terkel: I watch TV...
...Her name was Mahalia Jackson...
...Headquarters, New York, the official word...
...I want to remember you as a guy who saved more lives than probably any other American in the last hundred years...
...I became a disk jockey before the word was used...
...Mahalia always said, "Studs, you're the one who led me to the white world," which, of course, is untrue...
...Studs is the author of more than ten books of oral history, including Working, Hard Times, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good David Barsamian is the director of Alternative Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado...
...And I would play the record of a certain woman I heard sing in the Greater Salem Baptist Church in Chicago...
...So I go over...
...In my books, you can find the astonishing wisdom and eloquence of people who have never spoken of their lives before...
...Terkel, we are doubling your fee from $100 to $200...
...My yea is my yea and my nay is my nay...
...So I played it, and so whites got to know it...
...Q: What other journalists do you admire...
...Terkel: When Mahalia Jackson became internationally known, CBS offered her a network radio program...
...Throw it away...
...There's someone older than me," he says...
...He refers to Haskell Wexler, Academy Award-winning cinematographer and Chicago native, as a kid...
...It was, as Studs recalls, "the not-so-grand Grand Hotel...
...As soon as we finish, he lights it up and then makes himself a martini...
...And when President Kerry is there, as I hope he will be, you will be after him...
...PBS is as much of a joke as Fox...
...I say, "Of course not...
...I ask...
...She knows all about me...
...Throughout the interview he keeps an unlit cigar in his right hand...
...It was an eclectic program with a select following...
...And I was his favorite pigeon...
...And they tremulously agreed...
...You have Britney Spears...
...Terkel: Gore Vidal calls this country the United States of Amnesia...
...He says, "You gotta...
...Terkel: I do and I don't, both...
...Right away, I notice two things: his trademark red socks and two big "Beware of Dog" signs in the windows...
...National Public Radio has gone more and more bland...
...He also was an orator, and just for conversation alone and letter writing, no one came close to him...
...One day Mahalia called and says, "Studs, come on over...
...Women's clubs would hire me to talk about folk music...
...She hears this argument...
...Q: You've talked about this country having a national Alzheimer's disease...
...Q: Tell me about your interview with Martin Luther King Jr...
...Terkel: Mahalia Jackson became his favorite singer...
...I don't hear too well, anyway...
...Just a few weeks before I saw him, he did a reading from Dalton Trumbo, the blacklisted Hollywood writer...
...Terkel: Liberal media...
...Once a week...
...There is an insult going on, an assault on our intelligence that is unprecedented...
...He is the keeper of the city's lore and a raconteur extraordinaire...
...He said, "I read Das Kapital in the original Russian...
...And it's a loyalty oath...
...One of his memorable film roles was in Eight Men Out, the John Sayles classic about the 1919 Black Sox scandal...
...What do you think I did...
...PBS is a joke...
...Terkel has to sign it...
...Q: What do you think about the Ralph Nader candidacy...
...Turns out the signs are there to ward off would-be robbers...
...Ronald Reagan was the first President I know who was an acknowledged fink...
...Q: You've kind ofset the standards in doing interviews...
...He says, "No, no, you go ahead...
...Can you imagine...
...She would have been known anyway...
...I walk gingerly into his house but nary a bark is to be heard...
...I said to him, your job, your destiny, is to be public citizen number one...
...He fell in love with jazz and the theater at an early age...
...He hits me with a fusillade of anecdotes and stories...
...It should be so easy for him to say what is so obvious: When I was a young man, I believed my President, and I went to war in Vietnam...
...I'm with the brethren...
...I don't find my name on it...
...New York parochialism...
...The guy vanished...
...She expressed amazement and asked him what book he was talking about...
...There's no dog...
...He still hits the stage...
...He tells me of a school librarian who was being hassled by a follower of Jerry Falwell...
...And to their everlasting glory, not one canceled...
...Working Studs, by Terkel," he said...
...And that's it...
...Q: When you approach an interview, do you have questions written out...
...During the third week or so of the dress rehearsal, about a half hour before the audience is let in, a guy from CBS in New York comes on the stage with a little piece of paper for me to sign...
...And I felt like a blue-haired dowager who didn't make the Social Register...
...Oh, Studs, this is just a pro forma...
...And she was so infuriated by the letters, she said, "Mr...
...Voices are raised, and Mahalia is on her way to the piano to rehearse...
...I loved this record, "Move On up a Little Higher...
...I believe it more, though I do admit I love Frank Rich of the Times...
...But this one woman I'll never forget...
...And nobody laughed...
...He tells me during the interview that he could go on for as long as I want...
...After the punch line, Studs guffaws and tells me, "That's when I knew I had a bestseller...
...You know I like to talk," he says...
...At that time, they paid me 100 bucks...
...Q: What's your best advice for this November's election...
...Terkel: I don't know what Kerry's doing...
...He's not happy...
...Q: Were you ever blacklisted...
...Are you going to sign it...
...Terkel: I'm working on a book on music...
Vol. 68 • November 2004 • No. 11
