Views » April 18, 2006

A Sit-Down with Studs

By Laura S. Washington

I’m not a big believer in the cult of personality. Neither was Jim Weinstein, the founding editor and publisher of this magazine. He was my friend and mentor. But I know Jim will forgive me if, in my inaugural column for In These Times, I tell you a bit about myself. I pen an op-ed column for the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper for the city’s proletariat. You can hear me opining on NPR’s “News and Notes,” hosted by Ed Gordon. At DePaul University, I proudly hold a chair named for the legendary activist journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I teach investigative reporting. My students keep me real.

I follow race and politics passionately. It’s an honor to be invited to share those passions here. Jim would no doubt differ with some of the ideas I’ll bring to these pages, and I hope you will too.

I have burning questions about The American Left. Where is it going? Who is leading it? Who should be? Who would have answers? Studs, of course. Louis “Studs” Terkel, at 93, is as Delphic as ever. We visited on a recent afternoon in the living room of his rambling brick house in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.

On the left, “people are waiting for voices,” Terkel said. Voices for “non-revolutionary change.” Instead, he argued, we get pragmatists. “The most horrendous word possible.” Terkel’s poster boy for pragmatism is U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Terkel dubs Emanuel the “Henry Kissinger of the Democratic Party.”

So Studs, is U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) a pragmatist? “Hillary? Of course. Hillary represents that move to the center. … Do you know when it began? As soon as Bill Clinton OK’d the welfare reform bill. I’m no fan of the Clintons.”

Would you vote for Hillary? “Would I vote for her against the Republicans? Sure. But in other words, I’ll vote for a case of the whooping cough rather than cancer.”

From my perch, a presidential nomination for Clinton seems inevitable. Since 2001, she has raised $33.2 million, reports the Center for Responsive Politics. 

Talk about pragmatism. It turns out that this “liberal” Democrat served on the board of the corporate behemoth Wal-Mart while her husband was the governor of Arkansas, according to the Associated Press.

Terkel says the decline of the left is the Siamese twin of the faltering labor movement. “You cannot separate the destiny of the failed left with the condition of the labor movement,” he says. “Without the labor movement there is no left.”

He does see hope, however, in a “new constituency for labor” in the Third World. And “we do have women, more than ever, and people who were never organized before. Women cleaning the beds. The doormen, janitors.” 

We have forgotten our history. He calls it National Alzheimer’s Disease.

As the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 11 books, Terkel knows something about words. Even our language has moved to the right, he says. Take the word “liberal.” “It’s now a word of disapprobation,” he posits. “Liberal. That guy’s a liberal.’ What was the phrase in the Cold War? ‘Guy’s a commie.’ Or a commie sympathizer. Isn’t that something?” 

“Something called ‘middle class’ took over,” he says. “Suddenly something called ‘working class,’ as a word, disappeared. It was a European word. It was almost a subversive word. If someone said ‘working class,’ you said ‘uh uh, a commie!’ We’re all middle class, whether we got $20,000 a year or $200,000 a year. The labor movement now suffers tremendously, because we’re now middle class.”

Another word, in fact an entire era, has disappeared, Terkel says. “Depression. When I say, ‘Are we going through another Depression?’ people don’t know what I’m talking about. Because the only depression they know is the psychic one … like manic depression.” It’s as if the Depression never happened. Another symptom of our National Alzheimer’s Disease.

Even as he rails against the Bushies, the ex-vaudevillian Terkel performs with style and charm. The day I dropped by, he was adorned, as always, in his trademark red-and-white checkered shirt and red socks.

The indefatigable pontificator broke his neck in a bad fall in 2004. Last year he went under the knife for open heart surgery. But he still enjoys his nip, and has the red cheeks to prove it. His curiosity keeps him going. His upcoming book, a memoir, is fittingly titled Touch and Go.

He’s back in writing shape. He’s learning to use an electric typewriter. For Studs Terkel, Google is the old comic strip.”When I hear ‘Google,’ I think of Barney Google. With the goo-goo-googly eyes.” 

Studs, stay well, and let the goose hang high.

Join Laura Washington and Studs Terkel in Chicago on April 20.

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• Reader Comments

  Well, it sounds like an enjoyable visit, I would certainly have liked to go along, just to check out the viejo wordsmith and hear him out. But when Terkel decries “pragmatists”, what does he mean? Is he referring to those who he believes have capitulated with the Right? Those whose values focus upon reaching goals they believe are realistically attainable, whether they go along with former ideals of the American Left or not?

  Does the American Left have defined set of ideals? Did they formerly? I’m sincerely asking.

  It’s a tough choice, I think. Is the pragmatist more to be respected, or the stalwart idealist? What do you do when the world changes, as it must? Should the ideals change as well, or is that a gesture of surrender?

  Not to throw stones at an old man, of course. You have to admire a guy in his 90s who still has most of his marbles, even if everything he says isn’t crystal clear. Maybe that’s why the author described him as “delphic”: eloquent but ambiguous.

  Posted by Kuya on Apr 19, 2006 at 8:03 AM

  The problem with making it an issue of pragmatism versus idealism is that neither terms on their own will help us build the Left.  If pragmatism is supposed to be a common sense approach to attaining goals, then lets look at what goals we’re accomplishing and if they make sense. 

  If we have leaders who are making decisions in the name of pragmatism, and those decisions help to widen the already enormous gap between the rich and the poor, does that make sense?  If in the name of pragmatism, our leaders say “if I knew then what I know now, I’d never have supported a war with Iraq, but now we’re in there, it’s pragmatic to stay the course”, does that make sense?  Fat chance!  I want to know what goals we’ve attained with this pragmatic approach.

  What passes for common sense these days is going to be our undoing.  Our situation is so distorted due to economic & political inequalities, folks throw their hands up in the air and become downright apocalyptic in their political choices.  And the Right knows how to capitalize on that nihlism.  People have lost faith.

  That’s why the Left has no hope unless it can put forth a vision that speaks to people.  Studs has just a few years on my great Aunt Ruth, and as much as the world may have changed in their lifetime, I think Studs & Aunt Ruth probably have more to offer to building the Left than a think tank full of politicos.  For Aunt Ruth, there is a virtue in caring for somebody when they’re down.  There are those who struggle to make a life, take care of themselves and their families, and there are those who get rich off of other people.  There is no virtue in the greedy and the powerful.  These notions are at the core of what made the Left the common sense choice for my Aunt Ruth during the Depression. 

  We had better listen to and learn from Studs and Aunt Ruth, before it’s too late.  And then we had better organize.

  Posted by jwmc on Apr 20, 2006 at 4:48 PM

  pragmatism

    1. The compromising of one’s ideals to better deal with the specifics of a situation.
    2. The pursuit of practicality over aesthetic qualities; utilitarianism.
    3. A philosophic school linking the meaning of beliefs to the actions of a believer, and the truth of beliefs to success of those actions in securing a believer’s goals.

  The first of these meanings leads to the corruption of principled beliefs, obviously.

  As for the second, I personally find it ultimately unsatisfactory. As Emma Goldman has been so famously paraphrased, “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be a part of your revolution.”

  The third possibly has some merit, with the caveat as expressed by some old German guy, “Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.”  As I like to put it,  “Work towards the best, prepare for the worst.”

  I would like to express my deep love and admiration for America’s chronicler of the working man (and woman).  You’ve created a truly monumental body of work, Studs.  Salud and Solidarity Forever.

  Posted by luminous beauty on Apr 21, 2006 at 3:28 AM

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