Studs Terkel

You try to fill up your time with trying to think about other things: what you’re going to do on the weekend or about your family. You have to use your imagination. If you don’t have a very good one and you bore easily, you’re in trouble. Just to fill in time, I write real bad poetry or letters to myself and to other people and never mail them. The letters are fantasies, sort of rambling, how I feel, how depressed I am.

Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up.

I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937 — on my one stock investment — because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool’s procedure . . . buying stock in other people’s businesses.

This is human. It happened before. The Spanish, in the Inquisition, under God, destroyed an entire population. What about the Albigenses ? It can happen again. We are all good people, but if we are led a little too far, we are going to believe everything we are told. We are ordinary people, who can also be weapons for evil Hitlers.

It was in ’35 — we had this campaign to raise a million tax dollars. In the town of Phillips, one evening, during a blizzard, I was met by a crowd of miners. They were given the day off and a stake to attend this meeting. They surrounded me and said this tax would cost six hundred of them their jobs. They were busted farmers and fortunately found a job in these Home Stake mines. I went back home feeling worried. But the tax was passed, and not a single miner lost his job.

WHEN TRAMPS and hoboes would come to their door for food, the southern white people would drive them away. But if a Negro come, they will feed him. They’ll even give them money. They’ll ask them: Do you smoke, do you dip snuff? Yes, ma‘am, yes, ma’. They was always nice in a nasty way to Negroes. But their own color, they wouldn’t do that for ’em.

Why did these big wheels kill themselves? They weren’t able to live up to the standards they were accustomed to, and they got ashamed in front of their women. You see, you can tell anybody a lie, and he’ll agree with you. But you start layin’ down the facts of real life, he won’t accept it. The American white man has been superior so long, he can’t figure out why he should come down.

I feel guilty because I think people should do something they really like to do in life. I should do something else, but there is nothing I can do really well. I’m established and make a steady living, so it becomes pretty easy. It’s not very fulfilling . . . but I’m lazy, I admit it. It’s an easier thing to do.

Curiosity never killed this cat’ — that’s what I’d like as my epitaph

I’m sure that in Germany people also took an oath of secrecy. We know what that eventually led to. If it works that way with us, the sanctions for breaking the secrecy are nothing compared to the sanctions there could be if we’re silent.

I don’t think we’re basically a revolutionary country. We have too large a middle class. The middle class tends to be apathetic. An apathetic middle class gives stability to a system. They never get carried away strongly, one way or the other. Maybe we’ll have riots, maybe we’ll have shootings. Maybe we’ll have uprisings as the farmers did in Iowa. But you won’t have revolution.

At a moment in history somebody says, “I was there.” I wasn’t. They were marching down to the Arc de Triomphe and I didn’t know it. All I knew is I wanted some perfume and scarves. I went to the Galerie Lafayette, a great department store. Nobody was on the street. We walked through the store, wearing boots, with the .45s on the hip and wearin’ a helmet. Great. Out from behind the counters came all those little French girls. They followed us: “Ohhh! Marvelous Américain.” We bought scarves and all of a sudden someone said, in broken English, they are firing on the Place de la Concorde. The diehards were in the eaves of the building sniping at the parade. They had to rout ’em out. But I wasn’t there. I didn’t see the parade. I wasn’t on the Place de la Concorde at this marvelous moment in history. I was in the goddamn Galerie Lafayette buying perfume and scarves. Shit.

Nora Watson may have said it most succinctly. “I think most of us are looking for a calling, not a job. Most of us, like the assembly line worker, have jobs that are too small for our spirit. Jobs are not big enough for people.

Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

It was the time of the Oxford Pledge and the movement against Fascism; his temptation to go to Spain as a member of the Lincoln Brigade . . . 'I was an ideal recruit, alone, on the run, searching for something'; a serious affair with a schoolteacher, running away . . . 'This is part of the Depression. You lived in a fear of responsibility for another person. You backed off when someone got close.' . . . I was born out of the Depression. I gave up my illusions. No more Horatio Alger Jr. I had a few bad hours, a few bad years. But I found excitement. It was an awakening.