In the summer of 1962, the Swedish writer Jan Myrdal spent a month in Liuling, China, talking to peasant farmers. Their testimonies were published in English by Pantheon, under the title Report from a Chinese Village. Pantheon’s managing director, André Schiffrin, saw the book as a natural complement to the works of E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and other “bottom-up” historians on his backlist. The same method, he realized, could be used to create “a collective portrait of everyday life” anywhere in the world, even Chicago.
It wasn’t so much the place that interested him as it was a particular resident. At the suggestion of an actress friend who had been a guest on The Studs Terkel Show, a long-running arts program on Chicago’s WFMT, Schiffrin read a few transcripts in the station’s magazine. Struck by the host’s “unique ability to listen to people,” he felt sure he’d found the right person to create an “American equivalent of Myrdal’s work.” Terkel, however, was apprehensive. “I thought he was crazy,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Are you out of your mind?’”
There was definitely a lot more ground to cover. Liuling consisted of 50 families, while Chicago was the second-biggest city in America. Then there was the matter of credentials: Terkel didn’t have any. He nonetheless decided to accept Schiffrin’s “fascinating challenge.” For three months in 1965, Terkel stalked Chicago’s North, South, and West Sides, reel-to-reel tape recorder over his shoulder and microphone in hand. (“There isn’t much East Side,” he noted. “If you head too far that way, you’re swimming in Lake Michigan.”)
His technique, such as it was, involved playing “hunches,” following up on “a tip from an acquaintance,” returning “an indignant phone call” to WFMT. He visited housing projects, penthouse apartments, furnished rooms, and fashionable suburbs, amassing more than a million words, some 100,000 of which became the 1967 book Division Street: America, the first of Terkel’s 11 oral histories. “Although there is a Division Street in Chicago,” he wrote, “the title of this book is metaphorical.”
Division Street is difficult to categorize. Unlike Hard Times and “The Good War,” Terkel’s chronicles of the Great Depression and World War II, it’s not about a specific historical event. And there’s no overarching theme, as with Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. The book is bounded, instead, somewhat arbitrarily, by time and place. Too colloquial to qualify as sociology and not informative enough to pass for journalism, it might best be described as a cross between a W.P.A. project and the Great American Novel.
For three months in 1965, Studs Terkel stalked Chicago’s North, South, and West Sides, reel-to-reel tape recorder over his shoulder and microphone in hand.
The 71 speakers in Division Street were, with a few “noteworthy” exceptions, “ordinary” people. (The quotation marks, in both cases, are Terkel’s.) He called them the “etceteras,” after a line in the 1939 song “Ballad for Americans.” Although every social class is represented, Terkel deliberately excluded “clergymen, college professors, journalists, and writers of any kind,” on the grounds that we already know what they think about everything.
Asking the proverbial “man on the street” to comment on current events is part of every reporter’s job. But Terkel wasn’t interested in sound bites, or in finding representative members of this or that group. “It was simply a case of making conversation,” he wrote. Certain newsworthy subjects naturally came up, without much prompting: urban renewal, automation, the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, fear of nuclear war. Mostly, though, Terkel just let himself be carried along by the speaker’s stream of consciousness.
Division Street might best be described as a cross between a W.P.A. project and the Great American Novel.
“Those Studs interviews, I’ve come to think of them like songs,” says Mary Schmich, a Pulitzer Prize–winning former columnist and author of the foreword to a new edition of the book. “You finish each of those and you feel like you know someone, right? But it’s in an intuitive kind of way. If you actually try to analyze what you know about the person, it’s not a coherent story.”
For Terkel, “the precise fact or the precise date is of small consequence.” Schmich’s friend and fellow Chicago Tribune veteran Melissa Harris respectfully disagrees. “I was like, This is the best thing I’ve ever read,” she says of discovering Division Street, in 2009. “You almost felt like you were there, having a conversation over a dinner table. Then the journalist kicked in: I was like, I have got to know more about these people.”
Harris began by enlisting Schmich in her project. The next step was figuring out the speakers’ real identities, since all but 13 appeared under a pseudonym. Then they drew up a wish list of possible subjects and used ancestry.com to track down any living relatives. Some hung up the phone. Others, Schmich says, “just didn’t want to go there.” But enough people did cooperate that they were able to move forward.
Their new podcast, Division Street Revisited, is a kind of extended epilogue focused on seven speakers from the book: an activist public-school janitor; a closeted gay actor; an anti-war tavern owner; a Native American tradesman; a packinghouse union leader; a mother of 15; and a philanthropist. Instead of the brief encounters we get in the book, Harris and Schmich give us a series of life stories, alternately inspiring and devastating. “We built episodes around themes,” Harris says. “We wanted to be able to answer the question of whether progress had been made—or not.”
So: Has it? Both Harris and Schmich respond with a qualified yes. And they are surely correct about the arc of the last half-century. Lately, though, history seems to have bent in a very different direction. But nothing human was alien to Terkel, certainly nothing American. He captured the country as it was, not as he wished it to be.
The Man Who Knew Everyone
Louis “Studs” Terkel was born in 1912, but the more significant date is 1922, when the family moved from New York to Chicago. His Polish-immigrant parents managed a rooming house not far from “Bughouse Square,” a popular spot for soapbox orators. According to Nels Anderson’s The Hobo, “this area may be described as the rendezvous of the thinker, the dreamer, and the chronic agitator.” Terkel spent many formative hours there, his ears perked. “I doubt whether I learned very much,” he reflected. “One thing I know: I delighted in it.”
Growing up, he pitched in around the family rooming house, or the local Democratic ward, as needed. “There are a number of familiar faces among the voters,” he wrote of Election Day 1930. “That is, they’ve become familiar, having entered the polling place several times this day; having done their duty as Americans, several times.... There are, as I recall, about fifty more votes cast this day than there are on the official lists. How can this be interpreted other than as a tribute to the patriotic fervor of these citizens?”
Terkel attended McKinley High School along with several future witnesses for the Kefauver Committee on Organized Crime. He went on to earn a law degree from the University of Chicago but never practiced. “I realized I wasn’t going to be the great Clarence Darrow, the courtroom advocate for the damned,” he said. “I was only going to be a humdrum malfeaser of torts.... And where’s the limelight in that?”
Terkel captured the country as it was, not as he wished it to be.
He applied to the F.B.I. but was passed over by the bureau, at least in terms of employment. Instead, he joined the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, and then for a short period the Treasury in Washington, D.C., where he got involved in the Workers’ Theatre Movement. Fatefully, he was cast in a Chicago production of Waiting for Lefty along with two other guys named Louis. A nickname was needed, and he happened to be seen reading one of James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan novels. Thus, Studs.
During the late 1940s, Terkel became a familiar voice on local radio, and then a familiar face when, in 1949, a variety-show sketch in which he played the owner of a neighborhood diner was spun off into its own program. The everyday scenarios on Studs’ Place were loosely scripted, but the dialogue was improvised live, a hallmark of what came to be called Chicago-style television. “It was frontier country, you could do anything,” Terkel wrote of the new medium. “The reverse of what TV has become today.”
Although the show was popular with viewers, Studs’ Place was canceled after three years, a casualty of the Hollywood blacklist, along with Terkel’s music column for the Chicago Sun-Times. He often said, “I never met a petition I didn’t like,” and he even had an actual rubber stamp with his signature, though he always denied having been a member of the Communist Party. The evidence is ambiguous, but whatever the case, he would have made a lousy apparatchik.
On Christmas Eve 1952, Terkel was listening to WFMT when he suddenly called the station to ask for a job. Rita Jacobs, WFMT’s co-founder, answered the phone and said she would be glad to hire him but didn’t have any money. “I haven’t any either,” he replied, “so we’re even.” The Studs Terkel Show was broadcast five days a week for the next 45 years. Terkel selected the music himself, mostly opera, jazz, and folk; he didn’t care for rock ’n’ roll.
He interviewed towering figures: Louis Armstrong, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan, Ralph Ellison, Allen Ginsberg, Mahalia Jackson, Buster Keaton, Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Parker, Bertrand Russell, and Gloria Steinem, to name just a few. More than 2,000 of these remarkable recordings have now been digitized, a selection of which can be heard on the Studs Terkel Archive Podcast feed.
Meanwhile, his parallel career as an author continued. Schiffrin, whom he followed to the New Press, usually suggested the general topic for a book. (Working, which has sold more than a million copies, was conceived as a grown-up version of Richard Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?) Terkel would then set off with his Uher 4000 Report. “I am a neo-Cartesian: I tape therefore I am,” he observed. “I am aware of one other: Richard Nixon. Our purposes may differ. But we are kindred spirits in this respect.”
Terkel was once recognized by his own mugger. Not even Mayor Richard J. Daley—“the Big Dumpling,” in Terkel’s phrase—was so reliable a feature of Chicago life. “In a city with a population of three million, Studs must know two million [nine hundred thousand] nine hundred and ninety-nine,” according to Calvin Trillin. “And the only reason he doesn’t know the other one is they’ve never happened to ride the same bus together.” Terkel died in 2008, aged 96. His ashes, mixed with those of his late wife, Ida, were scattered in Bughouse Square.
Terkel was once recognized by his own mugger. Not even Mayor Richard J. Daley—“the Big Dumpling,” in Terkel’s phrase—was so reliable a feature of Chicago life.
Over the decades, Terkel produced what Schiffrin described as “a veritable oral history of America” without ever mastering the basic functions of a tape recorder. And to the end of his life, he bristled at being called an oral historian. “It’s got too much air of academe about it,” he said. The feeling was apparently mutual. “There was a certain amount of scorn” among fellow practitioners “for his informality, for what he did and how he operated,” said one historian, “and a certain amount of grudging respect because he made oral history so popular.”
Terkel’s oral histories, nearly all of which are still in print, are revered by progressives for the same reason they’re often dismissed by conservatives: both camps view his published work as activist in nature. But Terkel’s books have always been more popular than his favored presidential candidates (Henry Wallace, Dennis Kucinich), none of whom managed to win more than 3 percent of the vote. As a propagandist, he was obviously not very effective.
In his review of Division Street for The New York Times, Peter Lyon had it right when he said, “Terkel is pushing no thesis, making no survey, looking for no solutions. He has simply listened to people talk.” And that’s why the book reads like literature. As an Irish waitress whom Terkel interviewed said of Dickens, “When I read about these people, I’ve seen them.... Maybe they wear a different coat. The coat changes, but these people don’t change. You constantly meet these people.”
Terkel, who literally wore his politics on his sleeve in the form of a red-checked shirt, was not shy about his commitments. Yet he never let his concern for humanity get in the way of his curiosity about people. What counted for him was not how many perspectives on an issue were presented, but how many sides of an individual.
Division Street Revisited: Unfinished Stories from the 1960s is available on Apple Podcasts
Ash Carter is a Deputy Editor at Air Mail and a co-author of Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
