Word: terkel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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NONFICTION: Abroad, Paul Fussell American Dreams: Lost and Found. Studs Terkel ∙ China Men. Maxine Hong Kingston ∙ Island Sojourn, Elizabeth Arthur-Lyndon. Merle Miller ∙ The Soul of the Wolf. Michael Fox ∙ Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Ronald Steel
...bitter (a traveling folk singer who says, "All the things I remember have been torn away and replaced with bullshit") to the hopeful (a Black defensive end for the Philadelphia Eagles who can't bring himself to hit the first successful Black quarterback). Just a list of the people Terkel talks to would make an interesting book: the president of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the night watchman who discovered the Watergate break-in, a rebel United Mine Workers leader, a professional wrestling promoter, a retired president of a Chicago bank, an anti-FDR Black, and ex-gun moll...
...gang member, who reformed and eventually became director of a program for ex-offenders. Like many others, he cannot achieve personal satisfaction until he has helped others; he doesn't come off at all preachy, only determined to see that the American Dream is spread as widely as possible. Terkel does have is share of individualists--a race car driver, a libertarian philosopher, a Chicago cop--but he doesn't pretend that the Dream begins and ends with them. For all that the descendants of Jefferson and Thoreau hold sway over popular mythology, the spirit that producer Abolitionism, Populism...
...Terkel revels in giving his readers sudden insights from unexpected sources. An ageing actress who performed in the USO shows in Vietnam asks, "Who wants to die cool? Nobody cool ever changed the world." Or the bitter but successful Mexican businessman who says, "The American Dream, I see now, is governed not by education, opportunity and hard work, but by power and fear. The higher up in the organization you go, the more you have to lose. The dream is not losing." Terkel doesn't capitalize the "d" here as he does elsewhere--this clearly isn't his idea...
...classic tucked away in some country school," she says. "It's funny, poetry has a way of molding people. There's a buried beauty--(suddenly) Gray's 'Elegy' changed my life. Who knows who's buried, who could have been what." The poet is English, but the words animate Terkel's theme: "Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid/Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire." The dream that one nation can kindle the celestial fire dormant in any person is Terkel's American Dream. And for this woman, Studs Terkel, and the reader of his new book, the Dream survives...