Word: terkel
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...only thing we have to fear is fear itself) form a personal psychodrama for him. He speaks with the authenticity of a war correspondent who saw men fall and whose vision was permanently altered by the experience. Calling the play "a mural for the theater inspired by Studs Terkel's Hard Times," Miller provides panoramic vignettes of just about everything one has read or heard of the period. The seemingly invincible princes of Wall Street get themselves wiped out overnight and take their suicidal plunges. Angry dairy farmers drown highways in milk. The haggard hour of the breadlines arrives...
...Citizens' Party may become the strongest challenge to the two-party system from the left since the brief challenge of the Populist Party in the 1890's. In fact, author Studs Terkel convened the gathering on a Friday night by saying, "We are all born-again Populists." Much of the rhetoric that weekend recalled the Populists' fight against turn-of-the-century monopoly capitalism. But what really united the 262 delegates gathered to create a new political alternative was a shared belief that the existing political parties are no longer addressing the issues of most concern to Americans...
...Terkel summed up this feeling in his denunciation of the "Republocrat" party he sees dominating contemporary politics. Barry Commoner, the environmentalist-turned-political-activist who received the near unanimous endorsement of the delgates as presidential candidate, put it more plainly when he accepted his nomination: "We are the people who are going to help our fellow Americans smile when they go into the voting booth, instead of holding their nose...
That ambitious statement, greeted by boisterous cheering, climaxed the effort Commoner, Terkel and about 100 others began last August to bring the Citizens' Party into existence. In eight months of hurried preparations, those founders managed to create party organizations in 33 states, and put Commoner on the ballot in four of those states...
Commoner, of course, has a vested interest in making an analogy with a successful political departure, but perhaps Studs Terkel's comparison to the Populist era is more appropriate to the contemporary political scene. Eugene V. Debs, founder of the American Socialist Party, once said during that period, "I would rather vote for what I want and not get it, than vote for what I don't want...