History’s Inner Life

Studs Terkel was born in New York in 1912 as Fordist industrial production was ascendant in the Midwest. When he was a child his family moved to Chicago, where his parents operated a rooming house that hosted dye-makers, carpenters, chefs, and countless other workers. He attended college and law school at the University of Chicago but had the misfortune of graduating during the Great Depression. This led him to work for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project in radio broadcasting. Terkel’s stint at the New Deal agency led to a career as a radio show host. In that capacity, he interviewed a stunning array of people, from musicians and writers and activists to actors and labor leaders.

A deep concern for labor and civil rights were constants in his radio interviews and books. Terkel was clearly a man of the Left, but if he had any formal political affiliations, he wore them lightly. An FBI investigation file revealed, among other things, his allegiance with anti-fascists and sympathy for refugees from Francisco Franco’s Spain. It also claimed to show him drawing inspiration from the communist Daily Worker, mainly its “racial angle” and its criticism of Winston Churchill. Innocuous though it was, the kind of evidence his FBI file marshaled had real consequences. McCarthyist suppression led to Terkel’s blacklisting from television in the 1950s.

This, however, could not prevent Terkel’s rise in public stature. Over the years he won public acclaim with a series of oral histories, none more notable than The Good War (1984), a history of World War II for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Before that, he took a keen interest in music in Giants of Jazz (1957), unemployment in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), and work in Working. The themes of these books — spanning from racism, class, and culture to war and power — would be touchstones in his long career until his death in 2008 only a few weeks after Lehman Brothers failed and the global financial crisis took millions of people worldwide into the jobless abyss. From the birth of Fordism to the global financial crisis, Terkel’s life — and thus his life’s work — seemed distinctively punctuated by modern US history’s defining social and political upheavals.

Terkel saw clearly how history not only shaped but actually created interior life. This was most evident in grand events — in wars and depressions, public violence and popular politics. But in between those more spectacular affairs were the daily, subdued rituals of necessity and inherited habit that made people who they were: the cleaning, the counting, the welding, the typing, the talking, the praying, the singing, the watching, the laughing, the weeping.

Interior life and thus social consciousness was made by an array of jagged, contradictory components — components that were, as Hall put it, “political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, and sexual.” While his other books were more publicly celebrated, it was Working that showed readers portraits of fragmented and contradictory social selves at a moment when American political and economic life were being fundamentally transformed.

Hurting and Meaning

In his first oral history, Division Street (1967), which centered on Chicago, Terkel described his general approach — or perhaps his lack of a formal one. He did not seek “representative” interviewees or particularly distinguished ones. His subjects were workers and his aim was to crack open the tensions of inner life heaped upon them. He sought out “the ADC [welfare] mother seeking beauty, and the affluent steelworker for whom life’s beauty has fled; the cabdriver finding his lost manhood in the John Birch Society, and the schoolteacher celebrating her humanhood; the Appalachian couple scoring in the big city, and the auto-body shop foreman who refuses to score; the blind woman who sees, and the sighted girl who doesn’t; some going with the grain, others against.” Labor was never just labor. It was laced with cultural meanings and plagued by contradictions.

Terkel’s was an experimental approach that was sensitive to how labor helped make the plural selves of any one person. He could write eloquently in his own right and could elicit unforgettable stories about race, gender, sexuality, work, and meaning without drowning vignettes in heavy-handed conceptual vocabulary. He was fond of invoking Sigmund Freud’s “two prime impulses of man, love and work,” which perhaps explained the brutal despair of his follow-up oral history, Hard Times. Terkel described it as “an attempt to get to the story of the holocaust known as the Great Depression from an improvised battalion of survivors.”

Terkel introduced something he called “the hurts” in Division Street, but it was through the Great Depression that he plumbed its depths. The hurts were the daily humiliations and indignities that workers experienced — not only because of uniquely depraved bosses but because this was just what work was for so many people. Sharon Atkins, a receptionist, did not need a bad boss. The job was bad enough: “You know you’re not doing anything, not doing a hell of a lot for anyone. Your job doesn’t mean anything. Because you’re just a little machine. A monkey could do what I do.” “Until recently,” she confessed to Terkel, “I’d cry in the morning. I didn’t want to get up. I’d dread Fridays because Monday was always looming over me.”

Working did not uniformly show work in bad light. There were the expected enthusiasms, and some more surprising ones. There’s the actor who described his work as meaningful when strangers told him how much his work moved them. There’s the jazz musician who rhapsodized: “I live in absolute freedom. I do what I do because I want to do it.” And there’s even a former bookkeeper turned garbage man who insisted: “I don’t look down on my job in any way. I couldn’t say I despise myself for doing it. I feel better at it than I did at the office. I’m more free. And, yeah — it’s meaningful to society.”

“Meaning” was a consistent appeal for those who looked positively on their work. For many, it denoted usefulness, personal fulfillment, or often both. Ruth Lindstrom was nearly eighty years old when Terkel interviewed her. She was a “baby nurse” for both poor and wealthy families. The affection she developed for babies was unmistakably important to her, but Lindstrom had a general attitude toward work that did not depend on bonding with children. Being useful gave her life meaning: “I’m never gonna retire. What for? As long as I can be useful and needed someplace, I’ll work.” Other encounters with work proved more complicated. Rose Hoffman loved being a public school teacher. She loved how disciplined and organized teaching made her. But her racism was easily discernible when she spoke of the growing number of Puerto Ricans who “watch their kids eat free breakfasts and lunches. There isn’t any shame.” By contrast, she “loved the Polish people. They were hard-working.”

One stonemason Terkel spoke to lamented how technology had degraded his work and how material quality had deteriorated over time. He nevertheless took immense pride in his profession, which had such a deep past. His work, and thus his life, could leave something for the future and leave its mark on history. “My work, I can see what I did the first day I started. All my work is set right out there in the open and I can look at it as I go by. It’s something I can see the rest of my life,” he reflected. “Immortality as far as we’re concerned.”

But work was more often the source of resentments, indignities, humiliations, and oppression. Unlike the concise and only sometimes personal prefaces to Terkel’s first two oral history collections, Working’s introduction is sprawling, at times intensely emotional, and constantly self-reflective without being self-indulgent. That the book was published amid the 1973–1975 recession added to its poignancy and its remarkable clarity in appreciating both the value of work and its colossal hurt.

Working the Crisis

The late 1960s through the 1970s saw a genuine crisis of capitalism. Inflation hurt the owners of capital, who saw its value drop precipitously. International competition pressed on profits, and so did worker militancy, as strike rates rose and stayed elevated. Unemployment coupled with newly acquired social rights, stoking already-roiling social upheaval as activists’ radicalism intensified. Inflationary oil shocks, global crop failures, and investor runs on the dollar compounded social problems. The whole social-political order seemed at risk.

But profits would soon recover in the 1980s and order would be restored — or at least order of a particular kind. Central bank interest rate spikes induced a steep recession in the early 1980s. An all-out assault on fragile labor law achievements reached a turning point when Reagan fired and replaced striking air traffic controllers. This decimation of organized labor’s power would be the basis for capital’s recovery. The long downturn was for labor, not capital.

Amid this calamity, Terkel wrote memorably about workers’ search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread.” But more telling are the book’s opening sentences: “This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is,” he confessed, “above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations.”

Through Terkel, the static popular image of “the working class” was rendered into a moving, breathing, living creature. His world of workers included receptionists, farmworkers, prostitutes, writers, actors, airline stewardesses, janitors, domestic workers, stockbrokers, cops, teachers, nurses, and gravediggers. They were men and women, young and old, who loved and loathed work, whose work made the world and whose work made them who they were. For Terkel, it was not nearly enough to explore the diversity of the working class. Through their own stories, he discovered the plurality of selves that constituted any one worker.

Consider Jim Grayson, a black spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago. “There’s no let up, the line is always running,” he said. “A lot of guys who’ve been in jail,” he laughed, “they say you don’t work as hard in jail.” Grayson had utter contempt for foremen, whom he described as ignorant and incompetent. The plant’s production of cars was workers’ doing, a triumph over the idiocy of management.

He told the story of a worker hurting himself with a welding gun: “Blood was oozing out,” Grayson explained. “The foreman didn’t say anything. He just turned the line on. You’re nothing to any of them. That’s why I hate the place.” Grayson recalled another incident in which his foreman scolded him to put his safety glasses back on when he briefly removed them “just to wipe my forehead.” He did not take the rebuke kindly: “I grabbed him, shook him a little bit.” Grayson went off to lunch and was supposed to be fired upon his return but for a wildcat strike: “These guys that had worked with me, they didn’t like it. So they sat down for a while. . . . They refused to work for about twenty minutes.” He kept his job.

In one sense, Grayson was a classic proletarian, ruled over by callous management in a workforce that was, in his words, “increasingly young and increasingly black,” like Grayson himself. He hated the work. He hated his boss. He found support from his fellow union workers. But that wasn’t enough. Grayson was also enrolled part-time at Roosevelt University where he studied business administration and nurtured his dream of a career in corporate law. “There’s no time for the human side in this work,” he said of the assembly line. “I have other aims. It would be different in an office, in a bank. Any type of job where people would proceed at their own pace.” When a fellow assembly line worker told him he hoped to rise to be a utility man, Grayson responded, “Well, that’s a hell of an ambition. That’s like the difference between the gravedigger and the one who brings the coffin down.” Black, young, proletarian, unionist. . . and aspirant to the business class. These were but some of the fragments that made up his composite consciousness.

In the context of industrial crisis, Grayson’s ambitions were understandable. While workers continued to strike at high rates throughout the 1970s, the ground was shifting under their feet. Years of capital flight to anti-union shops in the South and abroad was draining organized labor’s lifeblood. Gary Bryner, president of UAW Local 1112 at Lordstown, explained to Terkel how much everything had changed from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. “There was a lot of employment then. Now there isn’t. The turnover is almost nil. People get a job, they keep it, because there’s no place else.” “The way they treated us — management made more union people in 1966 and 1967 than the union could ever have thought of making.” Before, General Motors made cars and union people. Now they made life rafts in a storm.

Terkel captured how material transformations remade psyches, families, and freedom, though never in a direct way. Through Terkel’s stories one could see how the terrain of ideological struggle had shifted dramatically. New outbursts of emancipatory politics from feminist and black civil rights movements combined and clashed with shop-floor politics to produce new ruptures. Amid all that, there was a fragile joy in the assertion of workplace freedom. “I feel good all around when I’m able to stand up and speak for another guy’s rights. That’s how I got involved in this whole stinkin’ mess. Fighting every day of my life. And I enjoy it,” Bryner exclaimed.

The contradictions of that fight unfolded endlessly. For example, Bryner’s notion of freedom was itself imbued with changing normative assumptions about gender and the family. “Fathers used to show their manliness by being able to work hard and have big strong muscles and that kind of bullshitting story,” he argued. But, in his view, workers now found strength in something else: “There’s some manliness to being able to stand up to the giant,” Bryner explained. “There’s a substantial number of people that are Vietnam war vets. They don’t come back home wanting to take bullshit from foremen who haven’t seen as much of the world as he has, who hasn’t seen the hardships.” Fatherhood and combat experience hardened men; it made them willing to take on giants daily to assert the freedom that defined their manhood.

But Bryner’s thinking took yet more winding turns. Deindustrialization occurred amid the increased entry of women into the workforce, which, in Bryner’s rendering, enhanced and reshaped worker freedom. “In ’66 and ’67 the jobs were so physically demanding that a woman couldn’t have done them. They had to be made more normal. I think,” he said, “women really helped our union.” In talking with Terkel, Bryner was speaking through his own contradictory views of work and family and freedom. Those same stubborn ideas about men and women — those grand monuments to patriarchy battered but not broken by the storms of women’s liberation — were the very assumptions that made him embrace women’s entry into the industrial workplace and their role in advancing workers’ freedom.

The details of his thinking were topsy-turvy, but there was a clear throughline in Bryner’s idea of freedom. Ultimately, its substance was about the ability of workers to resist doing exactly as they were told. “If the guys didn’t stand up and fight, they’d become robots,” Bryner explained to Terkel. And part of being free was having the freedom to be an imperfect employee — occasionally lazy, occasionally rebellious, occasionally playful — not predictable or mechanical. Workers, Bryner insisted, were “interested in being able to smoke a cigarette, bullshit a little bit with the guy next to ’em, open a book, look at something, just daydream if nothing else. You can’t do that if you become a machine.”

The Social Life of Class Consciousness

Terkel’s project was a paradoxical challenge to the flat observation — incurious in its vapidity — that “people are complicated.” Hall rightly mocked this “pluralism which is so mesmerized by ‘everything’ that it cannot explain anything.” For Terkel, explanations were everywhere — and people’s complexity made them easier to locate, not harder. Terkel sought to examine people’s lives and language to understand and change them. He sought out the psychic tensions (“the ADC mother seeking beauty, and the affluent steelworker for whom life’s beauty has fled”) because he sensed that was what was most interesting about people — and most hopeful, too. He highlighted those inner tensions not to catch logical lapses and dead ends, but rather to illuminate opportunities for political openings.

Terkel brought workers to the world through his books out of a desire to see their lives become a little less distressed, a little less humiliating, quite a bit more free. He approached those nurses, spot welders, clerks, and prostitutes not as hollowed-out, objectified “workers” but as lively subjects — people made by the complexities of their relationships to their work, their personal history, and the broader culture. The endless permutations made workers hard to pin down and predict, but it also offered endless opportunities for connection and, ideally, change. We would do well to bring the same reverence for contradiction to bear in our own politics.