Sarah Gregson

OBITUARY

Oral Historian and Activist, 'Studs' Terkel (1912–2008)

In The Voice of the Past, Paul Thompson argues that oral history has the potential to shift historical spotlights and facilitate communication between teachers and students, academe and the wider community, old and young. Even more importantly, it is one of the few historical methods that routinely gives less-acknowledged makers of history – us ordinary folk – a voice. In late 2008, the history community lost an oral historian who put a microphone in front of more people than most would ever meet in a lifetime –vale Studs Terkel, radio host, writer, actor, consummate listener.	1
Born Louis Terkel in 1912, Studs grew up in Chicago, a city with which his name would become virtually synonymous. He spent his working life there, haunted the streets, knew the people. His family were middling folk; they did not suffer significant privation during the Depression but lived among many who did. His widowed mother ran a boarding house for migrant workers and Studs would recall conversations around the dinner table with people who travelled far and wide in search of jobs – he often referred to these chats as his 'schooling'. He did well at his more formal studies, went on to do law at university, but never found a desire to practice his profession. Instead, he exhibited all the classic signs of a 'misspent youth', frequenting music halls and clubs where some of the most exciting jazz and blues of the time were being played. It was a hobby that turned into a career; after the war, he worked on radio, where he met and befriended a great many musicians who would become household names – Billie Holiday, Big Bill Broonzy, Woodie Guthrie and the Weavers. Terkel also acted in plays that focused on the social issues of the day and was an early pioneer in local television before it became commercialised and sanitised. He became renowned for a program called Stud's Place, which was set in a diner; it had an impromptu chat format where an array of regulars and special guests discussed current events and how the world could be made a better place. From a local audience to national syndication, the laidback presentation was spontaneous, authentic and highly rated. Decades later, Studs would laugh that he still got asked, 'Whatever happened to that restaurant you used to own?'	2
However, America in the 1950s was not a comfortable place for people with critical views and Terkel had plenty of them. His outspoken support for campaigns about price control and rent control and his opposition to Jim Crow laws brought him to the attention of Senator Joe McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee. He was blacklisted. As happened with so many other left-leaning artists, political pressure from sponsors on Terkel's employers meant work dried up, despite protests from his legions of fans. But Studs had a great many friends and one in particular stood up to the bullying. Demonstrating great personal courage, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson got him writing work on her radio show with the CBS network. Still the persecution did not stop. The network management demanded that all employees sign a national loyalty oath – Terkel refused and was again fired. In response, Jackson protested, 'If Studs don't write the show, Mahalia don't sing'. She got her way.	3
Nonetheless, it was as an oral historian that Studs made his greatest contribution. In 1958 he began work at Chicago's public radio station, WFMT. Incredibly, it ran for 40 years and left a legacy of more than 9,000 interviews with people from every walk of life: a rich, valuable and deeply human body of work. He interviewed everyone from leading thinkers of the day, writers, architects, politicians and musicians. He also hit the streets. Calling it 'guerilla journalism', Studs took his tape recorder where most interviewers never went, talking to ordinary people in their homes about life, love, politics, faith and work. He was particularly interested in labour-movement and civil rights activists and would try to record what it was like for working-class people to think through issues and fight against oppression. Among a host of great interviews, one particularly stood out. In Race (1992), Terkel captured the experiences of a former Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan who began to see that the white leaders of his town were simply using him as cannon fodder in the battle against civil rights campaigners. Throwing aside his racist hatred, he joined forces with black women fighting for better local school funding and, at Duke University where he worked in maintenance, he was elected to the leadership of the union with support from a 70 per cent black membership. Together, they campaigned and won a holiday on Martin Luther King's birthday. This story made a huge impact on me personally as I was working on a project about racism; it was graphic proof that racism was not impermeable and could be challenged by life and struggle.	4
For his best-selling book, Working (1974), Terkel interviewed more than 130 workers about their lives and how they felt about their jobs. As a clear indication of his approach, it begins with an excerpt from Bertolt Brecht's poem, A Worker Reads History. Like Brecht, Terkel knew that although 'the books are filled with the names of kings' who were alleged to have erected large buildings and facilitated great social change, nothing really got done without the skill and co-operation of working people. Other books included Hard Times (1974) about living through the Depression and his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Good War (1985). Of this book, Terkel said, 'It was one war that many who would have resisted "your other wars" supported enthusiastically ... In a time of nuclear weaponry, it is the language of a lunatic'. He proudly described his work as 'history from the bottom up rather than history written by generals'.	5
Of course, as readers of Labour History will know, oral history has always had its detractors. Patrick O'Farrell (University of New South Wales) was convinced it was not 'real' history and that other historical methods were much more reliable. He would not allow, for example, that the oral testimony of truck drivers could have any scholarly significance. Terkel, on the other hand, railed against false notions of 'objectivity' which he thought were 'so often a reprise of the doctrine of the announced idea, of the official truth'. In his view, the search for the unofficial truth was a far richer vein: 'I confess', he wrote, 'to never having been privy to "highly reliable sources"'. In a world where we need critics who point out, as did Terkel, that the manufactured 'war on terror' has as much validity as the war on the 'witches' of Salem, he will be much missed.	6

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