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From “Observer to Activist”: Documentary Memory, Oral History, and Studs Terkel's “Essence” Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2010

ANDREA GUSTAVSON
ANDREA GUSTAVSON
Affiliation:
Andrea Gustavson is a doctoral student in American studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Email: agustavson@mail.utexas.edu.
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Abstract

Over several decades of interviewing people and crafting their words into published works, Studs Terkel defined, expanded, and challenged the field of oral history. Terkel often described his methods as similar to those of a “prospector for gold” sifting through the statements of his subjects to create essays that reveal each person's “essence.” Drawing on his planning documents, interview transcripts, manuscripts and published texts, I trace Terkel's approach to oral history through two of his best-known works – Hard Times and “The Good War” – and through three stages: his planning and performance of interviews, his editing of the individual transcripts, and his construction of the completed text. I conclude by considering the implications of Terkel's unconventional approach to oral history and the ways in which his methodology may reflect his long history of involvement with progressive political movements. Terkel crafted his subject's narratives into texts I term “documentary memory”; he insisted that his works are subjective “memory books” but also employed a documentary rhetoric of objectivity. Terkel believed telling stories of the past to be a form of social action and he used his texts about the past to comment politically on his present – his “memory books” document earlier periods in American history relevant to the cultural moment in which he published.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 103 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Studs Terkel, with Sydney Lewis, Touch and Go: A Memoir (New York: The New Press, 2007), 67. Subsequent references to this edition will appear as Touch and Go.

2 Ibid., 53–67.

3 Ibid., 66.

4 Ibid., 94.

5 Ronald J. Grele, ed., Envelopes of Sound: Six Practitioners Discuss the Method, Theory, and Practice of Oral History and Oral Testimony (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1975), 33.

6 The two interviews that I focus on extensively in this paper were chosen for their length relative to the rest of the interviews made available in the Studs Terkel papers and on the Chicago History Museum website. The interviews with Joseph Small and Peggy Terry were two of the longer transcripts in the archive and longer recordings released and so provide a greater opportunity to examine Terkel's methods in detail. Moreover, because the Small and Terry interviews represent a diversity of experiences according to race, gender, and class they allow an analysis of Terkel's differing approaches to his subjects accordingly.

7 Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: The New Press, 1970, rpt. 1986), 3. Subsequent references to this edition will appear as Hard Times. Idem, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II (New York: The New Press, 1984), 3. Subsequent references to this edition will appear as “The Good War”.

8 Studs Terkel papers and book interviews (manuscript), c.1950–99. Chicago History Museum.

9 Tony Parker, Studs Terkel: A Life in Words (New York: Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1996) 169.

10 Grele, 24.

11 Parker, 143.

12 Ibid., 211.

13 For more on the popular perception of James T. Farrell's persona and his affiliation with the Popular Front see Alan Wald, “James T. Farrell in the 1930s: The Athanasius of Union Square,” in idem, Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics (New York: Verso, 1994), 40–51.

14 Parker, 164, emphasis in original.

15 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 61.

16 Studs Terkel, interview with Joseph Small, Conversations with America, Chicago History Museum, 3 Oct. 2006, available at http://www.studsterkel.org/. Subsequent references to this interview will appear in the text as CHM, with a notation for the interview segment followed by the elapsed time at which it occurred. CHM Part 1, 2.20.

17 CHM Part 6, 13.35–14.25.

18 CHM Part 1, 7.50.

19 CHM Part 1, 7.67, emphasis mine.

20 Frisch, 6.

21 Grele, Envelopes, 20.

22 Hard Times, 65. Studs Terkel, Interview with Peggy Terry, Conversations with America, Chicago History Museum, 3 Oct. 2006, available at http://www.studsterkel.org/. Subsequent references to this interview will appear in the text as CHM with a notation for the interview segment followed by the elapsed time at which it occurred.

23 William Cutler III, “Accuracy in Oral History Interviewing,” 1970 rpt, in David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, eds., Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, 2nd edn (Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1996), 102; and Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 227.

24 For more on methods of oral history see Thompson; Dunaway and Baum.

25 Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).

26 It is possible to read Terkel's mediation of his subjects' narratives as a suggestion that their words carry more significance as he presented them than as they were spoken. For the most part, however, this seems not to trouble the people Terkel interviewed for his books. Several of Terkel's interview subjects wrote him letters thanking him for including them in his books, praising him for his “writing that is so natural,” or remarking that he managed to capture the truth of their experience. After his interview for the “The Good War” was published, interviewee Eugene Sledge wrote to Terkel, “You have made a wonderful historical contribution. I certainly appreciate the way you handled the interview you did with me … I think the secret to much of your success is that the person being interviewed can trust you not to quote them out of context.” Elliot Johnson, Letter to Studs Terkel, 7 Nov. 1984, Studs Terkel papers and book interviews (manuscript), c.1950–99, Chicago History Museum, emphasis in original. Although I only quote from two letters here, in the Terkel papers there are several letters to him from people he interviewed for his texts. Almost all of these letters are extremely positive and where the occasional letter differs from the others it is only to ask that Terkel slightly amend one or two elements of the published passage or correct the spelling of a name.

27 For a broader analysis of Terkel's editing techniques across twenty interviews see Miriam Pemberton, “The Writing of Oral History: Studs Terkel's ‘Working’ and ‘Hard Times’,” PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1987.

28 CHM Part 1, 5.38.

29 Terkel, Touch and Go, 174.

30 Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 321.

31 Ibid., 343, 326.

32 Terkel, Hard Times, 68, italics in original.

33 Ibid., 69, 75. This type of introductory exposition appears at the start of each section in both Hard Times and “The Good War”. While space does not allow me to catalog all such instances, representative examples from “The Good War” include “Betty Basye Hutchinson: on first meeting her, you sense that she had one time been a beauty queen” (128) and “Herman Kogan: Chicago journalist and historian” (364).

34 Terkel, Touch and Go, 177.

35 William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), ix.

36 Terkel, Touch and Go, 100.

37 Studs Terkel, Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973, 1977 rpt), 121, 119; Terkel, Touch and Go, 139.

38 Micheal Frisch's work on Studs Terkel has been extremely helpful for my own thinking. In particular, Frisch's recent paper “Studs Terkel: Historian” at the Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association in November 2009 argued for a reconsideration of Terkel's placement within the discipline of history.

39 Studs Terkel, undated transcript of interview with Playboy magazine, Studs Terkel papers and book interviews (manuscript), c.1950–99, Chicago History Museum.

40 Terkel, Hard Times, 3.

41 de Graaf, John and Stein, Alan Harris, “The Guerrilla Journalist as Oral Historian: An Interview with Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel,” Oral History, 29, 1, 87–107CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 88

42 Terkel,“The Good War”, 3.

43 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, in idem, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255.

44 Grele, Envelopes, 33.