A Reservoir of Untapped Power

By Stefan Kanfer

AMERICAN DREAMS: LOST AND FOUND by Studs Terkel; Pantheon; 470 pages; $14.95

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march. In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march: "Where to? what next?"

--The People, Yes

Few readers can now look at Carl Sandburg's epic without embarrasment. Happily, one of them is Studs Terkel. His vocabulary is sophisticated, his questions are informed by contemporary psychology and social theory. But Terkel's credulity remains that of the '30s populist who regards the American people as "a reservoir of untapped power and new astonishments."

And since he is Studs Terkel, the reservoir is always full, and the author is perpetually astonished. In Working, Terkel edited the testimonies of laborers and executives, secretaries and politicians who were too unique to prove his thesis about the degradation of the assembly tine and the anonymity of office work. In Hard Times, he set out to collect memoirs of the Great Depression and ended with an elegy for 133 voices and continuo. For his new volume, American Dreams: Lost and Found, Terkel has abandoned any attempt at doctrine. There is only, he admits, "in the manner of a jazz work, an attempt, of theme and improvisation, to recount dreams, lost and found, and a recognition of possibility."

Stripped of its Whitmanesque rhetoric, this means the fixture as before: first person singularities from the prominent (Miss U.S.A., Ted Turner, Joan Crawford, Arnold Schwarzenegger), the recognizable (Baseball Maverick Bill Veeck, Novelist Jill Robinson, Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner) and the totally obscure. All of them are highly individual, all discuss some aspect of that worn shibboleth, the American Dream. As they talk, platitudes give way to testimony, and the vision becomes a document.

Thomas Boylston Adams, great-great-grandson of John Quincy Adams, "cannot think of a greater disaster than Harvard becoming the arbiter of what happens to us. They have wonderful ideas and the world would be bankrupt without them, but there are other minds and other talents [whose] ideas will save the world."

Florence Scala, an aging Chicago activist, is less encouraged. She remembers the heady days of labor struggles, reviles the credit card society, then surrenders to activist nostalgia: "I don't even know what the American Dream is any more. Maybe it's picking up some pieces I've left behind."

Miguel Cortez, a middle-aged Cuban refugee, recalls the early days of Castro. When Terkel asks him if he could bribe a policeman after the revolution, Cortez encapsulates an entire mind of state: "No, because everybody a cop." Cortez's dream is simply to rise upon his failures--a vision not substantially different from Ted Turner's: "I never was valedictorian. I couldn't make the football team, I couldn't make the baseball team . . . That's kinda how I got into sailing."

A few of Terkel's subjects believe that whining is everything. "I learned that success is a two-edged sword," complains a sophomoric ex-professor. "There's a cost . . . I discovered in the hardest way possible that I had let other people tell me what my values were." A fight promoter, angry at newspaper attacks, decides that "a certain elite has decided that wrestling does not belong as a respectable sport in this country . . . I think it's a black day . . . There is no American Dream. It's a hype, an elusive nothing." A hyperactive executive regards zero growth as the sin of sloth: "If we don't grow and get more profit, there isn't more money for raises . . . 'Enough money' is always a little bit more than you have. There's never enough of anything."

Yet throughout this lost-and-found department there are continual instances of amazing grace. The late John Howard Griffin, terminally ill, recalls darkening his skin in order to live as a black man in the American South (the subject of his book Black Like Me, 1961). He speaks of violent beatings and physical suffering, and then discards self-pity by quoting a friend's dying words: "Ask Griffin if he can top this." A former Ku Klux Klan executive finds himself organizing workers of every hue in a North Carolina union. "People say: 'That's an impossible dream. You sound like Martin Luther King' . . . I don't think it's an impossible dream. It's happened in my life." A high school dropout, once thought to be incorrigible, institutionalized many times, goes back to school at the age of 28 and becomes an influential social worker, changing the lives of troubled adolescents. Her warning: "Don't go on like you do, or you'll end up like me, a big fat zero in the eyes of God." But that kind of zero is invaluable: by forgetting about No. 1 she serves an entire community.

Doubtless another interviewer might find subjects who are not so graceful, people embittered or trivialized by circumstance. But no other interviewer has Terkel's ability to elicit such deep response; and no one can duplicate his fundamental faith in the general--and specific--public. In American Dreams that belief is ratified by a multitude who prefer enlightenment to opulence and stability to success. In So Long!, Walt Whitman boasted, "This is no book,/ Who touches this touches a man." Who touches the book of American Dreams touches not one but a hundred men and women and, by implication, millions more. In an age of faceless polls, sociological tracts and psychobabble, politicians and historians would do well to discard ten pounds of printouts for every page of the author's impressive oral histories. The people, yes. Studs Terkel positively.

--By Stefan Kanfer

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