Interview: Studs Terkel

December 19, 2003 Episode no. 716

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week716/exclusive.html

“Hope has never trickled down,” writes Studs Terkel. “It has always sprung up.” His most recent book, HOPE DIES LAST: KEEPING THE FAITH IN TROUBLED TIMES (The New Press), is an oral history of social action — a collection of interviews about faith and hope with workers, organizers, school teachers, immigrants, chaplains, cooks, custodians, priests, politicians, and pilgrims from one of America’s most thoughtful listeners:

Q: Is there a difference between hope and optimism?

A: Hope is more of a tightrope. You can hope and still feel guardedly so, even a little pessimistic: “I hope it will be better tomorrow than it is today.” We use the word “hope” perhaps more often than any other word in the vocabulary: “I hope it’s a nice day.” “Hopefully, you’re doing well.” “So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.” With optimism, you look upon the sunny side of things. People say, “Studs, you’re an optimist.” I never said I was an optimist. I have hope because what’s the alternative to hope? Despair? If you have despair, you might as well put your head in the oven.

“Hope dies last” was a phrase used by Jessie de la Cruz, one of the first women to work for Cesar Chavez in organizing the farm workers union. Very few women were involved in the beginning. She is one of the few. She said, “Whenever things are bleak and seem hopeless, we have a saying in Spanish: ‘La esperanza muere ultima.’ Hope dies last.” I thought, if ever there were a time [to write a book about hope], it’s now.

Q: What do you think September 11 has to do with this book and with what people told you?

A: I would have written this book anyway, I think, but September 11 italicized it. Even the book preceding this one [WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? REFLECTIONS ON DEATH, REBIRTH, AND HUNGER FOR A FAITH], named after the old hymn that the Carter family and Johnny Cash sang, was about death. I wrote that one before September 11. But of course it wasn’t about death. No, it’s about life. The whole point is it’s about life itself. What’s the meaning of your death if there is no life to talk about? It was a hymn to life. And HOPE DIES LAST, you might say, is what follows.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer, was talking about my previous books and how they all seem to deal with more visceral events, like the Great Depression, of which young kids know so little. It’s as thought it never happened. Nonetheless, it was a visceral event. …

Q: But hope is visceral too, isn’t it?

A: Yes. All the other books ask, “What’s it like?” What was World War II like for the young kid at Normandy, or what is work like for a woman having a job for the first time in her life? What’s it like to be black or white? Hope is more abstract but, at the same time, this turns out to be the most personal of all the books. This, in short, is a tribute to all those people whom I call “the prophetic minority.” Through history, there always have been certain kinds of people who had a hope. They did stuff they shouldn’t have done. They discommoded themselves. They could have led nice lives. HOPE DIES LAST is an anthem to people who have hope, who always have been kind of a minority, who are called “activists.” “Activist” means what? Someone who does an act. In a democratic society, you’re supposed to be an activist; that is, you participate. It could be a letter written to an editor. It could be fighting for stoplights on a certain corner where kids cross. And it could be something for peace, or for civil rights, or for human rights. But once you become active in something, something happens to you. You get excited and suddenly you realize you count.

HOPE DIES LAST is also a tribute to Virginia and Clifford Durr, two people who lived in the South and who were well-off. I dedicate the book to them because it is about all those who succeeded them. He was from a top family in Montgomery, Alabama. Her father was a clergyman. He was a member of the Federal Communications Commission under Franklin D. Roosevelt when World War II was going on. He’s the one who wrote that the airwaves belong to the public, and the public has the right to all variety of programs. Then came the Cold War and Joe McCarthy. President Truman said to Clifford Durr, “Your people have to sign a loyalty oath.” He said, “I don’t believe in it. I won’t. Under no circumstances will I allow my people to be demeaned by doing this.” And he resigned.

And Virginia Durr — I first heard of her in 1944 at a big anti-poll tax gathering in Chicago. You know what the poll tax is? It was aimed primarily against blacks and poor whites. They couldn’t vote, especially African Americans in the South. So Virginia was campaigning against the poll tax in the company of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, an eminent African-American educator. This big symphony hall in Chicago was jammed! Dr. Bethune was good, but Virginia Durr — this lanky forty-year-old white woman — set the house on fire. So I go backstage with a number of us to shake her hand. As I put forth my hand, she says, “Thank you, dear,” and she puts forth her hand. In her hand are a hundred leaflets. She says, “Now, dear, you hurry outside and you pass out those leaflets, because Dr. Bethune and I are due to speak at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in a couple of hours. Hurry, dear!”

Virginia and Cliff Durr were ostracized by their community. They suffered a great deal. They were under investigation by Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who was very segregationist and very antiblack. He said the group the Durrs belonged to, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, was subversive because it was antilynching, anti-poll tax, and for integration. The Durrs got themselves in big trouble. Virginia’s seamstress was a woman named Rosa Parks. She encouraged Rosa Parks to go to a school that was teaching organizers, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, with Myles Horton, a great teacher. Rosa Parks went to school there and so did Dr. Martin Luther King and others. But the school was under attack. These people, few in number and way outnumbered, were fighting way back then. In the book I celebrate the ones who are doing this sort of work today.

Q: You interview a number of Catholic priests, or former priests, in this book. What did you learn from them about hope?

A: Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too. You happen to be talking to an agnostic. You know what an agnostic is? A cowardly atheist. Nonetheless, do I have respect for people who believe in the hereafter? Of course I do. I might add, perhaps even a touch of envy too, because of the solace. If solace is any sort of succor to someone, that is sufficient. I believe in the faith of people, whatever faith they may have.

It turns out that there are a great many Catholics in this book, like Kathy Kelly, a disciple of Dorothy Day. Kathy taught at a very wonderful parochial school, St. Ignatius, in Chicago. More on her later. We’ve got John Donahue [executive director for the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless]. He’s not a priest anymore and he is married. His story is about worker-priests, the phrase that was first used by some French priests. Pope John XXIII admired worker-priests — those who work in the community, work in the neighborhood. John Donahue tells the story of the priest in Panama who organized a cooperative of coffee pickers. Their coffee is so terrific that it’s being sold all over the world. It was a priest who did that. Then we’ve got two ex-seminarians — Jerry Brown, the mayor of Oakland, and Ed Chambers, who succeeded Saul Alinsky as a community organizer and who teaches how to organize. He was a disciple of Dorothy Day, too. Jerry Brown still believes in his Jesuit training. A number of them still believe in that.

There’s a priest at the very beginning of the book, Father Bob Oldershaw, and his brother, who is a neurosurgeon. I interviewed him about his experiences in the Vietnam War with soldiers he had treated and what he saw. But along comes his brother who said, “Why don’t you have the two of us talk and reminisce, and you ask provocative questions?”

Father Oldershaw had a parish. His altar boy, a Mexican kid, Mario Ramos, was part of a gang, and he shot Andrew Young, son of Steven and Maurine Young, a nice kid. It was a mistake, because he thought Andrew Young was a member of another gang. Here is Father Oldershaw: “That was my altar boy who did the killing. At first, I said to myself, No way! Then I started thinking about what made him do it, where he comes from. Then I had to go see the couple,” who are not members of his parish, but he was praying for them. It was pretty tough. Finally, he did see them and they got together. That couple, in a sense, have adopted as theirs the boy who killed their son. The one who arranged the whole thing was Bob Oldershaw himself. The kid has been in prison and is now rehabilitated. Throughout the book, you have this aspect of faith. [Read the related R & E story "Forgiveness" about the Young murder at