We’re it! I mean we’re the macho kid – and we lost!

We’re it! I mean, we’re the macho kid – and we lost! We’re the guy who kicked the shit out of Hitler. We kicked the shit out of Japan’s imperialism, by God! But the little Vietnamese guys: think about it They kicked the shit out of us. So how can we forgive them?”
Terkel, a little guy of 83, is explaining America to me It’s four in the afternoon. We’re sitting in a restaurant in Chicago nursing a couple of cognacs.

Outside, it’s raining and a chilly wind is blowing from the Great Lakes. We’re the only customers left but the waiters are in no hurry to get us out. Had we been sitting in a restaurant in, say, Des Moines, Iowa, they might have thrown Terkel out at gunpoint, for in a society as conventionally rigid as the United States, his views on Vietnam, the verbal cartwheels he performs in recollection of Uncle Sam’s humiliation, come across as utterly outrageous. But in Chicago, Terkel is a celebrity, and here, as elsewhere in America, celebrities can get away with murder. Besides, Chicagoans have a history of celebrating scoundrels and subversives.

Al Capone put the city on the international map; Louis Farrakhan, the spectacularly controversial Nation of Islam leader, has made Chicago his home. This is “the City of Big Shoulders” – the city with the biggest skyscraper in the world, the biggest airport, the biggest commodities market. And such is the force of Terkel’s personality that it has earned him a place among these monuments. Bill Campbell, a retired political cartoonist who used to work for the Chicago Daily News, describes Terkel as the heartbeat of Chicago: “To imagine Chicago without Studs Terkel,” he says, “is like imagining the New Testament without Jesus.”Terkel, who is Jewish – and as such, in the words of a friend, “has an advance on social consciousness” – is a man who trades in the spoken word. His fame at home derives from The Studs Terkel Show, a one-hour radio talk show that has been running daily in Chicago for more than 40 years. Usually, the shows are built around a studio guest, but the format is invariably imaginative, peppered like a docu-drama with music, studiously selected archive material and Terkel’s own boisterous stage persona. In the rest of the United States, and beyond, he is best known as the master of oral history, a man who has produced 10 classic books, most of them based on voluminous taped interviews.

Race (which included the memorable quote that being black in America was like wearing a pair of ill-fitting shoes) won Terkel a Pulitzer Prize. A stage and radio actor in his youth, he supplements his income these days on the lucrative American lecture circuit. People pay to hear his discourses on, among other things, jazz, politics, racism, old age, US foreign policy. They pay, also, for the theatrical flourish and the dangerous political edge he brings to his performances. He is an impertinent non-conformist who speaks – or, rather, barks, hoots and stage whispers – in exclamation marks, who takes delight in declaiming in wonder, pity and horror at the unfathomable idiocy of the species. No intellectual, but an admirer of intellectuals who counts Bertrand Russell among his greatest heroes, he is the crude, sharp, viciously witty voice of blue-collar Chicago. A rare survivor of America’s Old Left, he refuses to allow the loud voices of today’s rampant conservative crusaders to drown him out.In his books, and through thousands upon thousands of hours of unpublished radio interviews, he has chronicled the lives of the great men and the common people – but mostly the common people – who have spanned the Great Depression, the Second World War, the McCarthy witch-hunts, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, the Vietnam War and today’s Brave Newt World.