The journalist Nick Von Hoffman worked with Saul Alinsky for a while and said: “Once a person joins a group, a demonstration or a union, they’re a different person.” That particular fight may have succeeded or failed, but you realize there’s someone who thinks as you do, and so you become stronger as a result, no matter what the outcome. You count!
There is extensive wisdom and great current pertinence in all this. We live in a time when millions upon millions of us think we don’t count. Only the big money on Wall Street and in big business counts: Only the people who lie, cheat and steal unbelievable sums from scores of millions of small fry count. They, and only they, get what they want. The politicians are only bums who are bought off by these people. One after another we have economic disasters (and educational shortcomings) in which the small fry are raped, while a war wanted by only a few accurses the nation and the whole of its mood. So many millions upon millions of people have lost jobs in the last two or two and a half decades, have found themselves on the street and have lost their pride. Collective action to remedy any or all of this? -- Don’t make me laugh. Union membership has gone through the floor. In politics the history is that, to use a phrase made famous by George Wallace, “it don’t make a dime’s worth of difference” what pol you vote for or maybe even work for. Lots of people hope that Obama might make a difference, but history counsels skepticism, only the more so because so far he mainly talks about “change,” not substance. People have now learned we don’t count, and that all that really counts is to have the hundreds of millions or billions needed to buy anyone and everyone you need to buy.
Due to the internet, a person knows, regardless of his or her persuasion, that lots of others think the same way he or she does. But, at least for those on the decent liberal side of the equation, it so far has rarely if ever made a difference in actual action, as evidenced by the fact that Pelosi and Reid are nigh on to useless despite the Democratic sweep in 2006.
That the vast preponderance of us don’t count these days brings up another question Terkel deals with: whether or not common people have the intelligence to understand things. Since about 1763 or 1776 it has been an essential assumption of this country that they do. Our system is based on this, and depends on it, even though the pols and the mainstream media now act on a wholly different basis and may destroy the country accordingly. Terkel discusses the average bloke’s comprehension in a vignette about Buckminster Fuller, a vignette he says is “the one that, to me, represents what my books are all about,” a vignette that “was a key one in my life in underscoring a belief. It is a simple one: that people can understand what is necessary for their well-being if it’s explained to them. Honestly.” (Emphasis in original.) Again I am going to quote Terkel extensively, because I cannot paraphrase the matter as well as he said it:
I mentioned to [Fuller] that later that afternoon there would be a gathering at a local church. No heat. No electricity. All would be cold and dim. The church was holding a gathering of protestors against evictions. Cha-Cha Jimenez, the leader of the Young Lords, who rode with us that day, told us that his family had been kicked out and forced to move six times in one month; that they felt like checkers on a checkerboard. It was then that Bucky suggested the unthinkable: “Let me talk to these people.”
I thought to myself: “Oh, my God. What crazy thing have I suggested? If professors have a tough time understanding him, how will it be with working people who’ve gone no further than fifth grade?” Nonetheless, he insisted.
This moment, this event, was a key one in my life in underscoring a belief. It is a simple one: that people can understand what is necessary for their well-being if it’s explained to them. Honestly.
Consider this most incongruous of occasions. The cold church, filled with men, women, and children bundled up in coats and blankets. There on the stage paces this old man with his crew-cut white hair, no hat, an old overcoat with two buttons missing, a tiny lapel mike pinned against the warm wool. Imagine Bucky Fuller’s arcane speech and the chilled, downcast assemblage of Puerto Rican working people and their families. My head was spinning at the burlesque aspect of the situation.
What was the reaction? I closed my eyes fearing the worst. I opened my eyes and I saw something wondrous. These people, of such limited academic training, listened intently to Buck take off on the nature of housing. He spoke of gentrification and urban renewal and of the devastation it caused the have-nots and have-somewhats. He spoke of a world in which, thanks to technology, or as he called it, “technology-for life” (rather than against it), there would be enough to go around.
I speak about an utterly new world, a world in which it is assumed there’s plenty for all; a world in which you don’t have to have a job to prove your right to live. Where the first thing you’re going to think of is not “How am I going to earn a living?” but “What needs to be done? What am I interested in? Where might I make a contribution?” What an extraordinary new preoccupation of man! Work will be the most privileged word we have. The right to work will be not with the muscle, but the right to work with your brain, with your mind. You are born with that, but just getting accredited by the other man to be allowed to use that tool, and getting credit enough so he helps you, and cooperates with you, and you make a breakthrough on behalf of your fellow men, is the next thing. That’s the work. Work will be the most beautiful thing we can do.
The funny thing is, after he spoke, they asked him all the right questions. They had understood everything he said and exactly what he meant.
Bucky Fuller has been dismissed in some quarters as a hopeless utopian. But others have found out that his ideas are a thinking man’s ideas, and that some of his notions are right on the button. This revelatory afternoon proved for me that the intellectual and the Hand (an old-fashioned term for a workingman) can understand one another, provided there are mutual self-esteem and mutual respect. As Tom Paine put it, we must be not just men but thinking men. (Emphases original.)
I have often thought that, when experts and academics claim that something is allegedly too complicated for the average guy to understand no matter how clearly explained, this reflects only that the academic or expert lacks sufficient power of expression and, even worse, does not wish for such power lest the matters he deals in be exposed as simple and he himself consequently be exposed as something of a charlatan instead of the great genius he fancies himself to be. Very little aside from advanced nuclear physics or higher mathematics is truly incomprehensible to the average guy, one thinks. The event which Terkel says was “key . . . in underscoring a belief,” which “represents what [his] books are all about,” represents truth. It only underscores, one might add, the intellectual vapidness of a presidential campaign, in a time of enormous consequence, in which the candidates decline to discuss substance.
Related to the question of comprehension is the question of knowledge, in this case knowledge of history. Terkel has lived a long life, has read and absorbed a lot, and knows a lot of history. It shows in his memoir. Now and again he mentions names, events or books so obscure to the average reader, even the average semi-knowledgeable reader, that he drops a footnote at the bottom of the page to tell you who the person was or what the event or book was about, as when he tells you who Franz Boas or Giuseppe Mazzini were. You can learn a lot by reading Terkel, the more so because of our lack of knowledge of history, a lack which, I think, has contributed heavily to so many of the fixes we are in -- they are, after all, largely reprises in one way or another of fixes that we were in before.
There are also two interrelated, historical episodes regarding the presidency on which Terkel takes a revisionist tack. These are the dumping of Vice President Henry Wallace at the 1944 Democratic Convention in favor of Harry Truman (a dumping which Terkel says even involved physical thuggery), and Wallace’s 1948 run for the Presidency on the Progressive Party ticket, a campaign Terkel was involved in. In what little reading I have done about Wallace, anti-Wallacism has often been evident, and there has been a nagging feeling that perhaps Wallace is being jobbed. That Wallace was jobbed by conservatives in the 1940s, that he and his followers were unfairly tarred as Reds by the reactionaries of the country and even by Truman, is plainly Terkel’s view. And it is probable that the doing down of Henry Wallace had a major impact on this country, the more so because Truman became an ardent cold warrior type. It has always been thought that Truman was right to become so, nor has the fact that in Korea he launched what has become the disastrous tradition of Presidential war detracted (as conceivably it should) from the reputation of what many of us think was a great man. And yet, and yet . . . . there is the nagging feeling that, although Stalin was perhaps even worse than Hitler, still it is possible that various American actions may have made the Cold War even worse and more dangerous than it had to be -- just as today, in a reprise, the actions of Bush and Cheney may have made the world a lot more dangerous than it had to be. The American actions of the late ’40s and early ’50s would likely have been quite different than under Truman had either of the two alternatives to Truman, Wallace or William O. Douglas, been nominated for Vice President in 1944 and succeeded to the Presidency upon Roosevelt’s death (just as American actions likely would have been different in the early 2000s under someone other than Georgedick Bushcheney). Terkel puts the matter eloquently and poignantly at the end of his discussion of Wallace’s 1948 run for the presidency, and once again one cannot do better than to quote the literate Chicagoan himself:
Truman had been attacking Wallace as a Communist sympathizer, an agent of Russia. Wallace wanted peace in the world, and there couldn’t be peace unless there was peace between the two superpowers. Stalin was a butcher and a bastard. You can’t defend that, of course.
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