I meant to write this a few weeks ago when Studs Terkel passed away, but I wasn't able to find the time before now.
I was tempted to start out by saying that we'd lost an important figure a few weeks back, but the truth is that we haven't, not really. Terkel has left us, that much is true, but he had ninety six long years in which to leave behind a record that I suspect will last not for mere decades, but for centuries.
Howard Zinn, a man born a decade after Terkel, accomplished the amazing task of re-writing American history from the perspective of average people, rather than from the point of view of those in power. Terkel took things a step further and created a record of the actual voices, thoughts, opinions, and feelings of those people, average Americans living everyday lives in the turbulent 20th Century.
Imagine if we had such a record from Ancient Rome or Greece, if someone had taken the time to sit down and write out what common people, those otherwise completely lost to history, thought about the issues they were facing and about the world around them! Not the chronicle of those in power or the dry listing of dates and events, but the actual voices of the people who lived with the consequences of those events in real time. We'd know what they thought about their work situations, the social structures around them, their views on entertainment and religion, on hard times and good times.
The future will have just such a record of 20th Century Americans, thanks to Studs Terkel. His oral histories cover a variety of topics, from the Great Depression to music, from race issues to feelings on our jobs and working conditions, from hope in hard times to death and faith. It's all there, a valuable historical record that people centuries or perhaps even a few millennia from now will turn to for a sense of what life in our time was like for average people.
The future owes Studs Terkel a great debt of gratitude, and so do we.
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