Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
"Hope Dies Last"
Cultural Studies and Studs Terkel
by Victor Cohen | ns 71-72
As an undergraduate, I was drawn to the world of literary studies. Though I also pursued a degree in political science, it was in my literature classes that I learned about left politics. And no wonder—in spite of their Arnoldian framework, these classes trained me in a unique form of empathy that could be carried on throughout a lifetime and productively applied to situations, people, histories, and even things. How (let alone why) they accomplished this is something of a mystery to me, though Leslie Fielder, in his own credo published in the Autumn 1950 Kenyon Review, provides a clue. He wrote that "the general failure to come to terms with works of literature is often a failure to connect" (564). Though I'm fairly confident Fiedler would be nonplussed by much of my academic training, I find it uncanny how his point describes my undergraduate experience as an English major in the late 1980s. I was trained to connect.
After graduation and a subsequent Master's in English, I was even more interested in the relationship between left politics and culture, and so a career in cultural studies seemed a logical next step. Writers such as Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall appeared to point towards a vision of social transformation that in fact relied on an analysis of culture that held to the spirit of Fiedler's legacy while overcoming its cold-war animus. After looking hard for places to read more of what Williams and others engaged with, I landed in a cultural studies department, one of the few that still provided a venue for reading in that tradition. Yet when I began my doctoral work, I found a much more confusing academic practice and professional landscape than I expected. Though we read widely in left cultural and social theory, I found it challenging to generate a project that accurately joined these movement-oriented analyses of culture to the pressing concerns of the moment. I produced a historically-grounded study of popular representations of mid-twentieth century American mass politics. In retrospect, it seems a project more appropriate for an older generation who came up against Fiedler and his cohort, who generally opposed both popular culture and mass politics as a rule of course. How my project came out of the late 1990s puzzles me.
I'm not having a backhanded laugh at my own work, which I still find engaging and useful, or my department at Carnegie Mellon University, which has its own noteworthy spot in the history of cultural studies in the US. Instead, as I've been thinking about this essay, I've been struck by the degree to which, when I began my studies, I was unaware of the relationships between cultural studies and the complicated if hopeful legacies of the New Lefts, both British and American, which not only gave this academic field its politics, but provided its groundbreaking vision of culture. The fraught existence of these (New) left political traditions, in an era and institutional setting that has more generally obscured the role of the organized lefts both New and Old, helps explain the challenges cultural studies faced. In fact, my current project is as much an investigation into the nature of these challenges as into what drew me (and many others from my generation) to cultural studies in the first place.
As I completed my doctorate, I came across the story of a 1970s socialist-feminist organization, the New American Movement (NAM), an organization that based its political practice on Antonio Gramsci's analysis of civil society, and used this to carry on the practical work of grassroots education and organizing. After I came across this group's history, many of my questions about cultural studies, and my place in its history, became legible. I began to see writers such as Williams in a new context, as preoccupied with the same problems NAM faced—his "Notes on British Marxism since 1945" has an astonishingly useful description of the immediate prehistory of cultural studies that illustrates these connections, as well as a straightforward account of the contradictions of bringing Marxian theory into academia (published first in the Nov. 1976-Jan. 1977 New Left Review). However, unless I was especially motivated to unearth the connections between the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and cultural studies, I would never have come across Studies on the Left, a journal of the US New Left that ran throughout the 1960s. Though well known to those who read it, the journal is seldom referenced today—I was pointed towards it during the course of an interview I did with a member of NAM. Part of the reason we don't hear much about the journal today has to do with its topicality—it published reports on the movement and debates around issues of organizing and politics that were immediately relevant to its readership. However, it also presented to its audience of American radicals central texts from the Frankfurt School, including an early translation of Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
This early context of Benjamin's essay for a US audience is significant. His utopian critique of mass culture would have been very powerful to a generation of radicals for whom mass culture—rock-n-roll, for example—provided a venue to express their ambitions for a different social order. Though many of us are more than familiar with this essay today, our familiarity with it should not be understood or explained without reference to Studies on the Left and the social movement to which it spoke. Many left academics of the 1960s and 1970s actively contribute to their disciplines and departments today and carry forward the history of the New Left in thoughtful and productive ways. However, unless one seeks out the connections between the radical political movements of that era and cultural studies, these bonds of history and politics remain unspoken and obscure, but powerful nevertheless. For this reason, lately I've put down the criticism of cultural forms and instead begun to speak with the generation of people who were radicals first and academics second (if they were academics at all) to try and recover these connections. It troubles me that cultural studies is no longer the academic movement it once was. While there are logical explanations for how this came about that relate to the translation of a left political movement into an academic discipline, another part of the explanation lies in the demise of the movements from which cultural studies emerged.
Part of my motivation to do this work is that the history of the left is not only obscured in academia, but obstructed practically everywhere. The veil covering this history hung even around the occasion of the death of Studs Terkel, talk-show host and author of numerous collections of interviews regarding people's experiences with the overarching social structures that determine our lives: work, race, war, death, economic scarcity, and the dream of economic security. Terkel's ambition to represent the lived experience of these determining forces to a popular audience would suit many who come out of cultural studies. Certainly, that has become true for me. Of course, the exact nature of Terkel's "ambition" is precisely what seems to have been missing from many of the obituaries that followed his death, no doubt because of its origins in the political movements that helped shape it.
As a young man, Terkel took part in the world of radical left culture and anti-fascist/pro-communist politics that characterized the 1930s and 1940s. He was a member of the Chicago Repertory Group, originally a workers' theater troupe, and with them he performed many of the era's key proletarian dramas throughout the city, from soup lines to union halls. The day after the Memorial Day Massacre, he and other members of the theater group met with steelworkers who were beaten and shot by Chicago police as they were having a picnic while taking a day off from their strike against Republic Steel. Studs was a radio scriptwriter for the WPA Writers Project, and helped raise money for the Soviet American Friendship Committee and the Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Though never a member of the Communist Party, USA, like many others he was blacklisted from getting work for sharing their politics—from the Red Cross first and, after World War II, from television as well. His TV show, Stud's Place (begun in 1949) was canceled in 1951 when Terkel's pre-war sympathies were pointed out to NBC.
Terkel was luckier than most who were blacklisted—he continued to find work that suited his interests, and he retained control over the radio program that he hosted for most of his life. In a way that would make Benjamin proud, we should note that Terkel's literary legacy is a product of the radio, that central institution of twentieth-century mass culture. Its format taught him his craft. He honed his interviewing skills on-air, talking to people from all professions and of all ages, for almost an hour every day, for 45 years. It was only through the suggestion of editor Andre Schiffrin that Terkel came to the book projects he became famous for, such as Hard Times, his oral history of the Great Depression, or "The Good War," his collection of interviews about people's experiences in WWII, which earned him the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
The obituaries that followed Terkel's death had little difficulty describing his contributions to our collective memories of the twentieth century, yet his connections to the unique political matrix of the Popular Front and the 1930s did not emerge as easily, even though he was often named in the context of other Chicago writers whose lives and work were shaped by that exact moment and movement, such as Nelson Algren and Richard Wright. Every obituary writer nodded to Terkel's blacklisting, yet shied away from identifying Terkel's politics, though in his own autobiography he speaks admiringly of the Communist-led organizations of the 1930s and 1940s that he encountered or read about, such as the Workers' Alliance (or Unemployed Council), which placed people back in their homes (reconnecting utilities as well) after they'd been kicked out by the bank.
The writer who attempted to characterize Terkel's politics with the most ferocity was the New York Times' red-baiting Edward Rothstein. Though reductive and scornful of Terkel's work, Rothstein, in a feverish and prurient fashion, was at least able to bring up the word "Marxist" and correctly identify Terkel as an abiding communist at heart, if not affiliation. Like most red-baiting, Rothstein's argument purposefully drew false connections between a critique of capitalism, the horrors of totalitarianism, and a dogmatic resistance to looking at the world "the way it really is." Rothstein also makes sure to explain that he failed to connect with any of Terkel's work, and though he blames Terkel's politics for this, thanks to Fielder we know the fault more accurately lies with Rothstein. Many obituaries in The Nation, which also printed Howard Zinn's response to Rothstein, were much better about claiming Terkel as a member of the left. And Gary Wills, in the November 2008 New York Review of Books, provided a welcome accounting of Terkel's politics and those of his wife Ida, who evidently stood vigil with other concerned women outside the Chicago apartment where Black Panther Fred Hampton was murdered by police.
Yet even Wills refuses to provide a name for Terkel's politics. To his credit, he points out that Terkel not only acted in a version of The Cradle Will Rock (Marc Blitzstein's iconic proletarian drama of the 1930s), but had interviewed four of the actors who performed in the original. Wills also recounts how Terkel's blacklisting in TV was related to his refusal to sign a loyalty oath, and that he took his nickname from James Farrell's proletarian trilogy and its poor Irish protagonist, Studs Lonigan. What particular vision of social justice could motivate Terkel, or his wife, however, is left unspoken.
Although this might be a matter of taste (Wills as a good writer describes Terkel's politics; Rothstein merely labels them), there is something of the same disconnect between the political movements that by Terkel's own account shaped his life and worldview, the way we are presented with his work and life on the occasion of his death, and the history of cultural studies and how bookstores, universities, and publishing houses represent this field to us today. Thankfully, in his autobiography Terkel talks freely about his admiration for the elderly Wobblies who populated his parents' boarding house, his work with the Popular Front causes that prefaced his blacklisting in TV, and is neither ashamed of the blacklisting nor the politics that got him there.
If it seems a meaningless term by nature of its ubiquity in academia today, back when it got underway in the UK around the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, most people understood that the name "cultural studies" was a euphemism. As a student who attended the Birmingham School (as it came to be known) told me, that phrase was the best anyone could do to replace "socialist-feminist studies," which is what the teachers and students were really trying to put into practice. Though socialist-feminism is no longer a movement, I imagine that anyone who spends any time trying to connect with the bulk of writing, film, history, and political thought of the twentieth century and doesn't become a socialist and a feminist is by default executing exactly the task Fiedler imagines bad readers perform. As he puts it, such a critic "aggravates an endemic weakness of our atomized world" (564). I am torquing Fiedler's point about good and bad readers (in the original, he's simply referring to the critic who "chooses to deal with the work in isolation"), but I think there's a useful consonance between our views.
I remain committed to looking for the connections between the history of the left and the possibility for future social change, and it is in this context that I find cultural studies and its fate still most relevant. That the memory of the Popular Front can permeate Terkel's life and yet go practically unspoken in the bulk of his obituaries points to the problem: if we are unable to name the politics that gave us someone like Terkel, how could we expect to create another?
Works Cited
Fielder, Leslie. "Toward an Amateur Criticism." The Kenyon Review 12.4 (Autumn 1950): 561-74.
Rothstein, Edward. "He Gave Voice to Many, Including Himself." New York Times 2 Nov. 2008: C1.
Terkel, Studs. Touch and Go. New York: The New Press, 2007.
Wills, Gary. "He Interviewed the Nation." New York Review of Books 18 Dec. 2008: 53-4.
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