A radio man, Studs Terkel has become one of the great names in American oral history, paradoxically “ famous ”, as he liked to say, “ for celebrating those we don’t celebrate “. These anonymous voices bring the repressed trauma of the Great Depression out of oblivion, in Hard Times or scrutinize, in BreedAmerica’s racial obsession.
As Division Street (1967), Working (1974) and The Good War (1984), which earned Studs Terkel a Pulitzer Prize – all translated into French by Amsterdam –, Hard Times (1986) and Breed (1992) are thick volumes, real sums, which however are more of a mosaic or collage than a fresco: the hundreds of interviews which are transcribed there constitute a polyphony given for itself, without being brought to light. service of an overlooking interpretation.
A “ random sample of survivors » (excluding taxp. 23) from the 1930s is thus brought together in Hard Timeswhose title pays homage to the Hard times (1854) by Dickens and their description of the industrial misery of the imaginary Coketown. Interviewed by Terkel between 1970 and 1986, they are, or were, farmers, workers, miners, journalists, Roosevelt collaborators, politicians from different sides, brokers, artists, soldiers, descendants of slaves, trade unionists, businessmen, priests, or teachers. They lived through the Great Depression, suffered from it or benefited from it, sometimes simply saw it from afar, as something that happened to others. In Breedthey are black, light or dark skinned, white, WASP but also Italian or Irish, Hispanic, Asian, Chinese or Nisei (born in the United States of Japanese parents), or even mixed race, of all ages and from all social backgrounds. Their “ breed » is suffered or claimed, decreed, by the State, the family, the neighborhood, accepted or rejected, but obsessive. It is not always visible, and sometimes appears uncertain. It rarely has the evidence of a given or a simple color – including among “ Whites “, of which numerous recent works endeavor to show that the “ whiteness » (whiteness, « whiteness “) is also the fruit of a long and winding social construction. They say to themselves “ progressive ” Or “ sectarian » and many have the idea, whether it torments them or excuses them in their eyes, that racism is written deep within each individual.
“ Who built the pyramids ? »
It is they who, to use Brecht’s formula that Terkel often quotes, “ built the pyramids “. In other words, the mass of anonymous people who suffer from history more than they make it, but who live it, and whose words have long been excluded, as anecdotal, insignificant or incompetent, from the official writing of history . In this sense, Terkel is part of a certain tradition of American oral history, born from the beginnings of ethnographic investigation, the innovations of the Chicago school and the experiments of the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) – in which he also participated by writing documentary scripts for radio. Under the leadership of the writer Jack Conroy in Illinois and Benjamin Botkin, folklore, stories and memories, particularly from former slaves, were systematically collected from the 1930s. The use of recorded testimonies considerably broadens the field of available sources and makes possible the progressive development of a new approach to history in the 1960s: a history that aims to be “ view from below » (“ from the bottom up ), who works at the boundaries of sociology and anthropology, and is inherently attentive to emerging issues of gender, race, deviance and minorities of all kinds.
The public success experienced by Studs Terkel’s books has also contributed to the institutionalization and recognition of oral history as a discipline in its own right, which, since the 1970s, has had its chairs and its textbooks, its associations. and its magazines. Even if, within oral history itself, a competing concept has developed in parallel in the wake of Allan Nevins, a historian who also came from radio, creator, in 1948, of the Columbia Oral History Research Office. Far from being the occasion for a reversal of perspective and a change of object, recording is then simply seen as a means of filling in the gaps in written archives and therefore of nourishing history, which remains classically focused on political and diplomatic issues, testimonies from its “ actors » in the most traditional sense of the term.
Can we look at history from below ?
Because, from the outset, this bottom-up approach and his methods have raised a number of questions, if not objections. Starting with that of the truth. These ordinary witnesses are often considered unreliable, likely to lie, distort or embellish a reality on which they would in any case have too narrow a point of view. Therefore, their speech would constitute at most a “ source “, but not in itself and strictly speaking, a “ history “. (In this regard, we can note that the French publisher includes the term “ stories » in the plural in the subtitles of Terkel’s translated works, while it was in English, when it appeared, in the singular – which tends, intentionally or not, to give it the simple meaning of “ narrative ).)
The practice of transcribed interviews is also suspected of maintaining the romantic illusion of the restitution of life “ in the raw state “, a direct contact with the past and a “ people » in reality mythologized. This difficulty finds an echo in the ambiguity of Dorothea Lange’s photographs – documentary shots which give the feeling of being on the same level with a reality which they nevertheless do not fail to interpret – which accompany, in the French edition of Hard TimesTerkel’s text.
Quid then, of the axiological neutrality of the researcher ? If the approach he adopts is the translation of his political and activist commitment – like the British oral historian Paul Thompson who writes in The Voice of the Past (1978) his desire to “ bring history back to the people “, and, in doing so, to contribute to changing the effective relations of domination – then it would disqualify its work, guiding the choice of people interviewed, the way of asking the questions, and the development of the final text of the interviews since the latter are cut, mounted and classified. To the subjectivity of the witness would therefore be added that of the interviewer.
Finally, and at the same time, the apparent generosity of the one who “ give the floor » could well hide a form of condescension – if, to be able to give the floor, one must be, in one way or another, the legitimate holder of it.
“ Their truth is in their memories »
Terkel answered all these questions, sometimes directly, in the interviews he gave, or in the introductions to his books, sometimes disjointed meditations, more suggestive than demonstrative which, although they leave little doubt about his intentions or his positions, refuse any didacticism. It is also and above all answered by his books themselves.
THE “ comments » which open Hard Times are thus unequivocal on the question of truth: “ This is a book of memories, not a collection of indisputable facts or exact statistics. (…) Are they telling the truth ? The question is as theoretical as the day Pilate asked it (…). Their truth is in their memories. The precision of a date or fact is of little importance. » (excluding taxp. 23). Because for this there are the classic historical or sociological works, which Terkel, who always presented himself as simple “ journalist ”, never claimed to replace.
Proof of this is the very device of his works, in which stories and analyzes respond to each other, complete or correct each other, and where the types and degrees of subjectivity that are expressed vary as much as possible. Although the crowd of anonymous people is omnipresent, Terkel does not indulge in the cult of the individual or the dream of a history without a historian: he also makes room for personalities who took a privileged part in the events he studies (responsible political or trade unionists, activists, decision-makers » economics), as well as specialists in these questions (sociologists, historians, psychiatrists), including overviews » come to punctuate and shed different light on the other interviews. The resulting film has its moments of suspense, of distancing – especially since we do not hear these voices, but we read them.
We can finally read implicitly in his books his discreet art of interview, which knows how to both fade away and help, through always open questions, a speech, clearly free, to unfold. To take the image he offers in an interview published in theOral History Reviewit is this “ neighbor » who sometimes needs help to operate his tape recorder, and with whom we can discuss as equals.