The American Dream, and Where It All Started

By Stefan Kanfer

THE GREAT DIVIDE

by Studs Terkel

Pantheon; 439 pages; $18.95

Others interview, Studs Terkel elicits. Under the influence of his discerning eye and disarming tongue, truck drivers and professors, black activists and Klan members, entertainers and executives yield their secret griefs and their private truths. It is appropriate that in his film debut -- in John Sayles' Eight Men Out -- Terkel plays one of the first journalists to scent the World Series fix of 1919.

In five books and a Chicago-based radio talk show, the oral historian defines the American experience with collages of interviews. By now Terkel, 76, can be justly charged with employing a formula. Still, it is his formula, sedulously aped but never accurately reproduced. This latest compilation, subtitled Second Thoughts on the American Dream, finds an absence of consensus. "Things can go either way," Terkel observes. "There was a phrase in vogue during World War Two . . . Situation Fluid. It is so now as it was then."

As proof he offers some 96 varied testimonies dealing with postponed or fulfilled aspirations. A Minnesota beef farmer decides that America's problems are created by "Zionists . . . I believe they want to set up a messianic kingdom, with them as masters and the rest of us as slaves." Jean Gump, a quiet Roman Catholic grandmother, protests the presence of an Army missile site in Missouri and pays for her convictions by becoming No. 03789-045 in a West Virginia prison.

A Department of Agriculture executive in Minnesota offers a chilling report of two small farm children who eventually refused to board their school bus: "One afternoon, they came home on the bus and they saw the machinery being hauled away. On another afternoon, they saw the livestock hauled away. The kids said, if they rode that bus again, they'd be hauling mom and dad away."

Not everyone speaks of failed visions. A vastly successful Wall Street commodities broker demands, "Why is ((the farmer)) a solid citizen? That's a myth. The myth is that land is good, right? Farmers work hard, right? That's also a myth . . . Ten years from now, there will be less farmers. We don't need them."

Although Terkel maintains an air of bemused objectivity during these exchanges, there is no mystery about the location of his sympathies. The book's title is taken from the plaint of a black journalist: "If you don't have any hope and all you look forward to is producing more and more generations of welfare kids, you're definitely worse off. That is the big gap, the Great Divide."

Can it be bridged? At times Terkel is overtaken by despair: "What had presumably been our God-anointed patch of green appears to be, for millions of us, a frozen tundra." Yet the author cannot maintain a long face. After repeatedly exposing the country's down side, he expresses his own second thoughts on the American Dream. He decides to roll the dice with America's eternal resource: the altruistic young. They "may reflect something . . . unfashionable for the moment and thus hidden away, something 'fearful': compassion. Or something even more to abjure: hope."

Here the Grand Inquisitor exaggerates his case. The 50 states are not yet glacial; compassion and hope are warmly embraced by candidates of all political stripes; and the quality of mercy is not the exclusive property of youth -- or of septuagenarians. As before, Studs Terkel is best understood not as a thinker but as a portrait artist. Ninety-six provocative close-ups at a price of $18.95 comes to about 19 cents apiece. The Great Divide is a living refutation of those who insist that Americans are growing more and more alike, or that you can't get a bargain anymore.