Customer Reviews

Division Street: America

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chicago is the city of big shoulders. Carl Sandburg said that. Studs Terkel, in "Division Street: America," gives us the names of those people on whom those big shoulders rest. Like Edgar Lee Masters' collection of poetic epitaphs, "Spoon River Anthology," Terkel titles each chapter with the name of those whose lives are being described.

Division Street runs East-West through Chicago, ending at Lake Shore Drive. It is a major road, and Terkel could've chosen any avenue to name his book. What is important is that it cuts through the center of the city, and, symbolically, into and through the heart of it all.

Each story is a page or two. Some are five or six pages. None are too long. Terkel knows when to finish the story. However, to call the short chapters 'stories' isn't really accurate. They are edited conversations with people you might have known if you lived in Chicago in 1967 when this was first published. Some of the people are cops. Others are teachers, cabbies and nuns. There is even a couple CEOs and advertising guys. Terkel manages to connect with each interviewee, and allow them to do the talking.

Everything you've heard about Studs Terkel or this book is true. It is fantastically voyeuristic, and terrifically revealing without ever being cheap or exploitive. These people are so familiar, as if you overheard Terkel chatting with them at a diner or coffeehouse.

I wholeheartedly recommend "Division Street: America" by Studs Terkel.

Anthony Trendl
editor, HungarianBookstore.com

"Division Street: America" isn't the first title that would pop into most people's minds when they think of Terkel, but I think it should be. I'll admit, I'm totally biased being in Chicago, but maybe that's the best way to read this book.
There is a lot of upheaval and suffering throughout the city due partly to the constantly changing demographics of the neighborhoods, and many of the ethnic pockets and pyschological ghettoes that Terkel talked to people in during 1967 were in the middle of those changes. From the near north area, tight in the protective grip of Mayor Daley to the old Eastern European neighborhoods of the north and west sides which would soon become almost purely Puerto Rican, Cuban and Mexican.
You can really see firsthand, how stupid, how intelligent, how altruistic and how mean people can be in a big city. That's the best part of this whole book: you're left at every page feeling that something monumental is taking place in urban America while the interviews are happening. Civil rights, white flight, Latin immigration, the decline of the manual labor factory job, Viet Nam, etc.
Reading this in 1967 must have been interesting, but knowing what we know about Chicago today and how it's still in a state of flux (and maybe always will be) is really a reason to go back. The problems, the people and the strange mix still exists throughout Division Street today; but thanks to Terkel, we have a little hindsight.

This early effort stands with the best oral histories by author/radio host Stud's Terkel. In the mid-1960's Terkel took his tape recorder and let dozens of ordinary Chicagoans open up. Showing our City's diversity and divisions, we hear from executives, laborers, teachers, factory hands, social workers, rich, poor, and middle-class. Many are white, others are black ("Negro") or Latino, and they range from young swingers, to stressed-out parents, to aged retirees. Nearly all offer engaging tales, views, and outlooks. Among the major issues are life in Chicago, work, racial tensions, Vietnam, worship, Martin Luther King, the Bomb, opportunity, and (President) Lyndon Johnson. Anton Faber describes tool-and-die making in The Kaiser's Germany and then Chicago after arriving in 1912. Eva Barnes recalls coal miners, teen marriages, and bootlegging in her small town, plus working in Chicago's once-vast stockyards. Janice Majewski and her colleagues describe teaching at Marshall High School, then as now one of our city's more troubled facilities. Luci Jefferson arrived seeking work in the Great Migration of Southern Blacks, while activist Florence Scala fought City Hall. Many support the elusive goal of racial reconciliation, others nervously sense the decline of the traditional factory economy (replaced by white-collar services). As with many later Terkel efforts, the interviewees lean more left than right, with definite strains of anti-establshment sentiment - even among some we'd labed as distinctly "establishment."

Studs Terkel (1912-2008) made his mark by letting his subjects do the talking, and readers are better off for it. I'd have liked to hear from even more persons, plus those then fleeing to suburbia due to racial fears - what greater division existed both then and today? Still, this stellar book is as worth reading as many later Terkel efforts like HARD TIMES, WORKING, AMERICAN DREAMS, COMING OF AGE, etc.

Division Street is Studs Terkel's attempt to make sense of Chicago. Terkel constructs Division Street in the "oral-history" style that he used in so many of his other works; specifically, he went out into Chicago, recorded a group of interviews with people who represented a cross section of 1960s Chicago, and then included verbatim quotes from his interviewees in Division Street.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the candor with which Terkel's subjects speak. I am not certain how Terkel got his interview subjects to drop their guards, but it seems that no subject is taboo. After reading the book, you do have the feeling that you "know" each of the interviewees on a fairly-deep level.

If I have a criticism of Division Street, it is that the book is something of a downer. Terkel's books focus on the disappointments and frustrations of life. In Division Street he is particularly concerned with race relations and The Bomb. Though I liked the book, prospective readers should be aware that it is by no means uplifting.

Each reader will come away with a feeling that he or she knows something of Chicago. In the end, Terkel leaves the conclusions up to the reader. I suspect, therefore, that different readers will interpret Division Street in different ways. For those readers who want to learn something about Chicagoans, the effort will be worthwhile.

This is my book club selection for discussion next week and I'm totally enjoying it. I like the dialogue from different individuals and its a true depiction of Chicago at that time. I'm from Chicago so it is truly interesting to me.

I just reread this book as a kind of wake to Terkel after his passing. I first read it in my mid-twenties and was completely absorbed. Now, almost twenty years later, I've just finished it alongside Joseph P. Lash's "Franklin and Eleanor" and I'm fascinated by how topical both books seem as Obama prepares to take office amid economic catastrophe, internal homeland strife, and war. The '30s, the late '60s, and our times seem like stepping-stones in history, so similar in revolutionary content: forward-thinking, transformative and yet violent and painful. Yet the differences are clear, too. Depression-era policies focused just to establish social programs; civil rights had to wait 'til another day. That day emerged during the time covered by "Division Street," which reveals how far from black-and-white those issues were even to people who felt strongly about them. Time and again as I read I thought, this book was written forty years ago...some of these people must still be alive. What do they think now? And that question begged another: What will we think in forty years? If for no other questions than these, "Division Street" is abundantly worth reading. It's a true American classic--the voice of her people.

As I have done on other occasion when I am reviewing more than one work by an author I am using some of the same comments, where they are pertinent, here as I did in earlier reviews. In this series the first Studs Terkel book reviewed was that of his "The Good War": an Oral History of World War II.

Strangely, as I found out about the recent death of long time pro-working class journalist and general truth-teller "Studs" Terkel I was just beginning to read his "The Good War", about the lives and experiences of, mainly, ordinary people during World War II in America and elsewhere, for review in this space. As with other authors once I get started I tend to like to review several works that are relevant to see where their work goes. In the present case the review, his first serious effort at plebian oral history, Division Street: America, despite the metaphorically nature of that title, focuses on a serves a narrower milieu, his "Sweet Home, Chicago" and more local concerns than his later works.

Mainly, this oral history is Studs' effort to reflect on the lives of working people (circa 1970 here but the relevant points could be articulated, as well, in 2008) from Studs' own generation who survived that event, fought World War II and did or did not benefit from the fact of American military victory and world economic preeminence, including those blacks and mountain whites who made the internal migratory trek from the South to the North. Moreover, this book presents the first telltale signs that those defining events for that generation were not unalloyed gold. As channeled through the most important interviewee in this book, Frances Scala, who led an unsuccessful but important 1960's fight against indiscriminate "urban renewal" of her neighborhood (the old Hull House of Jane Addams fame area) Studs make his argument that the sense of social solidarity, in many cases virtually necessary for survival, was eroding.

Studs includes other stories of those , including the lumpen proletarian extraordinaire Kid Pharaoh who will be met later in Hard Times and the atypical Chicago character who gladly joins the John Birch Society in order to assert his manhood, who do not easily fit into any of those patterns but who nevertheless have stories to tell. And grievances, just, unjust or whimsical, to spill.

One thing that I noticed immediately after reading this book, and as is true of the majority of Terkel's interview books, is that he is not the dominant presence but is a rather light, if intensely interested, interloper in these stories. For better or worse the interviewees get to tell their stories, unchained. In this age of 24/7 media coverage with every half-baked journalist or wannabe interjecting his or her personality into somebody else's story this was, and is, rather refreshing. Of course this journalistic virtue does not mean that Studs did not have control over who got to tell their stories and who didn't to fit his preoccupations and sense of order. He has a point he wants to make and that is that although most "ordinary" people do not make the history books they certainly make history, if not always of their own accord or to their own liking. Again, kudos and adieu Studs.

Words can't even begin to describe what a powerful and moving book this is. Studs Turkel shows that he is an American treasure with each book he writes.