American dreams: a disparate chorus

BOOK REVIEW By RICHARD J. SHEREIKIS

American Dreams: Lost and Found, by Studs Terkel. Pantheon Books, New York, 1980. 470 pages, $14.95.

IN AMERICAN DREAMS, Studs Terkel is once again trying to take the national pulse with a microphone. This time, he has asked hundreds of Americans about their feelings toward "The American Dream," that fuzzy and nebulous ideal that has obsessed so many critics now for so many years. Terkel has spanned the country and clambered up and down the socio-economic ladder in his effort, and we hear in his pages from bellhops and bureaucrats, from athletes and addicts, from neighborhood folks and national celebrities.

The result is a cacophony of hopes and frustrations, of dreams and despair. There are miniature autobiographies like Coleman Young's frank and fascinating story of his rise from the crap games in back alleys of Detroit to the mayor's office in that city. And Sam Lopez' story of his metamorphosis from Latino gang leader on Chicago's West Side to director of the Uptown Center, an adjunct of Chicago's Northeastern University.

There is the chauvinistic materialism of an Arnold Schwartzenegger, who has found his "dreamland" in California, where "they all have a tan" and where he can fulfill his fantasies of wealth and power: Number One in America pretty much takes care of the rest of the world. You kind of run through the rest of the world like nothing. I'm trying to make people in America aware that they should appreciate what they have here. You have the best tax advantages and the best prices here and the products here. And the indignation of a Bob Ziak, a tough and feisty lumberman who worries over commercial disregard for beauty and natural resources: The timber companies don't want a single tree standing any more. They don't understand that a tree, a snag, is not only a hotel for birds and bats and bees. They are magnificent works of art created by nature and beyond the ability of man to equal. I don't think they have any feeling for beauty, for something that is old .... Timber companies are indifferent as to your feelings. The only feeling they want is the Ions of pulp to come out of there. There's Chicago alderman Vito Marzullo, celebrating the wonders of precinct politics, while lambasting "undesirable" and "un-American" individuals who "defy law and order" and annoy him with "demands" instead of deferential requests. And there's the sad and horrible story of Aki and Jun Kurose, who endured the terror of those concentration camps where Japanese-Americans were confined in this country during World War II.

There are businessmen who've failed, and some who've make it grandly. There's a former Klansman who became an activist for integration in his southern city. There's Clarence Spencer, headed for Washington, D. C, in 1963 to join Dr. Martin Luther King, 75-years-old and "overjoyed" at being part of a train that's bound for glory. And 75-year-old Hartman Turnbow, another black man, who earned a high school diploma in 1976, but who despairs about a future he hopes he won't see: "They talkin' 'bout we makin' progress. We makin' dyin' progress. We makin' progress to dig our grave. That's the kind of progress we're makin'. My lord in heaven, if I had another life to live and it was like this one, I wouldn't want it. In ten year from now, that the Negro don't be slaved, the good Lord'll be with 'em!"

The dominant tone of the book is melancholy. Most of Terkel's subjects have been burned in some way or another, victims of inequality, racism, rapacious competition, or the sundry seductions of a society that promises so much and so often gives so little, even to those who strive. The tone is set in the "Prologue," where Miss U.S.A. of 1973 bores to the heart of the American Dream she shared with so many young women and exposes the spiritual fraud she found there. It continues hauntingly in Rafael Rosa's dreams of having a chauffeur-driven limousine, of being something big, like a television personality or an investor — or a taxi driver. Dreams he has as he pedals his bicycle to his job as a bellhop in "a small theatrical hotel in Manhattan." And it goes through Bob Ziak's "Epilogue" over the vanished glory of the forests.

The book has its moments, to be sure, as any book must that touches so many bases. Many of the anecdotes are interesting. Some of the stories are illuminating. Some of them are fun. But whether the book adds up to more than the sum of its parts is at least debatable. So much of it seems predictable. So much seems repetitious. So much seems banal and mundane. And it is hard to say what we should make of this disparate chorus, what conclusions to draw from the heartbeats that Terkel has given us. Is the patient terminally ill? Afflicted with a mild disorder? Suffering from fin de siecle hypochondria? Or just in need of an aspirin?

For me, the most telling and depressing lines came from 95-year-old Scott Nearing, an American hero who has marched to a different and nobler drummer all his life, writing 50 books and fighting courageously against the forces of mindlessness and commercialism. He is a winner in so many ways, like many others in the book who've had a vision and worked to see it live. But his summing-up is the depressing dominant chord that emerges from the book: "The job is to keep your head above water and to do your share in making the dying society as tolerable as possible."

Terkel's voices, hopeful as many of them are, don't give us much cause for optimism. At least not of the naive kind.

March 1981/Illinois Issues/27