Books: A Reservoir of Untapped Power

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AMERICAN DREAMS: LOST AND FOUND by Studs Terkel; Pantheon; 470 pages; $14.95

In the darkness with a great bundle of grief the people march. In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people march: "Where to? what next?"

—The People, Yes

Few readers can now look at Carl Sandburg's epic without embarrasment. Happily, one of them is Studs Terkel. His vocabulary is sophisticated, his questions are informed by contemporary psychology and social theory. But Terkel's credulity remains that of the '30s populist who regards the American people as "a reservoir of untapped power and new astonishments."

And since he is Studs Terkel, the reservoir is always full, and the author is perpetually astonished. In Working, Terkel edited the testimonies of laborers and executives, secretaries and politicians who were too unique to prove his thesis about the degradation of the assembly tine and the anonymity of office work. In Hard Times, he set out to collect memoirs of the Great Depression and ended with an elegy for 133 voices and continuo. For his new volume, American Dreams: Lost and Found, Terkel has abandoned any attempt at doctrine. There is only, he admits, "in the manner of a jazz work, an attempt, of theme and improvisation, to recount dreams, lost and found, and a recognition of possibility."

Stripped of its Whitmanesque rhetoric, this means the fixture as before: first person singularities from the prominent (Miss U.S.A., Ted Turner, Joan Crawford, Arnold Schwarzenegger), the recognizable (Baseball Maverick Bill Veeck, Novelist Jill Robinson, Rolling Stone Publisher Jann Wenner) and the totally obscure. All of them are highly individual, all discuss some aspect of that worn shibboleth, the American Dream. As they talk, platitudes give way to testimony, and the vision becomes a document.

Thomas Boylston Adams, great-great-grandson of John Quincy Adams, "cannot think of a greater disaster than Harvard becoming the arbiter of what happens to us. They have wonderful ideas and the world would be bankrupt without them, but there are other minds and other talents [whose] ideas will save the world."

Florence Scala, an aging Chicago activist, is less encouraged. She remembers the heady days of labor struggles, reviles the credit card society, then surrenders to activist nostalgia: "I don't even know what the American Dream is any more. Maybe it's picking up some pieces I've left behind."

Miguel Cortez, a middle-aged Cuban refugee, recalls the early days of Castro. When Terkel asks him if he could bribe a policeman after the revolution, Cortez encapsulates an entire mind of state: "No, because everybody a cop." Cortez's dream is simply to rise upon his failures—a vision not substantially different from Ted Turner's: "I never was valedictorian. I couldn't make the football team, I couldn't make the baseball team . . . That's kinda how I got into sailing."