Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Studs Terkel’s book Working, published in 1974, is a panorama of American production. It is filled with edited interviews, not too different from the one that Heresies conducted with Georgina Garcia. Terkel recorded his conversations on reel-to-reel tapes, like an itinerant anthropologist. He talked to the skilled and unskilled, women and men, Black and white, rich and poor, people in all sorts of trades. His project was so wide-ranging that it is difficult to pick out any general pattern, apart from one: The American work ethic seemed to be in freefall. A foundational, nearly mythic quotient in the national character, almost taken for granted since the days of Alexis de Tocqueville, was under threat. “Inchoately, sullenly, it appears in slovenly work, in the put-down of craftsmanship,” Terkel wrote. “The careless worker who turns out more that is bad is better regarded than the careful craftsman who turns out less that is good.” The interviews in the book, particularly those involving industrial workers, seemed to bear out this diagnosis. A spot welder in a Ford plant says of the assembly line, “It don’t stop. It just goes and goes and goes. I bet there’s men who have lived and died out there, never seen the end of that line. And they never will, because it’s endless. It’s like a serpent. It’s just all body, no tail.” Another worker simply tells his sons, “If you ever wind up in the steel mill like me, I’m gonna hit you right over the head.”17