Voice on the Quads

Something funny happened in the way the ticker taped on that October day in 1929 when things fell apart. So I go visit years later a man who was...a senior partner at Goldman Sachs. I said, "What happened that day?" He says, "I don't know." "Well, who does?" Then he says, "We're waiting on some kind of announcement." I said, "From who, God?"

The announcement came from big government, from the New Deal. The very ones who condemn big government today… are the very ones whose daddies' and granddaddies' asses were saved by big government. That's what Ben Shahn is talking about, and that's what I mean by [saying] we have a national Alzheimer's disease, that there is no memory of yesterday. And Ben Shahn recalls all this all art is political.

-Studs Terkel, PhB'32, JD'34, in his April 19 lecture at the opening of "Ben Shahn's New York: The Photography of Modern Times" at the Smart Museum of Art.