Interview of the Day

Margaret Mead

Dr. Margaret Mead discussed the changing dynamic of the American family in a May 1963 interview with U.S. News & World Report. The distinguished cultural anthropologist explained that average parents were younger, less likely to live with their own parents, and working longer hours than previous generations, leaving American children with less supervision and guidance than ever before.

“By the time the children are 3 or 4, programs on TV and radio intrude into the home. The outer world takes over,” she said. “Moral training used to come from the parents. Now it comes in the standards that are being spread—and they’re not very high, either—directly to the children by TV and radio. It’s very hard for the parents to mediate between their children and these standards.”

Additional Interviews With Margaret Mead
Mead appeared at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 to speak about the differences in creativity between men and women. Her lecture was followed by a 40-minutes question-and-answer session with the audience.

Mead reflected on her career in anthropology in a 1959 interview with Howard Langer for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The interview requires a $9.99 fee to download.

To learn more about Margaret Mead, visit her profile on findingDulcinea.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King gave his first televised interview on Feb. 10, 1957, appearing on Richard D. Heffner’s “The Open Mind” alongside Judge J. Waties Waring to discuss the “new Negro.” The interview took place two months after the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, the event that transformed King into a national figure and one of the leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Heffner asked if it benefited blacks be aggressive in demanding their rights. King responded, “I think it’s better to be aggressive at this point. It seems to me that it is both historically and socially true that privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily. And they do not give them up without strong resistance. And all the gains that have been made, that we have received in the area of civil rights, have come about because the Negro stood up courageously for these rights, and he was willing to aggressively press on.”

Additional Interviews With Martin Luther King
King appeared on NBC’s “Look Here” with Martin Agronsky on Oct. 27, 1957. He discussed Gandhi and nonviolence, his expectations for the civil rights movement, and his reaction to having his home bombed. Read the transcript of the interview (PDF).
   
He touched on the effect of the bus boycott on racial relations in Montgomery and the South. “Very frankly, I think there is a great deal of bitterness,” he said. “However, I would say that this is something of a necessary phase of the evolution of a transition. Channels of communication are temporary, temporarily closed, but I don’t think this is permanent. This is the response that you always get in a moment of social change. Privileged classes rarely ever give up privileges without strong resistance. But I think these sort of jangling discords will soon be transformed into meaningful symphonies of racial harmony in which we will be able to work out the problem. And I don’t think it will be in the, in, in many, many years off, but it will be in the not too distant future.”

King spoke to Alex Haley in 1964 for the Playboy Interview. He told Haley about his first experiences with racial prejudice, the mistakes he’d made as a civil rights leader, his disappointment with white church leaders, and his hopes for the future. He also discussed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, proposal for racial preference laws, recent riots in urban areas, and accusations that he or other civil rights leaders were communists. Note: The site contains links to adult content.

On the outbreak of violence in some parts of the country, King said, “The Negro is trapped in a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign, caught in a vicious socioeconomic vise. And he is ostracized as is no other minority group in America by the evil of oppressive and constricting prejudice based solely upon his color. A righteous man has no alternative but to resist such an evil system. If he does not have the courage to resist nonviolently, then he runs the risk of a violent emotional explosion. As much as I deplore violence, there is one evil that is worse than violence, and that’s cowardice.”

To learn more about Martin Luther King, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain agreed to a conversation in 1889 with Rudyard Kipling, a then-unknown 23-year-old short story writer and correspondent for The Pioneer newspaper in Allahabad, India. Kipling much admired Twain and sought him out during his travels through America; he recalled their meeting in a March 18, 1890, article for The Pioneer.

Kipling wrote that Twain, “speaking of truth and the like in literature, said that an autobiography was the one work in which a man, against his own will and in spite of his utmost striving to the contrary, revealed himself in his true light to the world.”

“I believe it is impossible,” said Twain, “for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself. … It is not in human nature to write the truth about itself. None the less the reader gets a general impression from an autobiography whether the man is a fraud or a good man. The reader can’t give his reasons any more than a man can explain why a woman struck him as being lovely when he doesn’t remember her hair, eyes, teeth, or figure. And the impression that the reader gets is a correct one.”

Twain later expressed that he was fond of reading fiction. “What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind,” he explained. “If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me.”

About reading an article on mathematics, Twain said, “I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful. That mathematical fellow believed in his facts. So do I. Get your facts first, and … then you can distort ’em as much as you please.”

Kipling became famous a year after the interview, and Twain became a fan of his work. Recalling their encounter, Twain said, “I believed that he knew more than any person I had met before, and I knew that he knew that I knew less than any person he had met before—though he did not say it, and I was not expecting that he would.”

To learn more about Mark Twain, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Robert Pinsky

Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky appeared on poet Grace Cavalieri’s Poet and the Poem program at the Library of Congress on Nov. 10, 1999, to recite poetry and promote his Favorite Poem Project. He discussed his well-known theory that poetry is a vocal art or, as Cavalieri described it, a “musical celebration of air.”

“The medium of the poem is the audience’s body,” he explained. “It is the vocal art, but not necessarily a performative art. So though the medium of the poem is breath, it’s air—that is the medium, the things between the feelings and ideas of the poet and the reader—it is the reader’s breath—your voice or my voice—saying Emily Dickinson’s words or Yeats’ words, it is not necessarily Emily Dickinson or Yeats performing their poem, or a trained and wonder actor performing the poem, it’s whoever wants to say the poem. And that seems to me to be primary and it does give poetry a particularly intimate and personal place, but it also means the art is inherently on a human scale. It’s by its nature on the scale of one person.”

Pinsky also spoke of his love of doing difficult things; it is a “normal proclivity of the human animal to like to engage difficulty and cope with it.” Cavalieri asked why, if there a universal attraction of difficulty, all students don’t do well in school, to which Pinsky replied, “They are all good students, not necessarily in school or in the subjects studied in school. They are students of fashion, or of sports, or of evil, alas.”

To learn more about Robert Pinsky, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Charles Lindbergh

Charles Lindbergh gave an interview to a New York Times correspondent shortly after landing in Paris on May 22, 1927, to complete the first solo trans-Atlantic flight. “Lucky Lindy” expressed the confidence he had in himself and his plane, the Spirit of St. Louis.

“There’s one thing I wish to get straight about this flight,” he said. “They call me ‘Lucky,’ but luck isn’t enough. As a matter of fact, I had what I regarded and still regard as the best existing plane to make the flight from New York to Paris. I had what I regard as the best engine, and I was equipped with what were in the circumstances the best possible instruments for making such efforts. I hope I made good use of what I had.”

He also said that there were just two dangerous aspects of the flight: navigating the plane at night and landing near a crowd of people. “I appreciated the reception which had been prepared for me, and had intended taxiing up to the front of the hangars, but no sooner had my plane touched the ground than a human sea swept toward it. I saw there was a danger of killing people with my propeller, and I quickly came to a stop. That reception was the most dangerous part of the trip. Never in my life have I seen anything like that human sea. It isn’t clear to me yet just what happened. Before I knew it I had been hoisted out of the cockpit, and one moment was on the shoulders of some men and the next moment on the ground.”

To learn more about Charles Lindbergh, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Jacques Cousteau

Jacques Cousteau spoke to Bahgat Elnadi and Adel Rifaat for the UNESCO Courier in 1991. After talking about acquiring his love of the water and his career exploring the oceans, Cousteau addressed environmental pollution and overpopulation, making controversial remarks about population control.

“What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease?” he asked. “It’s a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species. It’s terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable.”

Additional Interview With Jacques Cousteau
Cousteau spoke to Time for a March 1960 cover story. “I used to dream of flying—the classic attempt to get away from the reality of earth,” he said. “But since I have been diving, I have not had the dream,” he said. “Diving is the most fabulous satisfaction you can experience. I am miserable out of water. It is as though you had been introduced to heaven, and then found yourself back on earth. The spirituality of a man cannot be completely separated from the physical. But you have made a big step toward escape simply by lowering yourself under water.”

To learn more about Jacques Cousteau, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite recounted his career in broadcast journalism in a pair of two-hour interviews with Don Carleton of the Archive of American Television on April 28, 1998 and October 18, 1999. He spoke of covering such topics as political conventions, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, Watergate and Middle East conflicts, and of interviewing Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

He discussed his famed report on the Tet Offensive, which he had been sent to cover by CBS president Richard Salant because “It was so confusing to the American people that maybe, since there did seem to be a lot of trust in my broadcasting, maybe I could be helpful in saying what it looked like to me on the scene. And probably a very egotistical idea that we thought that that could be important.”

After delivering a “straight report” on the situation, Cronkite recalled, “I very clearly said I will have a personal view of this after this commercial. … I came back and said this is an unusual departure. I’m going to deliver an editorial in effect; I’m going to give you my personal view of what it is. And with that, I said that I thought we should get out of Vietnam.”

He also spoke of how news coverage had changed for the worse. “The management is not responsible, as the old managements were, in understanding that they had a basic responsibility to the democracy in doing news and doing it well,” he said. “And today they only see it as a tale on their entertainment dog. So what they’re demanding is that these network news shows hold up their ratings by being perhaps more entertaining. So they’ve gone to all these features: your bank account and my bank account, your backyard and my backyard, all that kind of stuff. That doesn’t belong in that 24 minutes or 23 minutes of evening news. They have a responsibility to deliver news in that time. … They’re not discharging their responsibility.”

To learn more about Walter Cronkite, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Jimmy Stewart

Jimmy Stewart recorded an interview with Charles Higham of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office in 1971. He reflected on his life as an actor, discussing his break into acting, his famous roles, and his experiences with directors such as Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford.

“I’ve always been suspicious of these people that say, we shot this picture in such a short time because we planned it completely and we rehearsed it for five weeks and we knew exactly what we were doing, and we came in and everyone knew what they were doing, so we breezed through this picture and it was no problem, and it’s so simple,” he said. “It’s not that simple. John Ford always said that the best things that have ever happened in film, in American film, have happened by accident. He’s rather an outspoken fellow. I’m sort of inclined to agree with him.”

He also recounted how Capra pitched the idea of the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” to him: “He said, ‘It starts in heaven and you're down here on earth and you’re going to commit suicide, because you think you’re a failure. And you get out on a bridge and you're going to jump off the bridge, and then your guardian angel, he comes down.’ He said, ‘Jesus, this just sounds awful, doesn't it?’ And I said, ‘Frank, if you want to make a picture that starts in heaven with a guardian angel, I’m all for it.’ And it went from there.”

Additional Interview With Jimmy Stewart
Stewart sat down with Joan Bakewell at the British Film Institute’s National Film Theatre in 1972 and covered much of the same ground as in the Columbia interview. Asked what he was “most proud of having done,” Stewart responded, “A feller came up to me the other day and said ‘I don’t know whether this means anything to you but you’ve given me and my family a lot of enjoyment over the years.’ And I said to him, ‘Does it mean anything to me? It means everything to me. That’s the ballgame. That's it.’ And I think that if I have done that to that man, and maybe a couple more … then I’m proud of that.”

To learn more about Jimmy Stewart, read his profile on findingDulcinea.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Engineer, psychologist and efficiency expert Lillian Moller Gilbreth spoke to Minneapolis Tribune writer Trygve Ager in 1955 about teaching mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin. She also touched on raising her 12 children, which was chronicled by two of her children in the book and film “Cheaper By the Dozen.”

She explained that her “main objective is to get the students to think.” She continued, “I think we all … should always be on the lookout for new leaders, for young people with a new slant on things. We don’t want these young people to think the past was perfect. We don’t want them to sit here and let the world go to pieces.”

To learn more about Lillian Moller Gilbreth, read her profile on findingDulcinea.

Studs Terkel

Studs Terkel discussed his life and career, the people he interviews, the importance of oral history, and the human spirit in an April 2002 interview for the Chicago Historical Society.

He said that his interviewing philosophy was influenced heavily by the poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” by German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht. He explained, “If I were to ask the audience now watching this Web site, ‘Who built the pyramids?’ the first reaction, reflex, is ‘pharaohs.’ The pharaohs didn’t lift a finger. … No, slaves, the anonymous ones through the centuries built the pyramids. … I’m interested in … those millions and multi-millions and millions of people down through the centuries who made the wheels go round but never made our traditional history books. We hear of generals, we hear of kings, we have industrialists, great statesmen. But who are these others?”

He said that there was too much emphasis on competition in schools. “Is that what school’s about?” he said. “To beat somebody else out. I thought school was to enrich a person’s life. … We teach our kids to be competitive, to get the A at the expense of … that’s not it. It’s to learn about the world, to learn about the past, to learn about the then so know more about the now. And to be part of a community.”

Additional Interviews With Studs Terkel
Terkel spoke to Don Swaim of CBS Radio on Oct. 5, 1988, about his radio program.

Terkel discussed politics and the art of finding interesting people in an Oct. 29, 2003, interview with Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

Terkel did multiple interviews with NPR in the 1980s and ‘90s.

To learn more about Studs Terkel, read his profile on findingDulcinea.