Politics & Power Quote by Studs Terkel

Terkel is betting on the crowd, then immediately adding a proviso that reads like an indictment. The line flatters "the American people" with "deep decency" and "native intelligence", but only on the condition that they arent kept in the dark. That conditional clause - repeated twice, almost like a drumbeat - is the real message: decency and intelligence are not self-executing. They depend on access.

The specific intent is twofold. First, it defends the moral seriousness of ordinary people, the core premise behind Terkels oral-history project: if you actually listen, you find wisdom where elites assume there is only noise. Second, it quietly shifts blame away from "the public" and toward the systems that curate reality - government spin, corporate media incentives, and the comfortable habit of treating citizens as consumers of slogans rather than participants in democracy.

Subtextually, Terkel is offering a theory of American failure that avoids both cynicism and naivete. People dont collapse into ignorance because theyre stupid; they collapse because facts become scarce, distorted, or too expensive to obtain. The phrase "providing they have the facts" sounds simple, but its a radical demand: transparency, education, investigative reporting, and the time to pay attention.

Context matters. Terkel came out of the Depression, watched propaganda harden during war and the Cold War, and later chronicled how work and politics grind people down while insisting they should just "trust the system". His optimism is not cheerful; its conditional, journalistic, and democratic: give people truth, and theyll surprise you. Deny it, and the country gets governed by whoever controls the story.