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HOPPE: How would you characterize the politics and values you grew up with?

VONNEGUT: We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders. My ancestors came over from Germany about the time of the Civil War and one of them lost a leg and went back to Germany.

But they were all Freethinkers, formerly Catholics. It was science and Darwin, in particular, that made them decide, as educated people, which they were, that the priest, nice as he was, didn’t know what he was talking about.

They were Freethinkers—and that’s what I am, except we’re called secular humanists now. People stopped calling themselves Freethinkers because it was so specifically German and anything German was terribly unpopular because of the two world wars. My family became Unitarians instead—it’s the same sort of thing.

HOPPE: Didn’t Freethinkers place a great emphasis on rationality in public life?

VONNEGUT: What we secular humanists do now—and I am honorary president of the American Humanists Association—like the Freethinkers, is try to behave as well as possible without any expectation of reward or punishment in an afterlife, and to serve as best we can, the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.

HOPPE: In your essay about being a native Midwesterner, you make a lovely connection with the Great Lakes.

VONNEGUT: There’s almost nothing like them anywhere else in the world, except in Asia. They’re miracles all in themselves. In the middle of Siberia I guess there’s a lake that big, but there are practically no other lakes that big with fresh water.

We are continental and the other people are oceanic. We have no ocean, but we look around and for miles and miles and miles there’s all this land. Holy shit. One thing in the Middlewest: if you’re in my business you’re aware of the low opinion both coasts have of the midlands. And that is quite mistaken. New York would be a Kokomo if it weren’t for Middlewesterners coming there.

HOPPE: What accounts for the persistence of that low opinion?

VONNEGUT: People like to feel entitled, whether they’re actually entitled or not. They want to feel superior, so they imagine we’re Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.

HOPPE: What made high school such a great experience for you?

VONNEGUT: Learning. The people who taught really knew their stuff. My chemistry teacher, Frank Wade, was actually a chemist. I was so lucky in a number of ways. One of them was to go to school during the Great Depression because teaching became a plum job. The smartest people in Indianapolis became teachers. And, for once, there was something for women to do because teaching was regarded as a woman’s profession, like nursing. So the smartest women in town—Jesus, my women teachers were so exciting. My ancient history teacher, Millie Lloyd, should have worn a medal for her performance at the battle of Thermopylae. She was excited and we were excited.

Our classes were relatively small. Those small classes can feel like family. After a class in French or chemistry or whatever, we’d be talking in the halls about what we just learned.

In those days great teachers were celebrities. I would look up to them.

But you know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.

HOPPE: Wasn’t Roosevelt a controversial figure in those days?

VONNEGUT: Social class means a hell of a lot, and upper-class people—no matter how well Roosevelt did—it was stylish to hate him. What he did, which really offended them, was he strengthened the labor unions—made it possible for them to strike. The oligarchs were furious because the working class was not supposed to have any power at all.

I’ve written about Powers Hapgood. He was a Harvard graduate, son of a wealthy family who owned a cannery out there. After leaving Harvard, he went to work in coalmines and then was a CIO executive when I met him in Indianapolis. He had just come from court because there was some kind of dust-up on a picket line. The judge was so curious about him—coming from a rich family – why he would choose to live as he had. I guess you know what his answer was…

HOPPE: …the Sermon on the Mount…

VONNEGUT: “The Sermon on the Mount, sir.” That’s important. And what I’ve said about the Sermon on the Mount is I’d just as soon be a rattlesnake if it weren’t for the Sermon on the Mount.