tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/woody-guthrie-24174/articles
Woody Guthrie – The Conversation
2023-05-17T18:15:29Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205376
2023-05-17T18:15:29Z
2023-05-17T18:15:29Z
‘Mistaken, misread, misquoted, mislabeled, and mis-spoken’ – what Woody Guthrie wrote about the national debt debate in Congress during the Depression
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526336/original/file-20230515-38447-uevzio.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=2%2C2%2C564%2C347&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Guthrie questioned whether politicians really cared about the public interest -- such as the welfare of these veterans demonstrating in front of Congress in 1932.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/image/bonus_marchers.htm">Senate Historical Office</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The debt ceiling debate between the House GOP and President Joe Biden could, if not solved, lead to economic chaos and destruction – so it might seem strangely lighthearted to wonder what a Great Depression-era singer and activist would think about this particular political moment. </p>
<p>Certainly, in all the research I did in putting together my book “<a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Prophet-Singer">Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie</a>,” I never came across any comment Woody Guthrie made about the debt ceiling. </p>
<p>But he lived through the Great Depression and its aftermath. He also stood witness to legislators struggling to correct the direction that the nation was headed in during the 1930s and early ‘40s.</p>
<p>He had a lot to say about Congress in general and how it handled the national debt in particular.</p>
<p>He once made a folksy joke that suggests his feelings about this supposedly august body. </p>
<p>“The Housewives of the country are always afraid at nite, afraid they’s a Robber in the House. Nope, Milady most of em is in the Senate,” he wrote <a href="https://www.peopleslight.org/whats-on/archive/2017-2018-season/woody-sez/dramaturgy-note/">in his regular column for The People’s Daily, called “Woody Sez.”</a></p>
<p>Guthrie constantly railed against politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who he thought represented their own selfish interests rather than those of deserving working men and women. </p>
<p>What if he could survey today’s America? Would his comments on the state of the nation in the past suggest that he would have something to say in 2023?</p>
<p>In fact, some of his observations sound as if they were written about this political moment – rather than his own. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man with a hat playing a guitar with a sticker attached that says, 'This Machine Kills Fascists.'" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526310/original/file-20230515-31621-ummfq5.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Guthrie, who was known as ‘the Dust Bowl troubador’ for his songs about the Dust Bowl and the Depression.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.74705/">Library of Congress, World Telegram photo by Al Aumuller</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>'Hearin’ the hens a cacklin’</h2>
<p>When Guthrie visited Washington, D.C., in 1940, he managed to hear some Senate debates and provided his thoughts on their effectiveness.</p>
<p>“I gawthered the Reactionary Republicans was in love with the Reactionary Republicans; also that the Liberal Democrats was in love with th’ Liberal Demacrats. Each presented a brief case of statistics proving that the other brief cases of statistics, was mistaken, misread, misquoted, mislabeled, and mis-spoken,” he wrote in his column. </p>
<p>And just what were politicians arguing over then? The national debt.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/gop-debt-ceiling-trump-presidency/">Bipartisan legislative efforts</a> raised the debt ceiling three times under President Donald Trump. Now, House Republicans are <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/biden-mccarthy-start-debt-ceiling-talks-clock-ticks-default-2023-05-09/">balking unless certain conditions are met</a>, while the Democrats are demanding a clean bill with no restrictions. </p>
<p>Guthrie witnessed much the same situation in his era. During his visit to Washington, D.C., he listened to “senators a making speeches – on every conceivable subject under the sun, an’ though the manner in which they brought forth their arguments, their polished wit, and subtle maneuvers, were all very entertaining, I come out of it as empty handed as I went in,” he wrote in “Woody Sez.” </p>
<p>He then compared their debates to “hearin’ the hens a cacklin’ – and a runnin’ out to th barn.” Despite the scene’s being “loud, noisy, and plenty entertaining,” the result was “no eggs.” </p>
<p>There’s a lot of noise coming from Congress today also – but no results.</p>
<p>What could happen if the two sides cannot agree? A telling example occurred in 2011, when the bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-debt-ceiling-crises-and-the-political-chaos-theyve-unleashed-205178">came so late that Standard & Poor’s downgraded</a> the country’s credit rating – which hiked the interest that needed to be paid on the U.S. debt.</p>
<p>But if an agreement does not happen, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that such a crisis would bring on “<a href="https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1470">economic and financial catastrophe</a>” on a national and global scale. </p>
<p>Guthrie would find this kind of brinkmanship troubling. Not because he was a political operative, with merely an intellectual understanding of the risks. Instead, he was driven by a personal knowledge of the day-to-day hardships, the human toll of such momentous political decisions. His family had fallen from middle-class safety into abject poverty even before the onset of the Great Depression. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A family on the road, standing next to a rickety truck with their belongings. Two boys in overalls are wearing no shirts." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=755&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526325/original/file-20230515-21691-mvvckf.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=949&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Guthrie knew and sang about the needs of America’s poor, such as this Depression-era impoverished family of nine on a New Mexico highway.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/pnp/cph/3c30000/3c30000/3c30900/3c30926v.jpg">Dorothea Lange, photographer; Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Because of falling agricultural prices in the aftermath of World War I and his father’s real estate speculation in some small farms surrounding their hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, the Guthries could not keep up with their mortgages. They were forced into foreclosure. </p>
<p>Guthrie joked that his father “was the only man in the world that <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5853376M/American_folksong_Woody_Guthrie.">lost a farm a day</a> for thirty days.” </p>
<p>Foreclosures would likely be just one of <a href="https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/debt-ceiling-hurt-your-finances/">the ruinous effects of default</a> now, along with interest rates hikes, slashing of social programs, unemployment spikes and decimation of pension plans. All are negative results, but they are certain to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/05/14/1176062297/how-a-default-on-the-debt-ceiling-would-affect-the-average-american">hit the poor and working class</a> the hardest.</p>
<p>Those are the people whom Woody Guthrie advocated for throughout his career. Those are the people whose hardships he lamented in such songs as <a href="https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/I_Aint_Got_No_Home.htm">“I Ain’t Got No Home”</a> and “<a href="https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Dust_Bowl_Refugee.htm">Dust Bowl Refugee</a>.” </p>
<p>But he also expressed optimism about the power of those same people to make a positive change, such as in “<a href="https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Union_Maid.htm">Union Maid</a>” and “<a href="https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Better_World.htm">Better World A-Comin’</a>.” Individual and collective action was necessary, according to Guthrie, and he celebrated both. The union maid would “always get her way when she asked for better pay,” and in “Better World” he sings, “we’ll all be union and we’ll all be free.”</p>
<p>Perhaps his best-known comments about the nation appear in “<a href="https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm">This Land Is Your Land</a>,” with the popular version praising the American landscape. But in his early version of that song, he ended it with his narrator surveying a line of hungry people lined up “by the relief office” and then asked, “Was this land made for you and me?”</p>
<p>That question could rise again in 2023: If congressional leaders debating over the debt ceiling fail to find common ground for the nation’s greater good, perhaps someone will challenge them and ask if the politicians are in office for the American people, or for themselves – just as Woody Guthrie would have.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205376/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mark Allan Jackson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Folk singer and activist Woody Guthrie actually had thoughts about the national debt – and politicians in general. They’re remarkably apt today.
Mark Allan Jackson, Professor of English, Middle Tennessee State University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/121169
2019-08-20T11:23:24Z
2019-08-20T11:23:24Z
The misguided attacks on ‘This Land Is Your Land’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288573/original/file-20190819-123705-1u2csyz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some of Guthrie's greatest champions have had difficulties with the song.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95503348/">Al Aumuller/Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In recent years, Woody Guthrie’s “<a href="https://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/This_Land.htm">This Land Is Your Land</a>” has become <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2017/07/03/535017004/this-land-is-our-land-young-immigrant-musicians-reinvent-a-classic?t=1565900388074">a rallying cry for immigrants</a>. And in July, after President Donald Trump tweeted that four Democratic congresswomen of color needed to “go back where they came from,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the four targeted, responded with <a href="https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1152225140891107328">a tweet quoting Guthrie’s lyrics</a>.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1152225140891107328"}"></div></p>
<p>But not everyone sees the song as an anthem for inclusion. </p>
<p>In June, the Smithsonian’s online magazine, Folklife, published <a href="https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/this-land-is-whose-land-indian-country-settler-protest">a piece</a> that lambasted the song for its omissions. </p>
<p>The article, titled “<a href="https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/this-land-is-whose-land-indian-country-settler-protest">This Land Is Whose Land?</a>,” was written by folk musician Mali Obomsawin, a member of the Native American Abenaki tribe. She wrote of being shaken up “like a soda can” every time she heard the song’s lyrics:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“In the context of America, a nation-state built by settler colonialism, Woody Guthrie’s protest anthem exemplifies the particular blind spot that Americans have in regard to Natives: American patriotism erases us, even if it comes in the form of a leftist protest song. Why? Because this land ‘was’ our land. Through genocide, broken treaties and a legal system created by and for the colonial interest, this land ‘became’ American land.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Obomsawin’s article immediately generated a flurry of responses from conservative media outlets. </p>
<p>“<a href="https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2019/06/18/commie-folk-singer-woody-guthrie-not-woke-enough-for-mob/">Commie Folksinger Woody Guthrie Not Woke Enough for Mob</a>,” jeered Breitbart’s John Nolte, delighted with this evidence of internecine strife among what he dubbed the “fascist woketards” of the American left. The Daily Wire’s Emily Zanotti soon joined the fray, penning a piece under the headline “<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/48565/land-not-your-land-woke-culture-now-demanding-emily-zanotti">This Land Is NOT Your Land: Woke Culture Now Demanding Woody Guthrie Be Canceled Over Folk Music Faux Pas</a>.” </p>
<p>But Obomsawin and her conservative critics might be surprised to learn that some of Guthrie’s greatest champions have also had difficulties with the song. </p>
<p>As the author of <a href="http://www.willkaufman.com">three books on Guthrie</a>, I sometimes wonder how the folksinger would respond to the criticism of “This Land Is Your Land” for its omissions.</p>
<p>While we can’t know for sure, a glance at some of his unpublished writings and recently discovered recordings can offer some clues.</p>
<h2>Seeger sings a different tune</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pete-Seeger">Pete Seeger</a>, Woody’s colleague and protégé, was perhaps the most responsible for lodging “This Land Is Your Land” in the public consciousness. After Guthrie died in 1967, Seeger continued to perform the song all around the world. </p>
<p>At the same time, Seeger made it clear that he was sensitive to the theft of Native American lands. </p>
<p>In his memoir, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Where_Have_All_the_Flowers_Gone.html?id=h3kZAQAAIAAJ">Where Have All the Flowers Gone</a>,” Seeger recalled an incident during a 1968 performance:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Jimmy Collier, a great young black singer from the Midwest, was asked to lead [‘This Land Is Your Land.’] Henry Crowdog [sic] of the Sioux Indian delegation came up and punched his finger in Jimmy’s chest. ‘Hey, you’re both wrong. It belongs to me.’ Jimmy stopped and added seriously, ‘Should we not sing this song?’ Then a big grin came over Henry Crowdog’s face. 'No, it’s okay. Go ahead and sing it. As long as we are all down here together to get something done.’” </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=446&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/288574/original/file-20190819-123731-1kqpq9n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When performing, Pete Seeger occasionally tweaked the lyrics to ‘This Land Is Your Land.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Pete_Seeger_1986.jpg">Josef SCHWARZ/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sometimes, in an attempt to ease his conscience when performing “This Land,” Seeger would add a verse penned by the singer and activist <a href="https://vimeo.com/2074442">Carolyn “Cappy” Israel</a> to acknowledge the theft of Native land: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> This land is your land, but it once was my land
Before we sold you Manhattan Island
You pushed my nation to the reservation,
This land was stole by you from me.
</code></pre>
<h2>Woody wasn’t oblivious</h2>
<p>Was Guthrie himself uncomfortable with the song’s glaring failure to acknowledge the facts of settler colonialism?</p>
<p>There’s no record of his views on the issue. But we do know that he was very aware of – and concerned with – the history of Native American dispossession.</p>
<p>For example, he was angry enough with his cousin, the country singer <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sVBVOmx6Rk">“Oklahoma Jack” Guthrie</a>, for claiming credit for a song that Woody had written, titled “Oklahoma Hills.” But as Woody wrote in an unpublished annotation to the lyrics, Jack had also left out “the best parts of the whole song” – the names of “the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek and Seminole” who had prior claim to the lands of Oklahoma.</p>
<p>Then there’s a soundbite in a posthumously discovered <a href="https://store.woodyguthrie.org/products/the-live-wire-woody-guthrie-in-performance-1949-book-cd-2008-grammy-winner">live recording from 1949</a>:</p>
<p>“They used dope, they used opium, they used every kind of a trick to get these Indians to sign over their lands,” Guthrie says to the crowd.</p>
<p>One of these real estate tricksters was actually Woody’s own father, Charley Guthrie. As biographer and journalist Joe Klein writes in “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/93631/woody-guthrie-by-joe-klein/9780385333856/">Woody Guthrie: A Life</a>,” “Because he was able to speak both Creek and Cherokee, Charley became known as especially adept at relieving Indians of their property.” </p>
<p>How did Charley learn these Native tongues? Was it possible that the Guthries had Native ancestors?</p>
<p>In a tantalizingly vague 1950 letter to activist <a href="http://www.stetsonkennedy.com/">Stetson Kennedy</a>, Woody notes “the rainbow blends” of his own bloodline, including “pure virgin island negro” and unnamed “Indian tribelines.” </p>
<p>And in an unpublished poem entitled “Sweety Black Girl,” written the same year, Guthrie writes: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> my
blood beats Spanish and my breath burns Indian and my
soul boils negro.
</code></pre>
<p>Guthrie admitted that he was ashamed of his father’s disreputable real estate practices. And while he may have idealized his own genealogy, there’s no doubt that he was fully aware of “whose land was whose.”</p>
<h2>Native Americans see Guthrie as an ally</h2>
<p>Interestingly, not all Native Americans view the song in the same light as Obomsawin.</p>
<p>The song has proved adaptable and malleable enough to enable some Native American artists to work with it.</p>
<p>In 2007, the Anishinaabe songwriter and musician <a href="https://www.secola.com/">Keith Secola</a> sang his Ojibwa-language version of “This Land” on the album “Native Americana — A Coup Stick.” </p>
<p>Secola said <a href="https://www.oupress.com/books/14395002/heartbeat-warble-and-the-electric-powwow">in an interview</a> that his version “reflects a worldview, of being a part of the world and not detached from it. Woody was into people creating their own stories. … That’s what I got from him – how to apply this strategy, this procedure of songwriting, to the topics that affect American Indians.”</p>
<p>A few years before Secola’s cover, two of Guthrie’s previously unpublished songs – “Indian Corn Song” and “Mean Things Happenin’ in This World” – were <a href="https://www.discogs.com/Blackfire-Woody-Guthrie-Singles/release/9532848">recorded</a> by the Navajo siblings, Klee, Clayson and Jeneda Benally. </p>
<p>“We wanted to keep the spirit of Woody Guthrie alive,” <a href="https://www.oupress.com/books/14395002/heartbeat-warble-and-the-electric-powwow">Clayton said in a 2012 interview</a>. “He wrote songs about the Dust Bowl and unions, but he also wrote about American Indian issues.”</p>
<p>Clayson noted that “Indian Corn Song” was one of his favorite songs to play, because in it Guthrie “talks about wastefulness and how Indigenous people are … living off the planet in a balanced way.”</p>
<p>Mali Obomsawin might take heart from Secola, the Benally siblings and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ifbleDsSsI">other</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KgNaRQ_J-c">artist-activists</a> who have adopted and adapted “This Land Is Your Land.”</p>
<p>Woody Guthrie might not have been perfect, they say, but we don’t need to “cancel” him. </p>
<p>We’ll work with him instead.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>“Sweety Black Girl” and unpublished Woody Guthrie correspondence and annotations, words by Woody Guthrie © Copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission.</em></p>
<p>[ <em>Like what you’ve read? Want more?</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=likethis">Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter</a>. ]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121169/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Will Kaufman has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Broadcast Music Industry (BMI) Foundation.</span></em></p>
Woody Guthrie’s anthem has become a rallying cry for immigrants. But did he really have a ‘blind spot’ for Native Americans, as some have claimed?
Will Kaufman, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Central Lancashire
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/64221
2016-09-06T01:12:19Z
2016-09-06T01:12:19Z
In another newly discovered song, Woody Guthrie continues his assault on ‘Old Man Trump’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/136471/original/image-20160902-20238-njq1m2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Woody Guthrie's tenancy in Fred Trump's Beach Haven apartment complex coincided with a diagnosis of Huntington's disease.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Woody_Guthrie_2.jpg">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2016, <a href="https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026">I wrote about</a> a cache of bitter writings by Woody Guthrie that I had discovered while conducting research for a book on the balladeer. </p>
<p>The invectives were directed against a man Guthrie had dubbed his “worst enemy”: Fred C. Trump, the landlord of the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn, where the Guthrie family lived from 1950 to 1952. Guthrie especially loathed the housing project’s de facto color line. (“Beach Haven looks like heaven / Where no black ones come to roam! / No, no no! Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!”) </p>
<p>Later that year, Judy Bell – for 50 years the indefatigable custodian of Guthrie’s songs at TRO-Essex music publishers – told me she had found in her files a typewritten lyric sheet of Guthrie’s. Yet another broadside fired at Donald Trump’s father, the discovery comes on the heels of an in-depth <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/us/politics/donald-trump-housing-race.html">New York Times article</a> that details the “long history of racial bias” at the properties developed and owned by Trump Management. </p>
<h2>‘Trump made a tramp out of me’</h2>
<p>Like so many memorable folk songs, Guthrie’s seven-verse diatribe is unashamedly simple, repetitive and formulaic. It describes the songwriter’s outrage over the exploitative rents charged at a publicly funded housing project meant for war veterans like himself:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Mister Trump made a tramp out of me;
Mister Trump has made a tramp out of me;
Paid him alla my bonds and savin's
To move into his Beach Haven;
Yes, Trump has made a tramp out of me.
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>Guthrie was spot on about Fred Trump’s profiteering. He may have been <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/23/ike-didn-t-like-trump-s-dad-at-all.html">shy about the details</a>: the millions Trump earned from rental payments; his squirreling away five percent of Beach Haven’s development cost; the US$3.7 million worth of borrowed, unnecessary Federal building funds that had been earmarked for construction. But Guthrie instinctively knew that a raw deal was being played out at Beach Haven.</p>
<p>His song reflects, too, what the popular music scholar Edward Comentale <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TuQnSAQGXwoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=comentale+sweet+air&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiinZGu0vfOAhXJK8AKHdBhBTYQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=comentale%20sweet%20air&f=false">has called</a> Guthrie’s “rambing, funny streak”: a highly self-conscious and stylized rhetoric characterized by “an embrace of poverty and even dereliction in opposition to the structures of pride and power.”</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Well, well, Trump, you made a tramp out of me;
Well, well, Trump, you made a tramp out of me;
You charge me so much it just ain't human,
I've got to try to live with president Truman;
Yess, Trump, you made a tramp out of me.
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>Finally, it conveys something much more sobering. It offers a glimpse into the mind of a man who had received a chilling diagnosis from doctors at Brooklyn State Hospital on September 3, 1952, while still living at Beach Haven: “PSYCHOSIS ASSOCIATED WITH ORGANIC CHANGES IN THE NERVOUS SYSTEM WITH HUNTINGTON’S CHOREA.” </p>
<p>At last there was an explanation for what had been a pattern of frightening and disorienting behavior in Guthrie: constant dizziness, which he and others had been mistaking for alcoholism; sudden, uncharacteristic outbursts of verbal and physical violence; a heightened, often embarrassing sexual disinhibition; and the gradual twisting and warping of his writings – what his <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0UDEjlAETAcC&dq=Joe%20Klein%20Woody%20Guthrie&source=gbs_book_other_versions">biographer Joe Klein calls</a> a “linguistic anarchy” that “extended even to his address (Beach Haven became ‘Bitch Heaven’ in ‘New Jerk Titty’).” </p>
<p>The Beach Haven period, which had proved so hopeful at its outset (with more living space for the family, some modest royalties for Guthrie’s songwriting, and an opportunity for his wife Marjorie to open a school of modern dance), ended after two years with the breakup of Guthrie’s marriage and alternating episodes of hospitalization, incarceration and drifting.</p>
<h2>Beach Haven: A Jim Crow town</h2>
<p>Clearly, it was not Fred Trump who had “made a tramp” out of Guthrie. Yet equally clearly, Guthrie came to associate the name “Trump” with dispossession.</p>
<p>Even as he was being dispossessed of his own neurological and expressive faculties, he wrote from “Witchy Haven” to his close friend, activist and Klan infiltrator Stetson Kennedy, of “Mr Old Man Trump” and “his little pack of pets” preventing him from doing “one single ounce of work to nail or to build or to fix up the joint.” </p>
<p>And he wrote of something even worse: Fred Trump’s “color line.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“In addition to not being able to enjoy one single day of normal or natural life in Mr Trumps project of buildings here on acct of about ninety and nine clauses in his damnable old tenant’s contract, I find out that I’m dwelling in the deadly center of a jimcrow town where no negroid families yet are allowed to move in and to live freelike.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Guthrie lamented that he and his wife were forced to raise their children “under the skullyboned stink and dank of racial hate, jimmycrack Krow.”</p>
<p>Hence Guthrie’s parting shot at his landlord:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Humm humm, Trump, you made a tramp out of me;
Hummm, humm, Trump, you made a tramp out of me;
You robbed my wife and robbed my kids,
Made me stay drunk and to hit the skids;
Yepsir, Trump, you made a tramp out of me.
</code></pre>
<p></p> <p></p>
<p>In late September of 1952, Guthrie hit the road alone, to California, partly to come to terms with the reality of his diagnosis. Marjorie was left to apply to Trump’s office with a request to suspend their lease. After receiving no reply, she wrote to Trump’s Beach Haven agent on December 4, 1952: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“My husband after months of hospitalization and examination was declared incurable and is suffering from a fatal disease known as Huntingtons Chorea. We have three small children and since I now know that I alone will be responsible for them I feel it would be impossible for me to continue living in my apartment whose rental now becomes quite a hardship…. I believe I should be out within a week.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To date, the archives have yielded no evidence of a reply, sympathetic or otherwise. Soon Marjorie and her three children – Arlo, Joady and Nora – left Beach Haven and moved to Howard Beach, Queens. </p>
<h2>Guthrie’s lyrics resonate today</h2>
<p>It is not surprising that Guthrie’s Beach Haven writings should have attracted so much attention in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Some historical clarification is now in order. Journalist David Cay Johnston, for instance, writes in his <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=olZcDAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=johnston+making+donald+trump&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjr0_jZ0vfOAhVsLcAKHVxwCakQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&q=johnston%20making%20donald%20trump&f=false">new book</a> “The Making of Donald Trump” that Guthrie “set his thoughts about Trump’s rental policies to a song he titled ‘Old Man Trump.’” </p>
<p>In fact, Guthrie never wrote a song called “Old Man Trump.” Johnston used the title because it was a condition of the copyright license granted by the Guthrie family. Meanwhile, the song of that name <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jun/30/old-man-trump-tom-morello-ani-difranco-woody-guthrie">published and recorded</a> by Ryan Harvey, Tom Morello and Ani DiFranco is an amalgamation crafted by Harvey of verse fragments drawn from three separate archival sources (<a href="https://theconversation.com/woody-guthrie-old-man-trump-and-a-real-estate-empires-racist-foundations-53026">first published in The Conversation in 2016</a>). Nor did Guthrie use the phrase “Trump’s tower,” as Harvey and his colleagues sing it; Harvey has explained it was his decision “to throw in a present tense reference.”</p>
<p>Guthrie’s Beach Haven writings have emerged at a time when his publishers, TRO-Essex, in partnership with the Woody Guthrie estate, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/business/media/happy-birthday-is-free-at-last-how-about-we-shall-overcome.html?_r=0">are battling over the copyright</a> to Guthrie’s most celebrated anthem, “This Land Is Your Land.” </p>
<p>As Nora Guthrie has explained, “Our control of this song has nothing to do with financial gain…. It has to do with protecting it from Donald Trump, protecting it from the Ku Klux Klan, protecting it from all the evil forces out there.” </p>
<p>Trump has a healthy track record in appropriating unauthorized songs for his campaign, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/rolling-stones-and-five-other-artists-who-want-trump-stop-using-their-music">much to their composers’ outrage</a>. But looking beyond the campaign: If the Beach Haven writings are anything to go by, should we ever hear “This Land Is Your Land” pumped into the elevators of Trump Tower or in the clubhouses of Trump’s golf courses, there is no scientific instrument that could measure the velocity of Woody Guthrie spinning in his grave.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>In addition to all Woody Guthrie and Marjorie Guthrie correspondence and untitled writings copyrighted by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., I gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from the following prose and lyric writings (all words by Woody Guthrie, © copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission): “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home,” “Racial Hate at Beach Haven” and “Old Man Trump.” “Trump Made a Tramp Out of Me”: words by Woody Guthrie, © copyright WGP/TRO – Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. and Ludlow Music, Inc. (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.), all rights reserved, used by permission. Special thanks to Judy Bell at TRO-Essex and Kate Blalack at the Woody Guthrie Archives.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/64221/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Will Kaufman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
‘Trump made a tramp out of me,’ Guthrie lamented, denouncing his landlord who barred black families and pocketed federal funds.
Will Kaufman, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Central Lancashire
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/53026
2016-01-21T10:47:37Z
2016-01-21T10:47:37Z
Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a real estate empire’s racist foundations
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/108650/original/image-20160119-29762-1bwnl12.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Woody Guthrie lived in Fred Trump's Beach Haven apartment complex for two years.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nick Lehr/The Conversation</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take. </p>
<p>Below all the legal jargon is the signature of the man who had composed “This Land Is Your Land,” the most resounding appeal to an equal share for all in America. Below that is the signature of Donald Trump’s father, Fred. No pairing could appear more unlikely. </p>
<p>Guthrie’s two-year tenancy in one of Fred Trump’s buildings and his relationship with the real estate mogul of New York’s outer boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s most bitter writings, which I discovered on a recent trip to the <a href="http://woodyguthriecenter.org/archives/">Woody Guthrie Archives</a> in Tulsa. These writings have never before been published; they should be, for they clearly pit America’s national balladeer against the racist foundations of the Trump real estate empire.</p>
<p>Recalling these foundations becomes all the more relevant in the wake of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-a-bigot-and-a-racist/2015/12/01/a2a47b96-9872-11e5-8917-653b65c809eb_story.html">racially charged proclamations</a> of Donald Trump, who last year <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/10/the-middle-class-housing-empire-donald-trump-abandoned-for-luxury-building/">announced</a>, “My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy.”</p>
<h2>A champion for equality</h2>
<p>By the time he moved into his new apartment, Guthrie had traveled a long road from the casual racism of his Oklahoma youth.</p>
<p>He’d learned along the way that the North held no special claim to racial enlightenment. He had written songs such as “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1nzojwEACAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=editions:ISBN1258516411">The Ferguson Brothers Killing</a>,” which condemned the out-of-hand police killing of the unarmed Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Long Island, in 1946, after the two young black men had been refused service in a bus terminal cafe.</p>
<p>In “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=skT4nQEACAAJ&dq=Woody+Guthrie+Folk+Songs&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">Buoy Bells from Trenton</a>,” he denounced the miscarriage of justice in the case of the so-called “Trenton Six” – black men convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury in a trial marred by official perjury and manufactured evidence. </p>
<p>And in 1949, he’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger against the mobs of <a href="http://www.trussel.com/hf/peekskill.htm">Peekskill</a>, New York, where American racism at its ugliest had inspired 21 songs from his pen (one of which, “<a href="http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/My_Thirty_Thousand.htm">My Thirty Thousand</a>,” was recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco).</p>
<h2>A postwar housing haven – for whites</h2>
<p>In the postwar years, with the return of hundreds of thousands of servicemen to New York, <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/55efq7hy9780252038181.html">affordable public housing</a> had become an urgent priority. </p>
<p>For the most part, low-cost housing projects had been left to cash-strapped state and city authorities. But when the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) finally stepped in to issue federal loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, one of the first developers in line, with his eye on the main chance, was Fred Trump. He made a fortune not only through the construction of public housing projects but also through collecting the rents on them.</p>
<p>When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.” </p>
<p>Trump would be <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/23/ike-didn-t-like-trump-s-dad-at-all.html">investigated</a> by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.</p>
<p>What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing” – or as Trump biographer <a href="http://books.simonandschuster.com/The-Trumps/Gwenda-Blair/9780743210799">Gwenda Blair puts it</a>, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects – a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.</p>
<h2>‘Old Man Trump’s’ color line</h2>
<p>Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.” </p>
<p>In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the color line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright color laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> I welcome you here to live. I welcome
you and your man both here to Beach Haven to love in any
ways you please and to have some kind of a decent place to
get pregnant in and to have your kids raised up in. I'm
yelling out my own welcome to you.
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ....
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees – strangers in their own strange land – Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a blistering broadside against his landlord: </p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just cain't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had succumbed to the death sentence of Huntington’s Disease, <em>Village Voice</em> reporter Wayne Barrett published a <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/how-a-young-donald-trump-forced-his-way-from-avenue-z-to-manhattan-7380462">two-part exposé</a> about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire. </p>
<p>Barrett devoted substantial attention to the cases brought against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in the development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because</p>
<pre class="highlight plaintext"><code> God dont
know much
about any color lines.
</code></pre>
<p></p><p></p>
<p>Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps – father and son alike – might well have been arrogant enough to see it as one. After all, if you find yourself “way ahead of God” in any kind of a race, then what else must God be except, well, “a loser”? And we know what Donald Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/08/08/losers-a-list-by-donald-trump/">thinks about losers</a>.</p>
<p>One thing is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for “Old Man Trump.” </p>
<p>We can only imagine what he would think of his heir.</p>
<p><em>“Racial Hate at Beach Haven,” “Beach Haven Race Hate,” “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home” and Guthrie’s untitled notebook writings: all words by Woody Guthrie, © copyright Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53026/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Will Kaufman received funding from the Broadcast Music Industry Foundation (BMI-Woody Guthrie Fellowship).</span></em></p>
In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie lived in one of Fred Trump’s buildings. In newly discovered, never before published writings, Guthrie bitterly rails against the developer’s color line.
Will Kaufman, Professor of American Literature and Culture, University of Central Lancashire
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.