"Woody" Guthrie was born in 1912 in Oklahoma, seven years after it was admitted as a state. He was one of eight children, one of whom, a sister, died in a coal fire. His father, who was active in the Democratic Party, named him after the future President. Guthrie’s father was a businessman and property owner who later fell upon hard times. Guthrie's mother, Nora, suffered from Huntington’s disease - the same debilitating illness that would afflict Woody Guthrie during the last decades of his life. Nora Guthrie was institutionalized when Guthrie was only 14 years old. Since Guthrie’s father by then living and working in Texas in order pay off debts from failed real estate deals, Guthrie and his six remaining siblings were on their own in Oklahoma.
At that very early age, Woody Guthrie worked odd jobs around his home town, where he came to depend upon the compassion of family friends for meals and shelter. He soon taught himself to play the harmonica and displayed an aptitude for music that he learned to "play by ear." As a gifted listener, Guthrie also learned a number of ballads and traditional English and Scottish songs from the parents of his friends. To ward off hunger, Guthrie would often play a song in exchange for a sandwich or quarter.
When he was eighteen years of age, Guthrie began to travel with the migrant workers from Oklahoma to California. From them, he learned the traditional folk and blues songs. Many of the songs he later wrote described the wrenching suffering and injustices that he witnessed during in the Dust Bowl era and in the throes of the Great Depression. His experiences instilled within him a life-long commitment to social justice that he expressed in his folk songs. His most famous ballad “This land is your land” has been a inspiration to generations of folk artists.
The recording by Arlo Guthrie and Pete Seeger above captures the passion and love of country that is expressed by Walt Whitman in his poem, “I hear America singing,” in which Whitman celebrated the lives of the mechanics, the carpenter, the mason, the boatman, the shoemaker and the woodcutter. Much like Whitman, Guthrie believed that it was the ordinary person - the Everyman - who personified the quest for equality and whose lives expressed the essential democratic values. Guthrie also understood, as did Whitman, that great concentrations of wealth in the few, if not curbed, would subvert democracy and render meaningless the phrase "equality of opportunity."
In 1968, Guthrie’s ballad became the unofficial song of Robert Kennedy’s tragic presidential campaign. Kennedy’s murder that year, coupled with the assassination of Martin Luther King and the tragic death of Thomas Merton, caused this country to fall into a deep, numbing slumber from which it has yet to awaken. Since that fateful year, the democracy that the Progressive Movement, the New Deal and the Great Society endeavored to create has been chipped away, brick by brick, by the purveyors of money and influence.
The right-wing noise machine, fueled by an array of wedge issues such as guns, religious liberty, hostility to unions and public employees and budget deficits, are working feverishly to distract the attention of all of us who are vulnerable from noticing the root causes of our misery: a dysfunctional federal system and a poorly performing economy that are largely the fault of the political elite, at all levels of government, who continue to pander to the agenda of the wealthy and their corporations, rather than to address the needs of ordinary citizens.
If a song has the power to summon a nation to reclaim its destiny, Woody Guthrie's ballad should become the anthem for all progressive voters in the 2012 election at all levels. The lyrics challenge each of us to take our country back from those who seek to privatize the American Dream and to close off the access of ordinary citizens to the public square with signs that say “no trespassing.”
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IceRune
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Comments
-R-
Rated.
Commies murdered how many millions?
No wonder Liberals like him.
For me the message to both my republican right and democratic left friends is the same. Reform is not anti-business and reform does not mean destroying our free enterprise system. Success by its nature causes a few to gain so much power in the market they can in turn manipulate the market to the point it no longer is a free market.
To keep the system in balance from time to time it has to be adjusted by the people (government) so that it remains open to all people to fail of succeed. Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt understood this more than many progressives today.
Sadly, Harrison Pierce's comments reflect the utter inability of some grown-ups to step outside of their worldviews, put aside their prejudices, and to try to imagine the policy prescriptions offered by the other two competing political traditions that are, by and large, absent from our political discourse: conservatism ( as it is understood European Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition) and socialism.
President Obama is not a communist or Marxist. He is a mainstream politician who is in the center of the liberal consensus upon which the American polity was founded. Many would argue that he has been the best Republican President since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Romney and his GOP supporters, by contrast, represent the kind of extreme right-wing classical liberalism that an earlier generation of Americans repudiated. I suspect that Mr. Pierce's parents and grandparents understood - if they suffered during the Great Depression - knew instinctively that extreme economic inequality and a lack of regulation of the financial markets and government oversight in general didn't inspire economic growth. Instead, it resulted in a prolonged depression and an extraordinary collapse of demand across the board similar to what we are witnessing today.
Woody Guthrie's ballad reminds us that beyond each of us as competing selves there is something broader that belongs to all of us as a body politic - the public interest. It is not surprising that the Latin root word of the word republic - "res publica" -translates in English as "the public thing."
I've know many who left the USSR because of how hellish it was.
Name-calling is a highly unproductive enterprise, although I do agree with Santayana's admonition that- as a general proposition - we should not forget the lessons of history. But If you're still preoccupied with communism, you might complain to the US Chamber of Commerce and all of the pro-business organizations that enthusiastically endorse out-sourcing American jobs and technology to one of the most repressive regimes in the world - the People's Republic of China.
I concur that millions of innocents under the brutal regime of the former USSR. Will you concede that the collaboration of a number of large American corporations - directly and through their subsidiaries - continued to do business and pursue investments in with Nazi Germany until Hitler's demise? Were they thus also culpable for the slaughter of millions of people?
When all said and done, no political or economic system has a monopoly on virtue or wisdom. All of them have been created through the imaginations of human beings; and all of us too, sadly, are flawed.
Paul, as for responding to you... do not presume to speak for me or my family. My Great Grandfather was a 2 star general in the U.S. Army so he put in his time and I'd say having served this nation during times of peace and war that he had endured much greater hardships than anyone else can imagine. Another grandfather grew up poor and worked his ass off and died in very comfortable retirement. He didn't do it by taking from what others had he did it by creating what he had.
I simply pointed out a fact that Guthrie, as talented a singer as he might have been, wrote for the U.S. Communist Party's daily newspaper. 174 articles is quite a lot. Communism was and is a bloodthirsty ideology hatched and perpetuated by Leftists. Nothing can ever be said to downplay that. Having known many people who suffered under Communism for being Jewish or Catholic or business people I know of what I speak.
Do not attempt to shift or alter the conversation away from this fact.
The left has their heroes... Chavez, Che, Mao... all bloodthirsty murderers.
I'd pick a better topic to write about if I were you should I be interested in lauding someone.
What do I think of his song..? It's fine but unrealistic which is probably why he wrote for the Commies.
Liberals do not really believe that "this land is your land, this land is my land" they view things as it's "our land" meaning we'll take away, control, and manage "your land." That's what Collectivism is and that has only caused poverty and misery where it has existed.
I think you were unaware of Guthrie's Commie roots and, if that's the case, now you know.
Of those infamous commies Harri cites, none of the authoritarianism or murders were "leftist" acts. Authoritarianism is purely right-wing and always has been, no matter the supposed economic or pseudo-democratic stated goal.
Harrison, I know you'll never understand how childish your comments are, but you write like a True Believer 13 year old kid that never understands what the adults are talking about. Low IQ and delusional paranoia are never an attractive mix, but they describe the Glenn Beck demographic.
Guthrie=Commie=Liberal=Left=Mao=Murder=Anyone who expresses admiration for Woody is a bloodthirsty murderer.
Yeah, Harri, that kind of thinking is impressive. Adult much?
That aside, it is comical, so it's not a total loss. You wouldn't be interesting if you knew what you're talking about.
Cheers!
I've never heard of "Commie Light" vs. "Commie" must be something the kids are doing these days.
But, like I can with Wagner, I can still like the man's music. But the author of this piece would do himself well, in my view, to stop fighting with Harrison and say, "Yeah, Guthrie had some real lapses in moral judgement, but wrote a hell of a ballad". End of issue.