“This Machine Kills Fascists”The Life and Music of Woody Guthrie
- Daniel Holland
- Sep 3, 2020
- 8 min read
“Woody…is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of the people and I suspect that is, in a way, the people….There is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.” – John Steinbeck
Few American musicians have left a legacy as powerful, complicated, and contested as Woody Guthrie. His songs – “The Sinking of the Reuben James,” “Roll on Columbia, Roll on” “Union Maid” and “Pastures of Plenty”, became some of the most recognisable contributions to twentieth-century folk music. To many admirers, Guthrie was the father of the modern American folk song, a troubadour whose words carried the voices of labourers, farmers, and migrants who endured the Great Depression.
Guthrie rose to prominence in an era when struggling blue-collar workers were gaining a romanticised place in the nation’s cultural imagination. The rise of radio and phonograph brought his voice into homes across America, but it was the hardship of the Dust Bowl and the political unrest of the 1930s that gave his music its edge.
Yet Guthrie’s story is not a simple one of homespun virtue. His legacy reveals how a flawed, radical man became a mythologised figure of Americana. He was a poet, but also a wanderer, womaniser, absentee father, and outspoken communist. His anthem “This Land Is Your Land” — now sung in classrooms and political rallies — originally carried sharp verses challenging capitalism. The sanitisation of Guthrie tells us as much about American memory as it does about Guthrie himself.
A Childhood of Fire and Loss
Born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, Guthrie grew up in a middle-class family that unravelled through tragedy. His father, Charlie Guthrie, was a successful politician and real estate dealer, but poor investments ruined his fortunes. Woody’s mother, Nora, descended into mental illness later diagnosed as Huntington’s Chorea, a hereditary disease that would eventually devastate Woody himself.
The Guthrie household was marked by trauma. Woody’s sister Clara died after setting herself on fire during an argument with Nora. Rumours swirled that Nora later set her husband ablaze, an injury he never fully recovered from. Eventually she was committed to an asylum.
This instability marked Woody’s early years. He later recalled his youth to folk musicologist Alan Lomax while recording songs for the Library of Congress, painting a picture of a boy surrounded by both music and misfortune.
The Road to Music
In 1929, Guthrie resettled with his father and brother in Pampa, Texas. The oil boom briefly gave the town life, and it was here that Guthrie’s musical identity began to take shape. His uncle Jeff, a fiddler, let Woody accompany him at county dances. Guthrie also married young — the first of three marriages — but soon abandoned domestic life for adventure.
By 1937, he was riding freight trains and hitching west. On the road he gathered folk songs from across the country and absorbed radical ideas from Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World. These encounters shaped his political and musical voice, fusing traditional balladry with biting social critique.
Woody and Lefty Lou – Los Angeles Radio
In Los Angeles, Guthrie found an unlikely stage. He began performing with Maxine Crissman, later known as Lefty Lou. The pair hosted a daily two-hour slot on KFVD, a progressive radio station run by Frank Burke. Their simple folk duets offered listeners a nostalgic connection to the songs of their parents and grandparents, a counterpoint to the jazz and swing dominating radio.
For many Dust Bowl migrants who had landed in California, Woody and Lefty Lou’s programme was a reminder of home and identity. Guthrie’s popularity grew, but so did his awareness of the harsh realities faced by these very migrants.
Firsthand Misery
By the mid-1930s, some 50,000 migrants had entered California, lured by flyers promising steady work in fruit orchards. Instead they found themselves competing against thousands of others for meagre wages. Locals derided them as “Okies,” regardless of whether they came from Oklahoma or not. “No Okies” signs hung on storefronts, and paramilitary groups often crushed efforts to unionise farm labour.
Migrants lived in desperate camps, forbidden by armed guards from eating fruit off the trees they harvested. Starvation and disease spread. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath captured this misery, and when the film adaptation was released Guthrie was asked to write a ballad about it. His 17-verse ode to Tom Joad remains one of his most haunting works.
Songs for the Downtrodden
The camps radicalised Guthrie. He saw families robbed of their dignity and began writing songs that gave them a voice. “Pretty Boy Floyd” became a Robin Hood ballad of sorts, celebrating an outlaw who stole from the rich. “The Jolly Banker” mocked bankers who foreclosed on farms.
In the camps, he often heard the hymn “This World Is Not My Home.” It angered him. As his biographer Joe Klein explained, Guthrie believed it urged the poor to meekly await rewards in the afterlife rather than fight for justice in the present. Guthrie responded with “I Ain’t Got No Home”:
I ain’t got no home, I’m just a-roaming around
I’m just a wandering worker, I go from town to town
And the police make it hard wherever I may go
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
His songs became less about heaven and more about hunger, eviction, and resistance.
The Almanac Singers and the War Years
In 1940, Guthrie moved to New York and joined the Almanac Singers, alongside Pete Seeger, Millard Lampell, and Lee Hays. They cultivated a working-class image and played union halls and strikes, writing songs for labour causes.
Initially, they opposed U.S. involvement in World War II, echoing the Communist Party line. But after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, their stance shifted. Guthrie himself wrote “The Sinking of Reuben James” about an American destroyer sunk by German forces, while carrying a guitar stencilled with “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
The Almanacs briefly tasted success when CBS used their “Round and Round Hitler’s Grave” for a war series. But their communist ties soon drew criticism. Offers dried up, and they became too controversial for mainstream outlets.
Woody’s Political Identity
“I ain’t a communist necessarily, but I’ve been in the red all my life,” Guthrie once declared.
Whether or not he ever carried a Party card remains unclear, but his FBI file identified him as a communist and “Joe Stalin’s California mouthpiece.” Guthrie used humour, folk melodies, and storytelling to critique inequality. He described his politics not as communism but “commonism”:
“Every single human being is looking for a better way… To own everything in Common, That’s what the Bible says. Common means all of us. This is pure old Commonism.”
He disliked long political debates, preferring action and music. His philosophy was practical, rooted in empathy for ordinary workers.
“This Land Is Your Land” – Protest or Anthem?
Guthrie’s most famous song, “This Land Is Your Land,” began as a rebuttal to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” In 1940, Guthrie bristled at Berlin’s rosy patriotism, knowing the harsh realities of poverty. His original verses included biting critiques:
Was a great high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said: Private Property
But on the back side it didn’t say nothing—
God blessed America for me.
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office I saw my people—
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God Blessed America for me.
Later recordings left these verses out, transforming the song into a simple patriotic anthem. Yet Guthrie continued to sing them, teaching them to his son Arlo, who has performed them ever since. Pete Seeger too preserved the verses, warning against “the danger of this song being misinterpreted.” Seeger even added his own line:
Maybe you been working just as hard as you’re able
And you just got crumbs from the rich man’s table
Maybe you been wondering, is it truth or fable
This land was made for you and me.
Decline and Influence
By the mid-1940s, Guthrie’s health was failing. As the war escalated, Woody enlisted with the merchant marines, at least partially to avoid the draft. Ironically, though, the army inducted Woody in May 1945, the very day Germany surrendered to the Allies. After a brief and uneventful peacetime stint in the military, the army released Woody from duty to return to his second wife in Brooklyn.
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, Woody noticeably deteriorated as the hereditary Huntington’s Chorea, now known as Huntington’s Disease, made itself shown. Woody spent the last decade of his life in hospitals in an increasingly incapacitated state, where he nevertheless inspired his many visiting fans, including a young Bob Dylan.
The Shaping of a Legacy
Even before Guthrie’s death in 1967, mythmaking was underway. The 1956 benefit concert for his family at New York’s Pythian Hall was later remembered as the rebirth of folk music. It also marked Guthrie’s canonisation.
The FBI’s “communist mouthpiece” became, in later decades, a celebrated cultural figure. In 1966, the Department of the Interior named a power substation after him. In 1998, the U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp. Critics like Irwin Silber remarked: “They’re taking a revolutionary, and turning him into a conservationist.” Arlo Guthrie called it “a stunning defeat” for a man who hated respectability.
“Commonism”
Woody was critical of the vast inequality of wealth in American society, but at the same time had an unswerving faith that the American people would ultimately do the right thing (once telling a newspaper, “I can safely say that Americans will let you get awful hungry but they never quite let you starve.”) Woody’s outlook was as much fueled by disdain for the impersonal forces of Wall Street as it was a profound empathy for the struggling common man. Woody summarized his sociopolitical philosophy as “commonism.”
In his words:
“Every single human being is looking for a better way…when there shall be no want among you, because you’ll own everything in Common. When the Rich will give their goods unto the poor. I believe in this Way…This is the Christian Way and it is already on a big part of the earth and it will come. To own everything in Common, That’s what the Bible says. Common means all of us. This is pure old Commonism.”
Whitewashed Legacy
Why was Woody’s legacy whitewashed? Woody embraced communism at its peak in the United States, but as the nuclear tension of the Cold War made the communist threat that much more immediate to Americans, prompting purges of communist influence from the government and entertainment sectors, it was likely harder to reconcile Woody’s leftist leanings with his role as an American cultural hero. As Yale cultural historian Michael Denning has written, “Cold War repression had left a cultural amnesia,” minimizing the real intellectual and cultural influence the Popular Front, and communist singers like Woody, had on American society.
Woody Guthrie’s Complicated Spirit
Guthrie was deeply imperfect, a womaniser, absentee father, hygiene avoider, and erotic letter-writer. But his genius as a songwriter is undeniable. He wrote an estimated 1,000 songs, transforming the struggles of ordinary Americans into enduring folk anthems.
His music gave voice to the voiceless. He mocked the wealthy, comforted the poor, and challenged listeners to confront injustice. As Steinbeck wrote, “There is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But… there is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression.”
That is Woody Guthrie’s true legacy, not the sanitised folk hero of postage stamps, but the troubadour who sang America’s pain and resilience.
Sources
Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (1980)
Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011)
Alan Lomax recordings at the Library of Congress – https://www.loc.gov/collections/alan-lomax/
Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (1997)
“The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie” – Smithsonian Folkways – https://folkways.si.edu/woody-guthrie
Irwin Silber, radical music commentary archives – https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/folk_music.htm
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