Woody Guthrie, American Radical by Will Kaufman (review)

Will Kaufman is angry. Indeed, he is mightily pissed. People, Kaufman asserts, are diluting or ignoring entirely the very obvious fact that Woody Guthrie was, if nothing else, a radical, a "fellow traveler" (to borrow that creaking Cold War label), or, to use a Yiddish word in lieu of an obscenity, a kochleffl.¹

After a self-indulgent and totally unnecessary "Introduction"—I counted no fewer than twenty-nine instances of the first-person singular—Kaufman sets out to reconstruct Guthrie's turn to the Left in seven chapters, the introduction, and a conclusion. Even there he begins with the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939, at least a year after Guthrie had demonstrated his sympathies with the down and out, with his fellow Dust Bowl migrants, the displaced Okies, Arkies, and Texicans. He had delivered food collected by the (John) Steinbeck Committee to Aid Agricultural Organization; he had begun writing for the Communist Party's weekly paper, People's World; and he was broadcasting daily on an avowedly left-of-center radio station. Here and there Kaufman jumps forward to underscore a point, which can sometimes be confusing to even the most knowledgeable of Guthrites, but he usually regains his footing.

Certainly Guthrie's passions could lead him to silly extremes. Joe Klein, Guthrie's first biographer, quoted Guthrie stating, "The whole world cannot trick Joseph Stalin because he is too scientific." As Kaufman points out, "The orthodoxy of Guthrie's jargon at this time could sometimes border on caricature" (129).²

Guthrie's politics were as convoluted as was his personal life. He was first antiwar, then abruptly prowar, then antiwar once more. He was pro-union, then anti-union, disillusioned when the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 forced even the most militant union leaders to expel the very CPs who had helped them organize. Kaufman notes that even Guthrie's own National Maritime Union joined in; it was "a tangled, wild sort of a salvage yard . . ." (125). Initially an unthinking racist, he later became a close friend of Huddie and Martha Ledbetter, singing songs to entertain their children, then often enough sleeping on the living room floor of the Ledbetter's flat. He formed a group with black musicians Saunders "Sonny" Terry and Brownie McGhee, then was furious when they encountered discrimination in the South.

He married three times, ignoring his first wife and their three children, doting on the second wife and their four children, traipsing the country with his third wife and baby daughter, and still finding time to impregnate at least two other women.

He was hardly the model proletarian. Raised in a middle-class home, he was an autodidact, reading his way through two small-town libraries; he dropped out of high school, but came away with a firm grasp of the English language and speed typing. Despite the "coon huntin'" drawl he affected on stage and in his weekly columns for The People's World and The Daily Worker, his letters home were in Standard English. As fellow Oklahoman Gordon Friesen barked, "You never harvested a grape in your life. You're an intellectual, a poet . . ." (89).

To be sure, Guthrie hated capitalism (204). He embraced the goals of the American Communist movement, yet was never a card-carrying member of the party. The standing joke was no one in California bothered to ask him, and no one in the party's New York apparatchik trusted him. As his friend and fellow member of the Almanac Singers, Bess Hawes, wryly commented, "Could you imagine Woody selling The Daily Worker on Brooklyn street corners?"

Guthrie apparently claimed that he never deleted or edited out his radical verses, or so Kaufman asserts (178). In fact Guthrie did edit. He himself immediately cut three verses from his most popular song, "This Land Is Your Land," probably on the grounds that those stanzas were both negative and bitter. (Three characteristics...