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Reviewed by:
  • Woody Guthrie, American Radical
  • John S. Partington
Will Kaufman . Woody Guthrie, American Radical. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011. xxv + 270 pp. Cloth, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-252-03602-6.

In Woody Guthrie, American Radical, Will Kaufman provides an interesting and detailed political biography of Guthrie. His work is a stunning accomplishment and the first sustained monograph on Guthrie's political involvements, opinions, and impacts. Although both Joe Klein's Woody Guthrie: A Biography (1980) and Ed Cray's Ramblin' Man (2004) give proportionate accounts of Guthrie's sociopolitical aspects, Kaufman rightly sees a place for [End Page 550] a dedicated political study of this most political of personalities: "The two major biographies . . . certainly do not ignore Guthrie's political journey; but it is a thread often disappearing into the epic tales of rambling and womanizing and the Greek tragedy of the voice, body, and life gradually lost to the grim reaper of Huntington's disease. An entire book devoted to the radical Guthrie had yet to be written: a book about a political awakening and its aftermath; a book that would uncover and reclaim the obsessive thinker and fitful strategist practically buried in the romantic celebrations of the Dust Bowl Troubadour" (xx-xxi).

In chapter 1, "Awakenings," Kaufman provides the political background to Guthrie's early years, focusing on Oklahoma's radical and socialist traditions before and after its elevation to statehood in 1907, through Guthrie's birth year of 1912 and migration to Texas and then California, up to his departure for New York in 1940. Given the depth of research by Klein and Cray, much of this early information has been well covered in the biographies. However, Kaufman's revelation of Guthrie's ambivalence toward Roosevelt's New Deal provides new insights into his California years. Kaufman points out that Guthrie "sang—with growing hostility—about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal" and states that his "Woody Sez" column in the Communist People's World "had become noticeably anti-Roosevelt by late 1939" (21). Although Guthrie did acknowledge Roosevelt as the "captain" of the Democratic ship sailing Culbert Olson into office during the 1938 campaign for governor of California in his song "Roosevelt-Olson," Kaufman sees Guthrie's shift in attitude against Roosevelt as tied to his Communist sympathies: "Clearly, one thing that had happened between the generosity of 1938 and the hardening of 1939 was the signing of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) and its closest fellow travelers had never warmed to Roosevelt in the first place, in spite of the New Deal reforms. . . . Now, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, any of Roosevelt's menacing gestures toward Germany must logically extend to the Soviet Union" (23).

In chapter 2, "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People," Kaufman traces Guthrie's radical development during his first year in New York, 1940. In addition to an abundance of radio appearances, Guthrie pressed his first discs with the release of Library of Congress Recordings and Dust Bowl Ballads, and Kaufman enlightens us about both the development of the Guthrie "pose"— his self-representation as an "authentic Okie"—and his wisening to the tolerance levels of the commercial music industry (both recorded and broadcast). [End Page 551] As Kaufman has it, "Guthrie's recordings for [Alan] Lomax—reissued under the title Library of Congress Recordings—are early case studies in the negotiation of the folksy Guthrie myth, on the one hand, and Guthrie's growing political radicalism on the other" (39). Nonetheless, given the political violence contained within Guthrie's printed songbooks and lyrical manuscripts, he was measured in the degree of socialist outspokenness he permitted to be recorded: "Taken together, the Library of Congress Recordings and Dust Bowl Ballads are both exercises in insinuation, soft-pedalling the political agitation to which Guthrie was certainly committed upon his arrival in New York" (43).

In chapter 3, "Almanac Days," Kaufman traces Guthrie's involvement with the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) and his "flip-flopping" with the Almanac Singers. Kaufman's account of Guthrie's BPA work is important for its corrective nature. Traditionally, Guthrie scholars have presented the folk singer's involvement...

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