All You Fascists

[cronus]

This don't look good for you fascists. According to the history books you lose the war. Every time.

[Coito ergo sum]

Too bad he was a devout Stalinist.

He wrote nice songs, though.

This Land is Your Land, and such...

[cronus]

Too bad he was a devout Stalinist.

He wrote nice songs, though.

This Land is Your Land, and such...

Yeah...they went to extremes in the old days didn't they? Forget the past, this is new territory. The extremes got bigger and better and faster. Best avoided though.

[Coito ergo sum]

much of Guthrie's story has been overlooked in our nation's attempt to lionize him as a working-class crusader and political icon over the years. For starters, few know that his father was a Klansman. Pops was also an upper-middle class Okehma, Okla., politician and land speculator. Guthrie, then, learned to sing and play guitar by imitating blues records from the comfort of his bedroom, not around a migrant labor camp fire. Throw in a nasty racist streak (outlined below), and one can make the case that his public and political presentation was fake, a theatrical facade.
His reputation as a selfless crusader, outspoken Everyman and indefatigable defender of the little guy is an easily punctured myth; one only need to examine his innumerable biographies, which we reference with footnotes below.

For starters, Guthrie originally said he took up the harmonica after hearing a local African-American street performer named George, who kindly mentored him. That was a lie. Years later, he recanted, admitting he learned from a neighborhood peer, and that the bluesman never existed.*

Then there was the fact that Guthrie claimed joining the Communist party was the best thing he'd ever done, but, according to the FBI, he never actually became a card-carrying member.**

His famous "This Machine Kills Fascists" slogan on his guitar? Turns out that was a morale-boosting WWII government slogan printed on stickers that were handed out to defense plant workers -- capitalist propaganda, if you will.

Then there's the fact that whenever Guthrie's sociopolitical stance became unpopular, he tended to switch course to a previously opposed viewpoint. He derided FDR as Churchill's lapdog and aspiring war profiteer, and sold the Communist pitch that WWII was "capitalist fraud." When that position became untenable, Guthrie transmogrified into a staunch, patriotic Roosevelt and war supporter, slanting his lyrics toward flag-waving anti-fascism, beginning with "Reuben James."

Guthrie cheered Joseph Stalin long and loud, defending the Reds' invasion of Poland. (Biographer Will Kaufman found the extent and duration of Guthrie's pro-Stalin stance "shocking.")

But the most damning buried Guthrie biographical fact? That he was, just like his old man, a racist.

Having blacked up as a teenager in Okemah to perform a half-baked minstrel show, Guthrie while living in Echo Park took time out from championing oppressed white Okies to doodle his innumerable cartoons of what he described as "jungle blacks," a group he also referred to as "niggers," "darkies," "chocolate drops" and, yes, "monkeys."*
After encountering a group of African-Americans on Santa Monica Beach one day in 1937, Guthrie immortalized the meeting in a lengthy poem that included stanzas like, "What is that Ethiopian smell / upon the Zephyrs, what a fright!" and "We could dimly hear their chants / and we thought the blacks by chance / were doing a cannibal dance."*

Broadcasting on Pasadena's KFVD, Guthrie often indulged in on-air employ of ebonics and was stunned when a black listener characterized the singer as "unintelligent" after hearing Guthrie perform songs with titles like "Run, Nigger, Run" and "Nigger Blues." Fortunately for Guthrie, recordings of these tunes do not survive.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/westcoastsoun ... logist.php

[cronus]

Makes me glad I haven't got any of his stuff in my fairly extensive music collection.

[mistermack]

Makes me glad I haven't got any of his stuff in my fairly extensive music collection.

That's pretty daft to blame him, when the whole country was just the same.

Separate drinking fountains for blacks, and 'get up nigger, and give your seat to the white man'.

That's America you disdain, not just Woodie Guthrie.

Anyway, I have plenty of tracks of him playing with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and Bill Broonzy, so he mixed more with blacks than most.

[Coito ergo sum]

It was a worldwide thing --

Don't forget the "colour bar."

[cronus]

It was a worldwide thing --

Don't forget the "colour bar."

It was a simpler world and a better one in someways. We've come a long way but can it be called social progress or social hypocrisy with a few token cases proving the overall failure of integration?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

On the racism thing. Lots of people do things they would later be mortified by as teenagers. I doubt Guthrie was any different. Once he was older and travelled the country, actually meeting many black musicians, I am certain his attitudes changed. All he was doing was reflecting the social mores of the place, time and community in which he was raised. That he emerged from that to be something (arguably) better is to his credit.

As for his political side-switching. Would you rather he was dogmatic and change-resistant in his views? Reconsidering your position and changing your stance according to new evidence is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Seems to me that the writer of that blog had a political point to make.

[mistermack]

It was NEVER the same in the UK as in America.

People always trot out those bed-and-breakfast signs, as evidence of racism, but it wasn't.
I know, because both my parents came over to England from Ireland before ww2, and they experienced no prejudice.

The '' no Irish '' signs were put up because a lot of the Irish navvies that came over would get blind drunk, and return to the boarding houses, wake everybody up and pick a fight. They were a real wild bunch. I've listened to the old guys talking about the havoc they caused, and bragging about the places they were thrown out of. They didn't give a damn. They were hard working, hard drinking, and always fighting.

And many of the blacks that came over from the West indies would steal anything that was not nailed down. It's a fact. They came from a different background, and the British landladies just weren't ready for it.
Hence the signs. They were for good practical reasons, not prejudice. Of course there was some prejudice about, but that wasn't the reason for those signs.

The prejudice in the US was totally different, it was against american born people, not recent immigrants.

[Clinton Huxley]

CES will know far more about the history of racism in England than anyone who lives here.

[Coito ergo sum]

CES will know far more about the history of racism in England than anyone who lives here.

Where did I mention England, specifically? I said it was a worldwide problem. Nor does that imply that I "know better."

As for who claims to know better about the home countries of other people, nothing compares to the Brit, Continental and Ozzie penchant for pretending they know everything about the US and its history far better than the brainwashed and propagandized Merkins, ay?

The suggestion that England was not racist is patently ludicrous. If that's the position folks want to take, fine, but come on. One need not be an expert in history to know that the English, like the Anglo-Saxon peoples in general, have been racist for centuries. It's only recently that we've shaken free from it, and that includes in Europe.

We can forget that the Brits engaged in the slave trade every bit as much as the US. You claim moral superiority, though, because you abolished it a few decades before the Merkins (1833 vs 1863). That's like the Merkins, however, taking the moral high ground because they abolished slavery a 1/4 century before the Brazilians (1863 vs 1889). Wow, we're soooo much more enlightened because we ended slavery before them.... We can also forget all the Brit race riots and such, which clearly were just polite misunderstanding between enlightened, coexisting partners. Nothing really justified the so called "Race Riots" in the early 1980s in Brixton, Toxteth, Mothside, Nottinghill Gates, Handsworth and St. Pauls. Nope. The blacks just didn't understand how non-racist the white Brits were. There was, of course, no racism in colonial Britain's dealings with its African holdings. The Africans were equal trading partners, for sure. As were the Indians.

In fact, the Africans, for one, welcomed their Brit overlords, due to the absence of racism among the British. "Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--Go bind your sons to exile -- To serve your captives' need; -- To wait in heavy harness, -- On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, -- Half-devil and half-child...."

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/abhaey- ... 21099.html "It is of no irony that virtually all former British colonies, from Kenya to India, and Egypt to Pakistan, have been cursed with almost identical Imperial footprints; the same set of existential problems, the same Victorian social character, and the same wholly disingenuous post-colonial narrative." And, http://www.workersliberty.org/node/5912 "The history of black and Asian people in Britain is a history of racism and of resistance to racism."

[Clinton Huxley]

Told ya.

[cronus]

I don't recall my parents being racist but then I grew up in a close to 100% white area so there was no need to be.

[Clinton Huxley]

I don't recall my parents being racist but then I grew up in a close to 100% white area so there was no need to be.

They had enough to worry about.