The unbelievable story of why Woody Guthrie hated Donald Trump's dad
Source:
The Washington Post
Woody Guthrie, folk singer supreme, is known for the magisterial portraits he painted of Dust Bowl America and his sweeping indictments of social injustice.
What's not there in the beautiful imagery of his song, "This Land Is Your Land" --
-- the ribbon of highway, the endless skyway, the diamond deserts -- is right there in the slogan often affixed to his guitar: "This machine kills fascists."
But artists who traffic in grand dreams are also allowed to get specific.
In one of the strangest stories yet to emerge from Donald Trump's presidential campaign,
it appears that, more than half a century ago, Woody Guthrie penned lyrics condemning the candidate's father, Fred Trump, for racism.
"Donald did inherit his father's racism, and was probably actively coached in his father's racism, and worked with his father to perpetuate it," argued Will Kaufman, the professor of American literature and culture at Britain's University of Central Lancashire who unearthed the scoop, said in a telephone interview with the Washington Post.
"He picked up the mantle and ran with it with his father at his side. That's why people are interested in this I think."
Trump has been repeatedly accused of racism after his comments about Mexicans and has repeatedly denied such charges.
"I don't have a racist bone in my body," he has said.
The story begins with Kaufman, the author of one book about Guthrie already at work on another and a performer of the folk hero's music, sifting through the Guthrie archives in Tulsa last year.
There, in one of Guthrie's notebooks -- which contain pages upon pages of lyrics never set to music -- he found these lines, written in the early 1950s:
"I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project"
There was also this:
"Beach Haven ain't my home!
I just can't pay this rent!
My money's down the drain!
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven looks like heaven
Where no black ones come to roam!
No, no, no! Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain't my home!"
More:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/22/the-unbelievable-story-of-why-woody-guthrie-hated-donald-trumps-racist-dad
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