The Real v. the Ideal

This Land is Your Land

This Land Is Your Land

When we last checked in with our story Kate Smith had a massive hit song with "God Bless America" being played in jukeboxes in restaurants across America. Folksinger and social activist Woody Guthrie was hitchhiking through a freezing Pennsylvania winter in the 1930s, and any cafe where he stopped he heard the recording of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America." It got on his nerves.

Not only did it get on his nerves, it just made Woody plain angry. America was still in the grips of the Great Depression and people were homeless and starving. "If

there was a blessing in the first place it was over and done with," said Guthrie.

Guthrie was born in Oklahoma and spent his life championing social justice and civil rights. You may remember from the beginning of the semester folk singer Pete Seeger's story about Guthrie being scheduled to play at banquet in the segregated South. When he learned that African-Americans wouldn't be allowed to attend the show he angrily pushed over the banquet tables and left without performing. "Everybody needs to start a little trouble now and then," he said.

He wrote his song as direct response to Berlin's "God Bless America." The original song was called "God Blessed America for me." As you can tell, especially from the censored lyrics, he presents a radical vision of a bottom-up, grassroots America, challenging it to move towards its democratic ideals.

These censored lyrics are:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn't say nothing; That side was made for you and me. In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me? Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.

This was also the years of the Great Dust Bowl when drought in Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico forced farmers off their land. Many took what belongings they could and left for California. (Their story was captured in John Steinbeck's epic novel "The Grapes of Wrath") These economic refugees were derisively called "Okies" and characterized as "shiftless," and "relief chiselers," and chided as having "a lack of ambition" and "stealing jobs" from Californians.

LA Police Chief Edgar "Two Gun" Davis (right) ordered "Okies" to leave California or face 180 days hard labor where you are only entitled to a Bible, "beans and abuse." Davis once said Constitutional rights were of "no benefit to anybody but crooks and criminals." The politically powerful chief set up a so-called "bum-blockade" manned by LA police at the state's borders though technically city police had no jurisdiction at the state's borders. One mother of six stopped at the "bum-blockade" was asked to pay $3.40 for a California license. She only had $3. She wept. "That's food for my babies," she said. They let her in

for free, but scholars say perhaps one in a thousand migrants "inspired mercy."

Refugees gathered in shanty towns called Hoovervilles (a derogatory reference to president Herbert Hoover, president at the time of the start of the Depression.) Police would often burn down Hoovervilles and evict the residents. In 1941 The US Supreme Court ruled in Edwards versus California that states had no right to restrict interstate migration by poor people or any other Americans.