◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

This Machine Kills Fascists I am Woody Guthrie. Born in Okemah, Oklahoma, July 14, 1912. My father lost the family fortune. My sister Clara burned to death when I was seven. My mother Nora was institutionalized for Huntington's disease — which took her voice, then her life, and eventually mine. I wrote about a thousand songs. The one you know is "This Land Is Your Land." I wrote it in New York, February 1940. I called it "God Blessed America for Me." It was a sardonic answer to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America," which I had decided was sentimental nonsense. The verses your children sing in school are the safe ones. I wrote two more that the schoolbooks leave out. One went: There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me — a sign was painted said Private Property. But on the back side it didn't say nothing. That side was made for you and me. The other went: In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple, by the relief office I'd seen my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking — Is this land made for you and me? Every line was political. The chorus was a question — who does this land belong to, and who has been kept off it. I wrote This Machine Kills Fascists on my guitar. I meant it. I served in the Merchant Marine. My ships were torpedoed. I knew what fascism was — Hitler abroad, and the version always around the corner at home. My guitar was a real machine because the songs went out faster than the police could chase them. We were called the Okies. The bank foreclosed our farms. The dust took our crops. We drove west with everything we owned. California called us dirty. California called us lazy. California called us criminal. The state line patrol turned our trucks back. The schools refused our children. The newspapers said we were a contagion. Look at what they are calling your immigrants now. The names they call them — they called us those names. The argument that they are bringing crime — they made it about us. The argument that the country was great before they came and will be great again when they are gone — they made it about us. I have heard this song before. In 1948 a plane crashed in Los Gatos Canyon. Twenty-eight Mexican workers being deported were killed. The newspaper printed the names of the four Americans on the flight crew. The Mexican workers were listed as "deportees." Twenty-eight people without names. I wrote a song called Deportee. I gave them names. Juan, Rosalita, Jesús y María. The country that did not print them was the country I was singing to. That country is the one you live in now. The names are still not being printed. I wrote a song about Pretty Boy Floyd with a line that went: Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. The biggest thieves in this country never carried a gun. They write the laws that let them take what working people make. They call it tax reform. They call it deregulation. They call it the free market. They are robbing you with a fountain pen — and they have figured out how to make you grateful for it. Huntington's took my voice. I spent thirteen years in a New York hospital, unable to sing the songs I had written. A boy named Bob Dylan came to visit. He took the songs I could no longer sing and carried them on. That is what the line is for. The voice they take from one singer goes to the next. This machine kills fascists. I mean the verses they cut out of This Land that you can put back in. I mean the names you give to the deportees. I mean the questions you ask the men with the fountain pens. All you fascists bound to lose. This land was made for you and me.