"You know, Woody was a Communist," says Woody Guthrie's longtime friend Pete Seeger (Joel Klein, Woody Guthrie, xiv)
"guy that put a sticker on his guitar that said "This Machine Kills Fascists," possibly the first punk rocker and definitely the first full-fledged folk music hero, was a Communist. No two ways about it, folks."
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"Guthrie's political mentor, introduced Guthrie to socialists and Communists in Southern California, including Will Geer (who, in turn, introduced Guthrie to John Steinbeck).  Robbin remained Guthrie's lifelong friend, and helped Guthrie book benefit performances in the Communist circles in Southern California. Notwithstanding Guthrie's later claim that "the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party""

"Guthrie wrote a column for the Communist newspaper, People's World. The column, titled "Woody Sez", appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940."

"Arriving in New York, Guthrie, known as "the Oklahoma cowboy", was embraced by its leftist folk music community. For a time, he slept on a couch in Will Geer's apartment"

"book Woody, Cisco and Me.  The book offers a rare first-hand account of Guthrie during his Merchant Marine service. In 1945, Guthrie's association with Communism made him ineligible for further service in the Merchant Marine, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army.(Klein, Woody Guthrie, pp. 302–03.
)"

"California, Guthrie lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, a summer-stock type theatre founded and owned by Will Geer; with blacklisted singers and actors, he waited out the anti-communist political climate."

 Christine A. Spivey. "This Land is Your land, This Land is My Land: Folk Music, Communism, and the Red Scare as a Part of the American Landscape".
https://web.archive.org/web/20080625072313/http://www.loyno.edu/history/journal/1996-7/Spivey.html

Little Known Fact: Woody Guthrie Was a Big Ol' Racist
"..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."
http://www.laweekly.com/music/little-known-fact-woody-guthrie-was-a-big-ol-racist-2412272


" Guthrie was born in 1912 in rural Oklahoma, the grandchild of migrants who had been offered land parcels by the U.S. government at the end of the 19th century. They lived real Wild West lives, complete with gun fights, fist fights, and family connections to real live outlaws. They were also participants in the wholesale racism that often went hand-in-hand with Western expansion: there is a record of Guthrie's own father participating in a lynching, and his father also actively participated in blocking a whole nearby town of black residents from voting in an election (Guthrie was a Democrat; at the time, blacks generally voted Republican) "

"There would be no particular problem with facing that fact, if it weren't for "This Land Is Your Land." Didn't they consider making this song into the national anthem at one point? (Well, kind of—some folk revivalists suggested it, and the idea stuck around long enough to get its own Facebook group"

"When Guthrie scribbled down the lyrics to "This Land Is Your Land" in 1940, there was no fanfare. He didn't even have a tune for the song, and he mostly wrote it because he was so irritated with hearing "God Bless America" all the time on the radio. Instead of the line we now know so well, This land was made for you and me, at the end of each verse, the verses ended with the line God blessed America for me (he changed the song when he first recorded it in 1944)."

""This Land Is Your Land" seems to envision a semi-socialist version of this very country. In Woody Guthrie's America, the land is held communally and the people come together in work and song. This land belongs to you and me. Literally. How did this radical anthem ever become such an accepted part of the mainstream?

" And so it came to pass that the lyrics "This land belongs to you and me" passed innocently over the lips of probably hundreds of thousands of Americans, both youths and adults. But the question remains: is the song fundamentally American, or anti-American? "

https://www.shmoop.com/this-land-is-your-land/meaning.html