LoL dude, he carried around that guitar in the thirties. Also in the 30s he was writing songs about socialism being good.
I never denied Guthrie was pro-socialism. What I said was that he was notably against fighting Nazi Germany until Nazi Germany attacked the USSR.
As Adolph Hitler began annexations in Europe, Guthrie was more concerned with the fight against fascism at home in the form of police brutality. His stance on the war in Europe was further complicated by Hitler’s infamous non-aggression pact with Joseph Stalin, a figure who for Guthrie would never lose his sheen of idealism. According to Kaufman, Guthrie’s hopes for the communist Soviet Union influenced this 1941 anti-interventionist songbook scribbling:
And underneath their noses
Their life is lent and leased
To wars across the ocean
To murder o’er the sea –
To fight and die on foreign soil
To save – democracy (?) (53)
It was at this time that Guthrie first attracted negative attention from the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Kaufman characterizes Guthrie’s political stance as one shivering with untenability: he hated fascism at home and in Germany, but his idealistic hopes for the Soviet Union forced him to reject US intervention. Ultimately, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union erased this paradox. Guthrie joined the Merchant Marines and quickly began writing pro-war anthems,
As mentioned.
It is notable that the position of Guthrie was perfectly in line with the CPUSA:
The Communist Party opposed American involvement in the early stages of World War II, starting in August 1939, when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact launched a deal between Stalin and Hitler that allowed Moscow to split control of Eastern Europe with Berlin. Communist activists in CIO labor unions tried to slow the flow of munitions to Britain. Leftist organizations like the American Peace Mobilization and veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade protested in opposition to the war, the draft, and the Lend-Lease Act. They said of Lend-Lease, "Roosevelt needs its dictatorial powers to further his aim of carving out of a warring world, the American Empire so long desired by the Wall Street money lords." Overnight on June 22, 1941, the date of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Communists reversed positions and became war hawks.
So, again, to my point: Guthrie had no problem with Nazi Germany until it attacked the USSR.
Also, just freaking type in was Guthrie a socialist. Just about every hit youre going to find is going to say yes or communist.
Yes, again, I never denied Guthrie was a socialist.
I don't think they were voting against Roosevelt (a democratic socialist)
Guthrie (as a member of the CPUSA) was against FDR when he was running.
Steinbeck wrote the grapes of wrath.
Yes. Steinbeck also wrote East of Eden. And this is what he wrote about communists:
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.