The unbelievable story of why Woody Guthrie hated Donald Trump’s dad

[misterhighwasted]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/22/the-unbelievable-story-of-why-woody-guthrie-hated-donald-trumps-racist-dad/?postshare=5261470376536082&tid=ss_tw-bottom


https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=

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 cain’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!

“Beach Haven,” it turns out, was an apartment building erected by Fred Trump — that is, “Old Man Trump,” who died in 1999 — in New York to house large numbers of veterans returning from World War II. Guthrie, who served in the Merchant Marine, was among them. As Kaufman recounted in a story first published at the Conversation, the singer moved there in 1950.

“When Guthrie first signed his lease, it’s unlikely that he was aware of the murky background to the construction of his new home, the massive public complex that Trump had dubbed ‘Beach Haven,’” Kaufman wrote. “Trump would be investigated by a U.S. Senate committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, not least by overestimating his Beach Haven building charges to the tune of US$3.7 million.”
MORE ...
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WOW!
Excellent Must-Read

[mucifer]

1. I wouldn't blame donald for things his dad did.

Woody Guthrie has said that his own father was in the kkk. Also a quote from Kaufman:

Guthrie may have been favourably disposed to the communist movement, but he had been raised by a father who had supported the Ku Klux Klan. “Woody was born a casual racist,” says Kaufman. “He absorbed the racism of his father and took it with him to California.” During a radio show one day, Guthrie announced that he was going to sing a song called Run Nigger Run. “He then gets a letter from a listener saying that he’s a young Negro in college and resented that remark,” says Kaufman. “That was a slap in the face for Woody and he read that letter out on air and apologised, and kept apologising for years.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/cultural-olympiad/9396054/Woody-Guthrie-the-authentic-voice-of-America.html

So it annoys me that people are criticizing trump for what his father did. There is so much bad stuff about trump it really doesn't matter what his father did. They are two separate people.

[misterhighwasted]

2. Point taken. However, the rascism as well as business practices

learned from his father still continue today.

No recognition nor apologies from Trump.

He is his own man, of course.

[heaven05]

6. like father, like son

both racist, one the nazi as well now...yeah I curse the whole trump line down to the first....

[WDIM]

3. Woody Guthrie should be required

His music is timeless and applies as much today as it did then.

I been robbed for cash and been robbed on credit.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

4. NOT unbelievable. If unbelievable then WaPo has no business printing it. . . . . nt

[blueseas]

5. Must read!

Interesting article.