[In honor of May
Day, a series on some compelling cultural representations of communism in
American history and identity.]
On communist
protest anthems and artists, then and now.
In one of my
earliest blog posts, I nominated Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”
(1944)—ideally the version with
all the verses, but I was willing to settle for the more commonly accepted shortened
version—as a new national anthem. I have been interested to see that both of my
sons have learned and performed the song (in that shortened version) in their
elementary school music classes, as I vaguely remember doing in my own. Because
the truth is that, even without the usually excluded verse about the “No
trespassing” sign that has nothing written on the back, “This Land” offers what
we would have to call a communist vision of America: as a place that is
fundamentally shared by all of us, owned not as private property or competitive
resource but as a communal space that “belongs to you and me.” By 1944,
communism had already come to be closely associated with (if not entirely tied
to) the Soviet Union, and thus to an explicit alternative to American identity,
making Guthrie’s song a subtle but (to my mind) definite protest anthem.
Far, far less
subtle is Steve Earle’s song “Christmas in Washington”
(1997), which in its chorus implores, “Come back Woody Guthrie/Come back to us
now/Tear your eyes from paradise/And rise again somehow.” Earle’s song is about
the need for new protest anthems at the turn of the 21st century, as
well as representing an attempt to offer precisely such a new anthem, and
besides the request of Guthrie’s ghost Earle’s speaker also calls for the
return of a pair of early 20th century communist activists: “So come
back Emma Goldman/Rise up old Joe Hill/The barricades are going up/They cannot
break our will.” Which is to say, while protest
songs can of course take any number of different political
and social perspectives, Earle ties both his and Guthrie’s protest anthems
much more specifically to communism—not, again, in the Soviet sense, but rather
in an emphasis on radical activisms (both labor and social) and their concurrent
arguments for social and economic equality.
Earle’s song is
even less likely than the full version of Guthrie’s to become a new national
anthem (and, to be clear, much less powerful than Guthrie’s as well, especially
in the much-too-specific late 1996 setting of its opening verse). But one
significant benefit of playing the two songs back to back is the reminder that
Guthrie wasn’t just a unifying American voice—he certainly wanted to be and (I
would argue) was that, but he did so through offering a radical, protesting
perspective, one that it is no stretch to call communist. Which, like all of
the week’s texts and artists in their own interconnected ways, would remind us
that communism has not been just some external threat to the United States—that
it has also, and far more importantly, been a multi-century thread and presence
in our own society and identity, an American community and perspective
deserving of the extended attention and analysis that these cultural works help
provide.
April Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Cultural representations of communism you’d highlight?
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