not interesting, but i wanted to be in new england and i wanted to be in upstate new york. and i had to go to oklahoma, of course. and i wanted to be in the northwest and i wanted to interview a native alaskan and i decided to end with a hawaiian and i interviewed a few people in california write live, but they're all actually from other places. not from -- not from my ..d pretty well known but i wanted to have a combination of tribes that were well-known and unknown. and men and women and different ages so it went from 24, 26 to 84 years of age. and i just wanted as much variety as i could, people who lived on reservations, people who did not. people who were very sophisticated and people who were very rural so i put those all in the mix. >> well, i would like to thank

allison owings and i want to assure everyone that when you have an opportunity to read this book, it's true oral history. it's the native american voices that you will be hearing. and we thank you for being our guest today. >> thank >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs use the online. tight the offer or book title in the search bar on the upper left of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. >> next will kaufman looks at folksinger woody guthrie's political activism during the great depression, world war ii the original cold war, the mccarthy era and the

civil-rights era. the singer-songwriter is best known for his song "this land is your land". this is about 45 minutes. >> tonight is a special guest. he will not only talk about his new book, "woody guthrie: american radical," the deal and audiovisual presentation showing images that illustrate the life and times of his subject and also performing some of the songs in the guthrie cannon. most of us know of america's unofficial anthem "this land is your land". but few may know the routes of guthrie's activism and the depth of his commitment to social justice. against takes a fresh look at the iconic guthrie and the context in which he struggled both personally and on a wider

political stage. tonight's father is a professor of american literature and culture at the university of central lancashire in england and author of the previously published book american culture in the 1970s and he is as you will soon find out a professional folk singer and musician. it is my pleasure to introduce to you the author of "woody guthrie: american radical," will kaufman. [applause] ♪ ♪

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♪ ♪ [applause] >> thank you. "woody guthrie: american radical" was born appropriately on bastille day.

july 14th, 1912, in okeema, a oklahoma. which was the yelling, walking and talking and laughing and crying, shooting and beating fighting, gun club and razor carrying of our farm towns. because it blossomed into one of our first oil boom town. they discovered oil there and 1920 when woody was 8 years old. he saw the population quintuple overnight from 2,000 to 10,000. one day it was a sleepy southern hamlet and the next day he woke up and everybody was fair and it was filled with these oil boomers wore boone chasers who were making their fortunes hand over fist everyday until 1928 when the oil ran out and it went from boom to bust. very quickly was dead as an oil

town so hundreds of oil boomers turned out to roam the countryside. in that respect, this town and its children become a microcosm of more towns and communities across the southern plains when the depression kicked in. in 1929 after a series of incredible family tragedies, burning down of their family home, burning to death of his sister in another house fire, near fatal burning of his father in the third house fire and the incarceration and slow death of his mother in the oklahoma state mental asylum. she wasn't crazy. she had the undiagnosed and misdiagnosed huntington disease. woody went to join his recuperating father on another boom to bust oil town in the texas handle -- panhandle. he dropped out of high school and became a sign painter. he married and had his first two children and they all waited

through the years to carry the black lizard of dust across the great plains. this was the work out topsoil of over 100,000 square miles of ravaged farm land. in november of 1933 the dust buried the midwest and came back the following year and buried the entire midwest again and as far east as albany and buffalo, new york and the dust continued to blow for the rest of the decade. the sky would turn black and red with thousands of tons of boiling dust. animals and people choked to death. children went out to suffocate. the worst day that they could remember was april 14th, 1935. palm sunday. they call it black sunday. winds of 80 miles an hour with the topsoil and red clay from nebraska dumped on the dying town of tampa, texas.

woody recalled when the dust cloud hit it looked like the ocean shoving down on a snail. like the red sea closing in on the israel children. baptist and a pentecostal and religious fundamentalists believed this was the end of the world. this was god's judgment being visited on a wicked people. as woody recalled we thought we were done for. thousands of us packed up and lit out. that year, he wrote the first of many songs about the death of his community and hundreds of others across the southern plains. ♪ ♪

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[applause] >> thank you. woody left his wife and children either for the first nor the last time and hit the road early in the summer of 1937. it was 24 years old. somewhere out there on those choked highways leading westward along jalopies and wagons piled high there was another native named agnes cunningham. years later she would sing a radical folk group with woody and guthrie. like woody and countless other children in the dust bowl she would become radically politicized by her migratory experience. as she recalled it, along with hundreds of thousands of performers we fought to survive, we battled crop failures, undero

illness without doctors, gully watches and hailstorms and the death of livestock, fires. we could have endured all those normal disasters but there was no way in god's world to escape the sharp teeth of the bankers. that is what happened. woody remembered the further west you walk the more brown and empty the country gets. the hard rock miners and old prospectors and swarms of hitchhikers and migratory workers squatted with their piles of belonging is in the shade of the big signboard out across the flat hard crust desert. kids chasing around in the blistering sun and ladies cooking scrappy meals in sunni buckets and scouring the plates clean with sand. young folks in work pants, khaki

and cotton dresses gathered around and they would sing sometimes they would stand quiet and listen. and i knew what they were thinking about. by 1936, the year of roosevelt's first reelection came to the midwestern american family farm had pre well blown away with the top soil. that is the way joe klein describes at. a human convulsion of epic proportions was in progress. the whole countryside seemed to heave and grown as the farms emptied and the highway is filled. on the country music station jimmy rodgers was up there yodeling and singing the california waters tasteay ust like cherry wine. and woody and half a million migrants from the dust bowl region grow their way westward towards those legendary vineyards and orchards in california. they were chasing a dream. somquiehing that woody later

called the stingiest thing i ever ran onto and this was the promise of unscrupulous labor contractors in california who were aware of the dust bobow crisis and decided to exploit it by flooding the dust bowl region with things like this promising work for every idle hand. hundreds of thousands of hand needed to pick the peaches and grapes and a per cots and croons. they d3 min't need hundreds of thousands of hands. they needed a couple thousand in particular periods of time. work out the implications for wage. you can engineer a crisis when you have a couple hundred thousand hands changing a couple thousand jobs. when they would do is lng aor contractors would give you the address of someone who may give yoonsaay nd j in california and have to give this person $5 or $10 to gquie the address not knowing whquieher the job was there or not. reena nadler was incensed ut.

this. arriving at the california border the migrants were stopped colled los angeles police department panickeled they squie up highly illegal, highly unconstitutional roadblocks they called the bomb blockade and they got the banks of the los angeles times and william randolph hearst and this huge anti migrant block. before this trip to the states i had never been to california. but can i share a secret with you? i had seen it on a map. i am pretty sure los angeles is as far west as you could gquie. what was the lapd doing setting up an illegal roadblock hundredo of miles to the east? stopping other americans from coming in to the state of calet ornia as though where a foreign country? where d js their jurisdiction end? long island? it was unconstitutional. they d3 mioont care ng aout it. they were turning back anybody

who looks like they were unemploneyble. how could you prove you weren't unemployng alen i o cf1 o you would reach into your pocket and pull out $50 and if you could showyn50 to the border guard you might make it into the golden state where you would be shopor to get a less than warm welcome anyway. he took a look at that situation and send a musical post card back home. maybe they beowyer think again. ♪ how

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[applause] >> woody made it into the state of california and encountered the first time the word okee. in with an insult used to describe all the migrants from the southern plains whether they were from oklahoma were not. those who were in the know might discriminate between oklahoma and texas and things like that but basically the formula went like this. if you were poor, white, homeless, unemployed and in california at that time, you were an okee. if you were black and homeless and unemployed in california at that time and from oklahoma, you were an okee. they were the underclass and target of a hysterical highly orchestrated campaign of statewide xenophobia. if you went to a movie theater

in bakersfield or somewhere in the san what king value might be met with a sign that said negros and okees upstairs. ones that no negros, dogs for k okees served. he started circling and the migrant camps in 1938 and this is where he ran to the old radicals who have a sense of the bigger picture as they saw it. as joe klein described it in woody's biography, these old radicals would mutter have coherent about the capitalist, rich bastards and reach into their pockets and pull out a battered old red card that proved they had been members of the wildest, most violent, julius and disorganized gang of reds ever to strike fear into the hearts of the american

bourgeoisie. industrial workers of the world. i don't know why he uses the past tense. that is my membership card. really trying hard. lot of people think they were wiped out in the red scare of 1919-1920. they weren't wiped out. just went underground to await the invention of the internet. you can pay by direct debit. guthrie was infected by their humor and cynicism and day care but particularly the song of a saying out of their little red songbook to fan the flames of discontent. of all the songs in that book the ones woody would have loved the most were the 26 parities, priceless leave sunni written by joe hill, swedish immigrant to the united states who became a martyr to the cause of american labor with his execution on a dubious murder charge in utah in

1915. students of american history will be aware of the stirring telegram he sent to his colleagues the night before his execution. he said don't waste time morning for me. organize. i think fewer people will be aware he also said in the same telegram do me a favor. when this is over can you promise you'll get my body across state lines? i don't want to be caught dead in utah. in the year before his death joe hill wrote in a pamphlet no matter how good it never read more than once but a song is learned by heart and is repeated over and over. that is the first lesson he taught woody guthrie from beyond the grave. the second is take a few colds common-sense facts, put it into a song and dress them up in a coat of humor to take the dryness of of them. a lot of people would think of joe hill's reworking of the old salvation army him sweet by and

by as a case in point. he turned that into the first and from the preacher and a slave for american labor. they think that is why joe hill was executed. for writing that song. the preacher and the slave. you all know that? i give you a little hand. is important. ♪ long haired creature every night. ♪ ♪

very influential stalin and american labor history and on woody guthrie. woody got himself a job posting and singing on a progressive radio station in los angeles. the date is wrong. couldn't have been earlier than 1937. he also began to circulate around a migrant camps. some of these were cosmetic show places set up by the government by the armed security administration and these were great places to be there were democratically run and self-governing and well provided for and clean and sanitary. the only problem was there were not enough of them to cope with the magnitude of the dust bowl crisis in california. the majority of camps woody would have visited were basically slums. they called them hoovervilles anywhere across the country they were named after the president on whose watch the depression

was ushered in. these were places where you maybe have families of eight or ten getting by on $3 a week between them picking cotton in the san walking valley. president roosevelt declared if i went to work in a factory the first thing i would do would be to join a union. it sounded pretty good from the oval office. i don't think any president had gone so far to endorse the rights of labor to organize but even with that kind of backing the reality for the radical migrants attempting to organize in the california fields were crushed time and time again because the true crop growers hated unions. they hated unions formed by working people. they were happy to form their own unions. what is the chamber of commerce the union? what is a manufacturer's association but a union? crop growers had a union. they call themselves the associated farmers who declared name was to stamp out all

un-american activities among farm labour because if you were a worker forming a union, you were an american. here are three of the associated farmers in california engaged in the un-american activities of their choice which is book burning. burning a copy of john steinbeck's the grapes of wrath as soon as it is published in 1939. they don't come out so good in that book. that is kind of extreme literary criticism. when they were not book burning they were hiring local funds and vince and given him axe handles and baseball bats and sawed-off shotguns and billy clubs and maybe a tin badge to make some feel authentic. sending them out to scatter ticket lines or bust up union meetings, to burn down and burnout entire migrant camps and assassinate union organizers. this was the grateful banks of the lapd and hearst and the anti

migrant block. woody wrote about that drawing -- how many of you read the grapes of wrath or seen the film? you remember preacher casey who becomes a union organizer and is subsequently murdered by the vigilantes' in higher of the associated farmers. ♪ ♪

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♪ ♪ [applause] >> there is something interesting happening about now. woody is listening to the radio really critically. all the migrants gather around one radio in the camp and he is listening along with them and he is hearing the big hit of the year say 1938, his hero's the carter taking the baptist hymn this world is not my home which

you may know. give you a sense of the sentiment. ♪ this world is not my home ♪ ♪ woody loved the carter family and he loved american church music but hated the sentiments of songs like that and i am pretty sure he would have had the little angel of joe hill jumping on his shoulder and saying in a situation like this here is what i would do with that song if i was you. ♪ i ain't got no home

♪ just traveling around ♪ ♪ got a mark of joe hill all over it. during the depression, woody begins to get particularly angry at the song's coming out of the popular music industry. the great american songbook which is top heavy with titles like back to those days and on the sunni side of the street. i love this coast-to-coast with hooverville, an old shanty town. the worst criticism woody would give a fellow songwriter was sounds too tin pan alley. didn't like the popular music industry. i think he overstates the case in his critique because the songs are pretty good coming out

of the depression that engage with the reality and the economic realities. ♪ great song. i love that song. there were a few songs that managed to capture the hopelessness and despair of the depression era. my point is helplessness and despair is the last thing woody guthrie is out to correll because he is getting angry. he wants to correll his anger. gaidar that will lead to organized rebellion, reorganization of the social and economic system. at this point he is dedicated to nothing less than the overthrow of american capitalism. this is the time when in contradiction to an approach like brother can you spare a

dime written by a friend and associate of his. in contrast woody is beginning to get interested in the out of balance his mother used to sing to him when he was growing up in oklahoma. the border ballads in britain that take a highway man and turn him into a crusade for economic and social justice. this is the time when woody is jotting in his notebooks i love a good man outside the law as much as i hate abaddon man inside the law. he starts writing his own outlaw ballads. for instance he chooses as a subject in his most famous outlaw ballad somebody who probably didn't deserve the honor conferred upon him. this is a local oklahoma petty thief, bank robber, general all-around scumbag named charles offer floyd. pretty boy floyd.

no evidence that he had any social conscience whatsoever. doesn't matter. in week's hands begging for a dime would be an act of self be trail and more importantly takes on the responsibility that capitalism would say blithely ignoring. pretty boy floyd will rob you with a six gun and some with a fountain pen. woody begins writing about the british high win and dick turban who takes the money and distribute it and spreads it equal like the bible suggests. the one that shows where he is going was written about someone who was a plain old working man and perhaps the world's first socialist. as he puts in the mouth of one of his characters and the autobiographical novel bound for glory he has these hobos in a box car, one guy says to everyone else i tell you one

thing. if jesus christ was sitting here he would say this very same vein. he would tell you we all just got to work together and build things together and clean out old films together and fixable things together and own things together. they will call us something bad but jesus doesn't care if you call it socialism or communism or just me and you. it is significant his ballad of jesus christ makes this connection with the holy outlaw even stronger because he bases the tune and the format -- he rips off 100% the tune and format from the old american outlaw ballad jesse james. ♪

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♪ there's an unrecorded first that is written down in woody's book hard hitting for hard hitting people. never recorded. ♪ the love of the poor should one day turn to hate ♪ if the patient's workers fade away ♪ it will be better for you rich if you had never been born ♪ you laid jesus christ in his grave ♪ ♪

♪ [applause] >> that's all was written in 1940 and was the end of an era because that year president roosevelt announced the great social experiment of the new deal was being officially wound up and the government's resources were being redirected to concentrate on increasingly global issues. is the bitter cold new year of 1940. woody guthrie decided to make new york city his home and is hitchhiking northeast out of texas and it seems that on every

car radio. every road house jukebox he hears what appears to him to be the latest self righteous complacent patriotic offering from tin pan alley. this is the heavier 3940, kate smith singing and berlin's god bless america. their two ways of reading that song. you could read it as an urban and fearful hope of a russian jewish immigrant to the united states who is nervously watching the rise of fascism in europe and praying that it will not hit here. that is one way of reading it. that is not our woody saw it. he saw it as an unbelievable assertions from the industry that there could possibly be an utter folly solution to earthly problems. he hated this song so much that he wrote an angry song in response to it and it became his most popular.