severe. he never paid. he dodges the sheriff and flouts the law. and he remembers ksm goes into his office and a small posse of other kuwaiti students and the iraq-iran war and israel is poor important in his radicalization -- >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..

and also performing some of these songs in the guthrie cannon. most of us know of america's unofficial anthem this land is your land. a few meno the roots of guthrie's activism and his commitment to justice. this is the first look at the iconic guthrie and the context in which he struggled both personally and on a wider political stage. tonight's authors professor of american literature and culture at the university of central lancashire in england. he is the author of the previously published book american culture in the 1970s and he is as you will find out

also a professional folk singer and musician. 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 on bastille day, july 14th, 1912, in oklahoma. it was the square dancing, walking laughing, shooting,

bleeding, gambling, fist fighting illegal gun club and razor kerri in of our ranch and farm towns. it blossomed into one of our first oil boom towns. they discovered oil in okeema in 1920 when woody guthrie was the piers 0. he saw the population quintuple overnight. one day it was a sleepy southern hamlet and the next day everybody was there and it was filled with these oil boomers for boone chasers who were making fortunes hand over fist every day. still 1928. when the oil ran out and okeema went from boom to bust. hundreds of these oil boomers turned out to run the countryside and in that respect okeema and her children become microcosm of the faith of many towns and communities the following year when the

depression came. in 1929 after a series of incredible family tragedies, the burning down of their family home and the burning to death of his sister and another house fire, near fatal burning of his father in a third house fire and the incarceration and slow death of his mother in the oklahoma state mental asylum. you wasn't crazy. she had been misunderstood huntington's disease. after those tragedies woody went to join his father in the texas panhandle. he dropped out of high school last two years and became a sign painter, had his first two children and they waited through the years of dust in the great plains. this was the work out topsoil of 100,000 square miles of ravaged farmland. in november of 1943 the dust buried the midwest and came back

the following year and buried the midwest again and as far east as albany and buffalo, new york and continued to blow for the rest of the decade. the sky would turn black and red with thousands of tons. animals and people choked to death. toddlers water route and suffocate. the single worst day they could remember was april 14, 1945. they call it black sunday when winds of 80 miles an hour ripped the topsoil from as far away as nebraska, dumped it on the dying town and woody recalled when the dust cloud hit it looked like the ocean chomping down on a snail. like the red sea was closing in on the children.

religious fundamentalists believed it 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. in that year he wrote the first of many songs about the death of his community in and hundred hundred of others across the southern plains. ♪ ♪

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♪ ♪ [applause] [applause] >> thank you. woody left his wife and children either for the first nor the

last time and it the road early in the summer of 1937. he was 24 years old. somewhere out there on those choked highways leading westward along the wagons piled high there was another oklahoma native call agnes cunningham. they would be in a radical folk group called the almanac singers. like woody and cal was others 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 settled crop failures, under, illness without doctors, hailstorms, death of livestock, we could have endured all those normal disasters but there was no way to escape the sharp teeth

of the bankers. that is what happened. woody remembered the further west you walked the browner and the hotter and emptier the country gets. the hard rock miners and gold prospectors and desert rats and swarms of hitchhikers and migratory workers with their piles of belongings in the shade of the big sign board across the hard crust desert. kids chasing the blistering sun, ladies cooking scrappy meals and scowling plates clean, young folks, blacks and cotton dresses gathering around us and they would sing too. but sometimes they would just stand quiet and listen and i knew what they were thinking about. by 1936, the year of roosevelt's

reelection, the midwestern family farm had blown away with the top soil. that is the way joe klein described it. he said a human convulsion of epic proportions was in progress. you will countryside seemed to heave and groaned as the farms emptied and the highways fill. on country music stations jimmy rodgers was singing that california waters taste like cherry wine. woody and many other migrants crawled their way westward toward those legendary vineyards and orchards in california. they were chasing a dream. something that woody later called the stingiest thing i ever ran on 2. this was the promise of unscrupulous labor contractors in california who were aware of the dust bowl crisis and decided to exploit it by flooding the

dust bowl region with handbooks promising work for every man. hundreds of thousands of hands needed to select 8 for carts and produce. they didn't need hundreds of thousands. they needed a couple thousand over particular period of time. you could work out the wages. if you engineer crisis with a couple hundred hands chasing a couple hundred jobs. these labor contractors would give you the address of someone who may give your daughter in california and you give this person $5 or $10 to get the address not knowing if it was there or not. woody was incensed by this. following this arriving at the california board of the migrants were stopped cold. los angeles police department panic. they set up a highly illegal and constitutional roadblocks calling it the bomb blockade.

they got the los angeles times and william randolph hearst and the chamber of commerce and the anti migrant block. before this trip to the states i have never been to california but can i share a secret? i have seen it on a map and i am pretty sure los angeles is as far west as you can get. what was the lapd doing setting up an illegal roadblock hundreds of miles to the stopping other americans from coming into the state of california as if it were a foreign country? where does the jurisdiction end? long island? it was unconstitutional. they didn't care about it. they were stopping and turning back anybody who looked like they were unemployable. how could you prove you weren't unemployable? you would reach into your pocket and pull out $50. if you could show $50 to the border guard you might make it

into the golden state of california where you would be sure to get a less than warm welcome anyway. woody looked at that situation and he sent a musical post card to the folks back, thinking of pulling up stakes and coming to california maybe they'd better think again. ♪ ♪ ♪

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♪ ♪ [applause] >> woody made it into california and encountered for the first time the word okee. this was an insult used to describe all of the migrants from the southern plains whether

they were from oklahoma or not. those who were in the know might discriminate between okees and texas and things like that but the formula went like this. if you were poor, white, homeless, unemployed and in california you were okee no matter where you came from. if you were poor, black the personal homeless, unemployment california at that time and from oklahoma you weren't and okee. okee were particular white underclass. they were the target of a hysterical highly orchestrated campaign of statewide the of phobia. it was an atmosphere in which if you went to a movie theater in bakersfield or the san walking valley you might be met with a sign that said negros and okees upstairs. one diner is on record posting a sign saying no negros, dogs or

okees serve. in that atmosphere woody began hanging around migrant camps. this is where he began to run for the old radicals who had a sense of the bigger picture as they saw it. as joe klein described in woody's biography, these old radicals around the campfire better half coherently about the capitalists, the rich bastards and reach into their pockets and pull out a battered old red card that proves they were members of the wildest, most violent. original julius and completely 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. tried real hard. a lot of people think they were wiped out in the red scare.

we were not wiped out. just went underground to wait for the invention of the internet. i iww.org and you can pay by direct debit. impressed woody guthrie with their anger and the songs they sang out of their little red songbook to fan the flames of discontent. of all the songs the ones he would have loved the most worthy 26 song parodies, price leaf sunni written by joe hill, swedish born immigrant 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 labor history will be aware of the stirring telegram he sent his colleagues the night before his execution. don't waste time morning for me, organize. fewer people are where he said this in the same telegram. could you do me a favor?

when this is over can you promise you'll get my body across state lines? are don't want to be caught dead in utah. the year before his death joe hill wrote no matter how good is never read more than once but the song is learned by heart and is repeated over and over. that is the first lesson you tell woody guthrie from beyond the grave. the second is take a few cold common-sense facts, put it into a song and dress them up in humor to take the dryness off. a lot of people would think of joe hill's reworking of the old salvation army him as a sweet by and by as a case in point. joe hill took it and turned it into the anthem to american labor and the first half of the 20th century, the preacher and a slave. people think that is why joe hill was executed, for riding that song.

the preacher and the slave. you know that? it is kind of important. ♪ ♪ >> very influential song in american labor history. and woody guthrie. woody guthrie got a job singing on the progress of radio station

in los angeles. that date is wrong. couldn't have been earlier than 1947. he began to circulate around the migrant camps. some were cosmetic show places set up by the farm security administration and these were great places to be. they are democratically run, will provide for and clean and sanitary. but there wasn't nearly enough to cope with the magnitude of the dust bowl crisis in california. the majority of camps he would have visited were slums. they called them hoovervilles anywhere across the country, named after the president on whose watch the depression was ushered in. these were places you maybe have families of eight or ten getting by on $3 a week between them picking cotton in the san walking valley. back east president roosevelt declared if i went to work in a

factory the first thing i would do would be joined the union. which sounded pretty good coming from the oval office. i don't think any president has gone so far as to endorse the right of labor to organize. even with that backing of the reality for the radical migrants attempting to organize in california fields were crushed time and time again because the fruit 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 but a union? what is a manufacturer's association but a union? they had their own union. they call themselves the associated farmers whose declared mission was to stamp out unauthorized activity among farm labor. if you're in worker forming a union you are un-american. here are three of the associated farmers in california engage in the un-american activities of their choice which is book burning. they are burning john

steinbeck's the grapes of wrath as soon as it is published. they don't come out so good in that book. that is kind of extreme literary criticism. when they weren't book burning they were hiring local thugs giving them baseball bats and sawed-off shotguns and a badge to make and feel authentic and sending them to scatter picket lines to bust up union meetings to burn down and burn out and hire mike encamps and assassinate union organizers. this is with the grateful banks of the lapd and huge anti-immigrant block. woody wrote about it drying partly -- how many of you read the grapes of wrath or seen the film? you remember preacher casey, the x preacher who becomes a union

organizer and is consequently murdered by the vigilantes' in the higher of the associated farmers. ♪ ♪ ♪

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♪ [applause] >> something interesting happened about now. woody guthrie is listening to the radio really critically. all the migrants gather and he is hearing the big hit of the year. his hero's taking the baptist hymn this world is not my home which you may know. give you a sense of it sentiment. ♪ this world is not my home ♪ i am just passing through ♪

♪ >> woody guthrie loved the family and american church music but hated the sentiments of songs like that. i am pretty sure he would have had a little angel of joe hill jumping on his shoulder saying in a situation like this here is what i would do with that song. something like this. ♪ ♪

>> the mark of joe hill all over it. during the depression woody gets particularly angry at songs coming out of the great american songbook which is top heavy with things like back to those days and the sunni side of the street. the country packed coast-to-coast with hoovervilles. the worst criticism woody would give a fellow songwriter was sounds too tin pan alley. didn't like that. he overstates the case because if you look at the song book there are some pretty good songs coming out of the depression that do engage with the economic reality. ♪

>> great song. i love that song. there are a few songs that manage to capture the helplessness and the despair of the depression era but my point is helplessness and despair is the last thing woody guthrie is up to correll because he is getting angry. what he wants to chorale is a anger that will lead to organized rebellion, reorganization of the social and economic system. he is dedicated to nothing less than the overthrow of american capitalism. this is the time when in contradiction to brother can you spare a dime written by someone who became a friend and associate of his later on, mr harbor, in contrast woody is getting interested in the old outlaw ballad his mother saying

to him growing up in oklahoma. the border ballad in britain to take a highway man and told him into a crusade for economic and social justice. this is when woody is jotting in his notebook i love a good man outside the law as much as i hate a bad man inside the law and he starts writing his own outlawed ballad. he chooses as a subject in his most famous outlaw ballad someone who didn't deserve the honor conferred upon him. this is a petty thief, bank robber, all around scumbag named charles arthur floyd. no evidence in the historical record he had any kind of social conscience whatsoever. doesn't matter. in woody's hands begging for a dime becomes an act of self be trail. he takes on the responsibility that capitalism was so blithely

ignoring. pretty boy floyd observes someone will rob you with a 6 done, some with a fountain pen. woody writes about the british highwaymen dick turban who takes the money and distribute it and spread it out equal like the bible and the profits suggests. of all his outlaw ballads the one that really shows which way he is going is an a la ballad written about somebody who is a plain old working man and perhaps the world's first socialists. as he puts in the mouth of one of his characters in bound for glory he has these hobos sitting around a campfire or a box car and one guy says i tell you one thing. if jesus christ was sitting here he would saying this same thing. he would say we got to work together, build things together, clean out things together and fix up things together and and things together.

they will call us some bad things but jesus doesn't care if it is socialism or communism or 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 american ally ballad jesse james. ♪ ♪

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♪ >> there is an unrecorded fierce that is written down. a hard-hitting song for hard-hitting people. never recorded. ♪ if the love of the court should one day turn to hate ♪ and the patient of the workers fade away ♪ it will be better for you rich ♪ if you had never been born ♪ that you laid jesus christ in his grave ♪ ♪ ♪

[applause] >> that song was written in 1940 and was the end of an era because the previous 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. so it is the bitter cold new year of 1940. woody guthrie makes new york city is home. he is hitchhiking out of texas and it seems on every car radio, every jukebox he hears what appears to him to be the latest self righteous complacent patriotic offering from tin pan alley, the hit of the year

39/40, irving berlin's god bless america. there are two ways of reading that song. the fearful hope of a russian immigrant to the united states who is nervously watching the rise of fascism in europe and praying that it will not get here. that is one way of reading it. that is not how woody saw it. he saw it as another unbelievable assertion from the industry that there could possibly be an unearthly solution to earthly problems. he hated this song so much that he sat down and wrote an angry song in response and it became his most popular. nearly 30 years after woody died from the huntington these did -- disease he inherited from his mother and silenced in the 50s and 60s his son recalled the irony of that song's history.

he said i remember him coming home from the hospital and taking me in the backyard and teaching me the last three verses of "this land is your land" because if he thinks i don't learn them no one will remember that. he can barely strum the guitar at this point and his friends think he is drunk or crazy and put him in that room in a mental hospital. then when he can't write or talk or do anything at all anymore he hits it big. all of a sudden everyone is singing his songs. kids are singing "this land is your land" in school and people are talking about making it the national anthem. bob dylan and those others are copying him and he can't even react. the disease doesn't affect his mind. he is in a mental institution and he knows what is going on but he can't tell anyone how he feels or what he thinks. "this land is your land" began life with the title god blessed

america and it contains a couple anti capitalist verses that i don't remember singing in school. a lot of americans never heard them until january of 2009 when bruce springsteen saying them from the steps of the lincoln memorial at barack obama's inaugural concert. the next it is they possess a that is the way woody wrote it? that is the way woody wrote it. i will leave you with a version that i think chart the progression of this song from the angry and bitter satire was to the unofficial national anthem became. i thank you for coming out and listening tonight. ♪

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[applause] >> thank you very much. thank you. >> you are watching booktv on c-span2. forty-eight hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> should always start with the assumption when a politician or a ceo is saying something they're not telling the truth. >> editor of mother jones magazine directed and produced three of the top ten and grossing documentaries of all time and a best-selling author. the latest memoir is here comes trouble. sunday on in-depth your chance to call, e-mail and tweet

michael more on booktv on c-span2. >> what do you think? did he do as well with the other architects who came along in his life? he had a good relationship -- [talking over each other] >> died at 45. >> i don't think he ever found a partner in worked with as well as fox or thought about prospect park. it was supposed to be two separate pieces of land. he said let's make it one contiguous -- he would think about landscape and provide a lot of landscape ideas. he thought olmstead had division of labor -- literally richardson was going to design the

structures and olmsted would think of landscape. some of these people had such massive egos that he would design a bridge -- olmstead was willing to accept that relationship. >> a lot of interesting other topics came up. the chicago world's fair was amazing because here was a guy -- >> would have been in his late 70s. >> he was told by that time. the fact that you mentioned google. but travel. you have all these commissions going on at the same time and he is doing this rush job. talk about that.

>> olmstead was not sanguine in his old age. being in your 60s or 70s you out of your contemporaries and he did not settle into a restful latter years. he became fevered because landscape architecture is so different from a painting or work of music that is never final. he had a real anxiety that after he was gone all his work would be undone. he spent his whole adult life fighting against people who were meddling with central park which was always his place. they wanted to fix something. always battling to fight this thing. he had a sense because they pioneered landscape architecture. after he was gone everything might be reversed. there are a couple commissions in the world fair grounds being one of them that late in life he was desperate to stake his

reputation. as an old man by the standards of that day he took on commissions in milwaukee, kansas city -- denver and work on the chicago world's fair. he came up with a preposterous mathematical formula where he gave half of his attention to chicago world's fair and have to the billmore stake in north carolina and already is up 100% and go to milwaukee. what he would do is he would work on the chicago world's fair ground and when he sensed a break in the action would sneak to ashville to do some work and then sneaked to louisville which was close to ashville and work on their part system. he was taking these late-night rail rides to secure his

reputation and make sure he left a lasting legacy. >> and writing letters all the time. he sent -- we sent short e-mails that will vanish off of the face of the earth. but he wrote thousands of letters. >> the way i always describe it is it was the nineteenth century. he was very much a man about town. he had a lot of friends. if he crossed the street he did a diary entry about it and wrote a variety of letters about it and an article about it and several friends had died resort letters they wrote about olmsted crossing the street. it created so many different takes on any given action but it

was an environment to be able to have so many -- articulately and very long -- ten or 15 pages of explanation of his being enraged about a park design being rolled back and all the people he sent letters to responding to create a rich trove to date in 2. >> nobody will be easy to find in the future. >> facebook page. >> i wonder what his facebook page look like. and the 8 horrible food. his diet was terrible. in the late 1890s he was brought back to prospect park to see where the tennis house should go. he goes around and doesn't like

the tennis house because it is a formal air conjectural peace -- architectural piece. this is the perfect part. there is a little preference in your book for central park. as somebody from prospect park i have to say i agree with olmstead that that was the perfect part because he had all that money, complete freedom and in central park he had everybody picking on him. what do you think? >> well played. you brought a quotation that won't counter. and won't be able to dig up a quotation. i found a letter in 1873 that

central park -- he did love central park. the way i would attempt to counter that is i always think about musicians like paul simon where he said my early work with simon and garfunkel was amateurish etc. i am the the top of my game doing more worldly music but i have a feeling artists are not the best authority on their own work. i know olmsted felt prospect park was his finest work but some argue central park was his masterpiece based on two things. that was his first work and like so many great artists he brought this and all this spontaneity and ideas came bubbling to the

surface. he goes from being surveyor turned farmer turned sailor and brings a park where -- the other suggestion i would make is central park is a particularly masterful design because of the constrained. it is a perfect rectangle. terrible shape for a parklike prospect park which is organic and natural. central park, perfect rectangle, terrible piece of land. a horrible -- that people didn't want. real-estate could develop elsewhere in the city and olmsted faced with that constrain that the design competition at all kinds of mandatory demand and things that had to be done as part of a mandatory design element. olmstead had a terribly

constrained piece of land. they brought their best creative thinking to make this constrained space have a flow, sense of grandeur and scale. the one thing that strikes me is you talk about a park that is half a mile wide and could never be anywhere where you are more than a quarter mile from civilization, roads, it is a considerable dilution you can get lost in that part or be in that park and feel you are in nature. >> i will add to that argument. he kept coming back over and over again. he keeps being brought in for a few questions and sent away. they take some and not