Grown-Up Anger by Daniel Wolff

Author:Daniel Wolff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

11

Struggle

In early 1941, Woody Guthrie decided he couldn’t continue working in a system he didn’t believe in. He quit his well-paid radio job in New York City and drove to Los Angeles. There, he stewed: angry, depressed, out of work.

4/4/41

Los Angeles,

Broke, feel

natural again,

but it ain’t

natural to be

broke, is it?

What rescued him wasn’t a new system or a revolution but the federal government. The Department of the Interior was sponsoring a documentary film about the Grand Coulee Dam and needed a singer with the “common touch” to write the score. Alan Lomax recommended Guthrie, and Guthrie, without any guarantee he had the job, put his wife and three kids back in the car and drove to the state of Washington.1

The Grand Coulee Dam job was, in essence, to promote FDR’s domestic agenda. As Guthrie headed north, the American Communist party had just withdrawn its support of Roosevelt’s policies. The president’s stated goal was to “protect the system of private property and free enterprise. . . .” He saw himself as “that kind of conservative . . . that kind of liberal.”2 Things had to change—the Depression made that obvious—but the goal was never radical change. As the motto for his 1936 reelection campaign put it, “Reform if you would Preserve;” Later FDR made it clear: “I have not sought, I do not seek, I repudiate the support of any advocate of Communism or any other ‘ism’ which would by fair means or foul change our American democracy.”3 Guthrie, on the other hand, believed, “The only New Deal that will ever amount to a damn thing will come from Trade Unions.”4

So the job at the Grand Coulee had him working for a government he didn’t much believe in, but it was a job. And it was a job that seemed to side with ‘the people’ against big business. Local entrepreneurs thought electrification should be left to the free market: private dams run for profit. They saw the Grand Coulee as an unconstitutional nationalizing of power. FDR’s Bonneville Power Authority, on the other hand, backed the project as “a purgative of national despair,” one of four giant western dams that would show what America could achieve.5 As the depressed economy continued to falter, here was a chance for government to step in and establish a planned, centralized “economic democracy.”6

Like the oil booms of Guthrie’s childhood, the dam would destroy streams, wetlands, and wildlife. And his political education taught him that the main beneficiaries of a capital project would be capitalists. But the promise of work went beyond just his job. Whether it was a local hired to run a jackhammer, a migrant pouring concrete, or a farmer able to water his crops, the Grand Coulee meant food for hungry families. The dam was an improvement (like the canal in northern Michigan), a way of taming nature and bringing electricity and irrigation to rural outposts. “So that several thousand families of migrating farm workers,” as Guthrie put it, “could move out there and settle down.

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