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saved their little homes/Others tell you ‘bout a stranger/That come to beg a
meal/Underneath his napkin/Left a thousand dollar bill.” And he concludes,
“yes, as through this world I’ve wandered/I’ve seen lots of funny men/Some
will rob you with a six-gun/And some with a fountain pen/And as through
your life you travel/Yes, as through your life you roam/You won’t never see
an outlaw/Drive a family from their home.” But Woody Guthrie’s most
lasting work was “This Land is Your Land”—a song he wrote as an angry
response to Kate Smith’s patriotic anthem, “God Bless America.” “This Land”
was a song about democracy and citizenship in which Guthrie claimed that
all people, not just the rich and powerful, owned America and had a right to
its bounty, “from the Red Wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters.” He also
took a dig at the ruling class in a stanza that is hardly known: “As I went
walking I saw a sign there/And on the sign it said “No Trespassing”/But on
the other side it didn’t say nothing/That side was made for you and me.”
With his music and his dedication to the downtrodden, Woody Guthrie made
millions of Americans aware of the hardships of depression life and helped put
pressure on the politicians to do something about it.
But more than cultural figures, politicians put real heat on FDR, and did
so while the First New Deal was just getting started. Roosevelt’s focus on
the production side of the economy through programs like the NRA and
AAA, which paid companies and farms to reduce production to raise prices,
had done little, so now many of those who had supported him in the 1932
election were criticizing him for taking care of the bosses instead of the work-
ers and the poor, and seeking alternatives to his programs. One of the first
politicians to take on the New Deal was already well-known, Upton Sinclair.
After writing The Jungle he had remained active in radical politics [he wrote
the novel Oil in 1927 upon which the movie There Will Be Blood was based
in 2007] and in 1934 decided to run for California governor. Sinclair created
a movement he called EPIC, or End Poverty in California, in which he recom-
mended that the state take over shut-down factories and farms and turn them
over to the unemployed so they could make goods they could use themselves,
furniture and so on, or grow crops for their own consumption, basically a
state-managed collective economy. This was far more radical than anything
the New Deal ever considered and raised charges of Socialism. The people
of California, however, saw it differently and Sinclair easily won the Democratic
primary for governor. At that point, conservatives and big business were