A Liberal Dose
April 14,
2022
Troy D.
Smith
“This
Land Was Made for You and Me”
Last week, in my basic U.S. History course, we came to one
of my favorite things to lecture about: popular culture during the Great
Depression. It gives me a chance to talk about several things I enjoy, but
discuss them on a deeper level, helping students see how those things reflect
the feelings of people at the time. For example, the Marx Brothers and the
Three Stooges -and even Bugs Bunny -were agents of chaos, going into the world
of the upper classes and turning everything upside down. Gangster movies (and
real-life gangsters, too) became hugely popular because they were “sticking it
to the man.” Pulp fiction and comic book superheroes took the country’s youth
by storm, because a Depression and a brewing World War helped make empowerment
fantasies extremely important to kids entering puberty.
We also discussed folk entertainers like those great
Oklahomans Will Rogers and Woody Guthrie. The students had never heard of either
one of them, but they all knew Guthrie’s most famous song: “This Land is Your
Land.” I asked them what the song is about. “How great America is,” they
answered. I informed them that, when they learned this song, they were never
played THE WHOLE THING. There is a part at the end that is almost always left
off. I played it for them, with the lyrics cast on the screen. I’m going to
paraphrase most of it here.
First there was a verse where the singer sees a No
Trespassing sign. The other side doesn’t say anything: THAT side is made for
you and me.
The next verse describes a line of people, in the shadow of
a church, at the unemployment office. This makes him ask, “IS this land made
for you and me?”
In the final verse, he says “Nobody living can ever stop me
as I go walking that freedom highway. Nobody living can make me turn back. This
land is made for you and me.”
I was watching them while they watched the screen. Several
had widened eyes and dropped jaws when we came to the last part of it… because
they were realizing that this song did not mean what they had always thought it
did. Guthrie wasn’t JUST talking about how great America is -he was also
talking about the ways it fell short. There are authorities making rules
designed to inhibit your freedom, while not doing enough to help you make your
way. Nonetheless, he expresses determination to be free nonetheless.
I then showed them the famous speech at the end of “The
Grapes of Wrath,” where the Okie Tom Joad (played by Henry Fonda) says that
maybe we aren’t a bunch of individual souls -maybe we’re all little parts of a
big soul, and when one person suffers we all do. I pointed out that the words
of Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck (through his character Tom Joad) were
reflections of a lot of New Deal Democrats and people on the left in general
during the Depression.
The Guthrie song, I said, reminded me of another song 50
years later by Bruce Springsteen (who did a whole album called “The Ghost of
Tom Joad”). I asked how many of them were familiar with “Born in the USA”
-almost all were. What is it about? “How great America is.” So we listened.
Jaws dropped once more when they realized the song was about a working-class
Vietnam veteran who couldn’t find a job, or any help, and wound up in prison.
The chorus was a sarcastic condemnation of the failure of the “American Dream.”
Here is my point, for them and for you. This is what history
is. Taking something you never thought about deeply before, and thought you
understood, and looking more closely to see what it really meant.
That practice, like those songs, ultimately IS patriotic,
after all. They’re about how great America SHOULD be.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
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