This Machine Kills Fascists: What Woody Guthrie's Guitar Said

On March 8, 1943, Al Aumuller, a photographer for the New York World-Telegram, pointed his camera at a folk singer holding a guitar, and the sticker across its face read, in block letters, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS. That negative, filed today with the Library of Congress, is the earliest dated photograph of the slogan on Woody Guthrie’s guitar. The guitar itself does not survive. Neither does a second one Guthrie marked the same way. A guitar cannot kill anyone, so the claim only ever meant what Guthrie meant by it: that a song could do a soldier’s work.

Okemah to the dust

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, the third of five children of Charles and Nora Belle Guthrie. His parents named him for Woodrow Wilson, New Jersey’s governor and, that summer, the Democratic Party’s new presidential nominee. Nora’s own health was already failing in ways nobody in the family had a name for yet. When Woody was fourteen, she was committed to the Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane, and she died there in 1930 from what doctors eventually recognized as Huntington’s disease.

His father sent for him in 1929, and Guthrie left Okemah High School to join him in Pampa, Texas, where he married Mary Jennings in October 1933. Pampa sat near the center of what the country would soon call the Dust Bowl. On April 14, 1935, the worst of the storms, a wall of black dirt that turned noon into night, rolled over the Texas Panhandle. Guthrie later fixed the exact date in a song, Dust Storm Disaster, that opens on that day. Two years after that storm, in 1937, he left his wife and children in Texas and joined the migration west, landing on KFVD radio in Los Angeles as half of the duo Woody and Lefty Lou.

The pact, the firing, and the turn

California gave Guthrie an audience of fellow migrants before it gave him a politics to match, and the trade he settled into, singing for strikers and writing for the movement’s own papers, was the same one Joe Hill had worked three decades earlier on the other side of the country. From May 12, 1939 to January 3, 1940, Guthrie wrote a daily column, Woody Sez, for the People’s World, the Communist Party’s West Coast newspaper, translating current events into the same Dust Bowl vernacular he sang in. He never carried a party card, and historians still argue about how close he came. What the record actually shows is messier than either side of that argument wants: in August 1939 the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and within weeks Germany invaded Poland, with Soviet troops moving into the country’s east soon after. Guthrie wrote a song praising the pact, and KFVD’s owners, no friends of Stalin’s, fired him for it.

The reversal came less than two years later. When Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the group Guthrie had just joined in New York, Pete Seeger’s Almanac Singers, dropped the peace songs they had been writing and started writing against fascism instead. The same group also wrote pro-union standards like Union Maid, and Guthrie made sure his own name went on that songwriting credit, he said later, so the royalty checks would reach his children. The photograph Aumuller took in March 1943 caught the same argument painted on wood: a man who had once written the pact’s defense now carried its opposite strapped across his chest.

What the sticker actually said

The words were not entirely Guthrie’s own. A similar slogan reportedly circulated on stickers that American defense-plant machinists stuck to their own lathes and drill presses during the war: the tool does its part too. The story of Guthrie borrowing it is repeated everywhere and pinned down nowhere in particular, which is its own kind of honesty about how slogans travel. What is documented is that by 1943 he had at least two guitars marked with it, one with a printed sticker and one in ragged hand lettering, and that he was rarely photographed without one of them that year.

That June he enlisted in the U.S. Merchant Marine and took his machine to sea. One of his ships, the SS William B. Travis, struck a mine in the Mediterranean. Another, the SS Sea Porpoise, was torpedoed off Utah Beach on July 5, 1944; Guthrie came through both unhurt. The same year he shipped out, 1943, he also published his autobiography, Bound for Glory, telling the Dust Bowl story in prose that the songs had already told in verse.

The verses radio skips

The machine’s biggest target during those years was not overseas. On February 23, 1940, the morning after he checked into the Hanover House hotel on 43rd Street in New York, Guthrie wrote out a song answering Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, which he had heard Kate Smith sing on the radio until he could not stand it anymore. He titled the draft God Blessed America before crossing that out for This Land Is Your Land. The manuscript ran six verses, and two of them never made the version schools teach. One puts a fence in the singer’s path:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me. The sign was painted, said ‘Private Property.’ But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing. This land was made for you and me.

The other puts him outside a Depression relief line:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple, by the relief office I saw my people. As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.

Guthrie recorded the song, private-property verse included, in April 1944, then more or less forgot about it. The recording sat unheard for decades until Smithsonian Folkways archivists found it while transferring the old acetate to digital in 1997. The relief-office verse never got an official recording at all. By the time songbooks and Pete Seeger had made This Land Is Your Land a standard in the 1950s, the wall and the relief line were already gone, and most Americans singing it have never heard either one.

The other inheritance

Guthrie had grown up watching his mother’s illness get mistaken for a bad temper. His own version, showing up in the late 1940s, first got mistaken for drinking. Doctors did not put a name to it until 1952: Huntington’s disease, inherited from Nora, the same illness that had taken her in 1930. He spent his last decade moving between hospitals, first Greystone Park in New Jersey, later Brooklyn State and Creedmoor in Queens, losing his coordination and then his speech. He died at Creedmoor on October 3, 1967, at fifty-five. His second wife, the dancer Marjorie Mazia, had divorced him years before but stayed his caretaker through all of it, and after his death she founded the Committee to Combat Huntington’s Disease, the organization that grew into the Huntington’s Disease Society of America.

The guitar in Aumuller’s photograph disappeared decades ago, and so did the second one Guthrie marked the same way. What survives is the paper: a 1943 negative at the Library of Congress, a 1940 manuscript with two verses still missing from the songbooks, a 1944 acetate that took more than fifty years to get heard. Guthrie said his machine killed fascists. Most of what the machine actually left behind was aimed closer to home.