Woody Guthrie on Fred Trump
In 1950, Woody moved to an apartment in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, near Coney Island, called Beach Haven. His landlord was Fred Trump.
Woody didn’t like the place, which he took to calling Bitch Haven. He knew, long before the federal government did, that Trump did not rent his apartments to black people. (In the 1970s, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department finally caught up with him; the case was settled.) In 1954, he wrote a song about Trump’s discriminatory policy:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line.
The song was never published or recorded, but was discovered recently by Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, in Britain. Several handwritten drafts of the song—variously titled “Beach Haven Race Hate,” “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home,” and “Old Man Trump”—are now on display at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.
One can only wonder at what Woody would have made of Old Man T’s son. But Woody was an optimist. One reason why his songs are so invigorating is that he believed that progress was possible if human beings took steps to change the world. On a radio broadcast in 1944, he sang this song:
I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose
Substitute “Trumpites” for “fascists” and you have an anthem for the Resistance.
Thanks to route22ny for alerting me to this.
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