Editing Woody Guthrie (section)

===Political views and relation to the Communist Party===
[[Socialism]] had an important impact on the work of Woody Guthrie. In the introduction to Will Kaufman’s book ''Woody Guthrie an American Radical'', Kaufman writes, "Woody Guthrie spent his productive life on the warpath-against poverty, political oppression, censorship, capitalism, [[fascism]], racism, and, ultimately, war itself."<ref name="978-0-252-03602-6">{{cite book |last1=Kaufman |first1=Will |title=Woody Guthrie, American Radical |date=2011 |publisher=[[University of Illinois Press]] |location=[[Champaign, Illinois]] |url=https://archive.org/details/woodyguthrieamer0000kauf |isbn=978-0-252-03602-6 |language=en}}</ref> Guthrie would time and time again back these beliefs up in his lyrics, specifically against capitalism at the height of the depression in the United States.

Guthrie never publicly declared himself a communist, though he was closely associated with the Communist Party. Kaufman writes: {{Blockquote| As he once claimed: "If you call me a Communist, I am very proud because it takes a wise and hard-working person to be a Communist" (quoted in Klein, p. 303). Klein also writes that Guthrie applied to join the Communist Party, but his application was turned down. In later years, he'd say, "I'm not a Communist, but I've been in the red all my life." He took great delight in proclaiming his hopes for a communist victory in the Korean War and more than once expressed his admiration for Stalin. Unlike his musical protégé, Pete Seeger, Guthrie never offered any regret for his Stalinism.<ref name=Kaufman2010/>}}

The matter of Guthrie's membership in the Communist Party, however, remains controversial. Scholar [[Ronald Radosh]] has written:

{{Blockquote|[H]is friends Gordon Friesen and Sis Cunningham, the founders in the 1960s of Broadside, and former members of the Almanac Singers, told me in a 1970s interview that Woody was a member of the same CP club as they were, and was regularly given a stack of The Daily Worker which he had to sell on the streets each day.<ref name="Radosh">{{cite journal |last1=Radosh |first1=Ronald |title=The Communist Party's Role in the Folk Revival: From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan |journal=American Communist History |date=2 January 2015 |volume=14 |issue=1 |pages=3–19 |doi=10.1080/14743892.2015.1013301 |s2cid=159878868 }}</ref>}}

Similarly, writer and historian [[Aaron J. Leonard]], in an article detailing Guthrie's Party membership for the [[History News Network]], quoted [[Pete Seeger]]:

{{Blockquote|On the other hand, Sis Cunningham, who was a much more disciplined person than either me or Woody, was in a Greenwich Village Branch of the Party. She got Woody in. She probably said, I'll see Woody acts responsibly.' And so Woody was briefly in the Communist Party.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Leonard |first1=Aaron |title=Woody Guthrie's Communism and "This Land Is Your Land" |url=http://hnn.us/article/177412 |website=History News Network |date=September 20, 2020 |publisher=hnn.us |access-date=17 May 2021}}</ref>}}

Leonard, in his book ''[[The Folk Singers and the Bureau]]'' also documents how the FBI treated Guthrie as if he were a member, adding him to various iterations of their [[Security Index]] – and keeping him on it till well into the early 1960s.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Rosenberg |first1=Daniel |title=The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA – 1939–1956: By Aaron J. Leonard, London, Repeater Books, 2020, 322 pp., US $16.95 (Paperback), ISBN 9780717807697 |journal=American Communist History |date=April 3, 2021 |volume=20 |issue=1–2 |pages=115–118 |doi=10.1080/14743892.2021.1918526 |s2cid=235689230 }}</ref>

After the [[Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact]], Guthrie took an antiwar U-turn and wrote one song describing the Soviet invasion of Poland as a favor to Polish farmers, and another attacking President Roosevelt's loans to Finland to help it defend against the Soviet Union's invasion in the 1939 [[Winter War]]. His attitude switched again in 1941 after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.<ref name=Kaufman2010/>