In December 1950, Guthrie had his first encounter with a Trump, Donald’s father Fred, when the folk singer signed his name to a lease of an apartment.
Having recently watched the highly praised 2024 film “A Complete Unknown”—about the early career of Bob Dylan—got me thinking about Woody Guthrie, whom Dylan often visited in the hospital. (Guthrie died in 1967, age 55, after a little over a decade of hospitalization, from Huntington's disease.)
I was a big fan of the 1960s’ enthusiasm for folk music, and Guthrie’s songs, like "This Land Is Your Land," were a major influence. Plus, as Dylan told one of my favorite poets, Carl Sandburg, when he showed up on his North Carolina porch one day in 1964, Guthrie often mentioned Sandburg.
Many of Guthrie’s songs reflected his progressive politics. Like all of us, he was sometimes wrong—he once wrote a song favoring the 1939 Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Poland—but he sympathized with the downtrodden and had praise for one of our greatest presidents—Franklin Roosevelt (FDR). (See his Dear Mrs. Roosevelt song.)
In this present essay, we will focus on two issues upon which our present president is adverse to the progressive views of Guthrie—immigrants and racism. In “Pastures of Plenty” Woody wrote and sang, “Every state in the Union us migrants have been,” and he celebrated the immigrants’ working contribution to the USA, but it was the words to "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" that paid the most lasting tribute to them. He first wrote his words in a 1948 poem about almost 30 Mexican guest farm laborers and undocumented immigrants who died in a plane crash.
A decade later someone else put his words to music, and it was sung by some of the 1960s big singing names—e.g. Baez, Seeger, Collins, Dylan, Nelson, Parton, Cash, and Springsteen. Below are its words, which are so different from Trump’s mid-2015 immigrant rant—“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems.They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” (There are also Trump’s present actions—the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] arrested more immigrants in the first half of 2025 than it did for all of 2024.)
Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting,
The oranges piled in their creosote dumps;
They're flying 'em back to the Mexican border
To pay all their money to wade back again
Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"
My father's own father, he waded that river,
They took all the money he made in his life;
My brothers and sisters come working the fruit trees,
And they rode the truck till they took down and died.
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died 'neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?
Called simply “deportees.” (The Hispanic victims were buried in a mass grave marked only as "Mexican Nationals.”) Pretty bad. Pretty inhumane, right? Yes, such a callous, inhumane approach is a long way from the urging of the late Pope Francis, who stated, “Our response to the challenges posed by contemporary migration can be summed up in four verbs: welcome, protect, promote, and integrate.”
It can successfully be argued that the U. S. cannot accept all those who wish to reside here, but we can treat all who aspire to come here, or all those whose stays we limit, humanely.
Yet in the late 1940s, when Guthrie wrote his poem, we were not especially welcoming to immigrants. Although we admitted millions of them prior to WWI, after the war things began to change. And in 1924, in a decade of Republican political dominance, Congress passed the Immigration Act, containing an Asian Exclusion Act, almost banning Asian immigrants, and a National Origins Act, limiting European immigrants but favoring those from northern Europe. (As Jill Lepore has written, the purpose of the new law “was to end immigration from Asia and to curb the admission of southern and eastern Europeans, deemed less worthy than immigrants from other parts of Europe.”)
Although Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman (Democratic presidents from 1933 through 1952) were less hostile to immigrants, the influences of public opinion, World War II, and the beginnings of the Cold War helped dampen any immigration reform. And the two-term Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s produced (in the mid 1950s) what one source has referred to as the “biggest mass deportation of undocumented workers in United States history.”
From the 1960s to the present, there has been some immigration reform—and some presidents have praised immigrants—but our current president has voiced more anti-immigrant and anti-refugee rhetoric than any of his predecessors.
In addition to immigrants, Guthrie defended a cause now anathema to Trump and his administration—diversity, which in part attempts to combat racism. According to Will Kaufman, the author of the excellent Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2015), Guthrie was especially active in the decade after WWII, part of which he served in the Merchant Marine. Kaufman recounts that he “had written songs such as ‘The Ferguson Brothers Killing,’ which condemned the out-of-hand police killing of the unarmed Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Long Island, in 1946, after the two young black men had been refused service in a bus terminal cafe. In ‘Buoy Bells from Trenton, he denounced the miscarriage of justice in the case of the so-called “Trenton Six”—black men convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury in a trial marred by official perjury and manufactured evidence. And in 1949, he’d stood shoulder to shoulder with Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger against the mobs of Peekskill, New York, where American racism at its ugliest” inspired the words he wrote for ‘My Thirty Thousand.”
Then, in December 1950, Guthrie had his first encounter with a Trump, Donald’s father Fred, when the folk singer signed his name to a lease of an apartment (part of a cluster of sixteen residential buildings in Gravesend, Brooklyn). The name of the complex was Beach Haven, and he remained there two years. As Guthrie apparently later discovered, it allowed no Blacks—in 1973, with son Donald listed as president of Trump Management and Fred as its chairman, the Justice Department sued the company for discriminating against Blacks.
In a trip to the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Kaufman discovered words about Beach Haven the folk singer wrote in 1954, but never recorded or published. They included,
I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed that color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project
For one whose words often display little respect for truth, Donald Trump’s
pronouncement in 2015 that “my legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy” is
surprisingly accurate.
