A Song With Many Meanings
Woody Guthrie met the Communist Party in Los Angeles in 1939, while working at Radio Station KFVD. There he met Ed Robbin, a writer for Peoples World, the party’s West Coast newspaper. One of the first things Guthrie did after meeting Robbin was to write a song about Tom Mooney a labor organizer who had been imprisoned for allegedly bombing a “Preparedness Day” parade held in preparation of the US entering World War I. Guthrie’s first partisan act in that respect was to write “Tom Mooney is Free,” on the occasion of Mooney’s release. A greater example of his partisanship came in the lyric, “Why Do You Stand There in the Rain?” which he wrote in response to Franklin Roosevelt’s scolding of a youth rally — that included communists — held soon after the USSR went to war against Finland. Among other things the lyrics take a strong anti-war stand consistent with the CP’s slogan at the time, “The Yanks Aren’t Coming” — a position they held during the non-aggression pact between Germany and the USSR. Guthrie, in other words, was already incorporating the political line of the Communist Party into his lyrics when he sat down at actor Will Geer’s house in New York to write what would become “This Land is Your Land.”
In that respect, in order to better understand the song, one needs to understand the peculiarity of the CPUSA under the leadership of Earl Browder. A major slogan of the CP when Woody came on the scene was, “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” That slogan was in keeping with Browder’s attempt to create a big tent for communism in the United States, steeped in anti-fascism and social-democracy. That the slogan was a mash-up of communism and US exceptionalism helps explain why Guthrie’s song stops in New York, rather than going on to the wider world — communism, after all, was supposed to be internationalism. Browder and the CP’s approach to communism was far more U.S.-centric than internationalist —except of course when it came to supporting the geopolitical dictates of the Soviet Union. All of which explains the orientation of the song.
Depending on the listener, “This Land is Your Land” can be heard in different ways. Guthrie most likely intended it as a call to move beyond private property, and toward a greater equality and common humanity. Notably the lines usually excluded, talk about encountering a sign reading, “No Trespassing,” while the other side of the sign, “didn’t say nothing.” — that being the sign that was “made for you and me.”
More moderately it can be heard as a liberal-secular hymn, in which all people ought to share in the country’s bounty. That is why Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen could safely perform it at Barack Obama’s first inaugural celebration.
Alternately still, and not without basis, it can be heard as a proclamation of American chauvinism — in fact the song has been criticized as justification of manifest destiny and even the theft of native lands because of its lines extolling the US landscape achieved through no small amount of blood and conquest.