PUBLISHED August 14, 2018
On 1/11/52 Edward RYAN, porter
of 49 Murdoch Court, who was interviewed under a suitable pretext, advised that
the subject resides in apartment 1-J and was [a] “Hill Billy” singer. Mr. Ryan
stated that he would co-operate with this office…. It is suggested that after a
review of the [unintelligible] that Mr. Ryan be considered a neighborhood
informant. — New
York FBI reportThis is the freest place in America. Here I can jump on the
table and shout, ‘I’m a Communist,’ and they say ‘Oh, he’s crazy.’ Try that
where you live.”— Woody
Guthrie, Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.
There is a long-standing
controversy about singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie’s exact association with the
Communist Party, with some describing him as a free-spirited sympathizer and
others representing him as a party member. For its part, the FBI, which had
difficulty establishing Guthrie’s membership bona fides, settled on the view
that, card-carrying or not, Guthrie was to be treated as a communist. This is
what sustained and defined the files that the FBI kept for more than a quarter
of a century on Guthrie, the Oklahoma-born folk musician whose pro-labor and
anti-fascist songs played a defining role in the folk movement starting from
the 1940s until his death in 1967.
In 1980, the FBI released 134
pages from its files on Guthrie into the public record. Recently, in conducting
research for a book on the FBI and the folk singers of the 1940s and 1950s, I
obtained the more substantial files on Guthrie—records totaling 447 pages— that
were maintained by the New York and Los Angeles FBI field offices. These newly
disclosed files offer chilling new examples of the US government’s history
of suppressing left-wing artists and intellectuals.
Guthrie and the Communist
Party
Woody Guthrie was
born in 1912 in Okemah, Oklahoma, and before becoming an artist, Guthrie made
his living, among other things, as a sign painter, laborer and fortune-teller.
After his mother was diagnosed with the genetic neurological disease
Huntington’s Chorea and committed to a state psychiatric institution, where she
would later die, Guthrie left Oklahoma to move to California, where he traveled
amid the migrant camps of his fellow Oklahomans and encountered the political
and cultural scene in Los Angeles. It was in California that Guthrie met
and became
radicalized by the Communist Party.
The Bureau kept at least three
files on Guthrie: A headquarters file (HQ file), a New York field office
file and a Los Angeles field office file. By the FBI’s own admission, it
destroyed records on him in 1988 — and none of the material I obtained deals
with his time in the Army. Likewise, there is no mention of his time in the
Merchant Marine, even though the FBI apparently played a role in revoking his
seaman’s papers because of an article he published in the communist,
Sunday Worker. That said, the HQ file — which until now was the only source
available to biographers and historians — begins in 1941, with correspondence
in relation to his work on for the Department of the Interior, where
Guthrie wrote some of his most beloved songs and narrated a film promoting the
government’s hydroelectric project in Oregon. In those reports, it is suggested
he was a Communist Party member in California, but because the work for the
government was temporary, the file does not show that an investigation was
launched. Then, after one other report about a wartime benefit Guthrie played,
the HQ file jumps to 1950.
However, the HQ file is not
the definitive source for assessing the FBI’s view of Guthrie. A fuller picture
comes through in the files I recently obtained, which were compiled in the
relevant field offices, particularly New York. For example, Guthrie’s New York
file opens in 1947 with pictures of him taken by an informant at a fundraiser
he played in Spokane, Washington. The first is a posed
photo of Guthrie holding his guitar with the iconic “This Machine
Kills Fascists” handwritten on the instrument; the other is
of him standing beside William Cumming,
whom the Bureau identifies as the former chairman of the Spokane Section of the
Communist Party.
The New York file also
contains a copy of a letter Guthrie
sent to Judge Harold L. Medina, asking him to let Communist Party leader
William Z. Foster serve as his own attorney in the trial of the 12 Communists
indicted (and later convicted) in the infamous Smith Act trial of 1949.
The FBI obtained the letter from the judge overseeing the trial, who dutifully
forwarded it to the Bureau.
Taken together, the items in
the New York file offer a more complete picture of the attention being paid to
Guthrie before he was added to the Bureau’s Security Index — the list that
marked one for preventative detention in the event of a “national emergency”
such as war or another crisis — a list that would include at points figures,
such as Pete Seeger, James
Forman and Martin Luther King Jr.
Factionalist Sabotage Group
Guthrie landed on the FBI
Security Index because of his association with two veterans of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade (Americans who fought against fascist Francisco Franco during
the Spanish Civil War). The FBI claims the two veterans, George Haggerty and
Ramón Durem, were part of a sabotage group ready to support the Soviet Union in
the event of war between the USSR and the US.
While Guthrie’s association
with the two was enough to land him on the Security Index, the Bureau had
evidence early on that there was likely nothing to this. As a report in his
HQ file notes, “Two informants who were closely associated with GUTHRIE
during April and May 1950, advised that he personally has never, in their presence,
made any statement relative to sabotage.” In fact, the Bureau would later
report that even the group’s so-called leader hardly fit their
suspicions. As
they wrote in a report in June 16, 1953:
These informants advised that
DUREM’s associates and activities reflect no apparent intention of organizing
such a group as described above, and that he has personally evidenced strong
indifference toward international affairs as well as to all Communist line
activities.
Despite this, the
“Factionalist Sabotage Group” remained a recurring reference in Guthrie’s file
— and justification for his potential detention.
A Pretext Call
After the entries relative to
the Factionalist Sabotage Group, the FBI’s attention to Guthrie took a surreal
turn. No longer were they pursuing a robust man with boundless energy. By 1952,
Woody Guthrie was becoming very sick. He was plagued by health issues, and his
friends worried he might be an alcoholic. Yet, because of his inclusion on the
Security Index, the Bureau kept track of his whereabouts. The following, from
his New York file, is exemplary:
On 5/6/53
MARJORIE MAZIA was telephonically interviewed at the dancing school
number [her business] under the pretext that writer had known WOODY GUTHRIE at
Brooklyn State Hospital and was interested in how he was and would like to get
in touch with him. MAZIA assumed that the writer [of the report] was a member
of Alcoholics Anonymous and advised that GUTHRIE was not in New York but was
traveling around the country and that she heard from him from, time to time.
The FBI was adept at such
methods, even writing an internal
manual on the subject – the released version taking care to redact
many of their methods. Regardless, one does need to acknowledge the
manipulative cunning in their call to the wife of a deeply troubled man.
Case Closed?
The last substantial
entry in Guthrie’s HQ file suggests removing him from the
Security Index:
Subject is suffering from
Huntington’s Chorea, a chronic neurological condition with occasional psychotic
manifestations. It is a deteriorating disease with no known cure and is
eventually fatal. A victim of this disease can live from five to twenty years
and most patients have succumbed by the time they are fifty-five to sixty years
old. Subject is forty-four years old…. In view of subject’s health status and
the lack of reliable firsthand information reflecting [Communist Party]
membership in the last five years, it is recommended subject’s [FBI Security
Index] card be cancelled.
Leaving aside the
cold-bloodedness of this passage — because Guthrie is ailing, on the way to
dying, the agent feels it is safe to take him off the FBI Security Index — this
was not the end of the government’s attention to Guthrie.
In looking at the background
of this report, one learns that in 1955, the FBI was fine-tuning its detention
list program. Both the FBI and the Justice Department, which managed the
Security Index, had up to then ignored the more rigorous stipulations of the
Congressional Emergency
Detention Act of 1950. The FBI, however, also kept secret the full
scope of its Security Index program from the DOJ. In 1955, they appear to have
been trying to get their ducks in a row. According to the
Church Committee, which investigated the Bureau in 1976, the FBI tightened
its standards and removed names from the Security Index. By 1958, the names on
the list decreased from 26,174 to 12,870. However, being removed from the
Security Index did not mean being free from FBI scrutiny. As the Church
Committee reported:
It kept the names of persons
taken off the Security Index on a Communist Index, because the Bureau believed
such persons remained “potential threats.” The secret Communist Index was
renamed the Reserve Index in 1960 and expanded to include “influential” persons
deemed likely to “aid subversive elements” in an emergency because of their
“subversive associations and ideology.”
In Guthrie’s case, it was “recommended
that a Communist Index card be prepared.” The details on the form calling
for this are jarring, listing Guthrie’s residence as “Brooklyn State Hospital” and
his employment as “Hospital Patient.” Guthrie was thus transferred from the
Security Index, which marked him for detention if the situation arose, to the
Communist Index, a list of those who bore watching. He appears to have remained
on that list until 1959.
Meanwhile, by the early 1960s,
Guthrie’s health was degenerating. In an email to Truthout, Guthrie biographer
Will Kaufman described photos he viewed of Guthrie from that time, which
clearly show the advanced stages of the musician’s Huntington’s Disease: “Some
of the photos – never released to the public – are snapped in mid-paroxysm.”
Similarly, historian Ronald
Cohen described Guthrie’s condition to Truthout as, “very incapacitated” with
him “rarely leaving the hospital.”
Regardless, in 1960, another review of
Guthrie was undertaken, this time investigating whether to transfer him to the
Reserve Index – a list the Bureau established to take the place of the
“Communist Index.” The FBI special agent looking into this concluded,
“it is not felt that subject meets the standards for inclusion on the RI
[Reserve Index], and for that reason it is suggested that his name be deleted
therefrom.” There is, however, no evidence that the recommendation was
followed. Not only is there no confirmatory documentation of his name being
deleted, the cover
sheetof Guthrie’s file, along with an entry dealing with his addition
to the CI, are stamped “RCI.” More telling is the fact that reports of his
activity continued to be added
to the file — five years short of his succumbing to his illness.
Real and Potential Threats
In looking back at the FBI’s
actions directed at Guthrie, it may be tempting to laugh off the time and
energy the FBI spent surveilling a musician. Why, after all, would the
government be worried about a folk singer? This, however, misses something
important. As trivial as this seems — and leaving aside the sickening specter
of targeting a desperately ill man — there was logic in what the Bureau did.
For the FBI and the elements
of the power structure the Bureau represented, Guthrie was a threat in
potential, someone who could conceivably reach millions. This would be an
unacceptable situation. One need only witness the repression leveled
against Paul
Robeson in the late 1940s for evidence of this.
Woody Guthrie, who at the time
was nowhere near as popular as Robeson, is today seen as one of the most
influential artists of the 20th century — he was indeed someone who might have
reached a very large audience in a way that threatened the status quo. That his
surveillance continued well after he became too ill to perform underscores the
entrenched persistence of the repressive apparatus.
While today’s world is
considerably different from the one Woody Guthrie inhabited, there is a
continuity worthy of note. In the current moment, ugly
reaction is still promoted at the highest levels of government, while
the forces of protest and social justice are told to remain “civil” lest they
be further marginalized
and suppressed. The treatment of Guthrie was not an aberration; it was part
of a repressive history that lives on in the actions of US intelligence
agencies today.
Special thanks to Conor Gallagher for
his insights and analysis of the FBI documents.
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