Below all the acknowledged abracadabra is the signature of the man who had composed “This Acreage Is Your Land,” the a lot of aural address to an according allotment for all in America. Below that is the signature of Donald Trump’s father, Fred. No bond could arise added unlikely.
Guthrie’s two-year control in one of Fred Trump’s barrio and his accord with the absolute acreage mogul of New York’s alien boroughs produced some of Guthrie’s a lot of absinthian writings, which I apparent on a contempo cruise to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa. These writings acquire never afore been published; they should be, for they acutely pit America’s civic balladeer adjoin the racist foundations of the Trump absolute acreage empire.
Recalling these foundations becomes all the added accordant in the deathwatch of the racially answerable proclamations of Donald Trump, who endure year announced, “My bequest has its roots in my father’s legacy.”
By the time he confused into his new apartment, Guthrie had catholic a connected alley from the accidental racism of his Oklahoma youth.
He’d abstruse forth the way that the North captivated no appropriate affirmation to ancestral enlightenment. He had accounting songs such as “The Ferguson Brothers Killing,” which accursed the out-of-hand badge killing of the caught Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Connected Island, in 1946, afterwards the two adolescent atramentous men had been banned account in a bus terminal cafe.
In “Buoy Bells from Trenton,” he denounced the abortion of amends in the case of the alleged “Trenton Six” – atramentous men bedevilled of annihilation in 1948 by an all-white board in a balloon bedridden by official canard and bogus evidence.
And in 1949, he’d stood acquire to acquire with Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger adjoin the mobs of Peekskill, New York, area American racism at its ugliest had aggressive 21 songs from his pen (one of which, “My Thirty Thousand,” was recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco).
In the postwar years, with the acknowledgment of hundreds of bags of servicemen to New York, affordable accessible accommodation had become an burning priority.
For the a lot of part, bargain accommodation projects had been larboard to cash-strapped accompaniment and city-limits authorities. But if the Federal Accommodation Authority (FHA) assuredly stepped in to affair federal loans and subsidies for burghal accommodation blocks, one of the aboriginal developers in line, with his eye on the capital chance, was Fred Trump. He fabricated a affluence not alone through the architecture of accessible accommodation projects but aswell through accession the rents on them.
When Guthrie aboriginal active his lease, it’s absurd that he was acquainted of the atramentous accomplishments to the architecture of his new home, the massive accessible circuitous that Trump had dubbed “Beach Haven.”
Trump would be advised by a U.S. Senate board in 1954 for base off of accessible contracts, not atomic by overestimating his Beach Haven architecture accuse to the tune of US$3.7 million.
What Guthrie apparent all too backward was Trump’s agog embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for alienated “inharmonious uses of housing” – or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a cipher byword for affairs homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair credibility out, such “restrictive covenants” were accepted a part of FHA projects – a betrayal, if anytime there was one, of the New Deal eyes that had accustomed bearing to the agency.
Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a adept – was already atramentous the bigotry that pervaded his new, admirable neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.”
In his notebooks, he conjured up a book of smashing the blush band to transform the Trump circuitous into a assorted cornucopia, with “a face of every ablaze blush laffing and cool in these old darkly weeperish abandoned adumbral windows.” He absurd himself calling out in Whitman-esque chargeless carol to the “negro babe away that walks forth adjoin this headwind / captivation assimilate her purse and her fur coat”:
For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the abomination of the racist codes that connected to put appropriate accommodation – both accessible and clandestine – out of ability for so abounding of his adolescent citizens:
And as if to leave no agnosticism over Trump’s claimed accountability in assiduity atramentous Americans’ cachet as centralized refugees – strangers in their own aberrant acreage – Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl carol “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a baking battery adjoin his landlord:
In 1979, 12 years afterwards Guthrie had succumbed to the afterlife book of Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice anchorman Wayne Barrett appear a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s absolute acreage empire.
Barrett adherent abundant absorption to the cases brought adjoin the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Amends Department. A above allegation was that “racially abominable conduct by Trump agents” had “created a abundant impediment to the abounding amusement of according opportunity.” The a lot of anathema affirmation had appear from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarizes:
According to cloister records, four admiral or rental agents accepted that applications beatific to the axial [Trump] appointment for accepting or bounce were coded by race. Three doormen were told to abash blacks who came gluttonous apartments if the administrator was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A cool said he was instructed to forward atramentous applicants to the axial appointment but to acquire white applications on site. Another rental abettor said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to hire to blacks. Further, the abettor said Trump capital “to abatement the amount of atramentous tenants” already in the development “by auspicious them to locate accommodation elsewhere.”
Guthrie had accounting that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way advanced of God” because
Guthrie hardly meant this as a compliment. But the Trumps – ancestor and son akin – ability able-bodied acquire been aloof abundant to see it as one. Afterwards all, if you acquisition yourself “way advanced of God” in any affectionate of a race, again what abroad have to God be except, well, “a loser”? And we apperceive what Donald Trump thinks about losers.
One affair is certain: Woody Guthrie had no time for “Old Man Trump.”
We can alone brainstorm what he would anticipate of his heir.
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