n the spring of 1941, more than a decade into the Great Depression and less than a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was a nation in transition.
A huge ramp-up of war production across the United States had already changed the very character of the country as it sent warships and bombers across the Atlantic to help the Allies fight Adolf Hitler. At the same time, the dispossessed masses of the economic collapse of the 1930s remained a reality in urban centers and drought-stricken farms alike. For this brief moment, Rosie the Riveter and Tom Joad stood side by side in American consciousness.
Portland, Oregon, exhibited this duality perfectly. Sitting at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, Portland had long been a substantial port city. However, it was chiefly an agricultural port for most of its history, the shipping point for the huge amounts of timber harvested from the thick Pacific Crest forests around it.
That fact changed dramatically in 1940, when the city was chosen as the site of two major shipyards to produce steel “Liberty ships” for Allied forces in Europe. The shipyards sat on either side of the Columbia, just west of where Interstate 5 now crosses the mighty river.
More than a hundred thousand people moved to Portland during the war years. The first ship to roll off the Oregon Shipbuilding Corporation’s docks was the Star of Oregon, in the fall of 1941, with 454 more to follow in the next four years.
Building of a Liberty ship at a Portland shipyard, 1942
And yet the Depression was still very much alive in Portland. Three miles away from the shipyards sat Sullivan’s Gulch, at that time a sprawling Hooverville filled with families left out of work by the economic downturn, which had proven devastating to the timber industry. Houses were made of cardboard, and heat was provided by small fires—“the Depression at its worse,” one observer said.
Sitting between these two worlds, both literally and figuratively, was the Bonneville Power Administration. In the literal sense, the BPA was a new agency headquartered in a single-story concrete building at 811 NE Oregon Street in Portland, just five blocks from Sullivan’s Gulch and not much farther from the shipyards. In a figurative sense, the BPA was an agency born out of the Great Depression, which proved instrumental during the war.
Created in 1937, the BPA was a novel, perhaps even radical, concept: a federal agency that would sell the power created by federal dams at Grand Coulee and Bonneville in order to drive down the price of electricity. As stated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and others, its purpose was to weaken private businesses that sold electricity for profit—one of many bold attempts by the Roosevelt administration to fundamentally reshape America’s economy.
BPA promotional poster, circa 1940
Predictably, the agency made plenty of well-heeled enemies. The idea of the government controlling the supply of anything, even something like electricity, struck many as socialism. If the government socialized power, what else might go?
“The next thing they’ll do is socialize the grocery store, and then they’ll socialize your wife, and it’s going to be the Russian system coming over and taking over” was a common sentiment the BPA’s public information officer Stephen Kahn recalled hearing at town hall meetings when the government tried to sell the idea of a federal power administration in the Pacific Northwest.
That sort of sentiment was frustrating to Kahn. As he saw it, the BPA was part of a massive effort to change the region for the better. Not only were the federal dams and the BPA driving down the cost of electricity—rates dropped by half in some cases—but they were also putting thousands of men to work and providing electricity to factories like the Kaiser shipyards, which employed thousands more. He foresaw irrigation coming off the Grand Coulee Dam and turning vast tracts of the Columbia Basin desert into arable land. He foresaw farmers who’d lost their land in the Depression working that land.
First-edition cover, 1939
As the head of public information for the BPA, Kahn was largely responsible for making people appreciate these benefits, but in 1941, he wasn’t sure the message was getting through. The agency had released charts and figures that explained how a publicly controlled power system worked in consumers’ favor. However, Kahn decided that in order for people to really get behind it, they shouldn’t simply understand the benefits; they should connect with them on an emotional level. What the BPA needed, he decided, was a feature-length film. It would be shown in cinemas across the country in order to do what the recent film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath had done: “capture the hearts of people.” It wouldn’t simply discuss the agency’s mission of selling cheap power, but it would show the high stakes and drama of giving citizens control over their own electricity.
In many ways, 1941 was an auspicious time for the government to make such a movie. The New Deal had prompted an unprecedented amount of government-funded artwork through the 1930s. Departing from the urbane tastes of the 1920s, artists sought to tell the story of the common man. In literature, film, and music, the working class was the hero of a newly imagined America. Radio programs featured folksingers, and Hollywood movies had everyday joes like Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith facing down corruption in the highest echelons of American power. The 1941 Academy Award for best director went to John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath. A popular sentiment of the moment was that we the people, as John Steinbeck had put it in the novel, may in fact be sharing “one big soul.”
It was natural, then, that when deciding how to sell the public on the BPA, Kahn started thinking about using a folksinger—someone who would bring the common touch, someone who would turn citizens into true believers in the Columbia River projects. In other words, Kahn needed someone to spread propaganda.
But who?
With that question in mind, Kahn called the preeminent expert on folk music in the United States: twenty-six-year-old Alan Lomax, the assistant in charge at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. Lomax had met folk artists from across the country and recorded everyone from Jelly Roll Morton to Aunt Molly Jackson to Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a. Lead Belly).
When asked if he knew anyone who might be able to sing for and narrate a film about the Columbia River, Lomax nearly jumped through the line. “I got your man for ya!”
Alan Lomax, circa 1940
In early 1941, that man was broke, busted, and disgusted.
Woody Guthrie was twenty-eight years old, married with three children, and living hand to mouth in Los Angeles. He had one record to his name, which wasn’t selling, and had just quit a lucrative gig at CBS in New York. He’d already written most of the lyrics to the song that would define him to generations of Americans—“From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters …”—but he hadn’t yet put “This Land Is Your Land” onto a record. His marriage was falling apart, he was drinking heavily, and he was seriously behind on his car payments and rent.
The house he and his young family rented on Preston Avenue in Los Angeles’s Echo Park neighborhood was dreary and leaky. In a letter to his friend and booster Lomax, Guthrie called it “rambling, rotten, rundown, rusty … Hard to get into. Hard to pay rent on. Hard to get out of.” But, he added, “3 kids has got to live in a house.” The house belonged to an anarchist poet who’d left it abandoned when she moved to Pasadena, and Woody had worked out a deal that let them stay there free for two months if he painted it. When that time was up, he quickly fell behind on his ten-dollar-per-month rent.
When the Guthries moved in, they couldn’t afford furniture, forcing Woody’s wife, Mary, to cull what she could from other families’ cast-offs. They had trouble putting food on the table, and relied on the charity of neighbors to feed the kids at times.
For Woody’s part, he was working itinerantly at best. The only place he seemed to be able to make anything singing was on Skid Row, where he sang for nickels and beer, and that certainly didn’t help matters. Friends recalled Guthrie drinking himself into depressive fits in those early months of 1941. Neighbors heard bitter arguments between Woody and Mary. At one point, they said, the family fled as Guthrie hurled empty beer bottles through the windows of their dilapidated house.
He was “in the worst mood I had ever seen him in,” friend and neighbor Ed Robbin told Guthrie biographer Ed Cray. “He was very depressed, unhappy, angry and drinking.”
At the urging of Lomax, he was plucking away at his autobiography, Bound for Glory, an effort that did nothing to help fill the kitchen pantry. KFVD, the radio station that had first hired Woody years before, put him back on the air, but without pay, and without sponsors to underwrite the show.
Given his destitute situation, it was hard to believe that the last six months of the previous year had proven to be the most lucrative of his career.
In early 1940, Guthrie had moved to New York, where he quickly became a minisensation as a radio personality. After his first appearance on national radio, he was a regular on national and local stations. He performed on the pilot of a radio show Alan Lomax was creating for CBS. And he scored his first hit, thanks to an appearance on WNYC’s Adventures in Music. It was on that show that he performed his Grapes of Wrath ballad, “Tom Joad”—a song that captures the entire saga of John Steinbeck’s masterpiece in a few stanzas.
In September of 1940, the Model Tobacco Company invited Guthrie to become the host of a radio program called Pipe Smoking Time. It was a typical variety show of the era—conservative, simple, and designed to sell the sponsor’s product. The producers wanted Woody to give folksy pitches of tobacco. They even created a theme song based on Woody’s signature song, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” essentially changing it into a jingle:
Howdy, friend. Well, it’s sure good to know you.
Load up your pipe and take your life easy.
With Model Tobacco to light up your way,
We’ll be glad to be with you today.
The money was like nothing Woody had ever experienced—his salary was more than $350 a week, which translates to nearly $5,000 in 2016 dollars.
Woody Guthrie performing on the radio program Back Where I Come From on WABC-CBS Radio, NYC, 1940
“These folks are paying me so much I have to back a truck up to the pay window to get my money,” he shared in a letter—surely to instill confidence in his career choice.
However, for the first time in his life, Guthrie was stifled, forced to limit his creativity. He struggled with the overt commerciality of the show and rules about what he could and couldn’t do. Mostly, he just wanted to sing his own songs. But Model wanted him to sing hillbilly songs, he complained to Lomax, songs that made fun of poor folks rather than celebrate them. And everything was scripted. The show had no room for Woody’s ad libs, jokes, and topical commentary—lest it strike the listeners at home as something that hinted at Guthrie’s far-left political leanings. He grew tired of the shilling and the shallow, demeaning portrayal of his country folk on the airwaves. It was not the place for him. So Woody Guthrie walked away.
He left New York two days after New Year’s Day 1941. Pipe Smoking Time had been on the air for little more than a month when Guthrie instructed Mary to pack up the kids. He was done with New York and ready to get back to Los Angeles. Loading his family into his new blue Pontiac, one of the only luxuries he would ever buy (on credit), Woody drove to Washington, DC, then down through the southern states to El Paso to visit family, and then out to California. Giving up reasonable stability and a healthy income, they were on the move again. They were always on the move.
As she left the apartment in New York, Mary couldn’t have known exactly what awaited her. Still, she must have feared the worst: less work, more poverty, a leaky house they couldn’t pay rent on.
Then, out of nowhere, opportunity stopped by the Guthrie household.
It was April, and a man that Woody referred to as “some feller from the Dept. of Interior” came by to chat with him about a film being shot along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington State. That “feller” was Gunther von Fritsch, a Hollywood producer who had signed on with Kahn to make the documentary for the BPA. Von Fritsch told Guthrie they were interested in hiring him for a year to act and narrate in the film, as well as write some songs about the river and its federal projects.
The prospect must have been highly exciting to the unemployed Guthrie. But in a letter, he was understated.
“Hope they give me a job,” Woody wrote a friend about the episode.
However, a follow-up letter from von Fritsch tempered those hopes, saying that funding for the film was still up in the air and telling him to hang tight.
But Guthrie couldn’t hang tight.
The house they were renting turned out to have bad plumbing, and Guthrie seemed intent on making it worse.
As it happened, Mary’s brother Fred Jennings and his wife were visiting the Guthries when the “sewer went bad,” as Jennings later put it to Ed Cray. In lieu of hiring help with money he didn’t have, Guthrie went to get a pickax to see what he could do himself about the backup, Jennings recalled.
“The thing to do is just to dig it up and knock a hole in it with a pick,” Guthrie reasoned aloud to his brother-in-law.
Borrowing the tool from a neighbor, he began digging up the crabgrass yard in search of the malfunctioning pipe. If Mary was watching and had any understanding of plumbing, then she surely recognized that with every heave of the pick, any chance of them remaining in their Preston Avenue house grew dimmer.
Pick, pick, pick. Woody hit pay dirt. As could have been predicted, once the pipe was severed, sewage began spilling into the yard. He and his brother-in-law tried to stanch the flow of feces with the grass they’d just dug up, but there was no stopping it.
“Turds were just floating out of it,” Jennings recalled.
Seeing they now had a bigger problem on their hands than just a clogged pipe, the Guthries and Jenningses did what they felt was the practical thing: they abandoned the house. They strapped a mattress on the car, stuffed everyone in, and headed north—homeless again, and no richer than when the day started.
Gunther von Fritsch’s test shot of Woody and Mary Guthrie, along with children Bill, Sue, and Gwen, at 1965 Preston Avenue, Los Angeles, 1941
This was the boom-and-bust lifestyle of Woody Guthrie in April 1941. He was the provider for three children and couldn’t provide. He was a singer of folk songs who couldn’t find his folks anymore. He was a poet deeply connected to the land he stood on who couldn’t find any land of his own.
It was because of the broken pipe and the abandoned house that a May 1 follow-up letter airmailed to Guthrie from Portland, addressed to the Preston Avenue house, didn’t immediately find him.
The certified letter stated in formal language that Guthrie was being considered for a yearlong position with the Bonneville Power Administration, and asked that he fill out a series of paperwork to be further considered for the job.
Woody Guthrie with Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman, Mary Guthrie (foreground), and the Jennings family at Preston House, 1941
Goings had become even tougher for the Guthrie family. After decamping LA, they’d relocated to an old California gold-mining town named, oddly enough, Columbia. The room that Woody moved his young family into had no power, and he was scraping together money by cutting firewood in the mountains and hauling it into town in his Pontiac—a car less than a year old that was in serious threat of being repossessed. It must have been a sight: Guthrie—all of five foot eight, scrawny as a scarecrow, and having spent his life ducking manual labor—playing lumberjack in the mountains with a new sedan. Although Woody tried as always to put a positive spin on his life in the Sierra Nevadas—“I’d ruther raise my kids like a herd of young antelope out here in the fresh air” than in the low-rent district of New York City, he told a friend—lumberjacking from his Pontiac wasn’t going to cut it for long.
When the BPA letter finally reached the family in Columbia, it probably should have struck Woody Guthrie as, at best, hopeful—a step toward a job sometime down the line. After all, what he needed was work right then.
But Woody Guthrie never saw things the way other people did.
With mere confirmation that there still was a movie in the works along the Columbia River, the family was loaded into the car again—this time headed for Portland. And why not? Woody Guthrie didn’t have much else to lose.
“Hard Travelin’ ” Words and Music by Woody Guthrie. WGP/TRO – © 1959, 1963, 1972 (copyrights renewed) Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. & Ludlow Music, Inc., New York, NY (administered by Ludlow Music, Inc.)
