History from the Forest by History from the Forest

Vol . 2 I s s u e No . 2 Au g u s t 2 0 1 4

Uni v e r s i t yofS ou t hWa l e sS t u de ntHi s t or yJ ou r na l

Edi t e db yCe r i Ca r t e r , S i a nDr e w, Ma r i aDy k e s , S e a nLoc k , Da r r e nMa c e y , Chr i sMa t t he ws&S a ma nt haRi c k a r ds

Editorial Team Lead Editors Ceri Carter Maria Dykes Sean Lock Darren Macey Chris Matthews Samantha Rickards Co-Editors Sian Drew Cover by Kris Carter

Contents Editorial Samantha Rickards

‘Then Came We Singing’: Gwyn Thomas’s world of music. Gareth Williams

‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’, Woody Guthrie’s ‘Okie’ history of the inter war years in America, a ‘Hard Hitting Song[s] for Hard Hit People’. Darren Macey

Forrest Gump (1994): A champion of the counterculture movement? Ceri Carter

Changing Faces: How film and television representations of Queen Elizabeth I mirrored contemporary issues of the late twentieth century. Chris Matthews

The Monroe doctrine: A Declaration of Western Hemispheric containment and a pretext to US Imperialism. Sean Lock

Review: Will Kaufman’s Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’ Performed on 6 March 2014 at the University of South Wales, Trefforest. Chris Matthews, Sean Lock & Darren Macey

Editorial Croeso and welcome to our latest edition of History from the Forest! For this issue, we’ve had a fantastic response from staff as well as students of the University of South Wales, and would very much like to thank all involved in both contributing and editing for their efforts. Our first article is a guest submission from one of the stalwarts of historical study concerning the collective cultural practices and beliefs in Wales and England since 1850, Professor Gareth Williams. Following the completion of his tenure between 2001 and 2012 lecturing in Welsh History at the University of South Wales (then University of Glamorgan), Professor Williams continues to be a major influence on current Welsh historical study. In this instance, his highly interesting piece is on the raconteur Gwyn Thomas discussing the Welsh novelist, playwright, and broadcaster’s numerous works. Continuing on a musical note, our second piece is by undergraduate Darren Macey, who investigates the social commentary within the music of radical American musician and protest singer Woody Guthrie. Macey ponders whether Guthrie’s music, influenced heavily by his experiences in the Great Depression and Dust Bowl of 1930s America is a legitimate reflection of the historical experience of the Dust Bowl migrants. From American music we progress on to American film, as postgraduate student Ceri Carter tackles the 1994 film Forrest Gump, and its political themes in order to discern the ‘real’ political messages of the film from the historical backdrop. Sticking with a film theme, undergraduate Chris Matthews takes us back across the pond, with an exploration of how portrayals of Elizabeth I in contemporary works can reflect social issues of the twentieth century. Returning to the Americas, this time in terms of the nineteenth century, undergraduate Sean Lock examines the intricacies of the Monroe Doctrine, and its use as a declaration of containment as well as a forewarning of later American imperialism and expansion. Finally, we have a collaborative review from Matthews, Lock and Macey on Woody Guthrie: Hard Times and Hard Travelin’ the ‘live documentary’ presented by Professor Will Kaufman (University of Central Lancashire) at the USW Trefforest Campus on 6 March 2014. Each section of the review takes a different look at the event from varying levels of background knowledge on Kaufman, Guthrie and American history in general, giving a very personal and unique outlook on the experience. Thank you for your continued support, we hope you enjoy the issue. Samantha Rickards Lead Editor

‘Then Came We Singing’: Gwyn Thomas’s world of music By Gareth Williams Gwyn Thomas (1913-1981), novelist, playwright, broadcaster and raconteur, is widely regarded as being among the finest writers Wales has produced. Born in Cymmer, Porth, at the confluence of the two Rhondda valleys three miles north of Pontypridd, he was renowned for his dazzling command of language and a colourful eloquence that was characterised by vivid verbal exaggeration and embellished by a torrential wit and rich dialogue. His work and early life, however, were both significantly inflected by a non-verbal mode of communication: music. The soundtracks to many of his novels and plays are of vocal solo and choral performances, of people listening to records and of singing, whether around the piano, in the open air, in concerts, clubs or, especially, in chapels. All Things Betray Thee (1949), a novel about the Merthyr rising of 1831 whose central character is a wandering harpist, throbs to the promise of ‘a new enormous music’. Now Lead Us Home (1952) is about the staging of the operas La Traviata and La Bohème. His radio plays ‘Gazooka’ and ‘The Orpheans’ (both 1952) are based entirely on music.1 His ‘Meadow Prospect Singers’ first appear in The Alone to the Alone (1947); Loud Organs (1962) is a musical, and hymns and songs accompany Jackie the Jumper (1963) and Sap (1974). His published lecture, The Subsidence Factor (1979), is punctuated by hilarious accounts, affectionately recalled, of musical incidents from his Rhondda upbringing, and of singing above all. In this essay I will confine myself to the many selected entrances to his musical world that are to be found in his short stories and autobiographical pieces. ‘The valley where I was born’ said Gwyn Thomas in a BBC radio talk on St David’s Day 1975, ‘was one vast choral impulse. If you had anything more than a fag end of a voice and there happened to be room for one more on the stage you were just whipped in to the nearest choral unit’.2 ‘To be born out of sight of trees, hills, fields - that would be calamity enough’, he wrote elsewhere. ‘But a childhood without music would be the ultimate defeat. Music is the great signal that there are others with us on the march, the most dramatic union in man’s long duel with ‘Gazooka’ was developed from an earlier short story, ‘Then Came We Singing’, first published in Coal, 1951. See Michael Parnell, Laughter from the Dark: A Life of Gwyn Thomas (London: J. Murray, 1988), pp.129, 228. 2 ‘Out of the Air - Llef’, The Listener, 13 March 1975, p.338. ‘[The hymn] ‘Llef’ is one of the great monuments to the Celts’ greatest hobby, which is melancholy.’ 1

loneliness. For myself,’ he went on, ‘I was lucky. My first ten years were a loud joyful song. The sides of life shook with every vocal impulse known to man.’3 Gwyn’s mother died when he was a child. She had a contralto voice, he said, that ‘wrapped the world in velvet’. His father, ‘a noisy distracted man with a fine edge to his manias’, was an underground ostler with no love of mining nor luck with horses but with ideas of his own of an often nationalistic hue. He sang in a male voice choir and had a collection of gramophone records, nearly all of tenors, especially Caruso. He had bought a player out of the compensation he got for a leg smashed at work and this kept the Thomas household in 196 Cymmer High Street full of good sound. One night the mechanism broke and Gwyn found him sitting tearfully beside the records he had smashed in his frustration, now scattered around him ‘in a circle of brilliant blackness’.4 As Gwyn remembered it, ‘our house was a cocoon of music’.5 The family nearly all sang well, and Emlyn on piano and Dilwyn on cello were instrumentalists too. Following the early death of their mother it was the much loved sister Hannah or Nana who took over the care of the family. The Rhondda Leader in November 1920 reported that ‘Miss Nana Thomas, Cymmer, a lovely local contralto, sang solo at a concert by the Rhondda Cymric Orpheus Concert Party. There is a successful future for Miss Thomas, coming as she does from a very musical family.’ 6 Despite the offer of a scholarship to study singing in Cardiff, her domestic circumstances prevented her from taking it up. While in the 1920s Dilwyn became a member of the chorus at Covent Garden, Emlyn – eighteen years older than Gwyn – took the LRAM in singing and in 1925 a further course in voice culture at London’s Royal College of Music. He briefly made a living teaching piano and singing at home, where there was a piano in the front room. Gwyn tersely notes: A brother of mine graduated in music after the First World War with qualifications in piano and voice production. The times were against him, and after a short while his career as local professor of music ended and he switched to become a sanitary inspector. From Sibelius to sewage in ten uneasy lessons and not unhappy to get there.7 Gwyn remembered his brothers having a close harmony session in the kitchen during which he was told to pipe down because his treble was too piercing. By his own admission one of the ‘A Joyful Noise; growing up with music’, Holiday (USA), Dec. 1964, p.15. Gwyn Thomas, ‘Where my dark lover lies’, Selected Short Stories [SSS] (Bridgend: Seren, 1984), p.52. First published in Gazooka and other stories, (1957), p.137. 5 ‘Out of the air’, p.338. 6 Rhondda Leader, 4 November 1920. 7 Gwyn Thomas, ‘The Face of our Jokes’, Meadow Prospect Revisited [MPR], (Bridgend: Seren, 1984), p.1. 3 4

reasons he was so unhappy at Oxford was that ‘I met no one who could sing in tune, and the lack of close harmony hurt like hunger’.8 As to Gwyn’s own vocal development, he gives us various accounts. He was well known locally as a boy alto for his temperance songs and recitations. ‘The songs I sang had a uniform morbidity and as I survey the titles and lyrics now I realise that my musical advisers must have been after gaiety with a gun. By the time I was nine I had developed an authoritative bellow that could stop flippancy dead in its tracks.’9 He first sang publicly standing on a box of lemonade bottles in the local chip shop, warbling songs of tender yearning and such sweetness he was accused more than once of ‘taking the tang off the vinegar.’ He also had a batch of Sankey and Moody ballads like ‘Have courage, my boy, to say no’, that, he reckoned, would have moved a mule to remorse.10 In Smedley’s fish and chip shop on Cymmer Hill you got ‘the smallest pennyworth in the history of the potato’. When Smedley first heard Otello’s death cry ‘Niun mi tema’ in the final act of the Verdi opera, he was so overcome he dropped a bag of chips on the floor and had to turn customers away as he stood over the bubbling pan in tears. As this was a clear breach of the Pure Food Regulations he was told by the Sanitary Inspector - surely not Emlyn, who would have been more sympathetic – ‘either to toughen his fibres or cry away from the chips’.11 Although Gwyn reckoned he couldn’t sing at all once his voice had broken (when he was about fourteen he went bathing in the river and when he came out ‘my voice was broken as if somebody had been after the thing with a hammer’) he later became a good baritone, ‘strong on the more violent recitatives from oratorio’ and claiming he owed his breath control to years of deep inhaling as a boy smoker.12 Of all the sounds of that era, he loved none more than the swelling, soaring climaxes of the male voice parties, comprising anything up to a 100 choristers, mainly miners, who seemed to be seeking in their leisure an art form as tough and dramatic as the job they did. In Gwyn’s view they found it. To their dedication to it, he said, they brought ‘a unique earnestness and the lung power of bison’.13 ‘The valley’s classic sound,’ he wrote in an anniversary brochure for the Treorchy Male Choir:

Gwyn Thomas, ‘Brotherly Love’, MPR, p.33; Thomas, Gwyn Thomas, A Few Selected Exits (Bridgend: Seren, 1985), p.50. 9 ‘A Joyful Noise’, p.15. 10 Gwyn Thomas, A Welsh Eye, (London: Hutchinson, 1974), p.15. 11 Thomas, ‘So they came and took him away’, MPR, pp.101-3. 12 Thomas, ‘And a spoonful of grief to taste’, SSS, p.7. First published in Where Did I Put My Pity? (London: Progress Publishing Company, 1946) p.171. 13 ‘A Joyful Noise’, p.15. 8

The great distillation of the strength and comradeship of our people, has been the male voice choir. The voices of men raised in full choral cry is what a stranger would take away as the clearest revelation of our talent and character. 14 As a boy he had been a bearer to a local men’s party, with the job of carrying the conductor’s sheet music and baton to and from rehearsals, and ‘not even the Dalai Lama could have given me a keener sense of sainthood’.15 Decades later he could still see those gleaming eyes and slanting mouths do battle with some of the loud and passionate items they favoured. In ‘Martyrs of the Arena’ they sang Christian defiance at the approaching lions and put Nero in his place. Another rouser was ‘Crossing the Plain’ which relates the opening of the American West. The libretto, the choristers and Gwyn and his chums were firmly pro-Indian, ‘Who in his wigwam strings his bow | His quiver filling forth to go | To hunt white men by day and night | To take their scalps is his delight’. For the Little Bighorn was as vivid as Dinas Mountain ‘and after each rehearsal fraternal greetings and gifts of Welsh arrowheads went from our lodge to the embattled Indian chiefs’.16 After all, ‘Crossing the Plain’ exercised a natural appeal to those for whom the opening of the bus routes over the ridge from Porth to Tonypandy or Penrhys to the Rhondda Fach had an impact ‘as dramatic as the opening of the Union Pacific but with less trouble from Indians’.17 Meadow Prospect was ‘a place of devoted and zealous vocalists’. 18 The Meadow Prospect Orpheans, we can surmise, were modelled on a local Cymmer party – perhaps the one Gwyn’s father belonged to - called the Sons of Glamorgan who specialised in pieces of vocal artillery like ‘The Destruction of Gaza’ and ‘The Warsong of the Saracens’, items that ‘headlined menace and ruin and reconciled thousands to the Social Insurance’.19 The Orpheans sometimes appear as the Meadow Prospect Glee Party, at other times as the YMCA Glee group or Meadow Prospect Melodists or Singers. However badged, they were a dogmatic lot of voters, who would not be weaned from the solfa and harried back to the old notation, despite the best attempts of their conductor, that lover of the head voice Matthew Sewell the sotto voce.

Gwyn Thomas, Excelsior: The Voice of the Treorchy Male Choir (Treorchy, 1977), p.1. Ibid. 16 Thomas, ‘A Joyful Noise’, p.15. 17 Gwyn Thomas, Foreword to Old Rhondda in Photographs (Barry: S. Williams, 1974), p.viii. 18 Thomas, A Few Selected Exits, p.7. 19 Gwyn Thomas in Fountains of Praise: University College Cardiff, 1883-1983, ed. by Gwyn Jones and Michael Quinn, (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1983), p.32. 14 15

Between them, the Orpheans and the Meadow Prospect Jubilee Band included most of those elements with English immigrant surnames and Welsh or biblical Christian names that Gwyn deploys to such comic effect: not just Bleddyn Bibey the Blast the euphonium player, or the Powderhall sprinter Cynlais Coleman the Comet, but among many others Idloes Osgood, Teilo Dew (Dew the Doom, the local visionary), Tudwal Dooley, Offa Cule, Pwyll Pertwee, Arfon Caxton, Seithenyn Hamer, Salathiel Cull (Cull the Lull, on account of his quietist views), Deiniol Dawes, Goronwy Gadd, Gwydion Pooley and principal tenor Idwal Bunney. It is the tenors who stand out. In this matter even juvenile delinquents were discriminating: Chaplin Everest was a petty thief who once returned a gramophone record he had stolen because of a scratch on one side and a ruse by the tenor to dodge a top note on the other. Omri Hemlock was a failed applicant to the second tenor section of the Orpheans. Moelwyn Cox, another tenor, proposed to the Debating Club a trip to Glyndebourne to hear an opera but was turned down on the grounds that ‘many of the most thoughtful members had been made tone deaf and averse to opera by the fall of heavy concepts inside the skull’, and also that Glyndebourne did not favour the charabanc trade. So instead they went as usual down long lanes to see a cromlech or a mansion where Henry Morgan the pirate once lived - ‘one of the few Welshmen to fulfil himself without ripping up a coal seam or conducting a choir’.20 Singing features so prominently in Gwyn Thomas’s soundscape because it was one of the defining characteristics of Cymmer itself. As he grew up he was surrounded by more choirs than you could wave a baton at – Porth and Cymmer Choral, Porth Harmonic, just over the hill Penygraig Philharmonic, Penygraig Music Lovers and Tonypandy and District Harmonic, to go no further than Mid Rhondda. Cymmer Musical Society had given the first Rhondda performance of Elgar’s King Olaf in 1910. In October that year the Porth and Cymmer Amateur Dramatic Society did G.F.Root’s ‘operatic cantata’ The Haymakers just a few weeks before some serious haymaking took place when striking miners rioted in neighbouring Tonypandy. And then there were the chapel choirs. Salem Chapel, Porth, at the bottom of the hill did two days of oratorio at Christmas 1913. In the previous decade they had performed Messiah twice, Haydn’s Creation twice, Mendelssohn’s Hymn of Praise, Rossini’s Stabat Mater, Spohr’s Last Judgment, Beethoven’s Mount of Olives, Joseph Parry’s Saul of Tarsus (not out of place in this company), Mozart’s Requiem and Hiawatha’s Departure by Coleridge Taylor. The war hardly interrupted the flow - Verdi’s Requiem in 1916, a mixed programme in 1917, the Spohr and the Rossini in 1918. Since for big occasions chapel choral societies would pull in members from outside, it is likely 20 Thomas, ‘O Brother Man’, SSS, p.78 (Gazooka, p.36); ‘Land! Land!’, SSS p.97. first published in Ring Delirium 123 (1960), p. 104.

that the more experienced singers of the Thomas family like Emlyn and Nana would have sung in them. Gwyn himself might as a twelve year-old schoolboy have attended at Christmas 1925 Porth Harmonic’s rendition of The Creation with Evan Parker of Cymmer leading the string orchestra. That year too the Porth and District Choral Society did the dramatic cantata The Moabitess, the sort of work that features often in his short stories. Or he might have heard the Mount of Olives and Schubert’s Song of Miriam which were on at the English ‘Congs’ at the same time. It is almost as if this vocal tsunami of choruses, anthems, cantatas, operas and oratorios was a tidal recognition that normal speech was inadequate for the telling of what had happened to the Rhondda. To the writer Rhys Davies of Clydach Vale, ‘our chapels were too confined for these mighty harmonies, ears too miniature for such impassioned shatterings’; he was ‘stifled’ by them.21 Not so Gwyn Thomas, who found them exhilarating. But then, he came from Cymmer. Cymmer’s musical history went back to the mid-nineteenth century. Choral groups from Cymmer participated regularly in the festivals of the Gwent and Glamorgan Temperance Choral Union: two choirs from Cymmer took part in the 1862 festival, another from Porth. Gwyn had no time for temperance but he was brought up on this choral lore in which the central player was his family’s own chapel, Capel y Cymer. It was one of several he knew well. ‘The valley was one continuous chapel. Fine optimistic Sundays were one massive harp of exultation’. From his house, he said, he was within shouting distance of seven chapels and he served at odd times as chorister in every one of them to qualify for the annual treat to Barry Island the seaside. 22 Little wonder that, ‘theologically, as a child I had a tangled time of it’.23 Capel y Cymer belonged to the Welsh Independents, the Annibynwyr, ‘a sect with a loose ideological framework and a kind of bland and easy-going tolerance that would have won a nod of agreement from Montaigne’. It had been established in 1743. Like the Baptist Chapel at Aberfan in 1966, it was put to exceptional and macabre use after the Cymmer pit explosion of 1856 which killed 114 men and boys – an event which, curiously perhaps, Gwyn never refers to, though it was one of the Rhondda’s biggest disasters and still within the memory of many local residents in 1913. The Rhondda’s first gymanfa ganu had been held in Capel y Cymer in 1869. Its tradition of richly harmonised congregational singing which Gwyn so loved had been honed to a fine edge by the appearance there as guest conductors of some of the leading musicians of late 19th century Wales like Eos Morlais, Tanymarian, and Dr Joseph Parry himself. The rapidly Gareth Williams, Valleys of Song: Music and Society in Wales 1840-1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), chap.6. 22 Thomas, Old Rhondda in Photographs, p.ix. 23 Thomas, A Welsh Eye, p.13. 21

growing population in the 1870s of Cymmer, Porth and Glyn-fach led to the building of a new chapel opposite the old one in 1878. In 1906 a split led 87 members, headed by the colliery manager who had challenged the authority of the minister, to form a new chapel, Caersalem Newydd (New Jerusalem), built in 1908 just a few doors down from number 196, but it was to Capel y Cymer that the Thomas family adhered. Continually extended, it seated 1050 by the beginning of the century and had over a thousand members if we include the 650 in the Sunday School. During the immediate post-war years Capel y Cymer continued to flourish, though Gwyn felt himself increasingly alienated from it. By 1939 however when he finally left home for good, the thousand members of 1900 were down to 187, encapsulating the tandem decline of both Rhondda coal production and its chapels.24 But between 1880 and 1914 the religious, social and musical activity of Capel y Cymer had been striking. It had embodied the nonconformist orthodoxy of the time, Liberal in politics and conciliatory in industrial relations; perhaps its harmonised singing might bring about a wider harmony as those relations became increasingly strained by the social consequences of an unbridled capitalism from 1900. The codwr canu – the precentor - who led the Sunday singing at Capel y Cymer was one of the iconic figures of Rhondda choralism. Taliesin Hopkins was employed at Insole’s Cymmer collieries and led the Porth and Cymmer Choral Society and the Cymmer Male Voice Party to many eisteddfod successes before his death in 1906. Only for musical events was the chapel filled to capacity. Chief among these was the gymanfa ganu, the annual inter-chapel festival of robust congregational singing that was Tal Hopkins’ legacy and to which the young Gwyn Thomas was early exposed, searing him for life, not least because in it people took on new persona - like Perry the grocer, ‘a loud tenor with a way of keeping a jump ahead of the hymn they were currently squeezing the juice out of, leaping onto the next verse like a fearless rider on some Pony Express of piety’.25 Those festivals were the greatest, most dramatic acts of our lives. In them, with voices only, we draped life in the most vivid colours. If we hit a series of harmonies that sprang up from the entrails and pounded the heart, we were caught up by an almost demented enthusiasm. We stood on that hymn as if it were the last raft on the last ocean, and wrung it dry of the last drop of compassion or joy. Each time it ended, to a massive rattle of deacons’ teeth, some impassioned chorister would cry ‘Cytgan eto’ – the chorus again and off we’d go loping like nonconformist wolves after a quarry that got closer with Mihangel ap Rhys, Eglwys Annibynnol y Cymer (Porth: D.J. Jones, 1938); E.D Lewis and I.G. Jones, ’Capel y Cymer’, Morgannwg, 25 (1981), pp.137-63. 25 Thomas, ‘The Appeal’, MPR, p.129. 24

every cadence. A chapel, with its deep gallery all around is a wonderful sounding box, and it is not strange that when we struck a really rich note on the great themes of pity, brotherhood, death and redemption we were so hard to stop. As the ageing silences fall into place around us’ he mused, ‘we sometimes wish we never had stopped.26 Even Rhys Davies recognised the force of choruses that ‘swung one off the earth’.27 The chapel was not solely the preserve of hymns and anthems. It also staged cantatas, which it was hoped ‘would purge the zone of lust, looting and class enmity’, and operettas, performed by child actors, that ‘swept across Meadow Prospect like hail’, to the discomfiture of some of the diaconate. When I was about 11 the nip of autumn was mitigated by the Band of Hope. We had been drafted into the chorus of a junior operetta of the ‘Merry Widow’ type that involved a lot of fondling, waltzing and bussing. Deacons would appear briefly at the door of the vestry and say it was nothing more than propaganda for a bland sensuality. We warmed to this tale of Viennese smooching, and as the melodies and words slipped into our bloodstream we could hear the laces of our moral stays go snapping.28 Once they had snapped there was room for full blown opera to step in. His interest, awakened by listening to his father’s record collection, was further stimulated by reports of, perhaps attendance at and even performance in, local productions. Gwyn fell in love with early and middle Verdi - he once played in Il Trovatore as a member of a Band of Hope junior operatic group - and claimed to find the ridiculous plots entirely plausible after being endlessly chivvied by humourless deacons in a language he claimed he didn’t understand. If Gwyn’s stories are wellpopulated by operatic tenors it is because there were probably more amateur opera singers in the Rhondda than anywhere else of comparable size. We can safely wager that the Thomas household frequently discussed the relative merits and achievements of those Rhondda soloists whose fame had reached far and wide. Todd Jones, Amy Evans, Bessie Jones, Ivor Foster, and Cymmer’s own Tudor Davies, principal tenor at Sadlers Wells and Carl Rosa in the 30s and 40s, were household names in the valley down to the Second World War and beyond. The choirs doubled as operatic societies, and there was no shortage of venues at which to perform. If further up the valley were the Theatre Royal, the Hippodrome an the Empire in ’Pandy, the Thomas, ‘A Joyful Noise’, p.15. Rhys Davies, Print of a Hare’s Foot (London, Heinemann, 1969), p.87. 28 Thomas, ‘A Paling Darkness’, MPR, p.76. 28 Rhondda Leader 3 June 1920; Glamorgan County Times 5 June, 1920. 26 27

Lyceum in Pentre, and the Opera House in Treherbert, in Porth itself were the Lyceum, the Opera House which opened in 1900, and the Palace of Varieties where the Porth and Cymmer society once did Trovatore, Gwyn’s favourite opera. In the early twentieth century all these venues hosted travelling companies like D’Oyly Carte, Moody Manners and O’Mara’s, performing in the course of a week Faust, Daughter of the Regiment, La Traviata, Carmen, Rigoletto, Meyerbeer’s The Huguenots, and even, during a punishing Wagnerian Christmas in Tonypandy, Lohengrin and Tannhauser in 1913, the year Gwyn was born. And as he used to say, the following year was even worse. ***************** Towards the end of May 1920 Percy Curtis, a miner, was found in a drunken condition creating a disturbance in Cymmer High Street. Taken in, he had to be locked up because of his continuing rowdiness. He later explained to the magistrate, ‘When I got into the station I started singing, sir. I couldn’t help it. I was bound to’. Gwyn Thomas knew what he meant. [This paper began life at a break-out session entitled ‘A Few Selected Entrances: Gwyn Thomas at 100’, Rhys Davies Short Story conference, Swansea University, 14 September, 2013. I am grateful to Professor Daniel Williams for suggesting it, to former University of Glam graduate Gill Thomas of Treorchy Reference Library for help with the quotations, and to Professor Dai Smith for his comments. Dai and I were taught at school in Barry by Gwyn. The experience marked us for life] Gareth Williams taught Welsh History at the University of Glamorgan between 2001 and 2012.

‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues,’ Woody Guthrie’s ‘Okie’ history of the inter war years in America, a ‘Hard Hitting Song[s] for Hard Hit People’.1 By Darren Macey The financial and ecological cost of American domestic policy in the inter-war years is well documented, this essay itself deploys figures from William E. Leuchtenburg’s The perils of Prosperity which is just one of a host of excellent texts.2 Leuchtenburg’s figures are astonishing, and can be accompanied by equally astonishing statistics illustrating the staggering scale of The Great Plough Up of the American Plains in the 1920s or the ecological effects of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.3 However, the human condition is such that it is possible for these vast figures to lose their meaning, their sheer scale is blinding, and there is an inherent danger of separating oneself from the true ‘cost’ to the individual in human terms. The catastrophic effects of these events would be borne by the unfortunate inhabitants of the American Plains, hundreds of thousands of whom would be transformed into ‘Okies’ or ‘Arkies’, economic migrants, outsiders in their own country. As a counterbalance to the dangers of this statistical ‘snow blindness’ an insight into their alternative history is useful. Their narrative is in more unconventional or unusual sources across a myriad of mediums including iconic cultural watermarks such as Dorothy Lange’s haunting picture of the ‘Migrant Madonna’ or John Steinbeck’s classic novel The Grapes of Wrath. Woody Guthrie’s music should also take its rightful place among this pantheon. Guthrie lifts the effects of the tens of thousands of foreclosures and the millions of tonnes of top soil lost to erosion off the balance sheets and pages of textbooks, it offers an insight into the ‘lived’ historical experience of the Dust Bowl migrants. This essay is an

The title of Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger 1967 publication giving an anthology of American popular and protest songs, Alan Lomax, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (eds.), Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People (New York: Oak Publications, 1967). 2 William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity 1914-1932 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp.246-247. 3 Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in The 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004), pp.9197.

examination of Guthrie’s songs particularly ‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’ as an insight into his social commentary.4 Guthrie was born in Okemah in the heart of the American Mid-West prophetically for a future doyen of the left on Bastille Day in 1912. He would become the hero or perhaps more accurately the anti-hero of the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s. The self-styled Dust Bowl balladeer, Guthrie was one of their own, a friend and a conduit for their hopes and aspirations. Guthrie’s voice was one from the dispossessed; it offers an insight into the impact in human terms of the ecological and economic disasters that enveloped America during the 1930s.5 His music puts the events into a contemporary human context, and used in conjunction with the more ‘official’ accounts of the period hints at a more three dimensional interpretation. Guthrie’s lyrics give us an insight into the subjective human experience of the Dust Bowlers and bridge the gap between the spheres of social and economic history. As John Tosh describes in his examination of oral traditions, they can ‘be a means of teaching the values and beliefs which are integral to [a] culture’.6 Oral traditions and contemporary music can provide voices for the desperate and defeated excluded from the ‘official’ accounts of history.7 Guthrie’s music represents an oral history of the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s. Guthrie’s music is part of a long line of American radical protest singers that includes such luminaries as Joe Hill, Paul Robeson, Pete Segar, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Bruce Springsteen. Guthrie used his songs as a means of clandestinely promoting a brand of homespun socialism, which often struck a chord with sections of the migrants. There's several ways of saying what's on your mind. And in states and counties where it ain't too healthy to talk too loud, speak your mind, or even vote like you want to, folks have found other ways of getting the word around.8 ‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’ is typical of Guthrie’s style, a hybrid of the lyrical traditions in the vein of the radical ironic humour of the Wobblies Little Red Songbook and the accessible musicality of In the tradition of the Little Red Song Book Guthrie adapted and amended the lyrics of his songs frequently, the version used in compiling this essay relates to; ‘Talking Dustbowl Blues: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Talking_Dust_Bowl_Blues.htm> [accessed 14 January 2014]. 5 Guthrie felt he gave a voice to the dispossessed, Bill Nowlin, Woody Guthrie - American Radical Patriot (Nashville: Rounder Books; 1 edition 2013), p.10. 6 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (New York: Longman, 1984), p.184. 7 For an introduction into the theories surrounding the mobilization of cultural traditions and formulation of new collective identities through the music of activism, see Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 8 Ronald D. Cohen, Woody Guthrie: Writing America's Songs (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), p.73. 4

the ‘Negro’ blues form, the talking blues. As Guthrie’s biographer Joe Klein describes it, Guthrie’s style was simple but effective, ‘at the end of each four-line verse, there was a spoken tag that Woody drawled out, often to ironic effect’.9 By challenging the concepts of both the excesses of the roaring twenties and the collective ‘New Deal’ stoicism in combating the depression of the thirties, Woody Guthrie’s music offers a different historical viewpoint. While studying Guthrie’s music is far less tangible than the traditional ‘top down’ Rankean sources, of of statesmen and statistics, Guthrie’s music and lyrics give us a fleeting glimmer of a different, more transient history from below, a history from the disenfranchised ‘Okies’. The narrative of American history is traditionally one written by and extolling Anglo-Saxon virtues, rooted in triumphant pioneering waves of political, religious, social and economic migrants from the Old World.10 However, all of these ‘victories’ have come at a cost, paid for by those ‘defeated’ who have often been singled out purely by ethnicity. It is more difficult to document their journeys, the journeys of those defeated made not through choice or aspiration but rather out of desperation or subjugation.11 It is the ‘other’ voices that America has been more reluctant to hear, the voices from the slave ships, the reservation, Great Migration or the sundown town.12 Young black poet Langston Hughes perhaps captures this in his poem ‘Let America be America’ written at the height of the Great Depression in 1935; …I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Nergo bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seekAnd finding only the same old stupid plan. Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak…. O, let America be America againThe land that never has been yetJoe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life, (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p.85. Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp.4-7. 11 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture v. 1 (London: Verso Books: New edition, 1996), pp 3-6. 12 The term Great Migration refers to the migration African Americans from the rural southern and former Confederate states to the urban areas of the North East, Mid-West and West of America during the twentieth century. Sundown town refers to the practice of only allowing African Americans in ‘white areas’ during daylight hours. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (London: Penguin Books, 2008); David Lavender, Let Me Be Free: The Nez Perce Tragedy (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the bitter waters: the hidden history of racial cleansing in America (New York: Perseus Books, 2007), pp. 1-13. 9

10Bernard

And yet must be- the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine- the poor man’s the Indian’s, Negro’s Me.13 The Dust Bowl migrants form part of this alternate history of America, a history from the perspective of the defeated peoples. These ‘Okies’ were not defeated in a war of conquest or enslaved because of race; they found themselves transformed into outsiders by the ‘black days’ of the Great Depression and the almost complete collapse of the American ecological and economic systems during the inter-war years.14 Theirs is not a history of a succession of facts marching straight to a settled outcome; voices such as Langston and Guthrie’s are a reflection of a cultural and collective memory that reveals not one moment caught in time, but rather the flow of history. Guthrie’s opening lines tap into just such a collective memory and allude to the perceived perfection of the American Dream, Back in Nineteen Twenty-Seven, I had a little farm and I called that heaven. Well, the prices up and the rain come down, And I hauled my crops all into town – I got the money, bought clothes and groceries, Fed the kids, and raised a family.15 Guthrie portrays the relative affluence of America in the twenties, conjuring up iconic American images of family, independence and success, describing a combination of high prices and plentiful rainfall providing a comfortable lifestyle. While Guthrie’s lyrics support the popular perception of the twenties as a decade of prosperity, there is no hint of the urban excesses, conversely he describes the ‘wholesome’ American values of the tenant farmers. Guthrie’s material vision of the American Dream echoes that of President Herbert Hoover who famously promised the voting public in his election campaign of 1928 ‘a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage’.16 However, just as with any other historical period there was not one uniform ‘American’ experience, income levels and prosperity varied widely across the separations of Langston Hughes, ‘Let America be America’, cited in Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People's History (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), p.134. 14 ‘Black Tuesday’ and ‘Black’ Sunday, eludes to the Wall Street Crash on Tuesday October 29th 1929 and the ‘worst’ storm of the dust bowl era on Sunday 14th April 1935, Timothy Egan, The long Darkness, Surviving the Great American Dust Bowl (Stroud: Tempus, 2006), pp. 12-15. 15 ‘Talking Dustbowl Blues: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Talking_Dust_Bowl_Blues.htm> [accessed 14 January 2014]. 16 Wilber W. Caldwell, Cynicism and the Evolution of the American Dream (Washington DC: Potomac Books Inc., 2006), p.102. 13

gender, class, ethnicity and geography. There was a separation of experience in the rural and urban areas with farming lagging behind in terms of prosperity, however as the decade ended it would become clear that as a society America both financially and ecologically existed beyond its relative means.17 An unfettered laissez-faire approach to the economy led to the excesses of unchecked and unregulated raw capitalism. In New York when the money ran out, they borrowed more, just as on the plains when the wheat prices went down they planted more. This would translate to an almost ceaseless and ultimately unsustainable level of expansion, which would finally lead to the over-heating of an already creaking American economy. The lack of regulation in banking, the stock market and agriculture would come back to haunt America as it spiralled towards catastrophe. While the Wall Street Crash itself caused relatively little direct disruption to the farming communities, the financial storm that followed the banking collapses would have far more effect. International protectionism and the resultant imposition of trade barriers on American produce witnessed a decimation of traditional export markets. These restrictions would be compounded by the slashing of domestic demand following the stock market collapse in 1929 and the resultant wide spread unemployment. Consequently, wheat prices would plummet from $1.05 in 1929 to 39 cents in 1932, the net result was a reduction in gross farm income from nearly $12 billion to a paltry $5 billion.18 Leuchtenburg points to the lack of regulation in banking as one of the main causes of the depression, a weak banking structure would see over nine million savings accounts wiped out and banks becoming far more willing to foreclose in an effort to recoup losses.19 The downturn in the farming economy and increasing mechanisation of the farming process would also compound to the devastation suffered by the poor tenant farmers of the plains. This combination would leave little choice for hundreds of thousands of largely tenant farmers than to migrate west, abandoning their homes in the hope of employment in California. As Guthrie describes these would, however, not be the only disasters faced by the tenant farmers. Rain quit and the wind got high, And the black ol' dust storm filled the sky. And I swapped my farm for a Ford machine. And I poured it full of this gasoline 17David

M. Kennedy, ‘Revisiting Lewis Allen’s Only Yesterday’ in American Retrospectives: Historians on Historians, ed. by Stanley I. Kutler, et al (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp.74-84 (p.79). 18Kennedy, ‘Revisiting’, in American Retrospectives, ed. by Kutler, et al, pp.74-84. 19Leuchtenburg, The perils of Prosperity, pp.246-247.

And I stared. Rockin and a-rollin. Over the mountains, Out to the old peach bowl.20 Guthrie’s lyrics describe the beginning of the ecological disaster and the downturn in the economy. He gives a vivid representation of the arid winds of the Dust Bowl blowing away both tenants and soil alike. The black winds he describes would carry South Westerners by their tens of thousands from the plains of Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Missouri over the vast spaces of America to a ‘promised land’ in the far west. 21 The ‘Ford’ travels across both the space of America and the time of the depression. Guthrie uses this as a metaphor to explain the breakdown in the mechanics of the American economy comparing it to the effect of the depression on the American psyche, which was as Fredrick Lewis Allen described it a ‘sudden and brutal shattering of hope’.22 I's a-goin' pretty fast, there wasn't even stoppin', A-bouncin' up and down, like popcorn poppin' -Had a breakdown, sort of a nervous bustdown of some kind, There was a feller there, a mechanic feller, Said it was en-gine trouble.23 The Republican administration of President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) reaction in the early years of the depression was shaped by the philosophy of ‘rugged individualism’. Hoover perhaps a little harshly castigated as a ‘do nothing’ President disapproved of the bankers deflationary ideas; he nevertheless reacted to the crisis with an inadequate level of direct intervention.24 Hoover in lacking the boldness to reflate the economy and following his preference for limited government action and failed to save the country by restoring confidence.25 Guthrie alludes to this and Roosevelt’s actions as a ‘mechanic feller’. In a rejection of these ‘traditional’ values, America turned to the ‘Big Government’ interventionism of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Guthrie has the benefit of hindsight, writing in 1937 five years into the New Deal policies and at a time when

20 The ‘old peach bowl’ is a description of California. ‘Talking Dustbowl Blues: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Talking_Dust_Bowl_Blues.htm> [accessed 14 January 2014]. 21 James N. Gregory, American Exodus; The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p.xiv. 22 Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s, (A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook) <http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500831h.html#c14> [accessed 22 January 2014]. 23 ‘Talking Dustbowl Blues: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Talking_Dust_Bowl_Blues.htm> [accessed 14 January 2014]. 24 Leuchtenburg, The perils of Prosperity, pp.250-256. 25 Ibid.

many saw governmental action as the way to help guide the country out of economic straits echoes this.26 The seminal work during the period illustrating this evolution an economic thinking from laissez-faire was published in 1936. John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, argued for greater government regulation.27 Keynes vision was one of a reformation of capitalism that would rescue it from both socialism and from itself. He argued for a ‘somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment’ and the states taking ‘an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investment’.28 That Ford took off like a flying squirrel An' it flew halfway around the world -Scattered wives and childrens All over the side of that mountain. 29 Guthrie describes the impact of the depression and the pressure it puts on the family unit. Absent fathers, working mothers and the humiliation of unemployment brought to millions of male ‘bread winners’ all impacted on the traditional social norms. While Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in 1933 of the growing ‘clan spirit’, in other cases this sprit disintegrated.30 Sociological studies described the impact of blurred gender lines, how former breadwinners losing status and becoming ‘just another member of the family’ would often lead to family breakups.31 Guthrie’s own childhood was troubled, a microcosm of the social and economic character of the depression. His father amassed a fortune in the Oklahoma oil boom of the early twenties and lost it again when the oil ran out in 1928. 32 The resultant poverty, breakup of his family and his location within what would become the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma led Woody to as he put it ‘write a little song about it’.33 By 1937, Guthrie’s ‘little songs’ and socialist message was reaching a relatively large radio audience in Los Angeles, an area that had ‘absorbed over a third of the South-Western migrants between 1935 and 1940’, his music is one strand in the collective ties of the lost and

Nowlin, Woody Guthrie - American Radical Patriot, p.10. Caldwell, Cynicism and the Evolution of the American Dream, p.104. 28 Ibid 29 ‘Talking Dustbowl Blues: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Talking_Dust_Bowl_Blues.htm> [accessed 14 January 2014]. 30 Walter LaFeber, Richard Polenberg and Nancy Woloch, The American Century: A History of the United States since the 1890s (New York: M.E. Sharpe), p.189. 31 Ibid., p.190. 32 Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Urabana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p.8. 33 Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, p.9. 26

disenfranchised migrant peoples from across the Southern Western states.34 These ties gave them a collective new identity as ‘Okies’ or ‘Arkies’. Guthrie explained the shared nature of this migration in introducing the song to Alan Lomax; ‘It tells about several hundred thousand people, it just don’t tell about me. I wrote it just to tell about me but then I found out that it fits about several hundred thousand’.35 These ‘several hundred thousand’ would be transformed into ‘Okies’ an ‘ethnic’ group outside the conventions of white American society, part of America’s marginalised peoples, like the Indians, the Hispanic and African Americans, all on the fringes of society. H.L. Menckenone of the most influential and prolific journalists in America in the 1920s and 1930s maintained that the Okies were biologically inferior and should be bribed into sterilization; a view shared by many other Californians.36 Donald Worster describes instance of a sign in a movie theatre in the Central Valley of California that pronounced ‘Niggers and Okies Upstairs’, the Okies were not real people but ‘white trash’. 37 Timothy Egan also points to this transformation with gives examples of similar attitudes towards Okies and African Americans, leave by sundown signs in Texas for both African American and Okies, and Okie go home signs in the Central Valley. 38 These attitudes even permeated into a strong contingent of anti-migrant politicians, police and newspapers in California. Chief James E. Davis in February 1936 set up a ‘bum-blockade’ to refuse entry to ‘all paupers and persons likely to become public charges’ on the state borders including at some points over 800 miles from the city limits. 39 Reflecting popular support among many Californians and railing at a national outcry at the actions of California’s anti-migrant policies of Police, the LA Times even ran a headline stating ‘Let's Have More Outrages’. 40 Guthrie’s narrative concludes in the last lines of the song by conveying the impact on the migrants of these state sanctioned indignations. He uses the analogy of a roadside meal of ‘tater stew’ he offers a damming indictment of what he sees as the emasculation of the American democratic process. His is a description of the inability and unwillingness of both national and state politicians to act. The power of his description of the contents of the stew is illustrated in 34 Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997), p.170. 35 Woody Guthrie, in conversation with Alan Lomax, introduction to ‘Taking Dust Bowl Blues’ Bill Nowlin on Woody Guthrie: American Radical Patriot (Rounder Records 6191382, 2013). 36 Donald Worster, The Dust Bowl, The Southern Plains in The 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004), p.53. 37 Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns, The Dust Bowl, an Illustrated history (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2013), p.168. 38 Duncan and Burns, The Dust Bowl, p.169. 39 Gregory, American Exodus, p.80. 40 Leonard Leader, ‘When L.A. Blocked the Borders’, Los Angeles Times, 2 February 1986, <http://articles.latimes.com/1986-02-02/opinion/op-3604_1_los-angeles-times> [accessed 1 February 2014].

performance, as biographer Klein points out the key ironic enunciation of the word politicians becoming ‘pollli-TISH-uns’ conveys more frustration and outrage than a dozen pamphlets.41 We got out to the West Coast broke, So dad-gum hungry I thought I'd croak, An' I bummed up a spud or two, An' my wife fixed up a tater stew – We poured the kids full of it, Mighty thin stew, though, You could read a magazine right through it. Always have figured That if it'd been just a little bit thinner, Some of these here politicians Coulda seen through it.42 Historians including Charles J. Shindo have raised questions surrounding the creation of a ‘mythical’ status surrounding the Okies as a cultural grouping; he argues that Guthrie’s songs formed part of their ‘legends’ and served to underpin, create and perpetuate the ‘mythical’ nature of the of Okies.43 As he explains it, they ‘identified with the old songs he sang and enjoyed the words he made up, sometimes on the spot. His music became more than entertainment; it became a link to his people.44 Shindo maintains that Guthrie, Steinbeck, Lange and the other icons of the underground Okie culture were, rather than a reflection of migrant society actually the roots of their cultural identity.45 He suggests that they were a self-fulfilling prophecy, their experiences were not just a denominator, they were in fact cultural associations that helped fix the disparate migrants into a new grouping to both themselves and to a wider society.46 However, Shindo’s is perhaps a moot point, regardless of whether Guthrie and these iconic figures are reflective of a cultural construct or a symptom of a fissure in American society is perhaps in many respects immaterial. Guthrie, is a focal point, he represents a section of America in the 1930’s that had been failed by and would reject the cult of raw capitalism, for a decade they looked to a different future, one in which society would take care of the less fortunate. In

Klein, Woody Guthrie, p.85. ‘Talking Dustbowl Blues: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Talking_Dust_Bowl_Blues.htm> [accessed 14 January 2014]. 43 Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), pp. 218-222. 44 Ibid., p.171. 45 Ibid., p.3. 46 Ibid., p.3. 41 42

their struggle to survive during the 1930s and their journey across America in time, space and perception, they would be transformed in the national psyche. They would be changed from Americans into ‘Okies,’ a racially inferior ‘other’ people. This would lead to a contradiction in American culture, on one level rejected as shiftless and yet on another eulogised as poor farmers failed by the greed of the system. To many Californians they were a dangerous under class, yet they would also spawn working-class heroes such as Steinbeck’s characters Tom Joad, Preacher Casey and Guthrie himself who would inspire the next generation of protest. Hey, Woody Guthrie but I know that you know, All the things I’m saying’ an’ many times more. I’m a-singin’ you the song, But I a-can’t sing enough’ ‘Cause there’s not many men that done the things That you’ve done.47 Fashioned in Guthrie’s image Bob Dylan the ‘leader’ of the next wave of protest singers, pays homage to Guthrie and also hints at his value to historians. While, Guthrie can in no way be considered an objective observer (if such a thing exists) he presents a unique insight and gives a perspective of ‘living’ through their migration and transformation. Guthrie’s ‘history’ ‘Talking Dust Bowl Blues’ records the evolution in the collective memory of the migrants, from the opening image of a farmer and his ‘little farm [He] called heaven’ of the twenties to the ‘Mighty thin stew’ in California. Woody’s comment of ‘All you can write is what you see’ is reflected in his lyrics, as he describes the systemic bigotry, prejudices and victimisation that he was subjected to alongside his fellow Okies. By placing these actions into a contemporary human context, and used in conjunction with the more ‘official’ accounts of the period Guthrie’s songs can hint at a more three dimensional interpretation. His lyrics give us an insight into the subjective human experience of the Okies and as such help bridge the gap between the spheres of social and economic history. Guthrie’s music as a source also offers historians a rare opportunity, some comprehension of the ‘disposition’ of an oppressed people, as while frustration and anger often subside and outrage can fade from the written page, the tone and inflection in Guthrie’s voice in audio recordings remains. He offers us a different perspective, his is not just a window into the lives of the Okies, Guthrie’s music also holds a mirror to the establishments and public’s actions and reaction towards the migrants. Guthrie’s central premise echoing Langston’s poem and permeating throughout his music, is a question asked by disenfranchised groups throughout

47Bob

Dylan’s early song ‘Song to Woody’ as quoted in, Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life, p.425.

history. He asks this question perhaps most succinctly in the words of his most famous composition; ‘As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me?’48

Guthrie’s hand written comment on the bottom of the original draft of ‘God Blessed America’. Guthrie wrote this as a parody of Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" and would later become “This land is your land”, Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life, p.141. 48

Forrest Gump (1994): A champion of the counterculture movement?1 By Ceri Carter The film Forrest Gump (based on a novel by Winston Groom) hit our screens in 1994 and became a commercial success, though it received mix reviews by critics.2 The film swept the 67th Academy Awards with an impressive six wins out of thirteen nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor in a leading role. It is reasonable to assume that the audience reach of the film was both far and wide in terms of age range and geographic location. Forrest Gump is the story of a man with an IQ of seventy-five and his experiences in post-war Alabama. The film also follows the life of his childhood friend and romantic interest Jenny, who leads a more sordid and controversial life to Gump. Forrest plays a role in many of the landmark events throughout the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. The film’s central focus is on the sixties; that famous decade that is fondly remembered (or perhaps misremembered is the correct term) by people the world over, whether they lived through it or not. However, the film also takes a wider historical scope by Gump explaining that he was named after General Nathan Bedford Forrest, founding member of the Klu Klux Klan; this shoulders Gump with the racist history of America as well as the major events in the mid to late twentieth century. 3 The political ideals of the film are somewhat obscured by the films journey. Some argue that Gump is the politically correct figure that is there to appease liberal audiences; his ignorance and innocence gives the character a sense of unspoiled goodness, unsullied by the prejudices of the masses in America, he is able to see the good in everyone and is not blinded by racism that is so prevalent

Forrest Gump, dir. by Robert Zemeckis (Paramount Pictures, 1994). Karen Boyle, ‘New Man, Old Brutalisms? Reconstructing a Violent History in Forrest Gump’, Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies (December 2001) <http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=dec2001&id=280&section=article> [accessed 24 April 2012]. 3 Peter N. Chumo II, ‘You’ve Got to Put the Past Behind You Before You Can Move On: Forrest Gump and National Reconciliation’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 23.1 (1995), 2-7 (p.3). 1 2

in the South. 4 On the other hand the film could be seen as championing conservative values; Gump, the man who always does what he is ‘supposed’ to, leads a good life and ends the film contented, living in the house he grew up in with his son and his fortune. In short, encompassing the ‘American Dream’ of self-determination. Whereas Jenny, whom began the film as a victim of her sexually abusive father, is involved in the counterculture movement; free love, drugs and anti war demonstrations and dies of aids, penniless. This article will discuss the issues and events explored in the film to determine whether or not Forrest Gump is a champion of counterculture or conservative America. Forrest Gump deals with a minefield of political events throughout the mid to late twentieth century. The title character is born into a single parent family and from an early age he is disabled, forced to wear leg braces, and is found to have a low IQ. To enable him to go to school his mother sacrifices herself and virtue by sleeping with the principal; one of many sacrifices she makes to give Forrest a normal childhood and shelter him from discrimination. At the same time we follow the story of his childhood best friend and sweetheart, Jenny, whose life is already following a very different and deprived path due to the molestation and abuse at the hands of her drunken father. After graduating they go their separate ways, with Jenny wanting to get as far away from the town that hold so many horrific memories of a traumatic childhood. Here is where the story gets complicated and indeed sensational. Both Jenny and Forrest lead very different lives; Gump embarks on a college football path while Jenny attends a different (women’s) college, appearing less frequently. Whilst studying, Gump finds himself in the middle of a key point in the civil rights battle when troops are sent in to desegregate schools; out of a racist crowd, Gump emerges to come to the aid of a black girl who had dropped her book. In his childlike innocence, Gump seems not to understand why white people hate black people so much; to him there is no difference. Here the film highlights that racism is not natural to human existence but something that is learned through nurture; Gump never learned to hate black 4

Boyle, ‘New Man, Old Brutalisms?’

people therefore he does not. One could also argue that Gump is symbolic of the United States and its history; if a man with a name that has its roots in racism can rise above its racist past and accept all as human beings then America can do the same. 5 As we progress further into the film we see Gump graduate from college after ‘only five years of playing football’ and immediately is recruited into the army.6 There he becomes best friends with Bubba, a black American who is as ‘simple’ as Forrest. They form a bond that transcends their racial divide; brothers dependent on one another in the jungles of Vietnam.7 Gump’s integrationalist attitude is one that mirrors the liberal attitude towards race. However, the film can be construed as suggesting that you can only take this attitude towards race and racism if you are ignorant. Gump is perceived to be a morally good person and this is personified in his non-racist attitude; but it could be then said that the reason for his non-racist attitude due to his lack of comprehension of the world in which he lives. Matthew Giunti believes that we cannot judge Gump to be a morally good or brave person because he is unable to access the cost of his actions; picking up the school book of the black school girl was an act of instinctive kindness but not of moral courage. 8 If Gump were an ordinary citizen that was fully integrated into society, he would stand to lose social standing, but as he is already on the outside of society he loses nothing. Therefore, Gump performing this act of kindness and seemingly defiant anti-racism is not the same as someone who is fully aware of the social implications.9 This level of naivety allows the filmmakers the ability to deny any political assessment of the film.10

Chumo, ‘Forrest Gump and National Reconciliation’, p.3. Forrest Gump (1994) 7 Ibid., p.4. 8 Matthew Giunti, ‘Forrest Gump: Ignorance is bliss’, Christian Century, 113.17 (1996), 547-550. Available at <http://search.ebscohost.com.ergo.glam.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=9605216015&site =ehost-live> [Accessed 24 April 2012]. 9 Ibid. 10 Thomas B. Byers, ‘History Re-membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of the Counterculture’, Modern Fiction Studies, 42.2 (1996), 419-444 (p.421). 5 6

As Forrest leaves for Vietnam, we are once again invited to see how Jenny’s life progresses after college; he finds her singing in a bar, naked, only covered by her guitar. Jenny’s life has begun its downward spiral into a world of low morals. Ever the naïve hero, Gump takes a stand to ‘save’ her; covering her up and carrying her off stage. One might say that that is a mighty courageous thing to do in front of all those men leering after his ‘girlfriend’. However, one might take the different view in that Gump is oppressing her right over her own body; covering up the moral degradation that is stripping for men. It is hard to know what the film is trying to portray; it is more likely that the meaning of this particular scenario will differ depending on the viewers’ individual political and moral compass. In one sense some feminists might say that it is degrading to women to strip for men but the thought of a man saving you from such a situation also goes against another feminist view that women do not need men to save them. It could simply be that Gump, again not understanding the situation, sees that his dearest friend is being shouted and jeered at by a group of drunken louts and he does not like that. To Forrest, these drunken louts possibly represent Jenny’s father and devastation he caused Forrest’s dearest friend. The simplicity of Gump means that he is a man who will always do what he is ‘supposed’ to do. Dutifully he goes to Vietnam and follows orders to the letter. Everything he says or does is literal and he understands things literally.11 When Lieutenant Dan facetiously asks whether he and Bubba are twins, he looks at Bubba as if he had been asked a serious question and answers it honestly.12 His need, or instinct, to do what he what he is ‘supposed’ to do is epitomised by his rescuing a number of his fellow soldiers (one at a time) whilst looking for Bubba, who had disappeared when they were running for their lives. After Forrest finds his friend and carries him to ‘safety’, Bubba dies on the beach, a consequential sacrifice for Gump saving the other soldiers. It could be viewed that Bubba’s martyrdom is a symbol for forfeiting the lives of few to benefit the ‘greater good’. Doing what one is ‘supposed’ to do is a very conservative attitude to take. 11 12

Maurice Yacowar, ‘Forrest Gump: Rejecting Ideology’, Queen’s Quarterly, 101.3 (1994), 668-682 (p. 677). Chumo, ‘Forrest Gump and National Reconciliation’, p.3.

Men were supposed to go to Vietnam and fight ‘Charlie’; not dodge the draft and move to Canada, or join the counterculture movement.13 Gump is rewarded for going above and beyond ‘the call of duty’ with the Congressional Medal of Honour and a short-lived post-war career playing ping pong. On the other hand, Lieutenant Dan, whose family destiny is to die in the line of duty, is denied the chance to follow in his father’s footsteps as he is one of the soldiers that Bubba was sacrificed for, and as a result is forced to live with the ‘humiliation’ of becoming a paraplegic. A nod to the tragic irony of war, both Lieutenant Dan and Bubba had fulfilled their duties, but whereas Dan wanted to die on the battlefield and lived Bubba wanted to live but died; perhaps as a direct result of Gump saving the Lieutenant. This also highlights the tremendous loss suffered by the African American community who had a disproportionate amount of soldiers fighting a racist war on behalf of a country whose prevailing ideology was racist; a black man died so that a white man could live. The glorification of the soldier is not a trait of the liberal minded; however, Gump is praised for his actions whilst a soldier. In this sense, the film is profoundly conservative. However, post-war we see a very different picture of the veteran. The film seems to critique the treatment of veterans after the war, especially those severely wounded. Lieutenant Dan is living in poverty, unable to reintegrate into society. He blames Gump for this as if he had just left him in the jungle he would have died like he was ‘supposed’ to. This could be a criticism of the government and the lack of support given to severely injured soldiers back from war. It could also be a snipe at society for not letting them back in. The treatment of the countercultural movement in the film is quite deprecating. A number of members are portrayed as deeply sexist, one man beating Jenny, and also as a source of moral degradation. Drugs are prevalent and it has obviously led Jenny astray and ruined her life; or so we are led to believe. Newt Gingrich, Republican and fifty-eighth Speaker of the United States A racist name that Gump doesn’t understand along with the word ‘coon’ earlier on in the film, which he thinks is in reference to raccoons.

House of Representatives, saw the film as a ‘reaffirmation that the counterculture destroyed human beings and basic values’.14 It would appear that the film embodies two different sets of ideals into two different characters; Gump represents conservative values, always doing what you are told to do. Jenny, on the other hand, represents liberal values; she lives life to the excess, becomes a free woman who has dominion over her body (though she falls under the grip of several abusive men), sleeps with whomever she pleases. Thomas Byers argues that this is a revisionist history of the counterculture.15 The film is said to be a champion of family values; John Lennon, one of the symbols of the counterculture movement in the sixties, is reprieved from his ties to the counterculture in the film because he was a good father.16 The film shows or mentions almost all of the major assassinations in the United States with two very notable exceptions, Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) and Malcolm X (1965). It is hard to find any good reason for omitting the assassinations of two such prominent figures in the Civil Rights Movement. Byers puts forth the possibility that Malcolm X was excluded because he is still seen by much of white America to have been too extreme; he then argues that the inclusion of George Wallace and his ‘stand at the schoolhouse door’ (the other extreme) was representative of the mainstream as the country moved to the right.17 The omission of Dr King, however, makes no sense to the film or the character of Gump, who is both sympathetic to the plight of African Americans in the south as well as prone to talking about assassinations.18 In conclusion, the evidence put forth from the film does not lend to the film having a liberal agenda; though there are parts of the film that seem to be a little more sympathetic to the liberal view (i.e. Gump’s attitude towards African Americans). For the most part the film takes a deeply

Byers, ‘History Re-membered’, p.420. Ibid., p.432. 16 Ibid., p.427. 17 Ibid., p.428. 18 Ibid., p.428. 14 15

conservative view to life in the mid to late twentieth century and we can be under no illusion that the film champions the cause of the countercultural movement. There are parts of the film that are contradictory. It allegedly champions family values; Jenny comes from a broken home with an abusive father and her life has been spent trying to forget that by liberating her body, eventually dying young. On the other hand, Gump comes from a single parent family, which goes against traditional family values, and flourishes. The main theme that the film seems to be asserting is that the past is the past and that we cannot move on until we let go of the past. One thing is very clear; Forrest Gump is not a liberal film.

Changing Faces: How film and television representations of Queen Elizabeth I mirrored contemporary issues of the late twentieth century. By Chris Matthews Paul Weinstein has argued that film and television should be acknowledged as one of ‘the great history educators of our time’, and states that a ‘greater impression on the public consciousness’ was made by Saving Private Ryan than the ‘myriad [of] scholarly studies of the Normandy invasion’.1 For many people, Elizabeth I’s image is the one that they see portrayed on screen. She is a figure that has been portrayed on screen almost as far back as the origins of cinema itself, with Sarah Bernhardt likely to have been the first to play her in the 1912 silent movie Les amours de la reine Élisabeth.2 Some productions, for example Flora Robson's portrayal in 1937’s Fire Over England, see Elizabeth ‘running the show’, albeit in a fictionalised account of the Spanish Armada. 3 On the other extreme, Miranda Richardson’s portrayal in the BBC comedy Blackadder II (1986) presents Elizabeth as a ‘bubble headed autocrat’ played purely for comedic value.4 Two alternative portrayals of Elizabeth will be discussed in this essay, the strong-headed feminist image of Elizabeth portrayed by Glenda Jackson in the BBC’s production of Elizabeth R, and the way Elizabeth’s quest for eternal youth is carried on after her death in the 1992 movie Orlando. While both attracted a minority audience at the time of their release, it could be argued that they were at the forefront of cultural changes, and their impact would be felt on screen and beyond for many years to come.

Paul B. Weinstein, ‘Movies as the Gateway to History: The History and Film Project’, History Teacher, 35 (2001), pp. 27-48 [p. 27]. 2 Latham, Bethany, Elizabeth I in Film and Television: A Study of the Major Portrayals (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company Inc., 2011), p. 16. 3 O’Connor, Dale, ‘Fire Over England – Plot Summary’, <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028872/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl> [accessed 3 April 2014]; Carlson, Eric Josef, ‘Teaching Elizabeth Tudor with Movies: Film, Historical Thinking, and the Classroom’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 38 (2007), pp. 419-28 [p. 425]. 4 Ibid., p. 426. 1

BBC2 was the home of Elizabeth R’s first broadcast in 1971. The channel had a reputation as being the home for ‘serious television’ with an adult and educational slant, while the other two channels were criticized for ‘churning out an alarming quantity of dispensable trivia’.5 Viewing figures for the channel were much lower than those for BBC1 or ITV, and in 1969, Robin Scott was appointed controller of BBC2, with the aim of finding a balance between highbrow and popular, along with attempting to gain an audience share of 15 per cent.6 On the night of the premier broadcast of Elizabeth R’s first episode, February 17, 1971, a cursory glance at the television listings emphasises the difference between BBC2 and the other two television channels. BBC1 featured the cartoon series Tom and Jerry, science fiction drama Star Trek, the police drama Softly Softly, and Sportsnight, featuring highlights of popular sports such as boxing and FA Cup football. Meanwhile, ITV viewers were treated to episodes of the soap operas Crossroads and Coronation Street, a celebrity biography in This is Your Life, and the American police drama Hawaii Five-O. In contrast, as well as Elizabeth R, BBC2’s line-up included programmes from the Open University, the current affairs programme Man Alive (that week dealing with issues concerning drugs), a half hour long Newsroom and Pot Black, a made-for-television snooker tournament which was itself a minority sport in the early seventies.7 It can be fair to say, therefore, that BBC2 offered a ‘natural home’ for Elizabeth R, and afforded the chance to depict a historic figure while echoing a growing social trend, namely second-wave feminism. Feminism had found itself in a more prevalent position within the public consciousness around the period of Elizabeth R’s broadcast. In 1970, the first National Women’s Liberation Conference took place at Ruskin College, Oxford, paving the way for ‘the beginning of a new wave of feminist scholarship’.8 While the conference may not have caught the imagination of the general public, that year’s Miss World pageant, watched by 23.76 million viewers on BBC1, certainly would have.9 The contest was noted for its disruption by feminists arriving at the venue having hidden ‘leaflets, water pistols, stink bombs and bags of flour’ as they took their seats, and then ‘hurl[ing] their missiles onto the stage’ during the competition. The aim of the protestors was to Science Museum, BBC2: Origins; Influence; Audiences: A 50th Anniversary Conference, <http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/new_research_folder/~/link.aspx?_id=1E645D1C8BB A421483795370412A2FA8&_z=z>, [accessed 3 April 2014]; Billington, Michael, ‘Restoring One’s Faith’, The Times, May 19th, 1969, p. 11. 6 Phillip Purser, ‘Robin Scott’, Guardian, 9 February 2000, p. 22. 7 ‘Television’, Guardian, 17 February 1971, p.2. 8 Peter Claus and John Marriott, History: An Introduction to Theory, Method and Practice (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2012), p. 201. 9 James Tapper, ‘The biggest TV audience ever... it is now’, Mail on Sunday, 1 May 2005 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-346942/The-biggest-TV-audience-now.html#ixzz2yZe0oGRt> [accessed 11 April 2014]. 5

‘strike a blow against passivity, not only the enforced passivity of the girls on the stage, but the passivity we all felt within ourselves’.10 The same year had seen the passing of the Equal Pay Act, a law that had made it illegal to establish separate pay levels for men and women doing the same job. This was brought about partly after a strike by 187 female employees of the Ford Motors factory in Dagenham, Essex, who were protesting at being placed on a lower pay grade for doing the same job as their male colleagues, an event dramatized in the 2010 Nigel Cole directed film Made In Dagenham.11 Feminism was beginning to hit the mainstream, and with the aforementioned police dramas boasting strong male leads, the time was ripe for a strong, female figure to play the lead in a television drama. Currently Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn, Glenda Jackson was described at the time of broadcast as ‘a born actress, capable of gorgeous eloquence and racy toughness of speech’, and was, over twenty years before being elected to Parliament, a politically active figure. 12 It could therefore be said that Jackson would likely have wanted to take on a role that suited her strong personality, and one that echoed the second-wave feminist arguments of the time, namely equality and strength for women. Jackson is clearly the strongest figure on the screen, playing the Queen as a promiscuous, flirtatious character, but also as a strong-willed woman, sticking ardently to her Protestant beliefs. In the second episode, titled The Marriage Game, she refuses to marry a Roman Catholic, spurning the requests of ambassadors from Spain and France to marry members of their Royal families, and not only for religious reasons. At a time when there were very few female figures in ‘front bench’ politics, Elizabeth is portrayed as being a strongly political woman, with many of the male characters depicted as weak sycophants. With feminism on the radar of the television audience, this dominant character would have had a strong impact, certainly ‘striking a blow against passivity’, and may have served to alter the public perception of someone regarded as the ‘Virgin Queen’. While Jackson dominates the screen time on Elizabeth R, Quentin Crisp’s portrayal of Elizabeth lasts for only the first ten minutes of the Sally Potter directed 1992 film Orlando, but has an

Shohini Chaudhuri, Feminist Film Theorists: Laura Mulvery, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis, Barbara Creed (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 32 11 Virginia Lalli, Women in Law (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2014), p. 74; Made In Dagenham, dir. by Nigel Cole (Paramount Pictures, 2010). 12 UK Parliament, ‘Glenda Jackson’ <http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/commons/glendajackson/175> [accessed April 6th, 2014]; Henry Raynor, ‘Elizabeth R – BBC2’, The Times, 18 February 1971; Marianne MacDonald, ‘The Afterlife of Glenda Jackson’, Independent on Sunday, 16 February 1997, <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-afterlife-of-glenda-jackson-1278880.html> [accessed 6 April 2014] 10

influence that lasts for the entire movie. The film is based upon the book Orlando: A Biography, written by the feminist author Virginia Woolf, and published in 1928, the year of universal suffrage for all women aged 21 or over in the United Kingdom.13 The film opens with a falsetto singing ‘Eliza is the Fairest Queen’, a composition by Edward Johnson that was originally sung at the Elvetham entertainment in 1591 and ‘apparently so delighted Elizabeth that she commanded to hear it sung and to be danced three times over’.14 The falsetto is played by Jimmy Somerville, a singer who found initial fame with the band Bronski Beat. Their first single, ‘Smalltown Boy’, told of ‘a gay youth forced to leave a provincial town’, and their 1984 album The Age of Consent not only listed the different ages of heterosexual and homosexual consent in different countries to emphasise discrimination, but contained tracks that offered ‘the most powerful angry gay lyrics since the early days of Tom Robinson’.15 As an openly gay man, Somerville was subject to much hostility during the time period prior to the filming of Orlando, being forced out of his flat in Camberwell after it was invaded and attacked by anti-gay youths, as well as being refused a mortgage due to his homosexuality.16 Elizabeth herself (as mentioned earlier) is played by Quentin Crisp, who achieved notable fame following the publication of his book The Naked Civil Servant and its consequent adaptation for television. Crisp was another figure attacked for his homosexuality, and was said to be ‘reviled’ by people on the streets of London, where he would be spat at by women and have stones thrown at him by children.17 Finally, the role of Orlando is played by Tilda Swinton, an actor whose ‘ghostly-pale androgynous face’, was well suited to the gender swapping role of Orlando.18 Swinton was the muse of Derek Jarman, director of Jubilee, a movie in which Elizabeth views a ‘post-punk […] wasteland where civilization has come to a halt’.19 Swinton is also known as a left-wing campaigner for LGBT rights, recently seen holding a

Michael H. Whitworth, Virginia Woolf (Authors in Context) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Kindle Edition. 14 Christian Kelnberger, ‘“Time Stands Still with Gazing on her Face…”: Queen Elizabeth I and her Musicians’, in Queen Elizabeth I: Past and Present, ed. by Christa Jansohn, (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), p. 118. 15 Alan Frutkin, ‘In Profile: Jimmy Somerville’, Advocate, 25 July 1995, p. 68; Jimmy Somerville, ‘It struck a chord because it could be anyone's story’, Guardian, 12 November 2006, <http://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/nov/12/popandrock27> [accessed April 6th, 2014]; Robin Denselow, ‘Steel Country Blues’, Guardian, 18 October 1984, p. 12. 16 Rose Rouse, ‘Solidarity Forever’, Guardian, 11 October 1985, p. 19. 17 Paul Bailey, ‘Camping it Up’, Guardian, 8 June 1975, p. 26. 18 James Mottram, ‘Tilda Swinton. I Was Expected to Marry a Duke!’, Independent, 3 April 2010 <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/tilda-swinton-i-was-expected-to-marry-a-duke1932431.html> [accessed 6 April 2014]. 19 Kim Newman, ‘Jubilee’, Empire Magazine, <http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/review.asp?FID=132522> [accessed 6 April 2014]. 13

rainbow flag in Moscow’s Red Square.20 These pro-gay figures mirror the growth in gay activism that became more prevalent in the 1990s, which saw the establishment of groups such as Queer Nation New York, formed to counter violence against homosexuals and to battle against the ‘continued existence of anti-gay discrimination in the culture at large’, and OutRage, established in London and ‘committed to radical, non-violent direct action and civil disobedience’ against homophobia.21 The last words spoken by Elizabeth to Orlando are ‘do not fade, do not whither, do not grow old’.22 While this can be taken literally, as Orlando does neither during the length of the film, these words can also be attributed to Elizabeth herself. With the ‘sensitive and simplistic’ Darnley portrait being the face pattern used for most portraits of Elizabeth during the 1580s and 1590s, she did not appear to grow old to most of her subjects, with paintings such as Egg’s Queen Elizabeth Discovers she is no Longer Young not commissioned until Victoria’s accession to the throne over two centuries later.23 Crisp portrays Elizabeth in Orlando in 1600 appearing rather like Egg’s portrait, and it could be argued that Elizabeth’s wish for eternal youth should be continued in the body of Orlando. Swinton’s long red hair and youthful complexion certainly bear more than a passing resemblance to the Virgin Queen. Returning to the cultural agenda of the early 1990s, this quest for eternal youth could also be said to mirror the growing fascination with celebrity, with magazines such as Hello, OK! and Heat, concentrating on visual imagery of famous people and their private lives, launched in the decade surrounding Orlando’s release.24 The ‘alarming quality of dispensable trivia’ referred to in 1971 could now be applied to these publications, but the interest in celebrities, and more importantly their image, could well been a reason for adapting Woolf’s novel as a critique of 1990s culture. , Halfway through the film, Orlando changes gender, but even following this, the character continues to look immaculate and youthful at all times. Eric Hynes, ‘Tilda Swinton Lives By Night’, Rolling Stone, 1 April 2014 <http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/tilda-swinton-lives-by-night-20140401> [accessed 6 April 2014]. 21 Queer Nation New York, ‘Our History’, <http://queernationny.org/history> [accessed 6 April 2014]; OutRage!, ‘About OutRage!’, <http://outrage.org.uk/about/> [accessed 6 April 2014] 22 Orlando, dir. by Sally Potter (Sony Pictures Classics, 1992). 23 S P Cerasano, and Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘“From Myself, My Other Self I Turned”: An Introduction’, in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. by S P Cerasano, and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 4; Augustus Leopold Egg, Queen Elizabeth Discovers she is No Longer Young, priv. col. (1848) <https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/augustus-leopoldegg-169> [accessed 10 April 2014] 24 Hannah Betts, ‘Is this really goodbye, Hello! Magazine?’, Daily Telegraph, 5 September 2012 <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/media/9522892/Isthis-really-goodbye-Hello-magazine.html> [accessed 10 April 2014] 20

Although Jackson and Crisp portray Elizabeth rather differently, both play the part in a commanding fashion. Jackson takes centre stage in Elizabeth R, and while Crisp underplays the part, his character has a presence that is felt throughout the film. While the notion of secondwave feminism would have appeared as something of a novelty to television audiences in the early 1970s, it is fair to say that Jacksonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s portrayal of Elizabeth paved the way for strong, female parts in television drama, and by the time of Orlandoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s release, the likes of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect, along with Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly in Cagney and Lacey, showed that women could take the lead in police dramas, which during Elizabeth Râ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s initial broadcast had been a largely male bastion. Orlando itself, with its gender swapping lead character and gay-friendly cast, could also be said to have paved the way for the increased presence of figures far removed from the comfortable nuclear families of the past, with peak-time family dramas such as Doctor Who, EastEnders and Waterloo Road featuring LGBT actors and characters that feature as part of the storyline. While both Elizabeth R and Orlando were in keeping with the times of their production, it is reasonable to assume that they were both instrumental in moving the agenda of television and movie drama forward and crossing new boundaries. Over four hundred years after the death of Elizabeth, her on-screen legacy endures in different ways, and is likely to entertain new generations of audiences for many years to come.

The Monroe doctrine: A Declaration of Western Hemispheric containment and a pretext to US Imperialism. By Sean Lock ‘It is impossible that the allied powers should extend their political system to any portion of either continent without endangering our peace and happiness.’ – President James Monroe. In 1823, the Monroe Doctrine was formed after President James Monroe’s annual address to Congress.1 This address assured that any American Colonies, dependant or in possession of European powers, shall not be interfered with by the United States; however the re-colonisation or oppression of any free nation by any European power would be consider an act of hostility towards the United States. 2 While this statement would strongly suggest a policy of Western Hemispheric containment it would act as a marker to US imperialism. The doctrine could also be considered a declaration of superiority over the Western Hemisphere. When describing the Monroe doctrine as a ‘declaration of containment’, James Dunkerley, is of course referring to the United States’ attempt to expel the old imperialistic power of Europe from the New World. 3 This is undoubtedly the basis of the doctrine, conversely, it is also coupled with the desire for imperialism and later (after the civil war) the need for formal and informal expansion. At the heart of this essay is the concept ‘Manifest Destiny’, which gave Americans the belief that it was their duty to spread liberal democracy throughout the Western Hemisphere. Manifest Destiny’ (in this context and almost all others) is used as a pretext to America’s primary goals of ‘strategic protection and economic expansion’.4 This paper predominately investigates the nineteenth century, and how, from the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, the United States attitude

Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov (eds.), Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000), pp.11-14. 2 Ibid., p.13. 3 James Dunkerley, ‘The United States and Latin America in the Long Run’ in The United States and Latin America: the New Agenda, ed. by Victor Bulmer-Thomas and James Dunkerley (London: ILAS, University of London, 1999), pp.3-31. 4 Paul W. Drake, ‘From Good Men to Good Neighbors: 1912-1932’, in Exporting Democracy: the United States and Latin America, ed. by Abraham F. Lowenthal, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p.7. 1

changed towards Latin America and the European powers. It will also look at the effectiveness of the declaration in terms of containment and whether this is the only motive behind the Monroe Doctrine. It can be said with some certainty that expansionism was an early policy for America; though, the growth came through land purchases of Louisiana and Florida; not through imperial aggression. Imperialism developed under the pretext of the Monroe doctrine. This first section of the article will look at the two stages of Mexican acquisition by the US. The first stage is the movement of American people westwards into Mexico and the independence of Texas, the second the forcible move westwards under President James K. Polk. In the early 1820s, newly independent Mexico struggled to gain economic and political stability, trying both a monarchical and constitutional forms of leadership. They struggled to find a balance before settling on republicanism in 1824. This would only mark the start of the long running period of political disorder.5 In 1822, Mexico had vast northern areas to populate; to do this the Mexican government implemented a scheme which allowed married men to purchase a league of land for up to $200. 6 This policy saw a huge influx of American settlers into the Texas region. After a short while the American settlers, as Peter H. Smith describes, started â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;[c]hafing under Mexican Ruleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.7 There were calls for Texas to become an independent state within Mexico; the vast movement of Americans into the region of Coahuila saw them make up the majority of the population. The Mexican government, recognising the threat of vast amounts of Americans occupying their land, tried to reverse the migration by emancipating slaves in 1829 and then prevent immigration in 1830; although, this response came too late and in 1836 Texas rebelled, achieving independence before the United States annexed it in 1845. This prelude to the United States imperialist expansion shows the gains made by America when a European power, in this case Spain, loses its colony. As well as this, it also highlights that without the interference of the Old World, the US stood to make substantial, unimpeded gains in the Western Hemisphere. The second stage of Mexican acquisition came in 1846 when President James K. Polk sent a diplomatic envoy to Mexico to discuss the acquisition of not only newly independent Texas, but also New Mexico and California.8 The arrival of this envoy is seen by many historians as a provocation war, and after talks broke down war did eventually break out in 1847. Supposed Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy towards Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) pp.15-20. 6 Ibid., p.16. 7 Peter H. Smith, Talons of the Eagle: Latin America, the United States, and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), p.22. 8 Ibid., pp.23-24. 5

military hostilities in Matamoros are also seen as a contributing factor. After the defeat and capture of Mexico City in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed this, along with the annexation of Texas, consumed one-third of Mexico’s territory.9 Imperialism is unquestionably a feature during the pre-Civil War period and the Monroe doctrine acted as a safeguard against European interference. Still, this imperialism came at a cost as this large acquisition of Mexican land led to Mexico seek a European protectorate. This defender came in the form of France. The fact that France was able to establish the Austrian monarch, Maximilian von Hapsburg, as ruler of Mexico in the 1860s with no notable repercussion truly shows how empty the Monroe doctrine was as a policy of containment. During and after the acquisition of Mexican land, the US, still firmly led by the theory of ‘Manifest Destiny’, turned its attention to the Caribbean which was a European haven at the time. The area was largely divided between Great Britain, France and Spain; although other European countries had a few colonies such as the Dutch and Swedish. The Caribbean was truly an arena of commerce and getting a foothold in it was crucial to financial gain. America’s imperialist efforts in the Caribbean brought it into direct contact with European powers for the first time since the Monroe doctrine was declared. Along with developing colonies, America also wanted access to the Pacific. America’s first significant involvement in the Caribbean brought about the Bidlack treaty of 1846 which was negotiated between the US and New Granada (modern day Colombia) and allowed the US to build a canal across Panama to the Pacific Ocean.10 The Panama Isthmus was also to be internationally neutral, a position which had previously been denied by both Britain and France. This ultimately culminated in the signing of the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, which created a pact between the United States and Britain and meant that any canal being built in Latin America would be done with the cooperation of both parties. 11 This set the tone for North America’s involvement in the Caribbean with the US adopting an active stance against European interest. Although Britain was granted permission, eventually, to co-build the Panama Isthmus, they and France were originally denied the privilege by New Granada. By America creating one of the most used trade routes in the Western Hemisphere, they were able to contain European powers as well as the ability to choose a business partner. The Caribbean is undoubtedly an area where a policy of containment was strongly being Walter Lafeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, 2nd edition (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), pp.5-85. 10 Robert F. Smith, ‘Latin America, The United States and the European powers, 1830–1930’, in The Cambridge History of Latin America Volume 4: c. 1870-1930, ed. by Leslie Bethall, Cambridge University Press, pp.83-119. 11 Lafeber, Inevitable Revolutions, pp.29-30. 9

stressed, and the US was able to achieve this through the means of formal and informal imperialism. Cuba, on the other hand, proved to be a contentious point between Europe and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. John Quincy Adams recognised Cuba as a ‘natural appendage to the North American Continent’ and in the first half of the nineteenth century America adopted a ‘two pronged policy’ towards Cuba which entailed either maintaining Cuba as a Spanish colony or capturing it for America.12 The independence of Cuba no doubt posed a threat to US national security due to its vulnerability and its proximity to the American border. However, there was a belief that if Cuba did achieve liberation, it would only be a matter of time before they were enveloped into US hands. After subsequent attempts to purchase the island, including a fiasco involving a Venezuelan adventurer who had attempted to conquer Cuba in the name of America, a tripartite agreement was arranged between France, Britain and Spain that ensured that Cuba remained in the hands of Spain.13This is only a testament to the weakness of the Monroe Doctrine as a declaration of containment; although the US did not agree with the tripartite agreement it did discourage the active pursuit of Cuba for the time being. The pursuit of Cuba is another example of America betraying the terms of ‘Manifest Destiny’ as it would have incorporated a Hispanic colony into Anglo-America. Cuba would later again resurge as an American priority; yet, this would not come until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After the American civil war, American imperialism took a different form. Gone were the days of American expansion, which Lars Schoultz believes was due to the US’s inability to regain momentum.14 However, the world that America re-entered after the civil war was vastly different from the world it left in 1861. France and Spain recognised that America would end the Civil War with a vast army ready for redeployment, this then governed their decision to make a strategic retreat from the Western Hemisphere. The days of Empire were dissolving, America too had less need to conquer and expand. Schoultz believes that this was due to the US being built on the idea of self-determination; but this position does not account for America’s behaviour towards countries such as Cuba and Mexico prior to the Civil War.15 The relationship between Europe and the Western Hemisphere had turned from colonial possession to trade partnerships. At the end of the Civil War the US’s initial economic growth was substantial. Nevertheless, a series of severe recessions throughout the latter decades of the century prevented Smith, Talons of the Eagle, pp.24-25. Ibid., p.25. 14 Shoultz, Beneath the United States, pp.88-89. 15 Ibid., pp.88-89. 12 13

consistent growth. The US economy grew massively from approximately $300 million in the 1860s to $1 billion in 1897; it also recognised that Latin America’s global exports had hardly grown over the same period.16 The new and rapidly developing market of Latin America was an ideal market for North America to engage in; due to the diversity in the products that both areas could generate, making them ideal trading partners. America, due to the Civil War, was late in establishing trade connection with their Latin American counterparts and once again let ‘Old World’ powers get there first; both Germany and France established fruitful trade connections with countries such Brazil and Peru. Although, by far the most prosperous nation in terms of trade and, subsequently the greatest influence in Latin America, was Great Britain. In the case of Argentina, Britain had developed a dependent nation-state through trade. The development of hegemonic trade connection certainly accounts for South America’s relationship with the great powers in the latter half of the nineteenth century and even into the early twentieth century. Historians, such as Andrew Thompson, have debated whether hegemonic trade partnerships during this period represented the continuation of empire, except without the formal recognition of the colony thus dubbing the term ‘informal Empire’. 17 It should be noted that these ‘informal empires’ were fundamentally based on economic control with no interference in Latin American politics; however, since the article ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ was written by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, Informal empire has remained a contentious concept among Latin American historians.18 America, as much as it condemned European colonies during the first half of the nineteenth century, certainly wanted to develop an ‘informal empire’ in the South, as it would help boost their economy. America would achieve great success in Latin America, rivalling that of Britain, with US imports not only doubled, but tripled between 1890 and 1910.19 These actions would seemingly confirm all of the traits inherent in the Monroe Doctrine, and in doing so; they are candid illustrations of America’s attempts at achieving containment through informal imperialism. Although this represents a different form of imperialism from the European model, it could certainly be considered as imperialism nonetheless.

Ibid., pp.85-86. Andrew Thompson, ‘Informal Empire? An Exploration in the History of Anglo-Argentine Relations, 1810-1914’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 24.2 (1992), pp.419-436. 18 John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, 6.1 (1953), pp.1-15. 19 Shoultz, Beneath the United States, pp.192-193. 16 17

Meanwhile American policy in Cuba centred on incurring a debt of gratitude from the Cubans.20 The US in 1898 engaged in the Spanish-American war over the independence of Cuba in the name of ‘Manifest Destiny’. This marked a reversal in America’s attitude towards Cuba. America had during the first half of the nineteenth century, supported policies that either wished to see Cuba under their jurisdiction or maintained under Spanish rule. This turnaround in policy was a result of the decline in the European Empires and an American belief that by fighting for Cuban independence, Cuba would be obliged to return the favour. In the wake of Cuban independence, two accounts of how liberation was achieved emerged. The American account depicted themselves as the sole liberators of the ‘downtrodden’ people of Cuba.21 The Cubans, on the other hand, portrayed the victory as achieved by the joint efforts of Cuban freedom fighters with the US military also playing a part. The continued American presence in Cuba after the war was won (as well as their disagreement over the circumstances of independence) created a sense of resentment amongst the people of Cuba. This growing resentment would prevent America from attaining the debt of gratitude it sought. In this instance, American intervention in Latin America could not be best described as motivated by containment, rather it should be considered as a form of informal imperialism and an example of America seeking to excerpt its superiority over another country. Before, concluding an assessment of the success of the Monroe Doctrine as a declaration of containment must be discussed; as has already been illustrated with the case of Mexico, in that; active imperialism could lead to the violation of this containment. This Latin American perspective of the Monroe Doctrine has scarcely been reviewed by historians as they tend to focus on the implications of the declaration; conversely, a look from a Latin American perspective shows that the Monroe Doctrine may have been counterproductive as a declaration of containment. Prior to the establishment of the doctrine, Simon Bolivar sought out Britain as an ally or protectorate from the influence of their larger northern neighbour. The Monroe Doctrine only served to reinforce the idea that the countries of Latin America need a European protectorate from the United States. The Monroe Doctrine is certainly a declaration of containment; in spite of this, it is best described as also a pretext to American imperialism and expansion. Without any form of imperialistic intention, the Monroe Doctrine would not have been declared. The Doctrine, when purely seen as a declaration of containment, is at best an empty threat; European powers, most Louis A. Pérez, Jr., ‘Incurring a Debt of Gratitude: 1898 and the Moral Sources of United States Hegemony in Cuba’, American Historical Review, 104.2 (1999), pp.356-398. 21 Ibid., pp.362-363. 20

notably in the first half of the nineteenth century, came and went as they pleased. Although America adopted an imperialist mentality at the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, it was not until the Polk regime that America first pursued an aggressive form of imperialism. The latter half of the century saw European powers move from direct control to indirect control. With this in mind, when considering the Monroe Doctrine as a declaration of containment, it can only be regarded as a resounding failure. When analysing the doctrine itself it is clear that not only is it a declaration of independence, but an open admission of America’s active anti-European stance in the Western Hemisphere. As for the term ‘Manifest Destiny’ it appears to only be used as a pretext to other US objectives (which usually consisted of one form of imperialism or another) and only really justifies the cause of absorbing Texas into the United States. ‘Manifest Destiny’ cannot be used to justify the Mexican war nor America’s interest in Cuba, therefore when addressing the question of whether the Monroe Doctrine was a declaration of containment the term ‘Manifest Destiny’ has no place at the table. To summarise, the Monroe Doctrine is best seen as a declaration of containment, imperialism and active aggression.

Review: Will Kaufman’s Woody Guthrie:

Hard Times and Hard Travelin’ Performed on 6 March 2014 at the University of South Wales, Trefforest. By Chris Matthews, Sean Lock and Darren Macey Professor Will Kaufman’s captivating ‘live documentary’ - which has appeared at such major events as the Glastonbury Festival, the Bath International Music Festival, the Chester Literature Festival, the Big Session, the Whitby Folk Festival and the Piacenza Literature and Blues Festival in Italy- was performed to an audience of academics and students at USW on the 6th March 2014.1 ‘Hard Times and Hard Travelin’ is framed around the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the plight of the Dust Bowl Migrants in 1930’s America. 2 The event was organised by USW History undergraduate Darren Macey in conjunction with the Welsh charity for the homeless Shelter Cymru and with the support of Dr. Jane Finucane the BA History Award Leader and Dr. Andrew Thompson, Head of Humanities and Social Sciences at USW.3 Macey, in his introduction, suggested that there was a striking similarity in the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants and the contemporary work of Shelter Cymru. He emphasised the challenge facing historians in presenting a history that can be understood both in the context of its own time and the lessons it offers present day society. In conclusion to his introduction he quoted British Whig historian G. M. Trevelyan’s maxim that, ‘if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves’.4 Kaufman’s presentation rises to Trevelyan’s entreaty, and in his musicality he illustrates new ways to engage with his peers and the public at large. Kaufman interprets and translates the fruits of All biographical information is as supplied by Professor Will Kaufman, <http://www.willkaufman.com/>[accessed 12 July 2014]. 2 Will Kaufman, <http://www.willkaufman.com/> [accessed 12 July 2014] 3 Macey, in his introduction to the presentation, also thanked Professor Neil Wynn lecturer in American History at USW for his inspiration, support and introduction to Professor Kaufman. 4 Dr Paul Roebuck, Community College of Denver paraphrasing British historian G. M. Trevelyan’s comments, <http://www.roebuckclasses.com/201/classdocs/overheadwhatishistory.htm> [accessed 12 July 2014] 1

his extensive research into a history, which is relevant and not easily forgotten with the closing of a book or a lecture hall door. A native of New Jersey, Kaufman’s first foray into academia consisted of a degree in English and history from Montclair State College, following which he left to further his education across the Atlantic. Kaufman was awarded a prestigious Marshall Scholarship to study in the UK and has a number of close links with USW, his first taste of British education coming as a postgraduate at the Caerleon campus that now forms part of USW.5 Following the completion of his studies at Caerleon Kaufman would remain in Wales and go on to gain his PhD in American literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1985.6 Alongside his research, he is a member of the Literature and Cultures Research Group; Kaufman has been Professor of American Literature & Culture at the School of Language, Literature and International Studies at UCLan since 1991. 7 Kaufmann in addition to his musical presentations, has also amassed an impressive body of work on American History and Culture, including, American Culture in the 1970s (2009), The Civil War in American Culture (2006) and The Comedian as Confidence Man (1997) however Guthrie is currently the focus of his work. In 2008, he was awarded the Woody Guthrie Research Fellowship from the Broadcast Music Industry Foundation and the Woody Guthrie Foundation, which enabled him to write the first political biography of Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (2011). In an effort to assess the impact of the presentation from a broad perspective this paper will present three separate reviews from contributors with varying levels of previous interaction with the study of twentieth century American history. The opening review comes from USW undergraduate, History from the Forest contributing co-editor and social historian Chris Matthews. Chris Matthews As someone with an interest in social history, and equally as someone with a limited knowledge of the music of Woody Guthrie, I came to the presentation not knowing what to expect. I left with an appreciation of a part of American history I had not previously considered. A part that dealt with the suffering experienced by thousands in the 1930s, as they travelled west across the United States in order to escape the harsh reality of the ‘Dust Bowl’. In this part, I saw a number of parallels with twenty-first century society. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s has been described as ‘one of the worst environmental disasters of the Twentieth Century anywhere in the world’ in which ‘three million people left their farms on Kaufman, <http://www.willkaufman.com/> [accessed 12 July 2014]. Ibid. 7 Ibid. 5 6

the Great Plains during the drought and half a million migrated to other states, almost all to the West’, with the term Dust Bowl becoming ‘part of the vernacular language of the Great Plains during the Great Depression of the 1930s’.8 This era was vividly brought to life by Kaufman, who cleverly interspersed tales of the era with some of Guthrie’s songs. Many of these described how Woody, like hundreds of ‘dustbowl refugees’, or ‘Okies’ as they were derogatorily termed, hit Route 66 in search of work. These men would ride freight trains, hitchhike and even walk to reach the Golden State. Some of the tales told by Kaufman certainly gave food for thought. Following the so-called ‘Black Sunday’ dust storm of 14 April 1935, Guthrie wrote the song ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh’. The lyrics told of how the Okies were forced to leave their homes after the destruction of their farmland, mirroring Guthrie’s own departure from his then hometown of Pampa, Texas. The song also showed the power of the church on 1930s America, in which the Baptists and Pentecostals spoke of how God was giving His judgement on what Kaufman described as ‘wicked people’, presumably for turning the Plains into farmland. As a witness interviewed for PBS stated, ‘God didn’t create the plains to be farmland. He created it for what He put on it, in grass and cattle. And they come in and completely changed it.’9 Personally, this drew parallels with how much influence religion still has upon American society. As recently as 2002, some six in ten people in the United States still stated that religion plays ‘a very important role in their lives’, a significantly higher proportion than those living in Canada and Western Europe, with religious leaders such as Pat Robertson stating that twenty-first century natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina as being God’s judgement of US support for abortion rights.10 Similar parallels with contemporary life can be drawn from Guthrie’s song ‘Do Re Mi’. This told of the ‘Bum Blockade’, in which the Okies were greeted at the Californian border by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), hundreds of miles outside of their jurisdiction. The Ben Cook and others, Did dust storms make the Dust Bowl drought worse? (New York: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, 2011) <http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/dust_storms.shtml> [accessed 20 July 2014]; Michael E Lewis, ‘National Grasslands in the Dust Bowl’, Geographical Review, 79.2 (Apr., 1989), pp.161-171. 9 Melt White, ‘Surviving the Dust Bowl’, American Experience <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interview/dustbowl-witness-white/> [accessed 31 July 2014] 10 Pew Research Global Attitudes Report, ‘Among Wealthy Nations U.S. Stands Alone In Its Embrace of Religion’, <http://www.pewglobal.org/2002/12/19/among-wealthy-nations/> [accessed 31 July 2014]; Domenico Montanaro, ‘Robinson on Haiti: ‘Pact to the Devil’’, NBC News, 13 January 2010 <http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2010/01/13/4436174-robertson-on-haiti-pact-to-the-devil?lite> [accessed 31 July 2014] 8

migrants were forced to show that they had at least $50.00 to support themselves, or proof of a job offer. Failure to provide either of these resulted in them being turned away, albeit illegally, as they could demonstrate ‘no visible means of support’. In all, the LAPD deployed 136 officers to 16 major points of entry on the Arizona, Nevada and Oregon lines.11 For me, this almost paranoid attitude to migrants certainly drew parallels with the recent negative news stories in some elements of the British press concerning European Union citizens entering the United Kingdom in search of employment.12 Similar stories have recently made their mark in American newspapers too, with headlines warning of ‘immigration courts bracing for influx of youth migrants’ from countries such as Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.13 Altogether, Kaufman provided an entertaining, and more importantly, a thought provoking presentation on a figure regarded as ‘the father of protest songs’ that has inspired figures as diverse as Bob Dylan and Billy Bragg to follow in his footsteps.14 Kaufman also served to remind the audience of the importance of song in reliving history and enabling the power of music to reach out to people who would not normally be interested in political issues. I shall end by mentioning another review of the presentation, written by none other than Pete Seeger, a figure that sadly passed away at the beginning of 2014, and who himself wrote and sang many protest songs. He stated that Kaufman has introduced ‘a new generation of Europeans to 'the other America'. It's a wonderful job he's doing’.15 Personally, I can think of no better accolade for this interesting introduction to a fascinating era of history. Chris Matthews 20 July 2014 USW undergraduate and fellow History from the Forest contributing co-editor Sean Lock, a student whose areas of research include Latin America and American foreign policy in the nineteenth century offers a different perspective.

Cecilia Rasmussen, ‘LAPD Blocked Dust Bowl Migrants at State Borders’, Los Angeles Times, 9 March 2003 <http://articles.latimes.com/2003/mar/09/local/me-then9> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 12 Roy Greenslade, ‘How the Daily Mail escaped censure for its false immigration story’, Guardian, March 17, 2014 <http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2014/mar/17/dailymail-pcc> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 13 Rick Jervis, ‘Immigration courts bracing for influx of youth migrants’, USA Today, 20 July 2014 <http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/20/border-children-immigrationcourts/12767011/> [accessed 31 July 2014]. 14 Tony Lawless, Lawless in Vietnam (Haverford, PA: Infinity Publishing, 2003), p.50. 15 Kaufman <http://www.willkaufman.com/> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 11

Sean Lock Before attending the presentation, I did some background research that revealed that Professor Will Kaufman of the University of Central Lancashire is a noted American Historian with expertise in ‘American comedy, the culture of the American Civil War, transatlantic studies, the American 1970s, and American protest music.’ Kaufman is (as I would discover) also a singer and a multi-instrumentalist who has performed at such prestigious venues as the Glastonbury festival, the Bath International music festival and the Blues festival in Italy.16 As my studies thus far have included only a cursory study of American twentieth century history (and that from the framework of American foreign policy), this presentation offered an exciting opportunity to extend my knowledge in an American domestic context. Kaufman’s presentation, entitled Woody Guthrie: Hard times and Hard Travelling, sees this blend of historian and musician come together as he guides the audience on a journey into the lives of the Dust Bowl Migrants through the eyes and the voice of the legendary Woody Guthrie. Kaufman describes how Woody Guthrie, born in Oklahoma in 1912, was one of the many who became uprooted and moved west to California under the economic pressures of the Great Depression and under the physical pressure of the Dust Bowl. 17 Unlike the other migrants who moved west, Guthrie would record the sights, smells and most importantly the journey in the form of songs, which would encapsulate the experiences of these displaced people. Kaufman gives a stunning performance of some of these songs, which Guthrie had imbued with a combination of Folk and ‘Negro’ blues. Guthrie’s music as Kaufman explains would also help define an entire group of American’s otherwise forgotten from or poorly recorded in the traditional text. Kaufman’s presentation begins with Guthrie’s childhood, but his main focus is on Guthrie’s as an activist and in particular his music during the Dust Bowl. His presentation also features such historical events as the New Deal and the Great Depression. Kaufman uses Guthrie’s music throughout his presentation to not only engage with the audience but also to act as a prime historical source which pitches the spectators into the mind of the ‘Okies’ and ‘Arkies’ (this was the derogatory terms used for the migrants of the Dust Bowls). The fact that Kaufman favours the non-traditional primary source of Guthrie’s songs over the traditional source is no surprise, as Guthrie’s songs not only capture the culture change but also provides a unique timeline of events in correlation with the overwhelming moods and feelings of the displaced minority; this is something that a traditional source would never hope to achieve. Guthrie was the voice of these Will Kaufman on Woody Guthrie, http://www.willkaufman.com/ [accessed 21 July 2014]. Jorge Arevalo, Woody Guthrie: Biography, <http://www.woodyguthrie.org/biography/biography2.htm> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 16 17

migrants and Will Kaufman’s presentation gives the audience the full effect of Guthrie’s music and an idea of the value of Guthrie as a value Historical source. Kaufman hits at the heart, as paraphrasing union activist Joe Hill, Kaufman pronounces, ‘No Matter how good a pamphlet is it is only read once, but a song is learned by heart and is repeated over and over’.18 Therefore, Will Kaufman’s presentation is not only a unique song based lecture on one man’s perspective of the effects of the Dust Bowl, but it is also an argument for the song as an historical source and its value to historians. Sean Lock 22 July 2014 The event’s organiser Darren Macey and twentieth century American History student offers the final review. Darren Macey Both Woody Guthrie’s music and political activism are ingrained into the cultural psyche of the left of centre on both sides of the Atlantic. To that end, much of the historical and artistic ‘raw material’ presented by Kaufman would be relatively familiar to those with an interest in American protest singers, or even more generally a student of twentieth century American history. This familiarity, though, has created its own problems, as it has resulted in a great deal of cultural fog appearing around the myth that is Woody Guthrie. In many quarters, this mythical character has been almost canonised at the expense of a semblance of accuracy surrounding the actual historical Guthrie. For example, British singer songwriter Billy Bragg’s successful tour in 2012 commemorating Woody’s ‘100 th birthday’, while being incredibly entertaining was in fact a partisan presentation of a sanitised Woody.19 This, however, is not a criticism of Bragg, who has every right as a performer to give his interpretation of Guthrie’s music and politics without any thought to historical accuracy. Similar descriptions could be offered concerning a fair proportion of the small library of books published on Guthrie. These publications have ranged from the highly parochial to more studious historical texts including Kaufman’s own excellent book Woody Guthrie, American Radical.20 The amalgamation of these two facets of Guthrie, the legend and the man that lies Will Kaufman: Clip from Will Kaufman’s Live Musical Documentary - Woody Guthrie - Hard Times & Hard Travellin’ ‘Preacher and the Slave’, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqLHjvZXCkw> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 19 Billy Bragg, Woody Guthrie’s 100th Birthday concert, (Hay Festival, Tuesday 5 June 2012). 20 Ruth Conniff, ‘Billy Bragg Brings the Spirt of Woody Guthrie to Madison’, The Progressive (11 July 2012), <http://www.progressive.org/billy_bragg_madison_wi.html> [accessed July 20, 2014]. 18

behind it, is Kaufman’s almost unique skill. He has the knack of appearing to have the freedom of a performer’s artistic licence yet he also operates within academic constraints. The power of Kaufman’s presentation is a seemingly effortless ability to unify the images, ideas and music of not just Guthrie but also the enduring tradition of radical American voices. The individuals who are peppered throughout the presentation are a truly impressive group, including, Sis Cunningham, Joe Hill, Yip Harburg, Pete Segar, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen… the list is seemingly endless. While Kaufman’s route in his journey through American history certainly comprises of a good deal of tub-thumping and rebel rousing music it is also cleverly interspersed with both pathos and homespun humor. The presentation is, however, most importantly grounded in meticulous historical research. Kaufman as well as an engrossing raconteur, a gifted singer, and a wonderfully talented multi-instrumentalist, is first and foremost an academic. Kaufman, dressed as if he had just stepped out of the 1930’s in a leather jacket bearing the insignia of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World or ‘Wobblies’ as he later refers to them) and a Stetson hat, started the presentation masterfully. Setting the tone for an enthralling performance Kaufman opened by playing a stirring rendition of Guthrie’s ‘Pastures of Plenty’, with a montage of powerful images from the Great Depression flicking across the screen behind him. The impact of these iconic images including many the most famous FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographs such as Arthur Rothstein’s ‘Fleeing a Dust Storm’ and ‘Migrant Mother’ by Dorothea Lange is hugely amplified by the power of Guthrie’s lyrics and the passion imbued in them by Kaufman: It's a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed My poor feet have travelled a hot dusty road Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes I slept on the ground in the light of the moon On the edge of the city you'll see us and then We come with the dust and we go with the wind.21

FSA collection in the Library of Congress archives, < http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=dust%20bowl&sp=3&co=fsa>[accessed 20 July 2014]; ‘Pastures of Plenty: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pastures_Of_Plenty.htm> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 21

Kaufman’s template, the use of imagery, music and anecdotal evidence is repeated superbly throughout the presentation. He proceeds by relating a description of Guthrie’s early years and the causes and evolution of the Dust Bowl. Illustrating the beginning of the exodus West, Kaufman gives a wickedly ironic interpretation of Guthrie’s ‘So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh’ and describes Guthrie’s first meeting with Sis Cunningham a future co-member of the Almanac Singers.22 Quoting Cunningham and Guthrie, Kaufman relates their raging resentment at the exploitation of the Dust Bowl migrant by capitalist bankers, Californian planters and labor contractors. Guthrie’s musical parody of the ‘Bum blockade’ by California’s police and politicians was Kaufman’s next musical offering.23 ‘Do Re Mi’ is a scathing attack on the treatment of the Dust Bowl migrants which Kaufman uses to lead into a description of the xenophobic transformation of the migrants into an underclass of ‘Okies’ by the authority’s in California: If you ain't got the do re mi, boys, you ain't got the do re mi, Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee. California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see; But believe it or not, you won't find it so hot If you ain't got the do re mi.24 In discussing the politicising of Guthrie in the migrant camps of California, Kaufman gives an excellent explanation of earlier labour movements particularly the Wobblies and the music of Joe Hill. Union activist Hill, who as Kaufman explains was executed on a dubious murder charge in Utah in 1915, was to have huge impact on Guthrie.25 As Hill advised ‘put a few cold, common sense facts in a song, and dress them up in a cloak of humour to take the dryness off them’ this sometimes-comic style and idea of a clenched fist wrapped in the velvet glove of humour would be a tremendous influence on Guthrie’s own music.26

Ronald D. Cohen and Jeff Place, ‘Sis Cunningham, Activist musician and Broadside editor’, Smithsonian Folkways, < http://www.folkways.si.edu/explore_folkways/sis_cunningham.aspx> [accessed 12 July 2014]. 23 Leonard Leader, ‘When L.A. Blocked the Borders’ Los Angeles Times, (2 February 1986) <http://articles.latimes.com/1986-02-02/opinion/op-3604_1_los-angeles-times> [accessed 1 February 2014]. 24 ‘Do Re Mi: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Do_Re_Mi.htm> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 25 Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Urabana: University of Illinois Press 2001), p.14. 26 Ibid. 22

Kaufman’s theme of exploitation and harassment by the authorities in California is continued with a rendition of Guthrie’s homage to ‘Preacher’ Casey, a character from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, who was murdered for becoming a union organiser: Preacher Casey was just a workin' man, And he said, ‘Unite all you working men.’ Killed him in the river some strange man. Was that a vigilante man?27 The conclusion of the presentation discusses the channelling of Guthrie’s anger at the capitalist system. Rather than the music of despair such as Yip Harburg’s ‘Brother can you spare a dime’ or the blinkered patriotism of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’ Guthrie songs reflected his belief that America should be returned to its people. Kaufman to this end concludes with Guthrie’s repudiation of Berlin’s standard, Guthrie’s ‘God Blessed America.’

The original

version of what would become ‘This land is your land’, Kaufman in closing the presentation put on the screen an image of the original handwritten words before performing the song including the normally unused ‘lost lyrics.’ ‘Down in your cities, in the shadow of the steeple, by the relief office, I saw my people and as they stood hungry, I stood there wondering about God Bless America for me?’ 29 Kaufman does much more than simply chart the journey in the ‘space’ of America of the Okie migrants, or present a straightforward biographical journey in time through Guthrie’s life. The true value of his presentation is the sublime manner in which Kaufman threads his narrative of a working class struggle in the face of oppressive capitalism from Joe Hill, through Guthrie, Cunningham and Segar to Dylan and Springsteen. Kaufman in retracing the musical odyssey of radical American protest music demonstrates the often-violent reactionary nature of American twentieth century history. Kaufman’s presentation reveals the horrific levels of violence both mental and physical in the methods used by these reactionary forces. The economic exploitation of the bankers and planters to the murders both fictional and real of Preacher Casey and Joe Hill,

‘Vigilante Man: Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Vigilante_Man.htm> [accessed 20 July 2014]. 28 Sarfraz Manzoor, ‘Woody Guthrie: the authentic voice of America,’ Daily Telegraph, (13 July 2012) < http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/cultural-olympiad/9396054/Woody-Guthrie-the-authenticvoice-of-America.html> [accessed 16 July 2014]. 29 Robert Santelli, This Land Is Your Land, Woody Guthrie and the Journey of an American Folksong, (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2012), p.253.

as Kaufman explains it quoting from Guthrie’s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’, ‘Some will rob you with a sixgun, and some with a fountain pen’.30 Darren Macey 20 July 2014

‘Pretty Big Floyd Words and Music by Woody Guthrie’, Woody Guthrie, <http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Pretty_Boy_Floyd.htm> [accessed 20 July 2014]