Woody Guthrie's Anti-Fascist America

Woody Guthrie's guitar with inscription. Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle

The Trump administration has been pressuring the Smithsonian museums to mark the nation's 250th anniversary with exhibitions of "unifying" history. One of the few museums outside of DC to venture a large 250th anniversary show is the Huntington, with "This Land Is…," a sprawling survey of American history. It comes with a twist, featuring in title and content the American folk singer—and earliest Trump critic?—Woody Guthrie.

The singer's beef was with the Trump patriarch, Fred Trump. From 1950 to 1953 Guthrie and family lived in Beach Haven Place, a Brooklyn apartment owned by the elder Trump. In letters Guthrie complained about the apartment and its policy of not renting to Blacks. This led to a song, "Beach Haven Place Hate" ("I suppose Old Man Trump knows/Just how much racial hate he stirred up/In the bloodspot of human hearts.") Donald Trump first came to media attention defending his father's exclusionary policies in a 1973 suit filed by the Department of Justice. 

Lester Balog photograph of Woody Guthrie. Woody Guthrie Archive

The title of the Huntington show, "This Land Is…", alludes of course to Guthrie's best-known song, "This Land Is Your Land" (1940). The exhibition's Guthrie material is sourced from the Woody Guthrie Center, Tulsa, and the Museum of Pop Culture, Seattle. On view will be the only surviving Guthrie guitar inscribed with his trademark incantation, "This Machine Kills Facists." Carved into the back of the instrument, the inscription is barely visible. Another of Guthrie's guitars had the words painted on the front in large letters. That guitar ended up in a Greenwich Village repair shop, where the owner refurbished the instrument and sanded off the words.

Guthrie was a self-taught painter, and the exhibition will have his portrait of George Washington.

Also on view at the Huntington will be two annotated copies of the July 1776 Declaration of Independence broadside; Washington's survey of Mount Vernon; documents of the Walking Purchase, Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Civil War, Reconstruction, and Japanese-American internment; literary material relating to land by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Thomas Pynchon, and Octavia Butler.

 "This Land Is…" will be in the Boone Gallery June 14, 2026, through Jan. 11, 2027.

Timothy O'Sullivan, Ancient Ruins in the Canon de Chelle, N.M., 1873