Woody Guthrie is the surprising soundtrack to Trump's Homeland Security vision board

CNN

5 days ago

The Trump administration recently presented a vision for the country's future in song and video.
'The Promise of America is worth Protecting. The Future of our Homeland is worth Defending,' the Department of Homeland Security wrote on X. In the accompanying vintage-filtered montage, families gaze out wondrously at our national parks, Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty stand tall in all their glory, and law enforcement officers salute a horse-carried American flag.
What caught some attention, though, was the music: The video was set to Sam Hunt's country cover of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land.' This version appeared on the soundtrack to 'Bright,' Netflix's 2017 Will Smith-fronted buddy cop movie about orcs and elves.
The Promise of America is worth Protecting. The Future of our Homeland is worth Defending. pic.twitter.com/wkpSvZZlT7 Woody Guthrie fans who know the song's origins as a socialist protest anthem would find the Trump administration's embrace of 'This Land' an odd choice.
Guthrie — a lifelong socialist, anti-capitalist and communist sympathizer — penned 'This Land Is Your Land' in 1940, irritated by what he felt was the blind patriotism of Kate Smith's late '30s hit recording of 'God Bless America.' He was also motivated by the stark poverty and social injustices that he witnessed during his travels throughout the country, as evidenced by the original lyrics that include two verses critiquing widespread hunger and the concept of private property.
'This Land Is Your Land,' was not — as it's often understood today — a paean to the country's natural beauty, said Will Kaufman, author of 'Woody Guthrie, American Radical' and two other books on the artist.
'Woody is writing about a different America,' he told CNN. 'He's writing about cops and vigilantes and barbed wire and bread lines.'
CNN reached out to ask if the government was aware of the song's radical roots and history. DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin answered in a statement that read, in part: 'Loving America may be a radical or foreign concept for CNN, in fact we're quite confident it is.'
The song's final two verses weren't frequently reprinted nor did they make it to the more circulated recording of the song, Kaufman said. Over the years, as the shortened version made its way to elementary school classrooms and the greater national consciousness, it became increasingly divorced from its beginnings. (To that end, when Guthrie was honored by the US Department of the Interior in 1966, Kaufman said the artist's friend Irwin Silber retorted that 'they've taken a revolutionary and turned him into an environmentalist!')
Though the more political verses made a resurgence in the 1960s and have been performed by such artists as Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger, 'This Land Is Your Land' is now embraced by both liberals and conservatives. It's also worth noting that many Indigenous people understand it to be a celebration of the dispossession of Native American lands.
It's unclear whether Woody Guthrie's estate is aware of the recent DHS video that uses 'This Land.' His daughter Nora Guthrie and granddaughter Anna Canoni, the stewards of his cultural legacy, did not return requests for comment. While some parties have fought to make the song public domain over the years, his estate has resisted such attempts precisely over fears it would be used in ways he wouldn't wish.
'Our control of this song has nothing to do with financial gain,' Nora Guthrie told The New York Times in a 2016 interview. 'It has to do with protecting it from Donald Trump, protecting it from the Ku Klux Klan, protecting it from all the evil forces out there.'
There's plenty of reason to suspect Guthrie might have revolted at the Trump administration's use of 'This Land Is Your Land.' In his songs and his writings, the folk singer paid tribute to Mexican laborers who died on a deportation flight and criticized an illegal police blockade to keep Dust Bowl migrants out of California, Kaufman writes in 'Woody Guthrie, American Radical.' His guitar bore the inscription 'This Machine Kills Fascists,' and he even railed against Trump's father and his discriminatory housing policies.
'There is a personal venom that Woody Guthrie has for everything that Donald Trump represents,' Kaufman said.
From Beyoncé to Celine Dion to The Rolling Stones, the list of artists who have objected to Trump's use of their work is so long that there's an entire Wikipedia page devoted to the subject. Just last week, Jess Glynne said she felt 'sick' over the White House using her song 'Hold My Hand' in a cruel meme about deporting migrants. And in another recent example, the Thomas Kinkade Foundation denounced DHS for using the artist's painting to promote the administration's immigration crackdown.
'We strongly condemn the sentiment expressed in the post and the deplorable actions that DHS continues to carry out,' the foundation wrote in a statement on its website. 'We stand firmly with our communities who have been threatened and targeted by DHS, especially our immigrant, BIPOC, undocumented, LGBTQ+, and disabled relatives and neighbors.'