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“Hey Hey General Mackymacker, Ho, Ho Mr. Lovitt:” Woody Guthrie's Forgotten Dissent From the Atomic Bomb to the Korean War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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Woody Guthrie is an American icon best known for his 1940 song “This Land is Your Land” which has been sung in countless classrooms, political conventions, demonstrations, and even at the Obama presidential inaugural. Sometimes forgotten is the fact that the song, written in response to Irving Berlin's “God Bless America,” has a subversive message in paying tribute to public rather than private ownership of land and property and in its striving for social equality. Woody was a radical whose worldview was forged by the poverty he witnessed growing up in rural Oklahoma during the 1910s and by the Sooner Socialist Party, the second largest in the country outside of New York City. His music celebrated working class struggles and condemned oppressive institutions and authority. Drawing on the legacy of Joe Hill, whose music inspired the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he was active in the popular front of the 1930s, a radical social democratic movement promoted by the Communist Party and forged around anti-fascism, anti-lynching, and the industrial unionism of the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO).
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1 Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011); Ronald D. Cohen, “Woody the Red?” In Hard Travelin': The Life and Legacy of Woody Guthrie, ed. Robert Santelli and Emily Davidson (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 140.
2 Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical, 55, 56.
3 Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical, 92, 96. During his time in the Merchant Marines, Woody wrote an ode to the National Maritime Union (NMU), the country's most radical union.
4 Figures in Lawrence S. Wittner, One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Bruce Stokes, “70 Years After Hiroshima, Opinions Have Shifted on Use of Atomic Bomb,” Pew Research Center, August 4, 2015. 56 percent of Americans in 2015 said the dropping of the atomic bomb was justified, compared to only 14 percent of Japanese.
5 Pvt. W.W. Woody Guthrie, 3505th AAFBU, Squadron L, “What Kind of Bomb?” September 8, 1945, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
6 Woody Guthrie, “Talkin' Atom Bomb,” date unknown but thought to be 1947, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
7 On the antinuclear movement, see Wittner, One World or None.
8 “World's On Fire,” Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Jay Farrar.
9 Woody Guthrie, “Chiang Kai Chek,” July 3, 1946; and “Shy Yang Kye Check,” Undated, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma. © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
10 Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical; Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004); and Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (New York: Delta, 1980). Mark Allan Jackson provides an analysis of many of Woody's songs in Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007) but neglects discussion of his anti-Korean War songs.
11 Woody Guthrie, “Bye, Bye Big Brass,” 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
12 See Dick Wiessman, Talkin' ‘Bout a Revolution: Music and Social Change in America (New York: Backbeat Books, 2010); Ronald D. Lankford, Jr. Folk Music USA: The Changing Voice of Protest (New York: Schirmer Books, 2005), 18, 19, 20.
13 Ivan M. Tribe, “Purple Hearts, Heartbreak Ridge, and Korean Mud: Pain, Patriotism and Faith in the 1950-1953 ‘Police Action‘” in Country Music Goes to War, ed. Charles K. Wolfe and James E. Akenson (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), 128, 130.
14 In Woody's home state, in the month after the Korean War broke out, Senator Robert S. Kerr was inundated with letters demanding that he “get rid of all the communists before it was too late” and “get rid of [Secretary of State Dean] Acheson and every other red in the employment in our great country.” Another letter specified that “no person who was a communist had any rights the country should respect,” and another that Kerr should cooperate with the FBI in “plac[ing] all the communists in concentration camps like the Japs [sic] in World War II.” Letter from an ordinary housewife, July 31, 1950; letter to Robert S. Kerr; Anthony C. Johnson, letter to Robert S. Kerr in Robert S. Kerr Collection, Box 5; Robert S. Kerr Papers, Carl Albert Center, Oklahoma University.
15 See Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1999); Daniel Horowitz, Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); John Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (New York: Octagon Books, 1971), 275.
16 See Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (University of Illinois press, 2013, reissued); Smedley Butler, War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America's Most Decorated Soldier (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003).
17 Gibbs M. Smith, Joe Hill (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Books, 1984), 36, 37. The last song Hill wrote, a day before his execution, “Don't Take Papa Away From Me” sentimentally depicts the orphaning of a little girl as her father goes off to war and is killed – mid the cannons roar.“
18 Woody Guthrie, “Korea Bye Bye,” November 1952, Topanga Canyon, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
19 Woody Guthrie, “I Don't Want Korea,” 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
20 Cray, Ramblin' Man, 306. Cray writes that “the longer the Cold War wore on, the more his lyrics hardened into polemic. Only rarely did he equal his earlier poetry.”
21 Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians: From the 20th to the 21st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History, ed. Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B. Young (New York: The New Press, 2010), 160.
22 Woody Guthrie, “Korea Quicksands,” April 1951, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
23 Robert Neff, “Destruction of Han River Bridge,” Korea Times,
24 Woody Guthrie, “Han River Woman,” “Han River Blues,” “Han River Blood;” “Han River Mud,” December 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
25 Woody Guthrie, “Thirty Eighth Parallel,” March 19, 1951, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
26 “Korea Ain't My Home,” December 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
27 Woody Guthrie, “Korean Blues,” December 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
28 Woody Guthrie, “Mr. Sickyman Ree,” November 1952, Topanga Canyon, California, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission; Woody Guthrie, “Jeep in the Mud,” November 1952. Also Woody Guthrie, “Han River Woman,” Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
29 See Frank Kofsky, The War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996); Jeremy Kuzmarov and John Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). Lovett had been an executive with Brown, Brothers, Harriman, a company founded by Averill Harriman, the director of the Marshall Plan which had taken on one of Hitler's top financiers as a client.
30 Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 340-41; A.H. Raskin, “U.S. Arms Being Produced at 7 Times Pre-Korean Rate,” New York Times, June 25, 1952; “McDonnell Backlog Climbs Steeply,” Aviation Week, October 16, 1950; “Industry Poised for All-Out Mobilization,” Aviation Week, December 11, 1950, 13-14; William D. Hartung, Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (New York: The Nation Books, 2011); Kai Frederickson, Cold War Dixie: Militarization and Modernization in the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013).
31 Woody Guthrie, “Korean War Tank,” November 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
32 Woody Guthrie, “Han River Woman,” November 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
33 E.F. Bullene, “Wonder Weapon: Napalm,” U.S. Army Combat Forces Journal, November 1952; Earle J. Townsend, “They Don't Like ‘Hell Bombs‘” Washington Armed Forces Chemical Association, January 1951; Robert M. Neer, Napalm: An American Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). Napalm was developed by Harvard scientists encompassing napthenate and coconut palm added to gasoline at the end of World War II.
34 Andrew Salmon, Scorched Earth, Black Snow: Britain and Australia in the Korean War (London: Aurum, 2011), 223-225.
35 Malvina Reynolds, “Napalm.” The song was set to the tune of another Woody Guthrie song, “Slipknot.”
36 Woody Guthrie, “Talking Korea Blues,” 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma. © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
37 Woody Guthrie, “Hey General Mackymacker,” New York City, 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma. © Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
38 For background on Joe McDonald and the song, see Doug Bradley and Craig Warner, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).
39 Phil Ochs' “I Ain't Marching Anymore,” Elektra Records, 1965. On Och's career, see Michael Schumacher, There But for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs (New York: Hyperion, 1996).
40 Allen Winkler, “To Everything There is a Season,:” Pete Seeger and the Power of Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 125-126.
41 See Mary Sperling McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978).
42 Ronald D. Cohen and Will Kaufman skip over the Korean War in Singing for Peace: Antiwar Songs in American History (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015). The archival documents at the Woody Guthrie museum do not indicate when and where Woody might have sung these songs.
43 C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (New York: Ballantine Books, 1960), 89. On Mills' career and influence on the New Left, see Stanley Aronowitz, Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
44 “Korean War Lullaby”. For a profile of Fast, see Gerald Sorin, Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
45 Against the Beast: A Documentary History of American Opposition to Empire, ed. John Nichols (New York: Nation Books, 2004), 231; Paul Robeson, “Denounce the Korean Intervention,” June 28, 1950 in If We Must Die: African American Voices on War and Peace, ed. Kristen L. Stanford (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 191-192; Paul Robeson Speaks, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1987), 297. Robeson paid a great price for his outspokenness as recording companies began refusing to issue his records or record new ones and concert halls and theatres became closed to him. His income dropped from a high of over $100,000 (equal to around $1.1 million in 2016 U.S. dollars) in 1941 to about $6,000 (equal to around $54,000 in 2016 U.S. dollars) in 1952.
46 Woody Guthrie, “Bye Bye Big Brass,” November 1952, Woody Guthrie Archive, Tulsa, Oklahoma @ Woody Guthrie Publications Inc. All rights reserved. Used by Permission.
47 See Burchett: Reporting the Other Side of the World, 1939-1983, ed. Ben Kiernan (London: Quartet Books, 1986); Tom Heenan, From Traveler to Traitor: The Life of Wilfred Burchett (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006); Wilfred Burchett, This Monstrous War (Melbourne: J. Waters, 1953).
48 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (New York: Anchor Books, 1969); Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970); Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & 70s, ed. Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle (New York: Routeledge, 2002).
49 Hank Reineke, Arlo Guthrie: The Warner Reprise Years (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2012), 6, 12; Braudy, “As Arlo Guthrie Sees It;” Spencer Kornhaber, “‘Alice's Restaurant’ an Undying Thanksgiving Protest Song,” The Atlantic, November 23, 2016.
50 See here.
51 Reineke, Arlo Guthrie, 108, 109.
52 See Kuzmarov and Marciano, The Russians are Coming, Again for a thorough rebuttal of John L. Gaddis, the conservative historian who draws the opposite and wrong conclusion in his Council on Foreign Relations (Wall Street's think tank) sponsored book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
53 For further corroboration, see The Chomsky Reader, ed. James Peck (New York: Pantheon, 1987); Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World (New York: Pantheon, 1990); Alfred W. McCoy, In the Shadows of the American Century (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).
54 See Rennie Davis, The New Humanity: A Movement to Change the World (Las Vegas: Bliss Life Press, 2017).
55 The 170 figure comes from K.K. Rebecca Lai, Troy Griggs, Max Fisher and Audrey Carlsen, “Is America's Military Big Enough?” The New York Times, March 22, 2017.
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