#WoodyGuthrie #PeteSeeger

"The Powerful Messages That Woody Guthrie & Pete Seeger Inscribed on Their Guitar & Banjo: 'This Machine Kills Fascists' and 'This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender'

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Guthrie was deeply embedded in the formative racial politics of the country. While some people may convince themselves that a time in the U.S. past was “great”—unmarred by class conflict and racist violence and exploitation, secure in the hands of a benevolent white majority—Guthrie’s life tells a much more complex story. Many Indigenous people feel with good reason that Guthrie’s most famous song, 'The Land is Your Land,' has contributed to nationalist mythology. Others have viewed the song as a Marxist anthem. Like much else about Guthrie, and the country, it’s complicated.

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But whether socialist or populist in nature, Guthrie’s patriotism was always subversive. 'By 1940,' writes John Pietaro, he had 'joined forces with Pete Seeger in the Almanac Singers,' who 'as a group, joined the Communist Party. Woody’s guitar had, by then, been adorned with the hand-painted epitaph, THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS.' (Guthrie had at least two guitars with the slogan scrawled on them, one on a sticker and one with ragged hand-lettering.) The phrase, claims music critic Jonny Whiteside, was originally 'a morale-boosting WWII government slogan printed on stickers that were handed out to defense plant workers.' Guthrie reclaimed the propaganda for folk music’s role in the culture.

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Guthrie’s long-lived brother-in-arms Pete Seeger, carried on in the tradition of anti-fascism and anti-racism after Woody succumbed in the last two decades of his life to Huntington’s disease. Like Guthrie, Seeger painted a slogan around the rim of his instrument of choice, the banjo, a message both playful and militant: 'This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.'

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Both Guthrie and Seeger drew direct connections between the fascism and racism they fought and capitalism’s outsized, destructive obsession with land and money. They felt so strongly about the battle that they wore their messages figuratively on their sleeves and literally on their instruments. Pete Seeger’s famous banjo has outlived its owner, and the colorful legend around it has been mass-produced by Deering Banjos. Where Guthrie’s anti-fascist guitars went off to is anyone’s guess, but if one of them were ever discovered, Robert Santelli writes, 'it surely would become one of America’s most valued folk instruments.' Or one of its most valued instruments in general."

https://www.openculture.com/2026/02/the-powerful-messages-that-woody-guthrie-pete-seeger-inscribed-on-their-instruments.html