Woody Guthrie wrote about the national debt debate in 1940

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Certainly, with all the research I did in putting my book together”Prophet Singer: The Voice and Vision of Woody Guthrie“I have never come across a comment from Woody Guthrie on the debt ceiling.

But he survived the Great Depression and its aftermath. He also witnessed legislators’ efforts to correct the direction in which the nation was moving in the 1930s and early ’40s.

He had much to say about Congress in general and its handling of the national debt in particular.

He once made a folk joke expressing his feelings towards this supposedly exalted body.

“The housewives of the country are always afraid at night, they are afraid that they are a robber in the house. No, my lady, most of you are in the Senate,” he wrote in his regular column for The People’s Daily entitled “Woody Sez”.

Guthrie constantly railed against politicians, both Republican and Democrat, who he felt were representing their own selfish interests and not those of deserving working men and women.

What if he could survey modern-day America? Would his past State of the Union comments suggest he will have anything to say in 2023?

In fact, some of his observations sound like they were written about that political moment – and not his own.

“Hear the chickens laughing”

When Guthrie visited Washington, DC in 1940, he was able to hear some Senate debates and share his thoughts on their effectiveness.

“I heard that the reactionary republicans were in love with the reactionary republicans; also that the Liberal Democrats were in love with the Liberal Democrats. Each presented a brief case of statistics proving that the other brief cases of statistics were wrong, misunderstood, misquoted, mislabeled and mispronounced,” he wrote in his column.

And what were the politicians arguing about back then? The national debt.

Bipartisan legislative efforts Under President Donald Trump, the debt ceiling was raised three times. Now it’s the Republicans in the House of Representatives unless certain conditions are metwhile Democrats want a clean bill with no restrictions.

Guthrie experienced a similar situation in his day. During his visit to Washington, DC, he “listened to senators making speeches – on every topic imaginable, and the way they made their arguments, their polished wit and their subtle maneuvers were all very entertaining.” out just as empty-handed as I went in,” he wrote in Woody Sez.

He then compared their debates to “the hens cackling – and how they run into the coop”. Although the scene was “loud, noisy and very entertaining,” the result was “no balls.”

Also today there is a lot of noise from Congress – but no results.

What could happen if the two sides cannot agree? A telling example was the 2011 bipartisan agreement to raise the debt ceiling came so late that Standard & Poor’s downgraded the rating the country’s creditworthiness – which increased the interest that had to be paid on the US debt.

However, if no agreement is reached, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned that such a crisis could lead to “economic and financial catastrophe“On a national and global level.

Guthrie would find that kind of risk-taking unsettling. Not because he was a political activist and merely had an intellectual understanding of the risks. Instead, he was driven by a personal knowledge of the day-to-day hardships and human toll of such momentous political decisions. His family had already fallen from the secure middle class into abject poverty before the global economic crisis began.

Due to falling farm prices after World War I and his father’s real estate speculation on a few small farms around their hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma, the Guthries could no longer pay their mortgages. They were forced into foreclosure.

Guthrie joked that his father “was the only man in the world who did that.” lost a farm every day for thirty days.”

Foreclosures would probably be just one of them the ruinous effects of a default now, along with interest rate hikes, welfare cuts, rising unemployment and decimating pension plans. They’re all negative results, but that’s for sure hit the poor and the working class The hardest.

These are the people Woody Guthrie has championed throughout his career. These are the people whose plights he lamented in songs like… “I have no home” And “Dust Bowl escapee.”

But he was also optimistic about the power of these people to bring about positive change, as in “Union Maid” And “A better world is coming.” Guthrie said individual and collective action were necessary, and he appreciated both. The union girl would “always get her way when she asks for better pay,” and on “Better World,” he sings, “We’ll all be unionized and we’ll all be free.”

Perhaps his best-known comments on the nation appear in “This country is your country“, with the popular version praising the American landscape. But in his early version of this song, he ended it with his narrator eyeing a line of hungry people lined up “outside the relief office” and then asking, “Was this country made for you and me?”

That question could arise again in 2023: if congressional leaders debating the debt ceiling fail to find common ground for the good of the nation, perhaps someone will challenge them and ask if politicians are for the American people or only in office for themselves as Woody Guthrie would have done.