Song: “I Ain’t Got No Home”

Artist: Woody Guthrie

Album: Dust Bowl Ballads (1940)

Genre: Folk

Featured image is “Dust Bowl, Cimarron County, Oklahoma,” by Arthur Rothstein (April, 1936)

In the 1930’s, a combination of severe drought and bad farming practices led to the “Dust Bowl,” vast dust storms that devastated large swaths of the American Midwest, already reeling from the Great Depression. Among the thousands of “Okies” who traveled west in a desperate search for work was one Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie.

Guthrie, already a talented musician, eventually found a spot in Los Angeles’s music industry. He made a point to visit migrants living in camps (“Hoovervilles”) throughout California. At one such camp, the story goes, he encountered the folk hymn “Can’t Feel at Home,” which had been recorded by the Carter Family in 1931. “Can’t Feel at Home” traverses territory familiar to so much of American folk music: that this transitory life is a sojourning on the way to our true home in heaven. 

But Guthrie wasn’t having it. Using the same folk idiom and the same theme of homelessness, Guthrie nonetheless bypasses the solace of religion in his “I Ain’t Got No Home.” There may or may not be a world “beyond the blue,” as the Carters sang, but we know for sure that there is trouble in this one. In between harmonica riffs — the harmonica is always weirdly cheerful in a melancholic way — Guthrie’s narrator sings of a world of sharecropping, repossessions, privation.  

And this world has its villains. A “rich man,” likely a banker, took the narrator’s house when the latter couldn’t make payments. As he wanders from place to place seeking employment, the local police give him trouble. Guthrie’s narrator is a working man in a society stacked against working men: “The gambling man is rich /  and the working man is poor.” The American Dream, it turns out, is nothing more than a dream. There is no place for him, never mind how hard he tries. 

In recent weeks, some cultural commentators have drawn parallels between Guthrie and Oliver Anthony’s chart-topping “Rich Men North of Richmond.” Like Guthrie, Anthony has lost faith in the idea that working men can get ahead in this country. His titular ‘rich men,’ however, are those of a particular sort: namely, the inhabitants of Washington, D.C., who tax his dollars (which already “ain’t s–t” due to inflation) and distribute them to obese good-for-nothings presumably in exchange for votes. It’s worth noting here that Anthony’s scorn appears to be bipartisan — he has, for instance, expressed disdain for Republican politicians who have sought to co-opt his breakout hit. 

For Guthrie, though, the problem is even more fundamental. It’s a “great and a funny” world, not in any positive sense, that systematically disadvantages working people in a way that no tax reform would fix. In Guthrie’s world, the owners (of mines, land, capital) win, and the rest lose. Between them a great gulf has been fixed, one that cannot be crossed without (at a minimum) strong labor unions. 

As Marx noted, capitalism’s problem is not a lack of productivity. It’s ridiculously productive. It lifted South Korea, for example, from a medieval farming culture into a highly developed economy in six decades. Capitalism’s problem is that it necessarily creates winners and losers. And by no means are the “losers” stupid or lazy people. Ron Swanson’s famous dictum that “capitalism is God’s way of deciding who is smart and who is poor” is funny, but it’s simplistic and dangerous politics when taken literally. The fact is that market liberalization enriches a society as a whole while leaving behind individuals, sometimes in large numbers. 

Conservatives are suspicious of mass overhauls of the American economic system — and rightly so, given that forced redistributions tend to be disastrous. What they must do, however, is imagine what it’s like to be the “losers.” It might not even be that hard to imagine — very little of what I do for a living, for example, could not be automated with currently existing technologies. Artists like Guthrie can help here, telling the story of earnest and hardworking people whose skills and abilities are, for whatever reason, not in sufficient demand. Markets work, but they do not work for all people at all times. That’s just a fact. To be conservative, as Michael Oakeshott pointed out, is not blind devotion to an ideology; it’s trying to hold on to what is good about a society (with a certain degree of awe that it has come to exist at all) while incrementally and carefully improving what is bad.