Woody Guthrie, the iconic protest singer, once turned his pen toward Fred Trump, casting the current Republican front-runner’s father as “Old Man Trump,” according to a new dive into the Woody Guthrie Archives by University of Central Lancashire Professor Will Kaufman.
“I suppose Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate he stirred up,” Guthrie wrote in one of his notebooks.
Kaufman wrote Guthrie once lived in a Trump-owned Brooklyn apartment. Guthrie came to hate the development and the neighborhood for what he viewed as a hostile environment toward people of color — and laid the blame on Trump.
Guthrie lived in Trump’s Beach Haven low-cost public housing unit, an apartment complex backed in part by the Federal Housing Authority. Kaufman wrote the elder Trump embraced the FHA’s guidelines promoting racial segregation, leading an unwitting Guthrie into the “lily-white neighborhood” he would come to loathe.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Guthrie’s hatred for what he saw as purposeful racial exclusion manifested in writings against the Beach Haven neighborhood and his landlord, Fred Trump.
“No, no, no. Old man Trump. Old Beach Haven ain’t my home,” wrote Guthrie in an apparent adaption of his song, “I Ain’t Got No Home.”
Guthrie’s inherently political work, from “This Land is Your Land,” to his guitar bearing the label “This Machine Kills Fascists” made up some of the more iconic elements of the 20th century American protest scene.
Almost 50 years after his death, one can only imagine how he would weigh in on the current crop of candidates, but these new findings show Guthrie counted Donald Trump’s father among the many objects of his scorn.