We’ve Gotten ‘This Land is Your Land’ Wrong All Along

The "land" is not a country.

I've been reading the new Woody Guthrie biography, which is very good, but the thought occurred to me as I was reading it: we've been getting his most famous song wrong for many decades now. Like many other American schoolchildren, I sang “This Land is Your Land” in assemblies, alongside such songs as “America the Beautiful” and “Home on the Range.” Like many other people, I later learned about the song’s “missing verse” – the one about the sign that says “No Trespassing” on one side, but “on the other side it didn't say nothin’/ that side was made for you and me.”

But I still didn't get it, and neither did the country.

Here's why we got the song wrong. Because it talks about the entire American nation, “from California to the New York islands, from the redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters” most of us assumed the song was using the word “land” in the nationalistic sense, as in “fatherland” or “motherland” or “Homeland Security.”

But now I think Woody was using that word, good communist that he was, the same way it was being used by the Latin American and Chinese revolutionaries who were building military and political strength among rural populations. When they dreamed of reclaiming the land, it was not some abstract conception of a Westphalian state with borders and a national anthem. They fought for the land that was physical and real and near to them, the land they touched and smelled and farmed for a living.

A later generation of Latin American revolutionaries would sing “Cuando Tenga La Tierra” – “when I have the land “ – as a utopian vision of farmland that was freely available to all who would care for it and share in what it produces. “Peasant,” the song says, “I’ll put the moon in your pocket when I have the land.” Centuries earlier, the English rebels who resisted the enclosure of common lands had similar visions, songs, and dreams.

I may be wrong, but I'm convinced that Woody Guthrie was singing about that the land in that sense, the land that free people can share and nurture in common. It was made for you and me by whomever or whatever created it. The fencing in of that land, a relatively recent human phenomenon that began in the 14th century, is a violation of creation's natural order.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's words, spoken in a very different context in his Harvard Divinity School address, could be applied to this violent act of enclosure: it is “monster,” it is “not one with the blowing clover or the falling rain.” There should be no fences, no signs. Wherever we walk, from California to New York, the ground beneath our feet should belong to us. I think that’s what Woody was singing about. I think he believed that someday it would.