‘You are the machine that kills hate’: Woody Guthrie’s protest anthems strike a chord with a new generation

‘This could have been written today,’ says the exhibit’s co-curator Bea Esteves Mendez, 19, of listening to Woody Guthrie’s All You Fascists. Photograph: Lester Balog/Courtesy of Woody Guthrie Publications

Bea Esteves Mendez knew as much about Woody Guthrie as most people her age – which is to say, she knew This Land is Your Land – when one of her professors put on a recording of All You Fascists last semester. It’s an upbeat folk anthem written at the height of the second world war that connects the forces of oppression abroad with those, like Jim Crow, that festered at home. “Well I’m a gonna tell you fascists, you may be surprised, people in this world are getting organized,” Guthrie sings, shouts, whoops and whistles in his distinctive Oklahoma twang. “You’re bound to lose. You fascists bound to lose.”

“It was our first time really sitting down to listen to a Woody Guthrie song, and we were like, ‘Wow,’” said Mendez, 19, a sophomore at New York University. “‘This could have been written today.’”