The Last Boyscout

Je n'en sais rien avec certitude, mais la vue des étoiles me fait rêver…

"Funny Face" was the mascot of Steeplechase Park in Coney Island. His name was a play on the park’s tagline "Steeplechase—The Funny Place." Here, he gets a fresh coat of paint from Tom “Skippy” Campagna in 1951.

Yes, really.

In 1950, Woody moved to an apartment in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, near Coney Island, called Beach Haven. His landlord was Fred Trump.

Woody didn’t like the place, which he took to calling Bitch Haven. He knew, long before the federal government did, that Trump did not rent his apartments to black people. (In the 1970s, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department finally caught up with him; the case was settled.) In 1954, he wrote a song about Trump’s discriminatory policy:

I suppose Old Man Trump knows Just how much Racial Hate He stirred up In the bloodpot of human hearts When he drawed That color line.

The song was never published or recorded, but was discovered recently by Will Kaufman, a professor of American literature and culture at the University of Central Lancashire, in Britain. Several handwritten drafts of the song—variously titled “Beach Haven Race Hate,” “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home,” and “Old Man Trump”—are now on display at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.

One can only wonder at what Woody would have made of Old Man T’s son. But Woody was an optimist. One reason why his songs are so invigorating is that he believed that progress was possible if human beings took steps to change the world. On a radio broadcast in 1944, he sang this song:

I’m gonna tell you fascists You may be surprised The people in this world Are getting organized You’re bound to lose You fascists bound to lose

Substitute “Trumpites” for “fascists” and you have an anthem for the Resistance.

Musicians on the subway, February 4, 1959.