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TROUBADOUR OF 1960S NEW LEFT IS CELEBRATED IN NEW EXHIBIT AT WOODY
GUTHRIE MUSEUM  
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Jeremy Kuzmarov
January 24, 2024
Covert Action Magazine
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_ The Woody Guthrie Museum has done a public service spotlighting
Ochs’s career. Phil Ochs’s biting commentaries remain resonant in
an era where the U.S. government provokes wars overseas and sends
young men to fight and die on dubious grounds. _

Phil Ochs singing at the Festival of Life outside the Democratic
Party National convention in Chicago in late August, 1968, [Source:
Photo Courtesy of Jeremy Kuzmarov, from the Woody Guthrie museum]

 

The Woody Guthrie Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma where I live has opened up
a new exhibition about Phil Ochs, one of the most popular anti-war
folk singers during the 1960s and early 1970s.

The exhibition includes videos of some of Ochs’s performances at
anti-war rallies, along with memorabilia from his shows, posters,
pictures and even a letter to him from Eugene McCarthy, the Senator
from Minnesota who challenged President Lyndon Johnson, and then
Hubert Humphrey, in the 1968 Democratic Party primaries, running on an
anti-war platform.

McCarthy was the choice of many in the youth counterculture after the
assassination of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy following his
victory in the California primary. The field had been broken open when
President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek
re-election because of the failure of his war policy in Vietnam.

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Scene inside 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.

McCarthy asked Ochs to help him in persuading delegates to support him
at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago taking place in
late August, which became perhaps the greatest fiasco in Democratic
Party history.

As the party nominated Humphrey, a Vietnam War hawk who had supported
anti-Communist witch hunts, thousands of young people protested
outside the convention at the Hilton Hotel and were battered by the
police under orders from Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley.

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Cops beating the kids outside 1968 Democratic Party convention in
Chicago.

When Senator Abraham Ribicoff (CT) spoke from the podium and denounced
the use of “Gestapo tactics” by the Chicago police, Mayor Daley
was caught on camera shouting down Ribicoff using an anti-Semitic
slur, exposing the viciousness of the Democratic Party establishment.

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Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley at Democratic Party convention in
Chicago, 1968—a representative of the party’s old guard who was
shown to be a racist bully.

While the Democratic Party was imploding inside the convention hall,
Ochs performed his eloquent anti-war ballads outside.

Ochs’s songs were part of what organizers called a “festival of
life” to counter the “convention of death” that the Democratic
Party had become.

Ochs worked closely with the Yippie leadership, who staged theatrical
protests to highlight some of the absurdities of American politics and
to gain media publicity for left-wing causes.

Ochs’s most famous anti-war song was “I Ain’t Marching
Anymore.” It contextualized the Vietnam War as part of a larger
pattern of unjust U.S. military interventions going back to the Indian
Wars and Mexican-American War when the U.S. had stolen California.
According to Ochs, it was “always the old to lead us to the wars
[but] always the young to fall. Now look at all we’ve won with the
saber and the gun. Tell me, is it worth it all?”

At the time that Ochs sang these words, thousands of young men were
defying the draft and refusing to serve in a war whose lies were
exposed when former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked
the Pentagon Papers—government war-planning documents which pointed
to covert U.S. intervention in Vietnam going back to the 1940s.

Born in El Paso, Texas, Phil Ochs went to a military academy and Ohio
State University before moving to Greenwich Village, New York, in the
early 1960s. There he joined the folk revival scene where he played
with such luminaries as Bob Dylan, Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger.

Woody Guthrie was an inspiration for Ochs, whose songs, like
Guthrie’s, mixed humor with biting social commentary.

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Woody Guthrie

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Joe Hill

Many of Ochs’s songs were in the tradition of the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW), a militant labor union in the early 1900s that
advocated for worker-run industries. In one, Ochs celebrated the life
of Joe Hill, an IWW songwriter who was framed on murder charges in the
State of Utah and executed. Among Hill’s last words were “Don’t
Mourn, Organize!”

The Woody Guthrie Museum exhibition spotlights another tribute that
Ochs sang to William Worthy, an African American journalist and early
opponent of the Vietnam War who was arrested after traveling to Cuba
during the travel ban following the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Ochs’s song raised awareness about Worthy’s case while, in
trademark fashion, ridiculing American foreign policy. Ochs sang that
the only way to Cuba from the U.S. was “through the CIA” which had
orchestrated an exile invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and tried to
assassinate Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro dozens of times.

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William Worthy

One of my favorite Phil Ochs songs is “The Ballad of Billie Sol”
about Lyndon B. Johnson’s financial bagman Billie Sol Estes who went
to prison for 20 years for his involvement in an agricultural fraud in
the State of Texas. Ochs sang:

_Stand tall, Billie Sol, we don’t know you at all,_
_We’ve taken down your pictures from the wall._
_Well, we don’t want to handle an agriculture scandal,_
_We have got to face elections in the fall._

Ochs continued:_ “And now I’d like to say, that crime sure
doesn’t pay,_
_But if you want to make some money on the sly, well you can always
rent the U.S. government, it’s the best one that money can buy.”_

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Billie Sol Estes

Another favorite of mine is Ochs’s 1966 song “Love Me, I’m a
Liberal.” It mocked the pretensions of liberal Democrats of his era
who supported the purge of communists from the AFL-CIO, saw Malcolm X
as a dangerous radical, backed U.S. military intervention in Korea,
and were all for civil rights, that is, until the Blacks and Puerto
Ricans moved next door.

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It is enticing to think about what Ochs would have said about the
hypocrisy of today’s liberals in the age of Russia Gate and
billion-dollar U.S. weapon supplies to Ukraine, which they all
support.

Tragically, Ochs committed suicide in April 1976 at the age of 35. He
had become disillusioned by the political scene in the U.S. with the
demise of the 1960s movement and rise of conservatives and lost his
ability to sing after his vocal cords were damaged when he was
strangled by robbers while traveling in Tanzania.

One of the high watermarks of Ochs’s career featured in the
exhibition was a concert he headlined in 1967 in Los Angeles to
celebrate the end of the Vietnam War—eight years before it actually
ended. A song that Ochs sang was titled “The War Is Over.”

Poster advertising musical celebration of the end of the Vietnam War
in 1967 that Ochs was one of the headliners for.

One of Ochs’s last public performances was at a concert in Central
Park, New York, in May 1975 that celebrated the actual end of the
Vietnam War. Ochs performed with Joan Baez and Peter Yarrow, of Peter,
Paul and Mary, who said that even though the war was finally over,
people should never forget its human tragedy and make sure something
like it never occurred again.

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Joan Baez and Phil Ochs perfmoing in Central Park in concert to
celebrate the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

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Victor Jara

The Woody Guthrie Museum has a copy of Ochs’s diary from a trip that
he made to Chile during the early 1970s when that country’s
government was headed by socialist Salvador Allende, who was
overthrown in a 1973 fascist coup backed by the CIA. Ochs was close
with Chilean folk singer Victor Jara, who embodied his same values.
Tragically, the day after Allende’s government was overthrown, Jara
was taken prisoner by soldiers and, over the next four days, beaten
and tortured, and then murdered in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

The Woody Guthrie Museum has done a great public service by
spotlighting Ochs’s career and introducing his music to younger
generations. Ochs’s biting commentaries remain resonant in an era
where the U.S. government continues to provoke wars overseas and sends
young men to fight and die on dubious grounds. If Ochs were still
around, he would have plenty of material for updates on his classic
songs that are timeless in th
eir content and quality.

J_eremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is
the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s
Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again,
with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How
Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From
Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023)._

_COVERTACTION MAGAZINE and COVERTACTION QUARTERLY are projects
of COVERTACTION INSTITUTE, INC., a not-for-profit organization
incorporated in the State of New York.  When you donate
to CovertAction Magazine, you are supporting investigative
journalism. Your contributions go directly to supporting the
development, production, editing, and dissemination of the Magazine._

* Phil Ochs
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* Woody Guthrie
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* anti-war
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* folk music
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