Phil d'Conch says: The Western tribes the Anglos displaced didn't exist when the Pilgrims landed.

Correct. They were removed from the Eastern States by the British and later by the Americans. I didn't learn about the Trail of Tears removal of tribes when I was in school in the 1950s and 1960s. We were just beginning to learn the Native American side of the story of the settling of the United States. We think of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee people as tribes of the West, but they were all "transported" on foot from the Southeast.

Raedwulf, Martin Van Buren, the 8th U.S. President, was elected in 1836. He was the first U.S. President not of British ancestry. And note that he served only one term. Surnames are one obvious but not totally accurate way of guessing the ancestry of people, and a look at the names of the Members of Congress in the 19th Century will bring up very few names that aren't English. Of course, there are exceptions. But in general, the rule in the US until 1950 was that people did not marry or even associate with people outside their own ethnic group.

I certainly wouldn't call Woody Guthrie a saint, but he wrote good songs and he had a heart for the common people. Did he have the prejudices of his age against Black and Native American people? Probably so. Heck, he was born in Oklahoma in 1912. His father was a real estate wheeler-dealer, sometimes wealthy and sometimes impoverished. Woody was married three times and fathered eight children, and it didn't seem like he spent much of his time living with his family. During the Dust Bowl days, he left his wife and three children in Oklahoma and moved to Los Angeles, where he made some famous friends and had a fairly successful radio program. He didn't stay in jobs or homes very long. I'm not all that sure that I would like the man - and it's kind of unclear whether there was anybody who actually liked him very much. It does seem like his second wife, Marjorie, was far more loyal to him than he deserved. They met in 1942 and she cared for him until he died in 1967 at the age of 55 - even though he had left Marjorie and married a younger woman.

No doubt, he was a scoundrel; but he was a good performer and he wrote good songs. And to my mind, "This Land Is Your Land" is a nearly perfect song. While Woody certainly had prejudices and faults, I believe that the song itself rises above all that and that it is truly inclusive, with no asterisks or exceptions.

-Joe-