Walk into any guitar shop today and you’ll likely see it. A small, black-and-white sticker slapped onto the body of a beat-up acoustic. Five words. "This Machine Kills Fascists." It’s become a bit of a cliché, hasn’t it? You see it on laptops in Brooklyn coffee shops and on the back of Subarus in Portland. It's almost easy to forget that when Woody Guthrie this machine kills first became a thing, it wasn't a fashion statement. It was a threat. Or maybe a promise.
Honestly, the story behind it is way more interesting than the bumper sticker version. People think Woody was just being poetic. They think he was using "machine" as some flowery metaphor for the soul of music.
Nah. He was being literal.
Where the Hell Did It Come From?
It’s 1941. The world is a mess. Hitler is tearing through Europe, and back home in the States, the "America First" crowd is busy trying to stay out of the fight. Woody Guthrie, a guy who had spent the last decade watching the Dust Bowl swallow the Midwest and seeing "Okies" get treated like dirt in California, wasn't about to stay quiet.
He didn't actually invent the phrase.
Most historians, including the folks over at the Smithsonian, point toward the war effort. Thousands of American workers were manning lathes and industrial presses in factories, churning out the steel that would eventually end up in Normandy. Some of those workers—guys who were probably just as fed up as Woody—started scrawling "This Machine Kills Fascists" onto their actual machines. Their lathes. Their drills.
Woody saw that and thought, Yeah, that’s it.
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He grabbed a brush and some paint (or a sticker, depending on which guitar you’re looking at in the archives) and emblazoned it across his Gibson. To him, the guitar was a piece of industrial equipment. It was a tool designed to produce a specific outcome: the destruction of an ideology he hated.
The Guitar as a Weapon
You've probably heard the song "Tear the Fascists Down." If you haven't, go find the 1944 recording. It’s raw. It’s not "This Land Is Your Land" with the campfire vibes. It’s a war song.
Woody’s logic was basically this: Fascism relies on people feeling small, disconnected, and hopeless. It needs you to believe that you’re just a cog and the guy next to you is your enemy.
Music—at least the kind Woody played—does the opposite.
He saw his guitar as a device that could "kill" the spirit of fascism before it even took root. By singing about labor rights, racial equality, and the common man, he was sabotaging the machinery of hate. He wasn't just entertaining people; he was trying to re-wire their brains.
Why 1943 Was the Turning Point
A lot of people forget that Woody actually joined the Merchant Marine during the war. He wasn't just sitting in New York cafes. He was on ships that got torpedoed. He was out there.
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There’s a famous photo taken by Al Aumuller in March 1943. It shows Woody sitting with his guitar, looking right at the camera. The sign is right there, impossible to miss. This wasn't some subtle "inner peace" message. This was a man whose friends were dying in a global conflict. He was justifying his existence as an artist. If he wasn't carrying a Thompson submachine gun, he was going to make damn sure his guitar worked just as hard.
What People Get Wrong About Woody
There’s a lot of revisionist history when it comes to the Woody Guthrie this machine kills legacy.
Some people try to sanitize him. They want him to be this cuddly "Father of American Folk" who just loved nature.
The truth is way messier. Woody was a radical. He was deeply connected to the Communist Party (though he famously said he wasn't a member because they "wouldn't have him"). He had a complicated relationship with the Soviet Union, especially during the Hitler-Stalin pact years. When the pact was on, he sang songs about staying out of the war. When the pact broke, he became the ultimate anti-fascist.
It’s okay to admit he was a complex, flawed human being. That’s what makes the message on the guitar more real. It wasn't written by a saint; it was written by a guy who saw the world as a battlefield and chose his side.
The Legacy (and the Copycats)
Since Woody passed in 1967, that slogan has gone everywhere.
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- Pete Seeger put "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender" on his banjo. A bit more wordy, very Pete.
- Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine has "Arm the Homeless" on his guitar.
- Joe Strummer of The Clash had "This Guitar Kills Fascists" on his Telecaster.
But here's the thing: slapping a sticker on your laptop doesn't make it a "machine" in the Guthrie sense unless you’re actually using it to do the work.
Woody’s machine worked because he took it to the front lines. He took it to the picket lines. He took it to the migrant camps where people were starving. The "killing" happened in the moments of solidarity those songs created.
How to Actually Use the "Machine" Today
If you’re going to invoke the spirit of Woody Guthrie this machine kills, you sort of have to buy into his philosophy. It wasn't about being "edgy."
It was about utility.
- Focus on the "Work": Don't just perform the aesthetics of rebellion. Woody wrote over 3,000 songs. He was a worker. If your "machine" is a camera, a keyboard, or a paintbrush, use it to document something real.
- Speak to the "Common" Person: Woody didn't write for the elites. He wrote for the people who felt like the world was closing in on them.
- Understand the Enemy: For Woody, fascism wasn't just a political party. It was greed. It was racism. It was anything that tried to "rob the world," as he put it.
The machine only works if you turn it on.
If you want to dive deeper into this, the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa has the original archives. They have the notebooks where he scribbled these ideas down in real-time. It’s worth a look if you’re ever in Oklahoma. Seeing the actual handwriting makes the whole "machine" concept feel a lot less like a brand and a lot more like a lifestyle.
Your next move? Dig up the 1944 "Asch Recordings." Listen to them without the modern polish. You’ll hear exactly why that guitar was a threat. Then, figure out what your machine is and what it's supposed to be fighting.