Man I never knew that about Guthrie.
Here’s a snip from wiki:
Notwithstanding Guthrie’s later claim that “the best thing that I did in 1936 was to sign up with the Communist Party”,[29] he was never a member of the Party. He was noted as a fellow traveler—an outsider who agreed with the platform of the party while avoiding party discipline.[30] Guthrie wrote a column for the Communist newspaper, People’s World. The column, titled “Woody Sez”, appeared a total of 174 times from May 1939 to January 1940. “Woody Sez” was not explicitly political, but was about current events as observed by Guthrie. He wrote the columns in an exaggerated hillbilly dialect and usually included a small comic.[31] These columns were published posthumously as a collection after Guthrie’s death.[7] Steve Earle said of Guthrie, “I don’t think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times.”[32]
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Yes, it is sad. The guy wrote and sang some uplifting music when the common man really needed it.
But, a lot of people fell for socialist propaganda at that time as they do now. And the people today do not have an economic depression as an excuse.