Rhetorical Analysis

“Your art is not a political weapon. Yet much of what you do is profoundly political.” -Lyndon B. Johnson

In a fit of patriotic zeal, Woody Guthrie famously scrawled the words “This Machine Kills Fascists” onto his guitar. The “machine” he was referring to, was his music, and the “fascists” he was defying, were the political and cultural power brokers he believed were out to conquer society. What Guthrie was alluding to however, was the notion that music, at its core, was a reflection of political and societal realties and to that effect, had the capacity to reshape the world.
Though the use of music as a tool for expressing political rhetoric was by no means a new concept, its primary purpose was to serve as a means of reinforcing …show more content…
Along with the Soviet Union, the United States was the undeniable victor of the Cold War, and as Winston Churchill phrased it, “America [stood] at the summit of the world”. The spoils of the war were reflected in all elements of American life; the rush to suburbanize, the explosion of mass consumerism, the sense of unwavering optimism, the development of the nuclear family, and the rise of the middle class. Immigrants began to reap the rewards that their “whiteness” bestowed, and serious racial rifts were obscured by America’s professed commitment to the Civil Rights movement (Ostertag). This apparent domestic stability however stood in stark contrast to the events unfolding on the international stage. Since the end of World War II, the “capitalist” United States was engulfed in a fierce ideological battle with the “communist” Soviet Union. As the former allied nations rushed to assert their respective claims as global hegemons in the post-War world, the Cold War, a forty-five year state of political and military tension, began. The Soviet Union, rapidly established pro-Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, rebuilt its military, and stockpiled weapons to counter America’s military might, thus sparking a nuclear arms race. Nikita Khrushchev and Dwight Eisenhower, leaders of the Soviet Union and the …show more content…
Although the Cuban Missile Crisis was still years away and nuclear hysteria had not yet seized American’s collective imagination, songs in the fifties began exploring Cold War atomic themes. Country music specifically, adapted a romanticized perception of the bomb, elevating it to a “political symbol of freedom almost equal to the eagle or the flag” (Edmondson). In an age of conservatism, even more common was the tendency to blur the line between religion and war, equating the notion of an impending nuclear Holocaust, to that of God’s nuclear capacity (Clark). More often than not, the bomb was seen as a source of moral obligation that God chose to bestow America with; it was our responsibility to use it to cleanse the world of evil, or more precisely, Communism. This was apparent in “Advice to Joe” (1951), Roy Acuff’s scathing harangue to Joseph Stalin, warning the leader to surrender lest he incur God’s wrath. In the opening refrain of the piece, Acuff tells Stalin that he “will see the lightning flashin’/hear atomic thunder roll” and when his sins catch up to him for “God to have mercy on his soul”. He then follows, proclaiming, “[Uncle Sam] will make a noose to fit [Stalin] to which “God will close up heaven’s door”. By the equating of Stalin to Satan, the song relays the general societal belief that God endowed the United States with the bomb to carry

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