Thank You Arlo Guthrie

It’s our family tradition to listen to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant on Thanksgiving. The song – released in 1967, as Lyndon Johnson was sending more and more American soldiers to Vietnam – is one of the greatest anti-war anthems of all time. What makes it so effective is its subtlety and humor. The war doesn’t come up until the song (which lasts eighteen and half minutes) is half over. Even then Guthrie doesn’t deal with war directly but instead tells stories about his physical examination at the Army induction center on Whitehall Street in New York City.

The Vietnam War was a terrible a mistake for the United States, something that was evident to anyone who had taken a little time to understand the background of the conflict. I was nineteen when the song was released; but I had read Jean Lacouture’s pertinent history, Vietnam Between Two Truce’s, and the collection of materials in Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall’s The Viet-Nam Reader, as well as Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse’s thoughtful senate speeches about the war. And, of course, I had followed the televised hearings before Senator J. William Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee the preceding year. Anyone who thought the war made sense was not paying attention. Alice’s Restaurant, therefore, spoke powerfully to me when I first listened to it through a pair of headphones attached to a turntable in the Syracuse University library. (A friend had the album, but neither of us owned a record player.)

It still speaks to me. The most important line in the song is this one: “If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud.” Those are words to live by.