The Political World of Bob Dylan

Freedom and Justice, Power and Sin

Jeff Taylor, Chad Israelson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137477477
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This work illuminates, identifies, and characterizes the influences and expressions of Bob Dylan's Political World throughout his life and career. An approach nearly as unique as the singer himself, the authors attempt to remove Dylan from the typical Left/Right paradigm and place him into a broader and deeper context.

CHAPTER 1

Bob Dylan’s Roots and Traditional World

From a purely statistical standpoint, Bob Dylan—Jewish and hailing from Minnesota’s Iron Range—should reliably vote Democratic. Loath to have labels put upon him, his political outlook cannot be reduced to statistics. Dylan’s political world has proved too broad and independent to be classified simply as left or right, conservative or liberal, though he has often been assumed to be decidedly leftist. His political outlook is partly derived from the atmosphere of his home state and partly from his religious upbringing. Placed into those two cultures by birth, Dylan melded what he learned from them with traditional American ideals and roots music. His appreciation for the ideals of an America rooted in the past, a powerful sense of the sacred, and identification with the underdog coalesced into a belief system that transcended contemporary politics. This combination intermingled in the fertile and artistic mind of a sensitive young man and reappeared consistently over the years.

Upon his arrival in New York in January of 1961, Bob Dylan created a persona separate from his actual background. Whether that meant emulating Woody Guthrie, changing his name, or creating a false adventure-filled past, he desired to fulfill a vision of greatness that existed within him from a very early age. However, a pseudonym, a phony back story, and misleading comments in an interview did not divorce Dylan from the culture that shaped him. One of his great talents as a songwriter has been the ability to apply his influences. In nearly every biography or interview about Dylan, someone who knew him in Greenwich Village refers to him as a “sponge” due to his ability to absorb the culture around him. They use the term to explain Dylan’s immersion in the culture and music of the folk scene, but he had already begun the process of assimilating nearly everything around him. Though his career began in New York, it was neither Dylan’s home nor his background. Bob Dylan’s roots lie to the north and west, in a small Minnesota mining town with an even smaller Jewish community.

Political Culture

The culture of Dylan’s home state still retains the influences of its early European settlers. In the 1850s, when Minnesota achieved statehood, the greatest number of white immigrants came from New York and New England. These immigrants were referred to as Old Stock Americans, Yankees, or Yorkers. They transmitted to Minnesota their Puritan heritage, which originated in Massachusetts. David Hackett Fischer and Daniel J. Elazar, among others, have noted the strong cultural connection between Minnesota and New England. Fischer’s Albion’s Seed lays out four cultural ways prevalent in the United States, all tracing their roots to a group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British Isles immigrants: Puritans, Cavaliers, Quakers, and Backcountry. According to Fischer, even though new groups moved in, merged with and influenced American culture, these four remained dominant and spread across the nation. Although Fischer has received criticism for painting with too broad a brush, nonetheless his analysis has merit.

The Puritan culture mandated a lifestyle built on a sober, hardworking citizenry. “Yankee idealism,” a notion that expressed faith in government as an instrument of protecting the public good, was transmitted across the northern tier of America.¹ These Yankees advocated participatory politics and placed an emphasis on education. The Puritan influence in Minnesota remains present today in leftover Blue Law restrictions that mandate, for example, that liquor stores stay closed on Sunday.

In political scientist Daniel Elazar’s analysis, the dominant political cultures in states such as Minnesota and Massachusetts are identified as “moralistic.” States or regions that embody this type of political culture cling to a sense that power should be used for society’s improvement. Thus, when political power is exerted, it should be for the purpose of pursuing justice, civic betterment, or similar activities. Elazar linked the moralistic culture to areas populated by large numbers of Yankees, Scotch, Dutch, Scandinavians, and Jews.² The desire for community enhancement makes Minnesotans acutely attuned to human shortcomings, and in their attempt to overcome them, Minnesotans are prone to “issuing jeremiads . . . commentaries on the weakness of their society.”³ Dylan has denied repeatedly that he is any sort of political figure and that politics can affect real change in the world. Although he has never claimed to have answers, frequently in both songs and interviews he has pointed out the failings manifest in society. Less a crusading reformer or political activist than a social critic, Dylan’s pronouncements have the ring of an individual raised in a region accustomed to striving for civic improvement.

Puritans stressed hard work, humility, and a strict adherence to biblical law. During the English Civil War, they generally pitted themselves against the landed gentry. The Puritans came to America as one of the most egalitarian groups of colonists and were “suspicious of inherited privilege and the conspicuous display of wealth.”⁴ Dylan consistently acknowledged the corrupting influence that the concentration of economic power brought and despite his vast wealth, seemed to grapple internally with reconciling the two.

The Puritan sense of freedom and justice originated in their religious beliefs and obedience to God’s will via the Covenant. They emphasized predestination, adherence to Old Testament laws, and the concept of original sin. In New England, the Puritans sought to make a “city on the hill” or a “New Israel” as a model for a sinful world. Dylan consistently paralleled this discontent with a society he viewed as corrupt, wayward, or empty. His 1989 song “Everything Is Broken” addressed a variation of a world gone wrong—which also happened to be the title of his 1993 folk covers album.

To the Puritans, allowing heretical beliefs such as witchcraft to exist among them threatened to incite God’s wrath on the entire community. This notion of collective guilt caused early New Englanders to fear the potentially damaging consequences of “otherness.”⁵ That created an atmosphere that exerted pressure to conform and fostered suspicion of outsiders. That attitude found its way into Minnesota, a state known both for its “niceness” and for its stoic aloofness, which is notoriously hard for newcomers to penetrate.

In Minnesota, the population centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul dominate the attention and often the politics of the state. In the Minnesotan lexicon, Minneapolis and St. Paul along with their suburbs are called “the Cities.” Everything outside this metro region is considered “outstate,” and just about anything north of the Twin Cities is “up north.” Bob Dylan did not just come from “up north”; he was raised on the ore-rich Iron Range. This is a distinct region within the state and stands apart geographically and culturally from Minnesota’s seat of power. “The Range,” as it is commonly known, has produced billions of dollars worth of iron ore that has benefitted the entire state. Despite its essential contributions to Minnesota’s economy, the Iron Range has been overlooked politically and has only seen one of its politicians ascend to the governorship—Hibbing’s Rudy Perpich. The region’s uniqueness has been summed up as a “frontier melting pot mixed with the fierce pride of the people [which] has brewed a certain mystique on the Iron Range that has always been difficult for outsiders—even fellow Minnesotans—to understand.”⁶

During the twentieth century, Minnesota’s largest three immigrant groups—Swedes, Norwegians, and Germans—comprised the majority of the ethnicities found in the state. For most of the state’s history, the Iron Range and Duluth, a harbor city roughly an hour from Hibbing, encompassed Minnesota’s most diverse locale outside the Twin Cities. The Range’s population consisted of Italians, Irish, Poles, Finns, and a variety of Eastern Europeans—to which Dylan and his relatives belonged. All told, thirty-five “sufficient sized” ethnic groups and a few members “from a handful more” found a home on the Iron Range.⁷

In the late nineteenth century, Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in Duluth and the Iron Range. Overall, the state’s religious distribution remained nearly as homogenous as its ethnic groupings. The vast majority of Scandinavians and many of the Germans were Lutherans, though a sizable number of Germans practiced Catholicism. Other Protestant denominations were represented across the state as well. Minnesota housed a small Jewish contingent, less than 1 percent of the state’s population, generally clustered in the Twin Cities, Duluth, and the Iron Range.⁸ During the early to mid-twentieth century, the Iron Range housed four synagogues, one of them in Hibbing. Especially as he grew older, Dylan has acknowledged the degree to which his experiences growing up on the Iron Range impacted him.

Throughout its history, Minnesota’s political tradition has boasted a strong independent streak and voters have expressed their willingness to diverge from major parties. In the late nineteenth century, the People’s (“Populist”) Party garnered strong support among farmers, workers, and those who sympathized with them in Minnesota and other Midwestern states. Primarily a reaction against economic hardship and corporate power, populism concerned itself with the plight of the “little guy” oppressed by a system rigged against him.

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, populism’s strength reached its pinnacle. The presidential election of 1892 was the high-water mark for the Populist Party on a national scale and its candidate, James Weaver, finished second in Minnesota behind Republican Benjamin Harrison. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota wrote the preamble to the Populist Party’s platform. In 1912, former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, who ran as a Progressive, won the state over both Woodrow Wilson and President William Howard Taft. In addition, Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs received the most popular votes from two of Minnesota’s northern counties. In 1924, Independent candidate Robert La Follette, from neighboring Wisconsin and a torchbearer of populist sentiment, finished second to Republican Calvin Coolidge, but received roughly six times the votes of Democratic candidate John Davis.⁹

Minnesota’s populist heritage, its independent streak, and the country’s economic woes converged in the 1930s. When the Great Depression hit, a new political force formed, the Farmer-Labor Party. It was similar in scope and sentiment to North Dakota’s Nonpartisan League and other independent or populist organizations. In Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party combined the Populist Party’s base of agriculture with the mining and manufacturing workers of the Twin Cities and Iron Range. The Farmer-Labor Party won gubernatorial races in 1930, 1934, and 1936 when their dominance seemed so complete that the Democratic Party did not even run a candidate. By the 1940s, the third party’s profile was high, but its electoral success waned and it merged with the Democrats. This created an entity unique to Minnesota, a party called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL).¹⁰

Minnesota voters’ willingness to support candidates outside of Democrats and Republicans sustained throughout the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In 1998, Minnesota gained national attention by again sending a third-party candidate to the governor’s mansion. In this case, former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura, who ran as a member of the Reform Party, won the office. In national elections, third-party candidates such as John Anderson (1980), Ross Perot (1992 and 1996) and Ralph Nader (1996, 2000, and 2004) did better in Minnesota than their national averages (roughly two percentage points higher for Anderson and Nader’s 2000 bid and five points for Perot in 1992).

The economic realities of the Iron Range helped to shape its political leanings as well. Not exactly urban, it is different from typical rural areas also. General attitudes on the Range demonstrate a population somewhat socially conservative but economically liberal, and who tends to vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Iron Range political stances have been branded a “quasi Libertarian brand of Democrat.”¹¹ In every presidential election since World War II, essentially when Dylan’s family moved to Hibbing, Democratic candidates far outpolled Republicans—generally by a two-to-one margin. Even in contests that were national blowouts, such as 1972 when Richard Nixon defeated George McGovern, St. Louis County (which includes Duluth and much of the Mesabi Range) turned out for the Democrat 3:2. Incidentally, in that same election, perennial Communist candidate and Iron Range native Gus Hall received his highest vote total in the entire state from St. L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1  Bob Dylan’s Roots and Traditional World
• Chapter 2  Voice of a Generation
• Chapter 3  Freedom and Justice
• Chapter 4  Conversion and Culture
• Chapter 5  Christian Anarchism
• Chapter 6  Dylan and the Jesus People
• Chapter 7  Dylanesque Politics in the Real World
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index