It pains me to write this because I always admired Pete Seeger, but I have been carrying this for nearly 21 years and I have to get it off my chest. It is the only flaw I am aware of in his otherwise utterly admirable character. He stood up to HUAC, to the FBI, etc., but he could not stand up to black antisemitism.
This happened on Feb. 25, 1993 (the night before the WTC bombing so I could look up the exact date). When my daughter moved to NY in 1989, she joined a group called The Streetsingers, which had been founded by and loosely guided by Pete Seeger. February is Black History month and The Streetsingers were invited by a HS in Brooklyn (I don’t know the name) to participate in an evening dedicated to that. My wife and I were in NY visiting our daughter and she invited us to come along. She said that Seeger would be there too. On the way, we bought a couple of subs for our dinner and figured we could find a nice quiet corner to eat them, since we were getting there an hour before the show started. Someone suggested we go to the teacher’s lounge to eat them which we did. A couple teachers were there and vented over being excluded from the evening’s events because they were Jewish and the blacks didn’t want them. This was the era when Al Sharpton was a political power in the black community in NY. Well Seeger didn’t organize the event and this could not be blamed on him.
What followed can, however. Before the singing (which was in fact the main event of the evening), Seeger stood up and gave a little speech in which he celebrated “all” the ethnic groups that constituted NY: the blacks of course, the Dutch, the Germans, the English, the Irish, and the Hispanics. Not one word about the ethnic group that constituted a quarter of the population of NY, not one.
I wouldn’t be posting this if it was my dentists cousin’s wife who reported this, by I was there and witnessed it.
In May 1941, the Almanac Singers (which included Seeger) released Songs for John Doe, an album opposing the US’s possible entry into WWII. A song from the album: Song for John Doe - YouTube
After the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, apparently opposing fascism had been put on the back burner.
Unfortunately, in July Hitler invaded Mother Russia. The CPUSA did a 180, and now the war was okay. The album was withdrawn, and the company asked people who bought the album to turn it in! In 1942 the Almanac Singers released Dear Mr. President, an album supporting the US’s part in the war.
So Seeger was against war (WWII) before he was for it (WWII) before he was against it (Vietnam).
He inscribed on his banjo head, “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender”. Except for Nazis and the USSR and, as Hari Seldon now reveals, anti-Semites.
I am very sad at the passing of Pete Seeger. I am a member of the environmental organization he founded and has nursed along for 50 years, Clearwater. I was lucky enough to meet him a few times including a sloop club meeting on board the Wavertree at South Street Sea Port in NYC. He had a lot of gravitas in person and it was impossible to dislike him. His concern for the environment and people came through in all he did and said.
I have mostly been an active member in one of the Clearwater Sloop clubs but he had provided the guiding principles for all we do. Working through Festivals and music and education to teach about environmental concerns. Running boat programs to teach an appreciations for our waters and especially our rivers.
We are currently building a new boat and will almost surely be naming it in honor of Pete. This legend was a good man, a great leader and managed to make a real impact in dozens of ways in his long an productive life. He will be sorely be missed.
The one point that he made to counter people who attacked him for being a Communist and therefore a bad American was that a good American is one who uses the laws of the country to try and change the laws in a peaceful way.
He certainly did that and he was a great activist for doing that.
IMHO, Pete Seeger was a truly great American and a great person as well.
To show how much I knew about Pete Seeger and folk music, I thought he was the Peter in Peter, Paul and Mary. But after watching a PBS doc on him the other night, I came away with a new appreciation for the lyrical poetry of his songwriting as well as his life and the way he lived it. Especially the way he stood up to the HUAC, not by invoking the Fifth Amendment but the First. Even in interviews, he refused to answer questions about his affiliation because he had a right to keep it private and not be discriminated for it.
And if ever a statue of Pete Seeger is erected, it should include his wife. They were an inseparable team. I wish now I had paid more attention to them when they were alive.
So though it’s darkest before the dawn
These thoughts keep us moving on–
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrow;
Through all this world of joy and sorrow
We still can have singing tomorrow.
From Pete Seeger's "Quite Early Morning"
As I sat at a great concert by Daniel Boling last night, he asked us all to sing this along with him. And all over the room, people raised their human voices, old and young, clear and cracked, sweet and salty. And we sang together. A great song about hope. What Pete left us.
You should not let your admiration of his music blind you to history. Seeger was a member of the Communist party during the late 1930s to the late 1940s at least. During that time the Kremlin gave orders to the Communist party and good communists followed. Seeger was in a band that recorded anti-war songs after the pact between the USSR and Germany. That album accused FDR of wanting to kill people for the capitalists. As soon as the USSR was invaded they recalled that album and made a pro-war album.
He made great songs and tried to turn America into a communist hell hole. He failed in his politics so we can reject the horrible poltics and embrace the beautiful music.
Isolationism before Pearl Harbor and flag-waving militarism after it were pretty much the default positions for Americans. It’s interesting to hear that Uncle Joe ordered it that way, and the orders were carried out so effectively by a few folksingers.
Communist hell hole? Psst, the Cold War is over. (Sorry, but anti-communist rhetoric like that sounds so 1950s.)
I think your modern view of communism has blinded you to Seeger’s motivation in the Thirties when capitalism had failed a large swath of that generation, and the Soviet Union wasn’t yet the Evil Empire it was to become. Here’s Seeger describing how he got into the movement (from Pete Seeger: A Life In Song that aired on PBS last week):
*"I got involved in the American Student Union which was a temporary coalition between pacifists and socialists and communists. And we were arguing what to do about Hitler. Some said, ‘Don’t have anything to do with war, just be a complete pacifist.’ The communists said the whole world should quarantine the aggressor, and I thought they were right. I ended up joining the Young Communist League…
“A couple years later, just before World War II, I actually became a card-carrying member. I was against race discrimination, the communists were against race discrimination. I was in favour of unions, the communists were in favour of unions.”*
Doesn’t sound so bad, does it. Punish Hitler, stand up against racial discrimination, support unions in a time of widespread poverty caused by the gross excesses of capitalism. That’s why Seeger joined. His idealism probably blinded him to some of the later realities of the Soviet Union (which he later admitted), but propagandistic criticism for being an Evil Commie™ is unfair.
Joining the communists because they were against racial discrimination is like joining the KKK because you are against rape.
By the time he joined the party the USSR had commited the terror famine in the Ukraine which killed 3 times the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. That was right during the time of the show trials in Moscow. Even though the worst was yet to come, communism was already guilty of killing people by the tens of millions. This was not just a youthful flirtation, even though he left the party after fifteen years of so, he remained a self described communist all his life. Even after the full horror of the gulags had been revealed, even after the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and even after the Killing Fields. Idealism is no excuse for aligning with the most bloody movement in the history of mankind.
(Sorry, but anti-communist rhetoric like that sounds so 1950s.)
