Pete Seeger’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities is a joy to read. I also enjoyed reading Howard Husack’s strange lament and grudging tribute to Seeger in the National Review. Reading them back-to-back, it’s easy to see how Seeger kicked William F. Buckley’s ass.
Here’s my favorite part of Seeger’s testimony. He was being asked whether he entertained at events held by the Communist Party as part of his “service” to the party. Seeger refused to answer any questions about where he had performed or who he had performed for, and he told them that they were immoral to ask him such questions under compulsion.
MR. TAVENNER: I believe, Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I will have the question read to him. I think it should be put in exactly the same form.
(Whereupon the reporter read the pending question as above recorded.)
MR. SEEGER: “These features”: what do you mean? Except for the answer I have already given you, I have no answer. The answer I gave you you have, don’t you? That is, that I am proud that I have sung for Americans of every political persuasion, and I have never refused to sing for anybody because I disagreed with their political opinion, and I am proud of the fact that my songs seem to cut across and find perhaps a unifying thing, basic humanity,and that is why I would love to be able to tell you about these songs, because I feel that you would agree with me more, sir. I know many beautiful songs from your home county, Carbon, and Monroe, and I hitchhiked through there and stayed in the homes of miners.
MR. TAVENNER: My question was whether or not you sang at these functions of the Communist Party. You have answered it inferentially, and if I understand your answer, you are saying you did.
MR. SEEGER: Except for that answer, I decline to answer further.
He received ten convictions for contempt.
This is also awesome:
In 1960, the San Diego school board told him that he could not play a scheduled concert at a high school unless he signed an oath pledging that the concert would not be used to promote a communist agenda or an overthrow of the government. Seeger refused, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district, allowing the concert to go on as scheduled. In February 2009, the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of their predecessors.
Husock writes that it is “a tragedy that this happened.” It’s a tragedy that Seeger inspired people to question whether a Jim Crow “American experiment was noble and the nation good, and imprint[ed] the idea that private business is anti-social.” That’s how the Buckley die-hard segregationists see it. Pete Seeger dealt with these nuts in the 1950’s and 1960’s when they had the power to fuck with him. By 2009, their successors were apologizing for how he was treated. That’s what the nation deserves from the National Review. Contrition. An acknowledgment that they are always wrong, always standing athwart bigotry and yelling ‘more.’
Seeger stayed in the homes of miners, like any good advocate for working folks would. They questioned his patriotism and he shamed them by pointing out that he was a true man of the people.
Now, let’s have some Seeger-inspired music.
I see in the comments section that “the reason right wing artists fail is because they see ‘art as art and politics as politics, separating the two’ and that ‘folk music was politics free until that Commie Seeger came along’.”
Lol, just lol. And they wonder why creativity is in almost every circumstance reserved on the left.
heh — and they love Springsteen because they either don’t listen to the lyrics or are incapable of understanding them.
It was this unity that scared the Congressmen and the fact that it was anchored in an advocate of the labor movement. The list of people brought before HUAC shows that it was defense of the rich elite (the Potters if you will and not the George Baileys) that was the sole aim of HUAC. That and delegitimizing media personalities who were to the left of New Deal Democrats.
HUAC is the reason that there is no left in this country. And that fear causes center-left politicians to continue to delegitimize those to their left with various euphemisms like “purity”, “extreme”, “idealistic”, and appeals to practicality. And the lack of a real left in this country exposes politicians like President Obama to the sort of nonsense that Michigan Americans for Prosperity put out on their web site–a neo-Soviet style poster of President Obama as Stalin.
There will be more contrition from the likes of the NRO when there is less fear from center-left and center Democrats. In the 1960s, they were the ones who were rightly marginalized–given the excesses of the 1950s. That reversal owes itself to the civil rights movement and that part of the folk revival that included Pete Seeger.
I disagree. HUAC was thoroughly discredited in the 1960’s. Reagan and millionaire Democrats are the reason there is no Left in this country. That and “Better Red than Dead”
And Cointelpro along with the “Democrats” for Nixon.
The point is that they killed it.
He outlived the bastards and his contributions to humanity will still be remembered with gratitude when they’re no longer even footnotes in history. That’s what you call winning.
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From its founding in 1948, during the ’50s the era of agriculture, kibbutz and politics dominated by the leftist Labor party in Israel – Edward R. Murrow interview with Ben Gurion in 1956.
○ Pete Seeger Dies: Where Have All the Folk Legends Gone?
○ Pete Seeger on Palestine (in 1967)
If he had been a Nazi?
Didn’t you help get Pat Buchanan kicked off MSNBC for his politics?
Your own kind of blacklisting?