The dark side of Pete Seeger

Fool for Joseph Stalin

Iconic folk singer Pete Seeger turned 90 last week and the occasion was marked by a concert at Madison Square Garden featuring musical luminaries Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Joan Baez and Ani DiFranco, and even a letter from President Barack Obama delivered to thousands of adoring fans.

Seeger popularized folk music and used it as a tool to effect political and social change in America. He is credited with writing such famous songs as “Turn, Turn, Turn”, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone,” and “If I Had a Hammer.” Seeger also popularized Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land.” In 1994 Bill Clinton awarded Seeger the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center feted him with a tribute for his music and activism. Seeger in many cases was at forefront of the civil rights movement and a dedicated advocate for American labor.

However, there is a dark side to Pete Seeger, one that is airbrushed out of all the effusive hagiography. Seeger was a dedicated Stalinist and has not renounced his devotion to communism, a political ideology, which according to the Black Book of Communism, responsible for the murder of over 94 million people. When you speak out against communism you get booed, when you’re a cheerleader for its mass murderers you get a Kennedy Center tribute and presidential praise.

Seeger was a member of the Communist Party from the 1930s through the 1950s. He left the party but never gave up the faith. He told the Washington Post in 1995 “I am still a communist.” Like his comrades and fellow travelers Seeger twisted and turned with every pronouncement from Moscow. Seeger supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact, a curious position for a noted “anti-fascist.” In 1941 Seeger along with Guthrie was a member of the Almanac Singers, a communist folk group. The group put out the anti-war album Songs from John Doe, containing songs that labeled Franklin Roosevelt a war monger. One of the songs had the following lyrics:

Franklin D, listen to me,
You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea.
You may say it's for defense
That kinda talk ain't got no sense.

Of course when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Seeger and the Almanac Singer’s literally changed their tune to get in lockstep with Stalin’s new foreign policy. They pulled Songs from John Doe from the market and quickly replaced it with the pro-war, pro-Roosevelt album Dear Mr. President:

Now, Mr. President
You're commander-in-chief of our armed forces
The ships and the planes and the tanks and the horses
I guess you know best just where I can fight ...
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done!

Seeger’s sycophancy for murderous communist tyrants didn’t end with Stalin. During the Cold War he praised Ho Chi Minh and provided a hearty jacket endorsement for Tomas Borges’ the brutal Sandinista thug’s book.

Seeger was blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but as Steve Chapman notes, “Not all victims of McCarthyism were innocent victims,” another fact airbrushed from history.

To be fair Seeger did eventually get around to realizing the horrors of Stalinism, albeit 50 years too late. Quite amazing given that no less than Nikita Khrushchev figured it out as early as 1956. Seeger penned the song “The Big Joe Blues”

I'm singing about old Joe, cruel Joe
He ruled with an iron hand
He put an end to the dreams
Of so many in every land
He had a chance to make
A brand new start for the human race
Instead he set it back Right in the same nasty place
I got the Big Joe Blues.

Color me unimpressed. Also unimpressive are the moral equivalencies Seeger used to water down his apology for supporting a regime that murdered more people than 20 million people.

I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was simply a 'hard driver' and not a supremely cruel misleader. I guess anyone who calls himself or herself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Moslems by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. could consider apologizing for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern white Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps.

As an apology Seeger’s words are underwhelming. While “cruel misleader” is by no means a term of endearment, in light of Stalin’s monstrous record, it vastly understates the depth of his depravity and the true horror of Stalinism. There are many more apt nouns and adjectives in the English language to describe the man who gave us the purges of the Great Terror, the Gulag, and the Ukrainian Terror Famine. Lost in the obfuscations of Seeger’s moral equivalencies is the fact that contemporary Christians, White people, and Mongolians are not responsible for the acts, however heinous, of Christians, white people, or Mongolians of the past, because they had nothing to do with them. Whereas Seeger is all too culpable for the crimes of Stalin because he was an open apologist for “old cruel Joe” and other communist thugs at the very time they were slaughtering millions.

Some would argue that these inconvenient truths are peripheral to Seeger’s musical achievements and altruistic fight for civil rights. However, that argument ignores the fact that communism, and for a very long part of his life, support of the Soviet Union were central to Seeger’s politics and worldview. Like his boyhood idol Lincoln Steffens Seeger saw the Soviet Union as the way of the future, and Stalin as the man who would lead humanity to the sunny uplands of history. Seeger preached non- violence and considered himself a man of peace yet he aped the party line for a murderous totalitarian ideology. In the end that makes him a hypocrite. Seeger and his comrades on the Old Left and many in the New Left too, were what Lenin called useful idiots. Western dupes, who could be counted on to provide uncritical support for the Soviet Union thereby providing the rope that would eventually hang them.

Stalin is dead and gone and the smoking embers of the Soviet Union lie on the ash heap of history, but Seeger’s useful idiocy and hypocrisy remains.

At Barack Obama’s inauguration Seeger, along with Springsteen led a rendition of “This Land is Your Land” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The tune is often referred to as a moving song of unity. However, that wasn’t how Guthrie intended it. In fact, it was a protest song written as a communist response to Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Lost in the wash of history is that many, who perform it deliberately leave out part of Guthrie’s original lyrics.

As I went rumbling that dusty highway
I saw a sign that said "private property"
But on the other side it didn't say nothing
This side was made for you and me

In the squares of the city, in the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office, I see my people
And some were stumbling and some were wondering
If this land was made for you and me

However, Seeger reinserted that Marxist ode to taking private property back into the inaugural performance and his birthday concert.

HBO a for-pay cable channel struck a $2.5 million dollar deal with Obama’s inaugural committee to air the concert. HBO broadcasted free of charge that weekend, but you had to have cable or satellite to see the show. If you want to view clips of Seeger and Springsteen singing This Land is Your Land on YouTube, you can’t because HBO… asserted its property rights and demanded the clips be removed.
 

Seeger’s useful idiocy and hypocrisy know no bounds.