Peter Seeger-An American Paradox
Peter Eisenstadt

I rather liked the caption under a photograph of Pete Seeger in this week’s New Yorker, “musically pure, politically complex, singularly American.” But there was really was nothing about Pete Seeger that was pure or simple, not his music, not his Americanness, and certainly not his politics. Everything about him was complex, perhaps his simplicity above all.

First, before going forward, let me state unequivocally that I have always loved Pete Seeger. As a child of Communist parents. Or rather, after 1956, when I was only two years old, ex-Communist parents, who left the party but retained its household gods, the right books, the right magazines, and perhaps especially, the right music, the Paul Robeson records, the Weavers and Pete Seeger everywhere.

I think I learned to say goodnight to Irene before I learned to say goodnight to my mom. I learned so much from Pete Seeger, perhaps especially the immense power of music and how some of that power could be used to try to change the world. And I learned not to worry if one’s cause was not fashionable, or seemed hopeless, all that mattered was that it was a cause worth fighting for. And how, like Seeger’s Hudson River, all good causes flowed together.

But I learned something else, and perhaps it is because of my background. As long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the connection of Pete Seeger to the Communist Party. By no means can Seeger be limited or reduced to his connection to the party; like anything else good that ever came out of the party, he transcended it. But make no mistake; if you want to understand the roots of Peter Seeger, you must understand his deep roots in the culture of the party, a culture he never entirely discarded.

The Communist Party was the place where good intentions came to die, and where the ends justified almost any means. I was listening last week to recordings over the span of his remarkable 70 year career, from cute songs recorded in 2012, to his first records, in 1940, with the Almanac Singers. They always leave a bad taste in my mouth. They are a series of ferocious and quite nasty attacks on FDR for trying to get the US involved in World War II, accusing Roosevelt of wanting to kill Americans just for the sport. I want to be clear here: I deeply respect pacifists, including pacifists who were opposed to the US involvement in World War II. There were many good reasons to take such a position, along with one terrible one—because Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939. And of course the Communists were phony pacifists.

After June 21, 1941, Seeger and the Almanac Singers issues many songs that complained that the war was not being waged fiercely enough. Perhaps Seeger’s first well-known song is “The Reuben James” about a US merchant ship sunk by German U-boats in the fall of 1941, before Pearl Harbor. The song is a rousing call for America to get involved in the war. If the ship had sank six months earlier, Seeger might have written a song about how the victims of the attack were dupes of an imperialist war.

I don’t want to belabor the point, or go into other instances of Seeger’s blindness towards the Soviet Union. I guess my point is this. There is nothing that harmed the left, and the cause of freedom, equality, and the fight for an economically more just society more than the monumental failure and horrible evil of Communism. When it comes to evaluating its legacy, which, certainly in the United States, contained both things good and bad, it must be considered accurately, dispassionately, and without sentimentality of any kind.

I don’t want to end on such a churlish note. Peter Seeger taught us to sing together, to sing the songs of “the people,” to use a phrase beloved in both the rhetoric of 1930s and 1940s America and in the ideological line of the Communist Party. (It was the genius of the Popular Front, of whom he was perhaps the last significant survivor, to combine these two very different senses of “the people” together.) Do “the people” in any real sense exist? I am not sure. But when you were in a sing along with Pete Seeger, a form of music that he perfected, you felt that your own power was greatly maximized by the power of the crowd, that you weren’t alone, that any political goal, however out of reach it might seem, whatever doubts you had about your own abilities to attain it, was possible. You knew where all the flowers had gone, and you had a hammer, and

that, for that moment at least, the people were united, and invincible.