Pete Seeger - a voice raised for the people

Vanguard, March 2014 p. 7
Nick G.

Pete Seeger passed away on January 27 at the age of 94.

It is right to acknowledge his enormous contributions to the body of songs and music that come from, and are sung for, the people.  He helped keep alive a history of working people’s complaints and hopes expressed through music – and not just US working people: he incorporated into his repertoire people’s music that he gleaned from around the world.

He sang, with Bruce Springsteen, Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land at Barak Obama’s inauguration.  He pulled no punches.  Woody was a communist at heart and had written a verse that many other artists ignored.  Seeger dictated the words as he encouraged all present to sing:

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

 It is right to acknowledge his front line advocacy of civil rights, particularly those of black citizens of the US, and his defiance, as a Communist, of the McCarthyite witch-hunts.  In defence of his own civil liberties, he refused to plead the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-American Activities Committee.  His example of open defiance of the Committee was inspiring:

“I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.”

This led to a conviction for contempt of Congress and a one-year gaol sentence, subsequently dismissed by an appeals court.  He was a staunch opponent of US wars of aggression.

It is right to acknowledge his tireless work for the environment and for his pet project:  cleaning up his own backyard -  the Hudson River in New York State.  In his second to last performance, at last September’s Farm Aid concert, he again sang This Land Is Your Land, adding a final anti-fracking verse.

Seeger claimed to have become a communist when as a 7 year old he began reading about US First Nations (“Indian”) peoples.  He made himself a tepee, lived in it and tracked animals.

“Indians shared within each tribe,” he wrote in a 2005 letter to a friend. “If there was food, everyone ate.  If there was hunger, everyone was hungry, even the learned chief and his wife and children.  When I was twenty I learned that anthropologists called this ‘tribal communism’”.

He joined the Young Communist league in 1937 at age 18, and graduated to full membership of the Communist Party after serving in the US Army for three years during World War Two.

However, his membership did not last.  Between his 1956 appearance before the McCarthyites and his 1957 indictment for contempt of Congress came the so-called “Secret Speech” in which new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin.

Khrushchev spoke with the prestige and authority of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  Under the guise of seeking to dismantle a personality cult around Stalin, Khrushchev painted a horrifying picture of abuses of power, of gross injustice, of murder and dictatorial practice.

Leaked almost immediately to the anti-communist US press, reactionaries everywhere had a field day with the so-called “revelations” of the “tyranny of communism”.

Seeger was not alone in being unable to withstand the pressure placed on his commitment to communism and left the CPUSA.

We should not judge too harshly those who, like Seeger, were unable to keep the faith.

Likewise, we should eulogise those who rejected Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin for what it was – an attempt to change the direction of the Soviet Party under the guise of a rejection of “Stalinism”.

It is only now, with the partial opening of former Soviet archives and the work of researchers such as Montclair University’s Professor Grover Furr, that we can state with some assurance that virtually every claim against Stalin made by Khrushchev was a lie.

That research and that knowledge was unavailable to Seeger.

In a sealed 1956 letter to his grandchildren, and in the wake of Khrushchev’s “revelations”, Seeger praised the ethics and commitment of Communists he had known and worked with.

“…when I think of communism, I not only think of this (the Khrushchev speech –ed).  I think of the communists I have known.  Bravery, steadfastness and, yes, continual intellectual searching and thinking. Every communist leader I have known has lived his life in the frank knowledge that it was unlikely that he or she would live their lives through without suffering jail sentences and possibly cruel death because of their beliefs.  I never knew people so intent upon a long-range goal to make this a better world to live in.  They were not content to say, ‘tsk tsk’ about such a thing as Jim Crow. They organised a committee or something and agitated and propagandized for its abolition.  They gave of their time and money to a fantastic degree.  Their entire lives were dedicated not to personal success, but to changing a selfish and evil world into one where all mankind could truly be comrades.”

Despite his departure from the CPUSA, his description of the qualities of communists paints a pretty good picture of the man himself.