According to David Corn, a journalist for Mother Jones who reviewed the FBI’s file on Seeger, he was drafted into the Army in July 1942 and sent to Keesler Field in Mississippi for training in aircraft mechanics. That fall, he wrote a letter protesting the California American Legion’s support of a measure not terribly different from Trump’s Muslim travel ban, one that would result in the deportation of all Japanese citizens and residents after the war:
Dear Sirs –
I felt shocked, outraged, and disgusted to read that the California American Legion voted to 1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!
We, who may have to give our lives in this great struggle—we’re fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism.
If you deport Japanese, why not Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians?
If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too.
America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed.
I felt sick at heart to read of this matter.
Yours truly,
Pvt. Peter Seeger
I am writing also to the Los Angeles Times.
Corn doesn’t mention what the L.A. Times may have done with his letter, but the American Legion passed it on to the FBI where it made its way to the Military Intelligence Service of the War Department. They began a full-scale investigation of Pete Seeger, sharing any information developed with the FBI. The intelligence service conducted interviews of his family, friends, and associates. One officer actually visited his grade school (to no avail, as the records he wanted weren't kept there).
Throughout 1943, the results of the military’s probe were compiled in reports on Seeger. One memo reported that Seeger’s “supervisors at Harvard University considered that Subject had radical ideas…and one of the supervisors thought that the Subject had a leaning towards Communism.” It noted that a “reliable source” had said one of Seeger’s “acquaintances” was a “self-confessed Communist, ardent in his love for the Communistic teachings of Russia,” and one “acquaintance”—maybe the same one—said Seeger was “in sympathy with the Communist cause.” The author of the report concluded that Seeger “will be further influenced along questionable lines by his new wife, the former Toshi Ohta, who is half-Japanese…Correspondence between the two indicated that both…were deeply interested in political trends, particularly anti-Fascist, and that she was a member of several Communist infiltrated organizations. Their marriage will quite possibly fuse and strengthen their individual radical tendencies.” The report concluded that Seeger was “an idealist whose devotion to radical ideologies is such as to make his loyalty to the United States under all circumstances questionable.” Seeger, this memo claimed, was “potentially subversive.” The document was sent to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI.
Apparently that was all it took to trigger a three-decade pursuit of Pete Seeger that finally ended in 1968. And, if examined from the FBI’s point of view, there was reason to suspect Pete Seeger. He did join the Young Communist League when he was 17, and he did support unions, and a worker’s right to join with others in order to achieve collective bargaining power. He was opposed to Jim Crow, and to war. And, as might be discerned from his letter to the American Legion, he wasn’t too crazy about racist barriers to immigration. For some reason, these were all considered to be un-American then, and perhaps even now.
Pete Seeger was born in Manhattan in 1919, to a family rich in music. His mother, Constance de Clyver, was a concert violinist and teacher at Julliard. His father, Charles Seeger, Jr., was a musicologist who in 1912 established the study of music at the University of California where he taught until his pacifism cost him his job in 1918. Packing up his wife and three sons in his homemade RV, Charles Seeger took them all on a trip through the South, attempting to bring musical uplift to the residents. According to the documentary The Power of Song, the family listened far more than they played. After Pete’s parents divorced, his father married his assistant and pupil, Ruth Crawford, who was a remarkable musician in her own right.
The family continued to travel and during a 1936 trip to Asheville, North Carolina, to attend the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, Pete discovered the five-string banjo. He spent years learning how to play it well. One day it would bear the inscription: This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.
In 1941, Pete Seeger and a friend, Lee Hays, formed the Almanac Singers. The group included ...
… Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax, Sis Cunningham, Mill Lampell, Arthur Stern, and others. They lived in a communal home, “The Almanac House,” in New York. The group performed for gatherings, picket lines, and any place where they could lend their voices in support of the social causes they believed in. Later, after World War II, many of the same people became involved in the musical organizations People’s Songs and People’s Artists.
After the war in 1949, Pete and Lee Hays re-formed the group as The Weavers, with Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman. Since the Communist as the boogey man had regained prominence, the Weavers had to be a little less obviously political than the Almanac Singers had been. Instead, The Weavers ...
… played lovely arrangements of American folk songs, many written by old friends such as Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. Some of their more popular songs were “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” “It Takes a Worried Man,” “Wimoweh,” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” But none were more popular than the double sided 78 rpm hit “Goodnight Irene,” which was learned from Lead Belly, and Hebrew folk song “Tzena Tzena Tzena.” These tunes reached number one and number two, respectively, on the hit parade in 1950.
A blacklist for radio and television.
Nevertheless, on June 20, 1950, Counterattack, a right-wing journal, published Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television. The Library of Congress says:
In June 1950, three former FBI agents who had created American Business Consultants, a vigilante organization to combat communism, issued Red Channels, a booklet listing 151 people connected with the broadcasting industry whom they suspected of subversive activities. The publication listed organizations and activities with which each individual had “reported” associations. Along with in-house private lists, Red Channels was adopted by the radio and television industries as a blacklist to deny employment to those named.
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Andrew Glass wrote for Politico in 2012, without a hint of irony or media self-awareness:
The tract sought to prevent criticism by claiming that the Communists engaged in analogous practices. The party, it wrote, saw to it that “articulate anti-Communists are blacklisted and smeared with that venomous intensity which is characteristic of Red Fascists alone.”
“Analogous practices” sounds a lot like “both sides do it,” with a little “projection” on the side.
After the publication of Red Channels, The Weavers had a hard time finding gigs. By 1952, new concert bookings disappeared. Their records were not played by radio stations. There were no more television appearances. The group dissolved and they each went their own way, although in later years they did get together for reunion concerts including a 1980 concert at Carnegie Hall featured in the PBS documentary The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time.
But back in 1955, after Seeger’s testimony to Congress, The Weavers staged a triumphant (though brief) comeback with their Christmas Eve performance that year at Carnegie Hall. Pete Seeger left the group for good in March 1958, when the other members (Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman) overruled him in order to record a cigarette commercial. Seeger did not believe in smoking and wanted nothing to do with the commercialization of his work.
For the next dozen years he got by through teaching children in a New York school once a week, the occasional job at local clubs, and working at summer camps for children. Meanwhile, he and his wife raised their own children in a log cabin that lacked running water and electricity but was filled with music. He built the cabin himself, which allowed excellent views of the Hudson River in Beacon, New York. He and his wife, Toshi, produced a children’s program, originally for a New Jersey Spanish language public UHF channel, and then for a regional public television network titled Rainbow Quest. He had some of the biggest names in folk music on his show, including Johny Cash and June Carter, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Tom Paxton, The Clancy Brothers, Judy Collins, and Buffy Sainte-Marie.
During this time of exile from radio, nightclubs, and television, Pete Seeger continued to record music. According to Folkways:
This became a period of explosive energy and creativity. Biographer David King Dunaway notes that from 1954 to 1958, Seeger released six LPs per year (Dunaway: 218). During the blacklist, Seeger supported his family by constant traveling, playing small venues, releasing numerous albums, producing documentary films, and authoring a fairly popular book on how to play the 5-string banjo.
Moses Asch, who in 1948 had started his Folkways label, was an old friend and supporter. He couldn’t have cared less about the blacklist. During the 50s and 60s, Folkways published dozens of Pete’s records. While the blacklisters were worried about Seeger singing before Middle America on the television, radio, or in nightclubs, his children’s records were entertaining a new generation of youngsters in schools and summer camps, where he was also known to make appearances. His great children’s albums from this period remain best sellers today, including his own story Abiyoyo. His series American Favorite Ballads taught a whole generation of young Americans the great American folk songs that Seeger himself had learned.
For 17 years he performed as a blacklisted entertainer. Finally, in 1967, the Smothers Brothers, while riding their wave of success, convinced CBS to allow Seeger to perform on the show. But the network censored his performance of The Big Muddy which contains a barely hidden reference to President Johnson and the Vietnam War. A very vocal protest resulted in Seeger being invited back to sing the song in February 1968:
Long before his appearance and as a matter of fact, long before his blacklisting, Pete Seeger was an advocate for equal rights for all citizens and was not alone in being targeted by the FBI. According to a January 2014 article for the Guardian by Amy Goodman:
Pete met another target of FBI surveillance and intimidation, Dr Martin Luther King, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1957. Seeger helped King and other civil rights activists incorporate song into their organizing tactics. It was at Highlander that Seeger first sang for King what would become the anthem of the civil-rights movement, We Shall Overcome.
[...]
Pete Seeger continued singing, for peace, nuclear disarmament and, most notably, the environment. He founded the nonprofit Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. He and others built a sailing vessel, the Clearwater, and used it to educate and champion the cleanup of the Hudson River, which his home overlooked. "Now the Hudson is clean enough to swim in," Pete told me when I interviewed him in August of last year. When I asked him to sing We Shall Overcome, he did, saying: "Yes, that is something the human race needs to be reminded of. Don't give up.”
Pete Seeger always believed in the power of song to change the world. The 2007 documentary on his experiences with the blacklist bore Pete Seeger: The Power of Song as its title. And as he explained to Bill Moyers in 1994:
“All I know,” he says, “is that throughout history, the leaders of countries have been very particular about what songs they want sung, so some people, beside me, must think songs do something.”
The highlights of Pete Seeger’s career are pretty well-known, from the fact that he worked with Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress collecting American folk songs in 1939; his work on behalf of unions as well as the civil rights and anti-war movements; to his environmental work, which began in the late 1960s and eventually expanded to clean up the Hudson River. He remained dedicated to his wife of almost 70 years and only survived her by a scant seven months. But for me, the inspiration that Pete Seeger brought was in his refusal to deny his beliefs—regardless of financial cost; his never-wavering faith in people; and his irrepressible optimism. This optimism and faith were clearly evident in any of the concerts he led during the civil rights and anti-war movements. He had a magical quality that led audiences to sing his songs and believe that they could make the world a better place.
Though he is gone, those who followed from The Kingston Trio to Peter, Paul and Mary, and Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen, continued to bring the music and the message. We can never give up and must believe that if enough of us just put one little tiny teaspoon of sand in that bucket, we can outlast and outweigh the pile of rocks on the other side of the seesaw. And we can change the world.
Just don’t give up.
