The Almanac Singers were the progenitors of the The Weavers, featuring Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, along with Woody Guthrie and occasionally Josh White, Burl Ives, and others. Active in New York in the early 1940s, the Almanacs were closely associated with the trade union movement, as well as the Communist Party of the United States. Pete Seeger was blacklisted in the 1950s for his alleged CPUSA membership, which he always denied. The song linked below, however, is pretty definitive proof that he was at least a strong sympathizer and a follower of the Party line.
Pete Seeger, singing lead in The Ballad of October 16:
Here is the context. The Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact (also called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty) was signed in August 1939. For the next two years, until Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union June 1941, Germany and the Soviet Union were nominally at peace, and the CPUSA therefore opposed U.S. entry into the war, as well as any support for the Allies.
That period saw the dismemberment of Poland, the conquest of France, the Battle of Britain, and the beginning of the Holocaust, while American Communists continued to argue against American intervention in Europe. The "conscription bill," which is the subject of the song, was actually the "Enrollment Act of 1940," which instituted the first peacetime draft in U.S. history.
Of course, the Party reversed its position 180 degrees when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Roosevelt became a hero to the CP, and Woody Guthrie soon joined the Merchant Marine, carrying a guitar with the words "This Machine Kills Fascists."
I don't know if Seeger and Hays ever acknowledged the tragic error of advocating neutrality between Britain and the Nazis, but the song is certainly an embarrassment. (I came across it yesterday by accident.)
During the postwar era, Communists and fellow travelers said they were being persecuted for being "premature antifascists." Whether Seeger bothered to actually purchase a party membership is not relevant. As Steve points out, Seeger joined his cohorts as supporters of Hitler from August 1939 to June 1941, when Britain stood alone against the Nazis. If he had any regrets about it, he sure didn't show it after the war when we held fundraising concerts for the legal defense fund for the CPUSA leaders being tried on charges of violating the Smith Act.
I'm looking at a night school class description being offered at Stanford on Pete Seeger. Those of you with any familiarity with the American left will not be surprised to see that the class will picture him as the victim of McCarthyite blacklists. One can certainly appreciate the art of a man whose politics are abhorrent but when that art is used to promote great evil, it becomes difficult.
Slow down guys. Yes, in retrospect we are all geniuses. But history starts in the past: After the great liberal western democracies went to Munich and sold out not only Czechoslovakia but anti-fascists everywhere (remember the Spanish Civil War),the Soviet Union had no choice but to buy time against the Nazi behemoth. The Communists (and socialists) in Europe and in the USA were the first and staunchest opponents of fascism, beginning in Italy in 1921. They were, in fact, pre-mature anti-fascists. The support for Mussolini in the US was considerable, and we didn't need Phillip Roth to remind us that Lindbergh and a whole coterie of fascist and Nazi supporters were very powerful in the US, not to mention the British House of Lords.
Yes, Communists like Seeger followed the party line and switched from their very real anti-fascism to an anti-war position until the USSR was attacked. If Paul B or others think the West had a better record than the Soviets then I would recommend history rather than law or music courses.
And, yes, once the Cold War resumed in the late '40s, he was a victim of McCarthyite anti-communist repression. I haven't read a defense of the Smith Act in a while, and am surprised that I had to find it here!
David A
Seeger eventually came around on Stalin and tacitly admitted his blindness on that score. Google for a NYT article, "This Just In: Pete Seeger Denounced Stalin Over a Decade Ago."
Can I still love Pete's banjo and vocals while disliking his myopia?
Here is a link to the NYT article, which appeared in 2007: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/01/arts/music/01seeg.html?_r=0
It quotes Seeger as denouncing Stalin in 1993, which was two years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and 25 years after the invasion of Czechoslovakia (which is when he is said to have finally broken with the Party).
I think that Pete redeemed himself over the years, especially in his support for the civil rights, free speech, and labor movements, but he took far too long to recognize what was going on in the Soviet Union.
I would like to second David Abraham's comments with an emphatic reminder that the US did nothing to help the Spanish Republic (on the contrary allowed American Businesses to sell things including airplane fuel to the Fascists. As they said, the CP was guilt of premature anti-fascism before they supported the Hitler – Stalin pact. (Some old communists told me that they thought they were buying time for Stalin to prepare for war but i find that a naive answer). All in all i find that the revisionist condemnations of the CPUSA somewhat disingenuous. Despite their Stalinism which i cannot defend, they were the most aggressive white civil rights advocates, union organizers in the country and when the Smith Act finally left the CP basically out of the unions note how the numbers of people unionized began to drop. And rumor has it that the Daily Worker had an excellent horse handicapper so there you are.
The U.S. and Britain certainly a had a disgraceful record opposing Fascism in the 1930s, but that was obviously no longer the case in late 1940 when the Almanacs castigated Roosevelt for signing the Enrollment Act (which was actually passed in September, not October).
Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty a necessity for Stalin? That is highly debatable. What is not debatable, however, even as of 1940, was the non-necessity of the Moscow Purge Trials, the invasions of Poland and Finland, the Katyn Forest massacre, the occupation of the Baltic Republics, the establishment of the gulags, and the Ukrainian famine.
As late as 1968, Seeger could bring himself to refer to Stalin only as a "hard driver." In the 1970s, writing in Sing Out, he defended the expulsion of dissidents from East Germany.
I grew up on Seeger's music, which I play to this day. (I saw him perform a couple of times in the mid-1960s). But to paraphrase Justice Jackson, history, too, has its claims.
David Dunaway's excellent biography of Pete Seeger has more information about his disillusionment with communism. In particular, Seeger sang at a rally for solidarity in 1982 and apologized for his Stalinism in his musical autobiography in 1997. He was also drifting away from the party in the late 50s. Full disclosure: David is my oldest friend, who introduced me to Pete Seeger's music when we were both 11.
Hello Steve Mayer, and welcome to the Lounge!
–Bernie
Easily explicable … maybe you need to take a course in Wobbly history 101, or listen to some of the songs on the draft in WWI. Or just read Abrams and Schenk … geez …