Pete Seeger passes and a lesson on presumptions of inevitability.

As I'm sure everyone knows, Pete Seeger, who may legitimately be regarded as an American musical legend, died this past week at age 94.

 Pete Seeger, 1967.  The stage looks amazingly like the one at the grade school I attended.

Usually, an entry that would start off that way would go on to be a praising summary of his career, which was very influential on American music, but that's not the point of this entry. This is not to say that Seeger wasn't very influential musically, he was, and that would be a legitimate topic and legitimately interesting post.  But his death raises an interesting point that's generally been missed, just as his fans struggle to a degree to bury his early past and those who weren't fans of that past are sometimes overemphasizing it. The reason for that is that Pete Seeger was a Communist as a young man, which gives us an interesting opportunity to visit the topic of the error of assuming certain paths in history are inevitable.

By that I'm not trying to dump on Seeger.  Seeger was pretty open about his views and never hid his past.  And it'd be downright silly to criticize the musical quality of his work based on politics at any one point in time.  And frankly it's also not really fair to judge a man on his early politics either.  You have to take the sum total of a man's life in order to consider it.  Maybe you have to take the last part of it really.  Plenty of mighty sinners become saints.  And plenty of people with early questionable views change them or they evolve into something else. Take, for example, the recent example of Nelson Mandela, whom some people were supporting due to the ANC's early traveling with  Communist. Well, Mandela's later life certainly counters any suggestion that he retained any Marxists lessons and his record as a free world leader is where he should be judged.  Or, to take an early example, consider W. E. B. Dubois, the great American civil rights leader. At one time he sympathized with Communism. Asked about that later, he gave one of the great all time responses to such a question, that being "Only a fool never changes his mind."  Du Bois himself remained a species of Socialist his whole life, openly, which certainly does not diminish his greatness in any fashion.

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the nation's greatest 20th Century civil rights leaders.

Anyhow, I've seen some try to argue the fact of Seeger's early Communism away, but Seeger was very open about his Communist party membership in the 1930s..  I don't feel that's reason enough to condemn him in our memories. The measure of a man isn't what he was at any one point in the course of the path of his life, but where that path went.  And indeed the fact that he isn't generally so condemned says a lot about the tolerance of Americans for disparate views.  While we're generally believed to be somewhat rigid in our ideological views by outsiders, Seeger, who held radical views his whole life, was widely admired for his music across the musical spectrum (although not by me, I generally don't like his music much, but not because of his politics, but rather because I just don't like his particular genre much).*  This was true even early on, as Seeger was one of those Communist whose position was adamant opposition to the US entering the war against Germany prior to Germany's attack on the USSR, at which point his position switched overnight.**  Seeger and his fellows issued some massively anti war songs prior to the USSR being invaded, at which point they withdrew them and issued ones going the other way.  That intellectual weakness in the American Communist Party was really demonstrated by this, as its thinking was so dominated by Moscow.*** But the burden of that didn't really attach to Seeger, just as being an opponent of entering the war, albeit for a completely different reason, didn't really tarnish Charles Lindberg's career much either.  Americans are pretty tolerant really, to those amongst us who hold political views we generally disagree with.****

The reason that I'm noting this is that Seeger's death has brought back, in some circles, the story of American Communism of the 1920s through the 1940s, and that story serves as a very cautionary tale for anyone who believes any movement's success is assured by it being "on the right side of history."  We hear this all the time about one social or political movement.  But history shows us that inevitable developments often aren't.

There were left wing radicals of varying stripes in the US well before there was a serious Communist Party in the U.S.  You can find all sorts of interesting groups emerging mid 19th Century, and continuing on thereafter.  But the Communist Party of the USA is somewhat unique as it seemed, to many well educated young people, to be the next step in the inevitable advancement of American political liberalism. Indeed, this was so much the case that even non Communist far left liberals generally held positive views of Communism and abstained from any criticism of the USSR even before World War Two.  They were woefully wrong, thank goodness, but they were sincere in their belief, which largely explains why they took up the role they did.

The American Communist Party burst upon the scene in 1919. Prior to that, radicals belonged to a variety of other parties, including an early Socialist Party, but the Communist Party didn't just take in those groups.  It was something new.  Socialism had been on the rise in Europe since the late 1890s, and with the Russian Revolution giving rise to the Bolshevik coup in that country, followed by a Communist uprising in Germany in 1918, it seemed that the new political force of Communism was the next inevitable step in European politics.  The United Kingdom feared a Communist rebellion at home. France saw its Communist and Socialist flex their muscles.  Here in the United States a new Communist Party formed claiming about 40,000 members in 1919, leading to a Red Scare here. 

Now, 40,000 people isn't really a lot, but for a start up party it is, and they were a serious group. Who were they?

Well, to a significant degree they were radicalized European immigrants who brought their politics with them. The early and mid 20th Century would see a lot of that.  Central and Eastern European working class immigrants who were socialists or communists when they arrived, Irish immigrants who were Fenians, Sicilian immigrants who came burdened with a sense of ometta, Italian immigrants who were anarchists, and so on. Not most of these classes fit those categories completely, but some did. And their children often did as well, later acquiring the moniker "Red Diaper Babies" in the case of Communist who followed their immigrant Communist parents into the party.  For German and Eastern European industrial workers attraction to radical socialism and communism had been strong at home, and the governments were they were from tended to feed it by an airtight suppression of it which made radicalism all the stronger by not letting its failures whilter in the light of day.

 The Seegers.  One of these young lads would be Pete Seeger.

But added to that, and the subject of the topic here, were very well educated Americans who largely, but not always, had acquired their Communism in universities.  Men like Pete Seeger, who joined the Young Communist League at age 17 and who would attend Harvard, or Whitaker Chambers who joined the Communist Party while a student at Columbia, this collection of individuals came form the Middle Class (and occasionally from the upper class).  They could not be said in any sense to be living in leisure, but they were very well educated as a rule and came from families that largely had espoused political liberalism.  Joining them were older men who came to their point of view at some point, sometimes not joining the Communist Party, but going along with Communist they knew as "fellow travellers", such as Harry Dexter White.  Notably, they were not from the American blue collar class whose plight they supposed themselves to be addressing.****

Why?  Today we know that Communism was a universal failure. Those who may still hold a romantic view of it (and some still do, I just read an article by Al Jazera in the US claiming that outside of Europe, Communism had been "on the right side of history") should read the Black Book on Communism, a grippingly fascinating massively depressing read written by French Socialists.  Communism's impact was universally negative everywhere it came to power.

But in the 1920s and the 1930s a person could still naively believe that wasn't so, as long as they didn't know too much about what was occurring in the USSR.  News was starting to leak out, however, and already by the late 1920s some early Communists, with developed consciences, were getting out, having heard, as Whitaker Chambers would later note about himself, the "scream" of millions of tortured souls.

But for those joining in the 1920s and the 1930s, who came from the middle class, there was a sense that Communism was the next stage in political liberalism.  To these people, it seemed that American Populism had yielded to Progressivism, which had yielded to Progressivism Lite, that being Wilsonian liberalism, which had yielded to FDR's liberalism.  They believed the next step would surely be Communism, or maybe something like Socialism and then Communism (a step that Communist elsewhere were also attune to, sometimes to the fatal end of the Socialist).

That all seems extraordinarily naive, if not pathetically blind, now. At the same time that American Communist were dreaming of a Red United States, Red Russia was beginning to slaughter its own.  News of that was even leaking out, as a letter reprinted by The New Republic in the last issue from one of their liberal editors, to Stalin, shows (the editor, blinded to reality, was lamenting to Stalin about the purges, in a belief that Stalin must not be the cause of them.)  But to a degree, looking back, it's understandable. The U.S. economy was in bad shape at a time when the majority of the nation was urban for the first time.  People were desperate.  Things vaguely seemed to be working in Communist Russia, and for that matter in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, other radicalized nations.  And in order to address the economic crisis, the Roosevelt administration was expanding government enormously, even putting people directly to work in construction and art projects, and a host of other projects, that really were socialistic in nature, and which even came replete with posters that, if you look at them now, sort of seem a little communistic, even if they were not.  Finally, while there was a Red Scare just after World War One, it abated in the 1920s and in the 1930s people by and large were not particularly concerned about the Communists.  The Roosevelt Administration was absolutely blinded to them, and saw no real problems with them, not really taking them particularly seriously.

In that atmosphere, for those of a certain class, Communism became attractive.  All the big universities had Communist clubs and became recruiting grounds for Communism.

Which is not to say that there were ever very many Communist in the U.S. There never were.  What the highwater mark was I don't know, but I'd guess maybe around 100,000 at some point in the 1930s.  Not enough to ever be any sort of ballot success, but just enough to actually occasionally get on a ballot here or there.  Knowing that they were small in number, the open party concentrated on associating itself with labor organizations, where there help was largely welcome, or with open opposition to various policies of one kind or another.  Much more sinister in nature, the underground party recruited from the open party for espionage, which those approached generally entered into.  Their view of this, however, differed from other spies in that, as naive as it was, they never really saw themselves as unpatriotic and they never despised their country.  they just thought that they were serving the evolution of an international movement of which their country would become an inevitable part.

Well, history didn't work that way.  The USSR attacked Poland in the 1920s and was defeated.  It began to murder its own almost immediately.  In Spain it helped turn near victory into defeat through the selective murder of other left wing radicals.  The USSR joined Nazi Germany in running over Poland and it independently violently reclaimed the Russian Empire's Baltic states.  It started starving the Ukrainians.  It's track record, globally, wherever it went, was bloody and oppressive.

By the early 1950s, most American Communist had awakened and bailed out.  Many had years and years before, first when rifts developed in Soviet Communism, and then in American Communism, in the 1920s, and then other in the 1930s when they became horrified at the results of what they were supporting.  The lid came off of Soviet espionage in 1948 when Congress began to investigate it, by which time the U.S. Army had been picking up Soviet cables on American espionage for several years.  The fall of the Nationalist in China, the Berlin Blockade, and the North Korean invasion of South Korea served to complete the process for most.

But at one time, a certain well educated political class truly thought its triumph inevitable.  Reading the signs, the nation seemed to be adopting what it was advocating, and the only thing that was necessary was to agitate for the triumph which was surely coming.

There's a lesson in that for anyone who thinks any movement of the day is "on the side of history."  History is on its own side, and it has all the time in the world.  Success over a decade or two means pretty much nothing at all.

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*I like some of the folk music of the 30s and 40s, including some by Seeger's fellow travelers at the time, such as Woodie Guthrie and Burl Ives.  But all of it tainted, in my view, by a certain degree of disenguininess that it can't overcome.  Folk music, like the blues, is nearly the property of the class that originated it, and getting over that hurdle, while not impossible, is difficult. In the case of folk music of the 30s and 40s, which came at a time in which there were still genuine folk musicians, the music of those who came from non folk backgrounds seems sort of manufactured to me.  In Seeger's case, he came from a family of classically trained musicians, and therefore the tradition he espoused seems alien to his upbringing, while perhaps explaining why some of his better works sound so good when performed by somebody else.  When performed by Seeger, who preferred to play a banjo, they just don't seem quite genuine. When performed by other artists, they seem more polished, and perhaps they should have been preformed that way from the onset. So a song like Turn, Turn, Turn, sounds really good when preformed by the Byrds.

Or, maybe that's just me. A music can have merit, and the better music by Seeger certainly does, without everyone liking it.

**This position, which was the position of the Communist Party of the USA, strikes me as really odd and it must have seemed so to some Communist at the time.  The Communist had been the primary force on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, and they knew that the Germans and Italians had provided arms and some men to the Nationalist side.  How the Communist could have opposed the Nationalist and then thought the Nazi Germans not a menace is difficult to appreciate.

***The first real rift in American Communism came to a degree over just such an issue. Following Trotsky's downfall, some American Communist chose to follow Trotsky out of the party, followed by others leaving when they could not reconcile themselves to the rise of Stalin and his fellows.  Most of those individuals eventually worked themselves out of Communism entirely, and oddly some of them would live to be the founders of Neo Conservatism.  Those who remained in the Communist party following this episode, which included most Communist, had to slavishly adhere to a Moscow dictated line to remain in good graces with the party.

****Seeger was called in front of the House Unamerican Affairs Committee, with which he didn't cooperate, and that for a time he was under some sort of political sanction in New York. Nonetheless, his career was about as successful as he wanted it to be in spite of some positions, even over a long period of time, which don't square with what most Americans view on the same topics, and in spite of the fact that, no matter what Al Jazera may think, he was generally on the wrong side of history regarding the Communists.

Seeger's appearance in front of the committees sort of shows its interesting evolution.  Early witnesses in front of the committee, in the 1940s, were really called there as the government had acquired a fair amount of information on Communist operatives in the US, and the FBI and NSA was feeding that information to the committee, even if the committee didn't really know that.  The NSA in particular couldn't reveal that it had tapped into Soviet cables without blowing its cover, and it didn't reveal it until the 1990s.  At any rate, the early witnesses were individuals like Whitaker Chamber and Alger Hiss, and others, who were actually involved in espionage.  By the time Seeger was a witness, however, the committee had expanded its inquiries to be so broad as to include the entertainment industry.  At the time that probably seemed legitimate to it, and the thesis was likely that it was looking for Communist influence there.  If there was any Communist influence there, it wasn't very successful as it'd be hard to find a really pro Communist film on anything up to that point which had been produced clandestinely.  It was about this time that the committee began to loose legitimacy in the eyes of the public, although not only due to this.  In part, however, the calling up of entertainers in the 1950s who had been Communist in the 30s or 40s, or perhaps just left wing in that period, looked rather odd to an increasing number of people.

*****Blue collar workers in the US were largely not attracted to Communism, even though Communist were influential in labor unions.  Unions accepted the help of the Communist party, but the workers never were attracted to the movement itself, unless otherwise part of it for some other reason.  For that reason, we could and did have rank and file union members that were very pro labor, but otherwise very conservative, and very far from Communism, even while Communist organizers, early on, worked to assist organized labor.