A couple of cold weather observations.

The most recent issue of the National Geographic has a nice article by Garrison Keillor about the area around St. Paul, and St. Paul, where's he's from.  It's a really nice article in lots of ways.

One of the photographs in the article is of a young couple, out on some ice, dressed for the weather.  Keillor notes that "as they were raised right", they're warmly dressed.  I sympathize with that statement.

The past couple of days it's been below 0F here.  Yesterday, when I dropped my daughter off at school, some kids were going into school wearing shorts.

Shorts?  Really, in this weather?

I know some young adults who do that too.  I don't get it.

Also, as a recent observation, the national news has been full of the shocking news that its winter, and its cold.

No kidding.

This morning, on the Today Show, which I do not watch but my wife does, one of the announcers was doing a "hash tag, enough already" routine.

Well, #get a clue, winter is cold.

Postscript 

-22F this morning.  Now that's cold. 

Postscript II

The cold must truly have set in by yesterday.  For one thing, I debated whether I needed to warm up my truck or not, as it was "only -9".  By the time that seems sort of warm, it's been pretty cold.

Secondly, for the first time the kids at junior high were wearing wool caps and nobody was wearing shorts.  About time. 

Military patrol (sport) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Military patrol (sport) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



The Winter Olympics back in the day when some team sports were composed of military teams only, in both the winter and summer Olympics.

USDA Blog » USDA Then and Now

USDA Blog » USDA Then and Now

Swimming Pools — NCSD Transform

Swimming Pools — NCSD Transform

Nice site on the proposed pools and the bond issue.

Here's the reason for the bond issue:  "While the State of Wyoming requires that Natrona County Schools operate and maintain a swimming pool to serve the needs of the district’s high school students, it is unwilling to pay for these facilities."  In other words, the state requires students have access to a pool (for safety reasons really), but won't pay for them.

If they aren't built, NCHS won't have one, and the district will arguably be immediately out of compliance with the law.  That would, quite frankly, seem to invite a law suit, which isn't the district's fault really, but that's what it might do.

Midwest, which tends to be the forgotten high school in the county, has an inadequate pool, would almost certainly seem to be out of compliance with the law without a new one.  For some reason, we tend to forget that Midwest even has a high school, let alone a pool, but they have both, and they need a new pool.

Here's something else worth noting:

The original proposal being discussed by the Board of Education has been
scaled back in scope and now includes the following projects:

• Replacement of NCHS’s 85-year-old
  swimming pool with a new 8-lane pool, diving area
  
  and seating
• Renovation of
  the existing KWHS swimming pool—including new pool equipment, plumbing,
  electrical, lighting and pool deck surface—providing 8 lanes, diving area and
  additional seating
• Design and
  construction of a new Midwest Pool with new supporting equipment, plumbing,
  
  electrical (within the existing pool building), new roof and remodeled locker
  rooms, restrooms and offices

What this doesn't note is that without the bond issue, at least the NC pool will be gone.  It sounds like the younger KW pool is in a terminal state as well.  It's usable, but long term it doesn't look good for it.  While some people are balking at the cost, it's important to note:

The scaled-back
proposal for improving the district’s swimming pools is an estimated $5.8
million LESS than the cost of constructing one large aquatic center to serve
the needs of the entire district. 

Note only is it less, but frankly the idea of "one large aquatic center" to serve the needs of the district is absurd.  No such central location can conceivably serve the needs of Midwest and we know it won't.  Those kids won't be bused across the county for swimming.  It'd take up at least half the school day, if the weather is good.

For that matter, swimming will drop off for both KW and NC students with a central pool.  Casper isn't that easy to get around in during the day, as any Casperite knows.  Students at NC, if they leave during the day, go west, not east, as that's the easy way for them to go.  KW students go east for the same reason.  Where could a pool even be built that would be only five or so minutes from both schools?  Nowhere.

And consider the actual pools. Here's the proposal for Midwest:

Midwest Pool.  A very rational sized pool, that the students there deserve.

And here's the one for NCHS.  Again, this is hardly a palatial pool, although it is one that would allow NCHS's swim team to have swimming meets in their pool for the first time in many many years.  Indeed, it's worth considering that should an increase in fuel costs ever cause the state to cease funding local busing, and that end up in terminating our county's unique "school of choice" system, about half the KWHS swim team would end up going to NCHS, assuming that, at that time, KW's team has a demographic similar to the existing team, and assuming that at that point in time KW still has a pool, which it very may well not, should the bond issue fail.

The real reason, of course, for the state requirement that the students have access to a pool is that their risk of dieing by drowning is reduced, a very worthwhile goal. And its that average student that the pools serve. These pools would do that job nicely, and the bond for them is well worth supporting.

Natrona County School District "Transform" Site.

Home



Includes bond issue information.

MId Week At Work: Chrysler Plant, World War Two.

Marijuana and statistics.

1.  10%, apparently, of marijuana users become addicts. That's with it being illegal. 

2.  15% of alcohol consumers become addicted.

3.  Worst reason for legalizing marijuana.  "Well, surely if alcohol is legal with all its problems marijuana should be."  No, that'd be a really good reason to make alcohol illegal, but it's a really bad one to make marijuana legal.  Just because something might be no more destructive than something destructive, doesn't amount to a supportable argument to make the second destructive thing legal.

4.  Most missed point in item #3.  Alcohol has such a long association with human beings that the best evidence is that the current population of humans, for the most part, has actually evolved to be able to consume it.  Alcohol, after all, is a poison.  Second most missed point in item #3 is that at the low dosages that were consumed per unit weight, prior to the invention of distilling (and keeping in mined that in ancient times the wine, one of the two most common alcoholic beverages, was routinely very much watered down), was not and is not generally consumed to the point of intoxication.  Marijuana for recreational use is only consumed to the point of intoxication.

5.  Scariest marijuana fact discussed since Colorado legalized it.  Those using it in their teens experience a 6 to 10 point drop in their IQs as an adult.

February 5, 1914. Arming Villa.

What could possibly go wrong?

Interesting effort at prohibiting divorce after remarriage as well.  In an era when shacking up was generally illegal, that would have had real implications.

Seems harsh to most, I suppose (although I'm not sure that I don't agree with the proposal, which of course went nowhere, and would go nowhere now).

Prince Abdullah I bin al-Hussein, son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, met with Herbert Kitchener, British Governor General of Egypt and the Sudan, in Cairo.  While the Great War had not yet arrived, the topic was potential British support against the Turks in response to their moves against Hejaz, which was independent at the time, but which was unfortunately absorbed by Saudi Arabia after World War One.

The British were no committal, but communications were kept open.

Alistair MacKay and three other members of the shipwrecked Canadian Arctic Expedition left their camp with a full stocked sled of supplies in an effort to find land.  They were spotted three days later by Karluk ship steward Ernest Chafe and the Inuit members of the party who were on a return mission from Herald Island.  They had been checking on a four-man scouting team. Thereafter, they were never seen alive again.

Bob Dylan on a Super Bowl Ad?

Now that's something I wouldn't have expected.

Not that it was bad.  Indeed, it was sort of cool. And it was Chrysler, and I like Dodges.

But still.

Best ad that I saw (and I didn't see them all) was the Chevrolet advertisement hauling the bull to the cows.

The Big Picture. Dartmouth v. Harvard Football Game, 1903

Note how very well dressed the crowd is.

Passing by the National Passtime

At no point in the year to I feel less attuned to the nation than during the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl.  I have to finally concede that I have less than 0% interest in them.

It's not that I'm opposed to football, although I am a bit concerned about the developing consensus that concussions associated with it can have a lifetime impact.  No, as I blogged here earlier, I just can't get into it for some reason.

I've tried.  If you don't follow football you are the odd man out on some conversations.  And people regard ti as strange, or just flat out don't believe it. Twice in the last several months I've been in conversations with groups of lawyers from all over the country when football came up, and I literally knew absolutely nothing about what people were talking about.

In those conversations, if you live here, it invariably is stated; "so you must be rooting for the Broncos, huh?"  No, I'm not.  I don't care who wins. Indeed, even though last weekend or whenever it was I knew who both teams were, I had to be reminded on Friday that the Seahawks were the other team.  My interest level is so low, I can't even remember who the other team is. And I'm not rooting for them either.

I do find it a bit odd that everyone assumes that Wyomingites are automatically Broncos fans.  Why would that be true?  I guess its because it's the closest professional team. But, while things have changed over time, it used to be common here that people would make sure to note that Wyoming isn't Colorado, and that a lot of things associated with Colorado, particular a large metropolitan area, we do not want associated with us. As I've stated, things have changed and that's no longer as common as it once was, but even back then it seemed most Wyomingites were Broncos fans.

I'm fine with that, I'm just not one.  Or a Packers fan.  Or a Steelers fan.  Or whatever.

I wish I was.  I've tried to follow football so that I could at least participate in these conversations, but it's impossible.  I can't do it.  At least this year I was in one of these group conversations where another lawyer, who had grown up overseas of American parents, stated he couldn't follow it either, passing that off to not growing up here.  I've given up trying.

I'll see the game, as my wife is a football fan and makes sure we always watch it. Some years we'll travel to a party to watch it.  I'm glad that we are invited, but I've actually had the experience of sitting through an entire party that way and not knowing who won. 

Sooner or later, I'm sure, some pharmaceutical company will offer a remedy for this condition, with all sorts of risky side affects.

Today is a poor day for Outdoor Fitness

Or so says my AccuWeather App.

Ice Fishing tent, yesterday.

Well it is really cold, that's for sure.  About 6F and likely to stay that way all day long.  And that's cold enough you have to be really careful outdoors.

But that doesn't mean some folks don't go out.  I guess it depends on how ancient and primal your idea of "outdoor fitness" is.

The Big Speech: The War Poetry of Alan Seeger

Earlier this past week we noted the passing of 94 year old Pete Seeger.  In that I noted that Pete Seeger was, in spite of being a folk musician, from a well educated artistic family.  Here we'll post his most well known poem, which proved to be accurate, given his death in World War One.

I have a Rendezvous with Death

I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade,
When Spring comes back with rustling shade
And apple-blossoms fill the air—
I have a rendezvous with Death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

It may be he shall take my hand
And lead me into his dark land
And close my eyes and quench my breath—
It may be I shall pass him still.
I have a rendezvous with Death
On some scarred slope of battered hill,
When Spring comes round again this year
And the first meadow-flowers appear.

God knows 'twere better to be deep
Pillowed in silk and scented down,
Where love throbs out in blissful sleep,
Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,
Where hushed awakenings are dear . . .
But I've a rendezvous with Death
At midnight in some flaming town,
When Spring trips north again this year,
And I to my pledged word am true,
I shall not fail that rendezvous.

A glimpse at the judicial system in other nations

This morning the Denver Post informs us that:

ROME—Italy's highest criminal court on Tuesday overturned Amanda Knox's acquittal in the slaying of her British roommate and ordered a new trial, prolonging a case that has become a cause celebre in the United States.

Knox called the decision "painful" but said she was confident that she would be exonerated.
Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial, and her lawyer said she had no plans to do so. The appellate court hearing the new case could declare her in contempt of court but that carries no additional penalties.

In the United States we use an evolved form of English Common Law, and of course that common law system has been greatly impact here by the protections afforded under State and Federal Constitutions.  There's no such thing here as a reversal of an acquittal and the thought itself is strange.  If you are acquitted, you're acquitted.

Italy uses a version of the Code Napoleon, which descends, but not in a straight line, from the Code Justinian.  Apparently, at least in the Italian version of this, you can be tried twice for the same time.  Very odd to think of.

I haven't really followed this entire story so I can't comment knowledgeably about it and I'm not saying that the Italian justice system is fatally flawed.  It's successfully handled a lot of really nasty and dangerous Mafia trials in the last 40 years.  But it does seem oddly slow in some ways, and the lack of an apparent double jeopardy provision is surprising.

Postscript

Once again, I haven't really been following this case, but yesterday the verdict in the second Knox case was rendered, and she was convicted again.

I'll confess that this time, while I'm not questioning the Italian justice system, I'm baffled about the procedure. The original trial seemed to feature some sloppy prosecution to me, but then Knox's evolving versions of events, including implicating an innocent man, were questionable too.  But the overall procedure is really baffling.

The original trail was held at Perugia, followed by an appeal to a court in Perugia. The first appellate court overturned the murder conviction (she was also convicted of slander).  That would have ended the matter, had this been an American, English, Canadian, Australian, etc. court. But there was a second level of appeal in Italy, and that appeal went to the Italian Supreme Court.

The Italian Supreme Court apparently vacated the Perugia appellate ruling, which is not the way I'd originally understood that holding, and sent it back to the lower appellate court for a second hearing, but this time at Florence.  Somehow, new evidence was taken in at the appellate level, by order of the Italian Supreme Court. That's a complete impossibility under the Common Law system we use.  Apparently the Italian intermediate appellate court can act, in at least some circumstances, act as an intermediate trier of fact as well as an appellate court.  It's apparently even the case that the prosecutor in the second intermediate appellate proceeding, used a different motive as his theory of the case.  Anyhow, that court not only reinstated Knox's conviction, but it increased her sentence from 26 years to 28.5.

A very large part of this process would be rampagingly Unconstitutional in the US.  The first appellate decision would have ended the whole case. To subject a criminal defendant to a second fact finding proceeding would be double jeopardy.  To those familiar with Common Law courts, this is extremely alien.  I'm frankly quite glad that we do not use this system.

Which isn't to say that its inherently unfair.  Code Napoleon trials are more in the nature of factual inquiries than they are adversarial proceedings, and the court acts as a fact finder.  Still, it seems rather protracted and messy.

Postscript II

Worth noting here in addition, there is a person serving time in Italy for this crime, Ray Guede.  He's apparently admitted to being in the house at the time of the murder, and he's implicated Knox as being in the house, but apparently hasn't blamed her or anyone else for the killing, although he continues to deny that he committed the murder. 

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming History In The Making: Janaury 30, 2014. ...

Today In Wyoming's History: Wyoming History In The Making: Janaury 30, 2014. ...: The Attorney General of Wyoming indicated that the State would file a petition for a rehearing in the Hill case. Rehearings are very ra...

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.

_________________________________________________________________________________

*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.