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Ronald Radosh (b. 1937) was a red diaper baby, the son of parents who were members of the Communist Party. He grew up in New York, attended left-wing schools, and at an early age became steeped in folk music. As a professional historian he has written numerous books, many attacking the Communist Party since his turn to conservative politics by the 1970s. In his autobiography, Commies, he discusses his love-hate relationship with folk music and Pete Seeger in particular, his banjo instructor and early idol. Seeger has served as a flashpoint for political struggles since his days with the Almanacs, which Radosh highlights with relish, as well as some nostalgia.*
In addition to learning the party line at the Little Red Schoolhouse, I spent a good deal of time hanging around the Village and going to Washington Square on Sundays for the weekly folk music gatherings, and to parties at people’s homes where we heard some of the first generation of city-bred country pickers and folk singers whose names would later become household words. Foremost among them, the man who inspired virtually everyone, was Pete Seeger, whom I had already gotten to know at Woodland. We all had what at that point was Pete’s only album, his 1948 LP on Folkways Records, which made him a folk legend. With his high tenor voice, crackling banjo played frailing style and head thrown back with his Adam’s apple bobbing as he sang, Pete was our Elvis Presley.
Seeger was also big at Elisabeth Irwin High School, where it was assumed that folk music was the “authentic voice of the people.” The school’s music program was led by Bob DeCormier, a charming, handsome and talented singer and choral director who went on to lead the New York Choral Society and then (under the nom de plume Robert Corman) the Harry Belafonte Singers during Belafonte’s heyday; and he was the music arranger for Peter, Paul and Mary. While he was at EI, DeCormier also directed a chorus I had joined, the Jewish Young Folk-Singers (the JYF), which was affiliated with the International Workers Order, a fraternal order created by the Communist Party.
SOURCE Ronald Radosh, Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001), 33–39.
The most cherished JYF performance was of Shostakovich’s Stalinist anthem “Song of the Forests.” We also excelled at performing folk cantatas, such as Earl Robinson’s “Lonesome Train” and his most famous composition, “Ballad for Americans.” We performed the latter many times, once with Paul Robeson recreating his wartime performance for a benefit concert for the Labor Youth League during its annual convention. Robeson had even sung the cantata at the 1944 Republican National Convention. In those days, the composition reflected the theme of wartime unity of American democracy against the threat of fascism—we’re all Americans, it said, united regardless of race and religion. In the 1950s, it symbolized something very different: the standing fast of American Communists behind their creed, and the myth that only the party represented the best of the American tradition, which McCarthyite fascism was destroying. Indeed, at the end of the chorale, an actor appeared onstage to read aloud Langston Hughes’ most sectarian Communist poem, “Let America Be America Again”—the only time Hughes argued on behalf of a soviet America.
I resolved to become a real folk singer and banjo player. Fortunately, Pete Seeger was giving group banjo lessons in the East Village, across the street from the Downtown Community School, where he taught music twice a week. For one year, Pete taught a small group of five or so students, at the princely sum of two dollars for a four- or five-hour class. Eric Weissberg, already a whiz, attended very briefly, but since he already knew as much banjo as Seeger, he quickly left the group. Another student was Vladimir Posner, who later became Gorbachev’s voice in America during the last dying gasp of Communism.
Seeger was my hero. Often he would stay in my parents’ New York City apartment when he was in town, since it was a long commute to home in Beacon, New York. Pete and I would head to my apartment after the lesson, and he would make music on the subway ride home. On a bus once, he remarked how musical the window wipers sounded as they swept away the rain. Like other left-wing youth, I made the pilgrimage to Pete’s home, which he said he had built in the 1940s with the help of other young people in the folk and Communist movements. He lived high up on a mountain, and had to meet us at the bottom to drive us up in his jeep. We spent the day there, singing, eating and having a good time. Among the guests was the Communist hack writer Michael Gold, née Granich, who wrote one note-worthy book in his entire career, Jews Without Money, now important only as a relic of proletarian literature that reflected an immigrant milieu. Gold had become one of the CP’s top propagandists, and wrote a weekly column for the Daily Worker called “Change the World.” After that picnic at Pete’s, Gold was struck by how many of us New York teens worshipped Seeger, whom he dubbed “the Karl Marx of the teenagers.”
It was not a comparison that Pete rejected; indeed, he was probably flattered by it. At one of my banjo lessons I noticed that Pete’s banjo case was stuffed with a week’s worth of the Daily Worker. “They’re to take to the hospital and read aloud to Woody,” he proudly told me. His hero and mentor Woody Guthrie, then suffering the horrible results of Huntington’s chorea and largely confined to Brooklyn State Hospital, had to be kept in touch with the party line.
Today, Pete is a national institution. As he arrived in town to receive his Kennedy Center Honors award in 1995, as well as a Medal of Honor in the Arts from President Bill Clinton, a puff piece in the Washington Post proclaimed him “America’s best-loved Commie.” Pete is widely regarded as an eccentric, somewhat harmless idealist, filled with good intentions. At the Kennedy Center gala, a brief film about Seeger told viewers how during the Great Depression he sang protest songs, as the soundtrack played the Almanac Singers’ version of “Which Side Are You On?” The ceremony also praised Pete’s refusal to capitulate to the witch hunters, alluding to his decision to invoke the First Amendment, rather than the Fifth, when he declined to testify before HUAC in the 1960s. And we were informed of his “pro-union and antifascist songs.”
But somehow, the award makers forgot to tell everyone about Seeger’s most famous record—the Almanac Singers’ very first album—Songs for John Doe. Released during the week in June 1941 when Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR, the antiwar album was filled with hard-hitting songs that called for no intervention in European battles on behalf of British imperialism, and condemned Roosevelt as a warmongering fascist who worked for J. P. Morgan. “I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead,” went a rollicking verse to the tune of “Jesse James.” Another, written to the melody of an old country tune, “Cripple Creek,” proclaimed “Franklin D., Franklin D., you ain’t gonna send us ’cross the sea.” It was pure party-line propaganda.
A writer for the Atlantic Monthly appropriately panned the album when it was released, calling it an offense to “the American defense effort, democracy and the army.” The reason so few people know of the album’s existence is easily explained: In true Communist fashion, Pete and his comrades had to respond immediately to the change in the party line that occurred when Hitler invaded the USSR. That meant a recall of the album just beginning to be produced. All pressings were destroyed, leaving only a few for posterity. Soon the Almanacs released an apology, “Dear Mr. President,” in which Pete lamented, in the understatement of the time, “Dear Mr. President, we haven’t always agreed in the past, I know,” and went on to say he was ready to “turn in my banjo for something that makes a little more noise,” i.e., a machine gun.
My friend Pete, then, was not just another antiwar activist. He was for peace during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, but called for U.S. intervention in the war after the Soviet Union was invaded. Then during the Cold War, when Stalin tried to expand the Soviet sphere in Europe, the time had come to order a new peace offensive. So Seeger made the transition from war to peace songs, bolstering the Soviet Union’s Stockholm Peace Petition, which called for unilateral Western disarmament “Put my name down, brother, where do I sign, I’m going to join the fight for peace, right down the line.”
Of course, Seeger had his own problems with the party, which never really trusted its own most favored artists—with the exception, perhaps, of the formidable Paul Robeson. For one thing, Seeger had the temerity to form a commercial group named the Weavers, which got on the Hit Parade in the late 1940s with “Goodnight, Irene,” the hora “Tzena, Tzena,” the traditional “On Top of Old Smokey,” and Leadbelly’s classic, rewritten with new words, “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.” The onset of the blacklist cooled the group’s career, which only picked up in the late 1950s, as the Weavers gained a new audience of leftists in the folk revival that functioned as a prelude to the Sixties.
Ironically, just as the blacklist was being developed, the Weavers got caught up in an internal CP issue: the party’s campaign against “white chauvinism,” when scores of white party members found themselves caught up in a war among the leadership, whose doomsday weapon was the accusation of racism. Party apparatchik Irwin Silber became the editor of Sing Out!, a folk music magazine which soon deteriorated into a sectarian publication for musical propaganda. On the side of the party leaders in the internecine conflict, Silber blasted the Weavers as racists for singing the songs of Negro America without having a black member. I remember asking Pete about this after a lesson. “Irwin is a literary type, not a folkie,” he responded, as if that answered the question. (Years later, Silber would be the first to condemn Bob Dylan for “betraying” the folk movement by going electric. Some believe that Dylan’s “Mr. Jones” was written about Silber—“There’s something happening here and you don’t know what it is, Do You, Mr. Jones?”) Shortly thereafter, Silber created a Weavers copycat group called the Gateway Singers, whose female singer was black. When the quartet performed at Carnegie Hall, the audience practically laughed them out of the auditorium.
Pete was caught up in all this infighting but he never seemed to become disillusioned. And he never criticized the Soviet Union. A few years ago, he told his biographer David King Dunaway that he now realized Stalin was a “hard driver”—quite a mild rebuke for perhaps the bloodiest of the twentieth-century dictators. As Dunaway wrote in his very sympathetic portrait of Seeger, “Decades after quitting the Party, [Seeger’s] harshest criticism of the Stalin era was an ‘awful lot of rough stuff.’” Recently, a PBS special about him found Seeger telling Bill Moyers that we must never forget the crimes of the past. He then sang an uninspired new song about the Nazi camp at Treblinka. One might pause to ask—Moyers, of course, did not—whether Seeger would ever consider composing a similar song about the Soviet Gulag.
Indeed, throughout the 1950s and ’60s, long after Stalin’s war against the Jews had become well known, Pete would sing “Hey Zhankoye,” for which he wrote his own English lyrics. Originally a Soviet ballad in Yiddish, it recounted the fiction that Stalin had freed the Jews of Russia and had settled them in a new Jewish socialist colony in Birobidzhan, Stalin’s answer to “reactionary Zionism.” Pete’s verses tell us:
When you go from Sevastopol,
On the way to Simforopol,
Just you go a little further down,
There’s a little railroad depot
Known quite well by all the people,
Called Zhankoye, Zhan, Zhan, Zhan.
Now if you look for paradise,
You’ll see it there before your eyes;
Stop your search and go no further on.
There we have a collective farm
All run by husky Jewish arms
At Zhankoye, Zhan, Zhan, Zhan.
In reality Birobidzhan was a completely failed experiment in which Jews were given virtually useless land, barely yielding a livelihood. Seeger used to sing “Hey Zhankoye” long after the Yiddish poet Peretz Markish was arrested as “an enemy of the people, American spy and Zionist agent.” I’ve always wondered if Seeger ever read Arkady Vaksberg’s powerful book Stalin Against the Jews, which describes Stalin’s murder of the Yiddish poets he once revered, Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer.
Pete’s argument has always been that although he may have been wrong, he only acted out of love for his country. That is why, he has often said, he opposed the war in Vietnam. But in fact, as Voltaire said of God, Vietnam is something Pete Seeger would have had to invent if it hadn’t existed. For it was Vietnam that brought Pete back into the mainstream. The broad and effective antiwar movement was waiting to welcome him and the other 1950s Communists back home. And Pete wrote a song that became the movement’s Vietnam anthem, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” with its harsh judgment on LBJ—“and the big fool said to push on.” In the mid-Sixties, Pete was booked to sing it on The Smothers Brothers program on television, but the CBS censors cut out his performance. It took a year of protest for him to be invited back and finally get to sing it on the airwaves. Still, one could be against the war—many were—and not write the kind of lyric Pete sang about Ho Chi Minh:
He educated all the people,
He demonstrated to the world,
If a man will stand for his own land,
He’s got the strength of ten.
But all this was in the future. As a teenager, I loved Pete and I loved music.