Pete’s controversial, and confusing, role during the 1965 Newport Folk Festival concerning the Butterfield Blues Band and Bob Dylan’s use of electric guitars would go down in history as the seminal musical event of the year (and much longer). The controversy had to do with the inadequate sound system and a wrangle over the proper presentation of folk music, with Dylan’s role front and central, but for others what continued to rankle was Pete’s radical politics.* In his hometown of Beacon a debate arose in late November when Pete agreed to hold a concert in the local high school, sponsored by the board of education and the Teachers Association. A Catholic priest, Monsignor Hubert Beller, sparked the formation of a protest committee that submitted a petition with 700 names complaining about Pete’s concerts in Moscow and his social protest activities. Paul Cowan (1940–1988), a staff writer for The Village Voice, in this piece focuses on Beacon’s history and rather conservative population. He emphasizes the odd situation of the Seegers living in such a place, but he places some of the blame on Pete for not cultivating his neighbors. This would soon change with Pete’s role in cleaning up the Hudson River.
A similar wrangle took place in early 1967 in nearby Yorktown, when Pete was invited by the American Field Service to appear for a fund raiser in the local high school auditorium. According to the account in the New York Times, “the largest single group in favor of the concert—which, by the way, has long since become a sellout—are the high school students. ‘The thing is,’ said Mike Fyler, a junior, ‘now since the fuss everyone wants to go.” As usual, the concert came off as planned. “A funny thing happened in Yorktown Heights last night,” Jay Levin wrote in the New York Post. “Nothing. Pete Seeger, who sings such radical folk songs as ‘Down by the Riverside,’ gave a concert in the high school there last night, playing to a packed house. And nothing happened. And so the performance passed into history and today the kids are back in school, their minds still pure, the flag still waving unsullied from its mast.” Students throughout the country were rebelling against the war in Vietnam, questioning parental controls and prevailing cultural norms, but Pete had little role in this generational revolt, although he certainly encouraged it. “Later, the lean and lanky 49-year-old singer blamed all the protest, which follow him where ever he goes, on the John Birch Society,” according to the article. “As a meeting last week in Palm Beach, Fla., he said its leaders had ‘ordered’ a stepped up campaign against him.” Formed in 1958, the John Birch Society, heavily anticommunist, was on the right wing fringe of American politics.*
Pete Seeger, who has lived in Beacon, New York, for the past 17 years, has in the past month been the focus of a heated controversy there. Late last spring the high school teachers association asked him to participate in a concert in the school’s auditorium whose proceeds would go toward a college scholarship for some high school senior. Seeger agreed to sing for free and the benefit was scheduled with no immediate objection. But this fall, while on a tour of the Soviet Union, Seeger performed a song about the war in Vietnam at a private gathering of students from the University of Moscow, which was described by reporters from the Times end Herald Tribune as anti-American. Within a week various groups in Beacon were protesting against the idea that a “Communist,” an “un-American,” a “controversial figure” (the terms were used interchangably) would sing at an institution supported by taxpayers’ money before an audience of impressionable youngsters.
“In these troubled times,” according to Donald Yallen, head of the Beacon Conservative Party, “we cannot afford the luxury of having person so closely aligned with anti-American policy looked up to as a hero by the younger generation. His recent … anti-American statement made in Moscow should stand as enough evidence that he is among those who are presently giving so much aid and comfort to the enemy.” “I don’t like the idea of this man singing in our schools,” asserted Phillip Brink. “But I also ask, should we permit someone like Senator Kennedy to speak here? He wants to give blood to our enemies.”
Most of the opinions expressed in Beacon have been decidedly anti-Seeger. Statements have piled one on top of the other in the local paper, the Beacon Evening News, and have only occasionally been rebutted by the singer’s supporters. A petition requesting that the concert be postponed was signed by 700 people in a town whose overall population is just 15,000.
SOURCE The Village Voice, December 16, 1965, 9, 11–12.
Despite these protests both the school board and the teachers association have voted, by large majorities, to sustain their support of the concert. But where Seeger’s critics frame the issue in terms of his personality and politics, the concert’s advocates usually emphasize the importance of the scholarship.
So the concert will probably go on, a kid will probably attend college next year—and Seeger’s reputation in Beacon will probably suffer. The issues that lie beneath his particular case—of the meaning of “communism” and “controversy” in this decade, of the right of dissent in a period of crisis, of the attitude most Americans take towards anything unfamiliar—will not have been joined. So a potentially useful debate will most likely dissolve into bitter memories, soured relationships, expanded fears. At the same time liberals in Beacon will remain proud of the fact that civil liberties in their town continue to be cherished.
The town of Beacon—which sits in the historic Hudson River Velley—was only established 50 years ago, when the citizens of two neighboring villages, Fishkill Landing and Mattawan, decided to join forces. For that reason, according to some people, Beacon is still somewhat less possessed of a sense of community than its neighboring towns, Peekskill and Poughkeepsie. Although there have been a few shared enterprises about which residents are still proud (last year a preliminary round of the Babe Ruth League baseball tournament was held in Beacon and hundreds of citizens pitched in to build a field that is reportedly one of the best in the country), the political life of the town seems somewhat disorganized.
The spirit of town-meeting democracy that one sometimes senses in other old American towns—of cooperation and communication among all sorts of citizens—seems to be missing in Beacon, perhaps because of its peculiar history. In fact, this became something of an issue in the recent mayoralty election there. The Democratic administration, which had begun an urban renewal project without any town-wide discussion, was defeated by an insurgent group of Republicans who promised to hold a referendum on the project. There are still many people who doubt whether the referendum will involve very deep discussion, and whether it will have much effect on a program that is already midway towards completion.
The physical symbol of Beacon’s disorganization is its curiously distended Main Street which spans the full distance of the two earlier townships. City officials claim that the unwieldy thoroughfare makes shopping difficult and that as a result local businessmen have lost a good deal of trade to store owners in Peekskill, Poughkeepsie, and to the shopping centers on the highway. But now, finally, because the entire Hudson River Valley is expected soon to become as vital a suburban center as Westchester County, there are plans to build hotels, motels, shopping centers, and housing projects in Beacon itself. These will be among the first visible reminders inside the town that America has reached a new phase of her history, and no one is willing to predict what affect they will have upon the thoughts and actions of local citizens.
For Beacon is still a remarkably parochial place, more insulated than Poughkeepsie, which feels the influence of Vassar College, or Peekskill, with its proximity to industries like IBM and the Texaco Research Laboratories. Its insulation seems to be accentuated by the fact that the town’s limited group of residents with cosmopolitan tastes have so few dealings with people whose range of experience does not extend beyond Beacon. It may be for this reason that the flailing criticisms against Seeger are taken so seriously.
For example, one of the town’s leading professionals, when he was asked how he felt about Seeger, said, “Of course I have no objection to his singing here. I’ve heard him many times myself and so have my children. He’s a great artist.” But the man knew very little about the controversy, and he had never heard of the men who were behind the anti-Seeger campaign. “Whatever they object to, they certainly aren’t stating it very clearly,” he mused. “They must want something more than just to prevent Seeger from singing at this concert.” But the idea that common citizens who wanted Seeger to sing might not speak out for fear of being called Communists was totally alien to him. “How can anyone even accuse Seeger of being a Communist?” he asked. “I don’t know the man personally, but I remember that all of the charges against him were dropped. And didn’t he refuse even to take the Fifth Amendment when he was investigated? It seems to me that he acted very bravely.” But he did not see any reason why he should defend Seeger publicly, since the concert will certainly take place.
The leading anti-Seeger critics also see little reason for public debate. They actively resist listening to people whose views do not match their own. The protest was largely inspired by Monsignor Hubert Beller, the rector of St. John’s Church in Beacon, who claimed in a letter to the Evening News: “Many students who have graduated from Beacon High (and are now fighting in Vietnam) would feel abandoned if they knew that in the hallowed halls they left behind there will now stand a man who sings songs against our position in Vietnam and therefore indirectly against them.”
When Beller was asked if he had ever seen Seeger perform, or heard a record by him, or whether he even knew the words to the song that had caused the controversy, he answered “No, no, such things aren’t important. I know enough about the man’s background. I don’t have to know anything about him personally. You can find out all you have to know from the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, or the FBI in Poughkeepsie.”
The attitude that Beller expressed in private was reflected in a public meeting, organized by Seeger’s critics, to discuss the protest. A man who had brought along a tape recorded explication by Seeger of the reason he sang the song was told that “there is no reason that any of us should listen to that.” And when Seeger’s supporters, who had come to the meeting under the mistaken impression that it would involve an actual discussion, tried to speak, they were either ignored or insulted.
At one point one of the leading opponents of the concert made a speech about how his own child had heard Seeger sing and had “been told some things.” Resenting the implication of the remark, some pro-Seeger people asked, in chorus, “What things?” The speaker turned to one of the ladies who had talked before and said, “Listen, Miss—I want to make one thing clear. If you’re one, I’m not one.” One? Communist, pacifist, controversial figure—it didn’t matter. Though the incident was not picked up by the Evening News (which had no reporter at the meeting, and published its story from an organizer’s oral account), it soon leaked out over the grapevine. “If it were only me,” a man who had heard the story said the next day, “of course I’d fight publicly. Somebody has to defend Seeger’s reputation. But I have to think of my family. I don’t want my wife to lose all her friends, and my children to be attacked at school.”
There are, however, a few people in Beacon who have decided to defend Seeger at public meetings, in print, and in talks with their friends. One of them, Ted Haley, is a former law student who years ago had to quit school so that he could support his large family. Now he is a foreman at a carpentry plant. A devout Catholic and a long-time member of the Knights of Columbus (whose officials have played a leading role in the protest), he has for years been friendly with the men who now criticize Seeger.
“But I don’t see how they can consider themselves either religions men or good Americans,” he says of the protestors. “What do they think freedom means if they want to refuse a man like Seeger the right to sing?” While Haley openly criticizes Seeger’s opponents, though, he implicitly expresses dissatisfaction with the singer himself. “If only people knew Pete they wouldn’t behave this way. But that’s one of Pete’s troubles—he’s so busy and so famous that maybe people here are a little jealous. He really doesn’t try to get to know people in town. Maybe that’s why he’s resented. People think he’s a little aloof. But still, that doesn’t begin to excuse the protest. I have to say that I’m ashamed of some of my friends.”
But a few men like Haley cannot really provoke a balanced public discussion in Beacon. What seems to be happening is that the attitudes expressed with some delicacy by the organizers of the protest filter through the newspapers, private discussion, and the rumor mill to people who, not knowing Seeger themselves, direct at him all the anger they feel about a variety of political issues.
“Pete Seeger! That Commie!” a shopkeeper said when he was asked whether the concert should take place. “American boys are dying in Vietnam, and he wants to sing here. He doesn’t even deserve to live here. If he likes Russia so much, why doesn’t he go there? Why don’t people in this town just ship him there?”
He paused for a moment, then continued: “I don’t know the man myself, never talked to him in my life. They tell me he’s a great artist—maybe he is, maybe he’s the greatest artist in the world—but that doesn’t matter. I can tell about him. His wife’s half-Jap”—he thought for a second—“I guess that doesn’t matter either. But you should see the people who go to visit him. They look like queers, beatniks. you know. Why the other day there was a man going out there I could have sworn was a spy. You could tell from the way he looked, with his shifty eyes. You can tell about Seeger from the way he lives, way off in the mountains outside of Beacon like some crazy hermit. We don’t need his kind around here.”
And in a way Seeger’s home does match the shopkeeper’s description: it is a log cabin located just a few miles outside of Beacon in a tiny village called Duchess Junction; and it is still further isolated by a windy, bumpy road that even the Seegers’ sturdy jeep station wagon has trouble traversing. In fact, the house is quite lovely. Aloft on a wooded slope, it affords, through a picture window in the spacious two-tiered living room, a lovely view of the Hudson River and the banks that surround it.
But it is clear why people in Beacon would find such a house, and some of its guests, peculiar and threatening. If the shopkeeper who was so outraged at Seeger’s ideas had come into that living room and been greeted by a young Danish girl, a Scottish family, Seeger’s wife and his Japanese father-in-law, and an American Negro who, having spent most of the last decade in Africa, was wearing a gaudy African shirt and a furry Russian astrakhan hat, he would have been perplexed beyond words. Nothing in his experience would have allowed him to understand the conversation that flowed so naturally there—about Africa, about Denmark and Scotland, about de facto segregation in Beacon, about the overall crisis of civil liberties of which Seeger’s own problem was just one part.
Of course, the shopkeeper will never go to the Seeger house, nor will he take the trouble to attend the concert at the high school. If he did he might, like most people who see Seeger perform, become so enveloped in the atmosphere of enthusiasm and good feeling that the singer always creates, that his perspective on the local situation—and on dissent, in general—might change. But there are no voices in Beacon that urge him to explore new situations, to acquire information before he unleashes sweeping criticism. Seeger, the radical is too isolated from the community, and professional people in Beacon, members of its intelligentsia, are too accustomed to talking among themselves, and not with the wider public.