In the New York Times. Sunday, May 31, Alan Light reviewed The Protest Singer: An Intimate Portrait of Pete Seeger by Alec Wilkinson:
The defining moment for Seeger was his 1955 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee (reprinted here as an appendix), in which he yielded no ground regarding his beliefs. He was sentenced to jail for contempt of Congress, but the conviction was overturned. With this event, Wilkinson writes, Seeger staked his claim as an American hero; forever after, he “typified the principles of all the brave people he sang about.”
Among his supporters and admirers, especially on the American left , Seeger is a much beloved saintly icon as Mother Theresa is to many Catholics. My comments are from my perspective as a non-ideological progressive critical thinker who tries to be tolerant of a wide range of political views.
Biographies of Seeger that do not discuss his full story do a disservice to history.
Nothing the House Un-American Activities Committee did was appropriate or worthy of support. Seeger and others should never have been called to testify. The communist organizations that the committee was investigating were marginal, ineffective, irrelevant or defunct. They were best ignored and allowed to wither as Communism continued to discredit itself by committing atrocities against its own and other people.
However, the more I learn about people like Seeger, the less of a heroic person of principle he seems.
Was Seeger refusing to testify not only because of some lofty First Amendment principles about freedom of association and belief but also because of his embarrassing association with American Communists? In 1940, following the line ordered by the Moscow based Communist International (Comintern), Seeger and other American Communists opposed Britain's and France's resistance to Nazi attacks because at that time the Soviets had an alliance with the Nazis. Of course, when the Nazis attacked the Soviets, Seeger and other American Communist enthusiastically supported the war.
To this day, Seeger is reported to barely be able to choke out a condemnation of Stalin who was responsible for more deaths than the Nazis.
Exactly what is so brave, heroic, and principled about refusing to discuss how one was a thoughtless ideologue who opposed a war against the Nazis because Stalin and the Soviet Communists told you not to? Exactly what was principle that Seeger was defending?
Communists preyed on idealists. They recruited Americans who supported civil and labor rights, the United Nations, diplomacy over war, and similar issues. They misrepresented the Communist Party as just another legitimate political organization or a third party alternative to the two mainstream parties.
I have given this much thought when I learned that one of my son's classmates was the grandchild of filmmaker Elia Kazan. Kazan may have been one of the idealists preyed upon and recruited by the Communist Party. He felt no obligation to sacrifice his career to shield those who preyed upon him so he testified. Kazan was condemned by his colleagues such as Arthur Miler and was estranged from them for the rest of their lives. I don't know if Kazan did the right thing either. I do think the issues are more complicated than viewing Kazan as a villain and Seeger as a hero.Seeger eventually drifted away from formal Communist organizations and has done great musical and political things since. To my assessment his greatness is diminished by his lack of full, honest disclosure about his past. As this review suggests, he actively deflects attention from some parts of his past and cultivates a saintly, heroic, principled image.
Some views fall out of the range of legitimacy and tolerance. On the right, they include white supremacy, secession or militia movements. On the left, they are the forms of communism that reject peaceful constitutional processes for the transfer of power or that are more loyal to a foreign or international communist movements than they are to our own people and nation.
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