It is good to despise Generalisimo Francisco Franco, the Spanish fascist and it is good to reflect that, at one moment or another, the enthusiasm for progressive causes can lead you over the cliff. The appreciation of his errors can introduce a note of reflective irony into your excited response to his songs in favor of the civil rights revolution, and generally his songs in favor of the causes of democratic equality and rational reflection. So it is good to remember that Pete Seeger, in his younger years, entertained some foolish and reactionary ideas. And yet, if you can persuade crowds of people that simple morality and a childlike vision of right and wrong can be summed up in a few phrases, there is nothing you cannot achieve, and some of what you might achieve could turn out to be disastrous in the extreme-e.g., Stalin's idea of dividing up the world with Hitler. Those songs, with their crowd-sourcing capacity, are tremendously moving. "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"-this is magnificent. I do not know if people will be singing "If I Had a Hammer" a hundred years from now, but they would be fools not to do so. "If I Had a Hammer," which he composed, is immortal. But no one played a greater role than Seeger in popularizing the song, and a magnificent song it was: an expression of moral grandeur. It is unclear to me what was Seeger's precise role in the creating of "We Shall Overcome," which became the anthem of the civil rights revolution in the 1950s and '60s. And so, he picked up his banjo and leaned into the microphone, and his vocal warblings and his banjo plunks were exactly what Stalin wanted to hear from Pete Seeger. He and his musical colleagues sang anti-war songs in 1939-41 because, in the Soviet Union, Stalin had decided that an alliance with the Nazis was a good idea and the order to support Stalin had gone out to every Communist Party in the world and Pete Seeger was, in those days, a good Communist. Pete Seeger's anti-war performances from those years are revolting.
It is true that, in later years, the mad-dog ultra-right-wingers and the McCarthyite demagogues tormented Seeger endlessly for those foolish performances, and they succeeded in ruining his musician's career, for a while-which could lead you to raise a fist and insist that something in his Soviet-line period must have been commendable, in spite of everything. His charming banter is childlike in its simplicity-his denunciations of the capitalist imperialists who might like to see America go to war foolishly against the Nazis. Have you ever heard a recording of Pete Seeger singing one of his anti-war hymns from the period, 1939 to 1941, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany? Pete Seeger in those performances sings in a lovely naïve tone, as always.
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