Pete Seeger, musical, political icon who helped create modern American folk music. Seeger wrote some of most the defining songs of the 20th century peace movement—”If I Had a Hammer,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “Turn! Turn! Turn!” expressed in melody the views of millions who opposed war and nuclear weapons and yearned to create a better world. In the ’50s, Pete Seeger opposed to Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt. He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, almost jailed for refusing to answer questions. Seeger became a prominent civil rights activist, helped popularize the anthem “We Shall Overcome.” He was also a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and inspired a generation of protest singers.
As a rebel who challenged the status quo, it might not have surprised Seeger’s fans to learn this week that Pete Seeger was under government surveillance for nearly 30 years. It turns out it was not an antiwar anthem that caught the government’s eye, but a letter. Newly released documents show the FBI began spying on Pete Seeger as an Army private in 1943 because he wrote a letter protesting a proposal to deport all Japanese-American citizens at the end of World War II. That same year, Pete married his wife, Toshi Seeger, who was Japanese-American. Pete wrote, quote, “If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too. America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed,” he wrote.
The disclosure is contained in the FBI’s file on Seeger, obtained by Mother Jones and the Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request. Military intelligence agents visited his grade school and his high school, investigated his father, his wife Toshi, interviewed fellow folk singer Woody Guthrie. A military intelligence report wrote, quote, “[Seeger’s] Communistic sympathies, his unsatisfactory relations with landlords and his numerous Communist and otherwise undesirable friends, make him unfit for a position of trust or responsibility.” The documents show the government continued to spy on Seeger until the early ’70s. Pete Seeger’s file runs nearly 1,800 pages, with about 90 pages still withheld. Pete Seeger died last year at the age of 94.
David King Dunaway talking:
that’s actually a drop in the bucket, because I sued the FBI and CIA, oh, decades ago, and actually, right before he wrote that letter, he and Woody Guthrie were out here in San Francisco singing for a guy named Harry Bridges, who helped organize the longshore workers’ union. And the FBI thought they had figured out the secret of Pete Seeger’s appeal to an audience. If I can read from an FBI document I declassified a long time ago, they said the—they characterized Pete and Woody as “extremely untidy, ragged, and dirty in appearance.” And then the song-leading technique that couldn’t fool the FBI: “After going through the song once, the majority of the audience joined in the singing,” noted their informant. “They joined in not from their own desire, but were led into it through mass psychology and apathy toward the utter control of the meeting by Communist officers and members.” So the FBI has been hunting—ghost hunting, you might say, red hunting—a long time.
I think the file was actually opened earlier, because Pete Seeger was a member of a very successful national group called the Almanac Singers. They were on all four radio networks at once, at one point, before a Harvard professor—ironically, since Pete went to Harvard for a year and a half in the class of JFK, that is—actually blew the whistle on the fact that before Pete Seeger was singing “Beat Hitler” songs, he was singing peace songs and union songs. And there were a lot of people that didn’t like unions in those days. And ultimately, that quality in him, the quality of what I think of as New England patriotism, the sense that we have the right to speak our minds, won out.
I mean, here’s Pete Seeger investigated for 30 years by the FBI. They sent people out to Boston. They sent them out to New York City. All over the country, they were trying to find out—they sent people to his elementary school, to his high school—all of this to find out: What is this man who wrote a letter? And after all, isn’t it a right of a private citizen to write a letter expressing their feelings to the government about what it means?
when I spoke to an attorney here in San Francisco as part of my suit against the FBI and CIA, I said, “Why are you caring so much about this material?” And I think—I think the real reason, Amy, is that they’re concerned that maybe some of the statute of limitations has not yet expired on the crimes that were committed against American citizens as part of this, you know, Cold War, against the remnants of the Roosevelt administration. So they may be worried about their own agents and what they did.
the FBI did go to Pete—to Woody and did ask him questions. And according to the summary released by their informant, which is not always quite accurate, well, they—Woody kind of soft-pedaled politics, said Pete was a liberal who believed in the common man, sic. And I think that what we can learn from all of this is, what does—what right does the government have into working with or interfering with artistic production and artists themselves? What role do we want the government to take? Do they get to pick and choose which artists they like and which they follow down hallways and skulk at in corners? I don’t think so. I don’t think America is that way. And I don’t think Pete Seeger’s tradition of intellectual and moral responsibility is appropriate here. You know, America needs heroes. We’ve lost a lot of them. Pete Seeger was one of those people who just never shut up. He felt like he had a world to defend, and he defended it.
— source democracynow.org