Where Have All the Flowers Gone? A Memorial to Peter Seeger

Pete Seeger, the eminent folksinger and political activist, died at the age of 94 on January 27, 2014. He was one of the few members of the 1930s Old Left who was influential with the youth generation of the 1960s. American left movements over the last century have often followed a developmental cycle that begins as youthful rebellion against unjust authority, followed by a period of ascendancy then diminishment and/or disillusionment. In these movements’ early stages, immoral special interests are seen as preventing democracy, while the virtuous victims are seen as populist forces of redemption. As time goes on, many on the left become like those they once opposed, as many Communists became anti-communists, or New Leftists became yuppies. Pete Seeger followed a somewhat different path, yet his early rebellion was succeeded in middle age by a blander social rebellion.

His affiliation with radicalism began as a teenager in 1936 and lasted until he resigned from the Communist Party in 1949. Yet in 2004 he said, “I’m still a communist, in the sense that I don’t

Page 95

believe the world will survive with the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer” (Hajdu, 2004, http://www.motherjones.com/ politics/2004/09/pete-seeger-last-war). Seeger’s musical career combined his allegiance to politically progressive causes with his prominence within folk music circles.

His birth in 1919 meant he arrived on this planet too early to be called a red diaper baby (the child of members of the Communist party) but he picked up his radicalism from his family. His father and mother were both professional musicians. His dad, Charles, from an old line New England family, established the University of California’s music department. Charles’ opposition to American involvement in World War I led to his resignation from “Cal” and a return to the east coast. The Seegers had three sons. Peter was the youngest. His parents divorced when he was seven. During the Depression, Seeger’s family was able to afford to send him to prominent boarding schools in Connecticut. After graduating from Avon Old Farms in 1936, Pete entered Harvard, but dropped out two years later, then went to work for Alan Lomax collecting folk music from throughout the U.S.

At the age of 17, Pete became another upper middle class adolescent who found the ideas of Marx appealing, and joined the Young Communist League, then six years later became a member of the Communist Party. He was drawn to Communism during the party’s Popular Front period. After Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, Stalin became preoccupied with the Nazis. Parties under his control began to find common ground with anti-Nazi political parties. In the U.S. at this time the party slogan was “Communism is 20th Century Americanism.” American Communists identified with the working class whether urban or rural.

For his entire career, Seeger remained somewhat true to the perspectives of the Popular Front period. He was interested in uncovering and recording folk songs from all regions of the United States and from countries throughout the world. Musically, Seeger was an internationalist and a champion of working people, wherever they might be. His own political songs also favored the lower classes over the economic bosses. Seeger believed that the people united can overcome the power of the elite. In this sense many of his political and non-political songs crossed the boundary between

Page 96

liberalism and radicalism and had a democratic flavor.

In the early 1940s, along with Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, Seeger founded the Almanac Singers, a politically radical folk group. Their first collection of songs were anti-war and anti-capitalist. President Roosevelt was seen as collaborating with Wall Street to promote war against the people’s interest. Here youthful radicalism saw the powerful as destructive and championed the masses. Later these singers recorded pro union songs. One of them, co-written by Seeger, is entitled “Talking Union.” In this composition, it is the familiar opposition of workers and bosses, where the employees want to unionize and their employers want to destroy this effort by whatever means necessary. In the conflict between the people and the interests, Seeger and his collaborators proclaim, “But if you all stick together, boys… You’ll win.” The redeeming power of democratic unity can defeat entrenched economic power. This song contains rhetoric that has characterized American political insurgencies from the Stamp Act to the more recent Occupy Movement. Later, after Hitler invaded the USSR, the Almanac Singers reversed their anti-war stance and embraced American involvement in World War II with Seeger himself writing a song of pro-war support called “Dear Mr. President.”

Seeger’s next important folk group was The Weavers, which he co-founded with Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman in 1948. The Weavers downplayed their political convictions and instead popularized folk songs from the U.S. and throughout the world. Their 1950 recording of “Goodnight Irene,” by the African-American blues singer Leadbelly, was a number one record. Seeger was entering a new stage in his leftist career by accommodating with the power structure, recording for a major record company, and keeping his politics and music separate. He resigned from the Communist Party the year after The Weavers were formed.

The Weavers’ popularity corresponded with the second Red Scare. Their record company succumbed to the pressure and dropped The Weavers who disbanded in 1952. In 1955, the onetime Communist Party member, Peter Seeger, was interrogated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). While many individuals called before this group pleaded the Fifth Amend-

Page 97

ment, Seeger refused to answer questions on the grounds of the First Amendment. He was later convicted of contempt of Congress, though the conviction was subsequently overturned. Television and nightclubs would not allow Seeger to perform for many years, but he found other ways to get music to his audience.

His fortunes began to alter as the U.S. slowly came out of the obsession with domestic subversion. Liberalism began to revive after the ascendancy of Martin Luther King Jr. in the mid-1950s and Kennedy’s election in 1960. In 1957, Seeger introduced to Martin Luther King Jr. an old hymn that he had somewhat altered. The song was “We Shall Overcome,” which, after King promoted it, soon became ubiquitous at civil rights rallies across the country.

In 1958 a folk group, the Kingston Trio, had a number one hit with “Tom Dooley.” All of a sudden a folk music revival spread throughout the country, eventually including television shows such as Hootenanny. One indication of Seeger’s changing circumstances was his signing to Columbia Records in 1961 by another old 30s radical and legendary Columbia Records executive John Hammond. Some of Seeger’s less radical music was about to enter the mainstream.

In 1955, he had composed an anti-war song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” As a member of The Almanac Singers Seeger associated war mongering with capitalists. Here it was just war itself that was the enemy. Seven years later “Flowers” reached number 21 on the top 40 in a recording by the Kingston Trio. Also, in 1962, “If I Had a Hammer,” a song co-written by Seeger and Lee Hays in 1949, reached number 10 in the Peter, Paul, and Mary version. This was a populist song about “love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land,” the “hammer of justice,” and the “bell of freedom.” Here is a Seeger composition about social justice where the people unite but again there is no evil force standing in their way as was portrayed in the earlier “Talking Union.” In 1954, when Seeger put music to and adapted lyrics from the book of Ecclesiastes for “Turn! Turn! Turn!” he added one phrase, after the line “a time for peace,” he wrote “I swear it’s not too late.” The Byrds rock version with this addition made it to the top of the charts for three weeks in 1965.

Page 98

The one occasion where a recording of Pete’s actually made the top 100 was in 1964. The song was “Little Boxes,” written by Malvina Reynolds, and is a satirical song about conformity and the loss of individuality in contemporary culture. Another anti-war Pete Seeger song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” was recorded in 1966. This song was about a fool army captain in the 1940s who, despite being repeatedly warned of the danger, died by wading too deep into the Missouri River (also known as Big Muddy). On the record, without quite saying so, Seeger made it clear he was also talking about Vietnam, but without any reference to a military-industrial complex. While this recording never landed on the Billboard charts, it made its mark in other ways. Seeger taped the song for an airing of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in November 1967, but the CBS censors removed it. The Smother Brothers objected, got their way, and early in 1968 Seeger sang this song on their program. Slightly earlier, in October 1967, prominent liberal journalist Richard Rovere wrote a lengthy anti-Vietnam war article for The New Yorker and titled his piece “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy.”

With the revival of activism in the 1950s and 1960s, Pete Seeger’s now watered down political convictions reached a wide public audience through the mediums of popular music and television. However, the politically active folk singers of the mid 1960s added a dimension to some of their compositions that are not often found in Seeger’s work: introspection and self-questioning. For instance, Bob Dylan’s 1964 “My Back Pages” reflects on how he has felt younger when being less self-righteous, and “Changes” by Phil Ochs from 1966 concerns the impact of shifting events and feelings. In Ochs’ 1966 satirical song “Love Me I’m A Liberal,” he has his phony narrator say, “I go to all the Pete Seeger concerts. He sure gets me singing those songs.” There were ways then that Seeger made the transition from the old to the new left and other ways that, in keeping with the fate of his youth, he had somewhat different concerns than the generation of singer songwriters inheriting his mantle. His renewed popularity was related to making people feel connected without arousing anger at the power elite.

Pete Seeger kept continuity between the radicalism of his youth and the political activism of his middle and later years in his

Page 99

championing of world music and his anti-war stance. He persevered in these beliefs all his long adult life. Seeger was able to appeal to many by making his beliefs compatible with recurring American democratic concerns with freedom, justice, unity, equity, and peace. As have many other once youthful radicals, in middle age he found himself flirting with the mainstream he once vehemently opposed.

Page 100