#oh pete seeger we're really in it now

[arlathen]

it's one of those lay down and listen to folk revival days

[maryellencarter]

you know what, I'm procrastinating on changing my sheets, let's have storytime.

okay, so it is the 1950s, and McCarthyism is banging along destroying careers, as one does. and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is the official government representative body of McCarthyism, is looking for more people to blacklist from working in entertainment, that being their raison d'etre, and they decide to hale up Pete Seeger to be bullied and questioned and turned around his words into a paper traitor.

Now, all this is from memory, but if I have things right, Pete had actually been a member of the US's Communist party way back in like 1940. At that point, he was just a scraggy young beanpole, son of an eminent musicologist and friend to Woody Guthrie (of "This machine kills fascists" fame; it perhaps tells you something about the pair that while Woody's banjo said "This machine kills fascists", Pete's later said "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender".)

Anyways, so in 1940, Pete Seeger had been a fiery young Communist singer, and while we were still being isolationist as we do, he had in fact written some now-forgotten protest songs urging the US, first to stay out of the war, then when Russia was like "oh help we're being attacked", urging the US to enter the war. Then Pearl Harbor happened and made that pretty much a moot point.

So anyway, by the time McCarthyism rolls around, Pete has decided he's not so hot on the postwar Soviet state and has given up his Communist Party membership. But he's still going around making a career out of being all Pete Seeger at people, singing extremely suspicious songs about peace and brotherhood and even somgs from Russia and China, let alone rabble-rousing songs like "L'internationale". So HUAC decides he is a Dangerous Influence and summons him up.

(In the final analysis, obviously, they were never going to win. You can blacklist people from hiring concert halls and publishing with major publishers, but Pete was making some early selfpub experiments, and you can't blacklist a man from owning a long-necked banjo. He would quite happily have gone back to riding the rails if that was how he had to get his message out.)

Anyway, so after all these tangents, here is Pete Seeger, a slightly older beanpole with a truly astonishing badger-beard, and here is the House Un-American Activities Committee all ready to bully this nancy peace-loving proto-hippie stringbean into incriminating himself.

So the first thing Pete does, he announces that, with no disrespect at all to his honored colleagues who have pled the Fifth Amendment before HUAC (that is, invoked the "you cannot be forced to incriminate yourself" clause of US law and refused to answer any questions whatsoever so that their words could not be twisted), he is going to take a different route. He believes that Congress has no authority at all to be asking him or any other citizen whether he has associated with Communists, or any of these other questions, and so without even invoking the Fifth Amendment, he is simply going to sit here and not answer the questions. That way, nobody can say "He must be a criminal or he would not have to plead the Fifth."

And then! Of course HUAC keeps asking him "did you sing this or that Suspicious song on such and such a date", and Pete tells them that he's happy to perform the songs for them, though he doesn't have his banjo at the proceedings, but it is none of HUAC's business where else he has sung them or for whom.

Sadly, HUAC declined to have the songs sung for them. I really wish that they had accepted. Pete Seeger trying to get evil Congressmen to join in on the chorus of "If I Had a Hammer" is a thing that ought to have happened in the world. But it still makes me happy that they got even that close.

(For the record, Pete was found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to a year in prison. I don't know if he served the time or not. But he was at President Obama's inauguration, singing as if he'd fly up in the sky from happiness, while HUAC was pretty much in their graves unmourned, so I'd say he won in the end. I'm glad he died before 2016, though. He would have joined the fight, and he was too old to see the end of it.)

every so often i remember the time pete seeger tried to get HUAC into a singalong and it just makes me so happy