The Real American Idol: Pete Seeger

CHILDREN EIGHTY YEARS YOUNGER THAN HE IS can sing his songs. Folk musicians around the world play an instrument that bears his name. An American rock icon releases a tribute album to coincide with his eighty-seventh birthday. The Kennedy Center honors him for lifetime achievement in the same city that nearly jailed him for subversion decades earlier. A fundamentally simple man, he wears his accolades with a frank and modest demeanor that puts literally to shame the self-aggrandizing, chest-thumping atonal frauds and mass production empty vessels who are called musicians today. He is both the first and last of a breed of whose creation he was a major part. He is an American original. He is Pete Seeger.

There is a hint of the timeless about the man. He never looked young, even when he was, and now that he is well into his ninth decade, he wears his age with the same grace that he held and played that now-famous long-necked banjo. Seeger has godfathered three younger generations of musicians, and nothing lends credibility to a folksinger as much as an association with ol' Pete does. He has spent nearly seventy years singing songs, through decades of wars and depression and peace and prosperity, always with an unarticulated faith that if he could just get folks singing together then somehow things would work out for the best. From his wanderings with Woody Guthrie to union rallies and migrant camps and with the Almanac Singers and the Weavers through their rise and fall - from pressing Bob Dylan and Joan Baez into freedom rides and demonstrations in the Deep South in the Civil Rights era through his cruises up and down the Hudson with Arlo Guthrie to cleanse that desecrated waterway - Pete Seeger has just kept on singing, and he wanted all of us to sing along with him.

A half dozen at least of his songs will likely outlive him by a century or more. While everyone knows that Pete wrote Where Have All The Flowers Gone? and Turn! Turn! Turn! and co-wrote If I Had A Hammer with fellow Weaver Lee Hays, few are aware that folk classics Guantamera and Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight) would have lain fallow in their countries of origin had not Seeger discovered, re-arranged, and introduced them to American audiences. Fewer still are aware that the present form of We Shall Overcome, originally a religious and labor song before it became a civil rights hymn and just about every activist's favorite anthem, owes its arrangement and many of its lyrics to the lanky Harvard drop-out with that impossibly long banjo.

That Seeger's supposed politics remain problematic for some is simply an indication of the extent to which Pete subsumed himself into his music. Not given to rants, Pete always tried to let the songs speak for him. That he was a socialist or communist or radical leftist is beyond question. But HUAC and McCarthy and the FBI never quite understood what Pete was up to. Seeger's activism had more in common with the utopian communards of nineteenth century New Harmony or Brook Farm than it ever did with sleeper cells or comic-opera type Commies who drummed out the vote for Gus Hall for forty years. If you want to understand Pete's collectivism, you have to look not in Trotsky or Lenin but in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes! or Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Like those classic American poets, Pete Seeger had an unshakable belief in the uncommonness of the Common Man, in the ultimate destiny that the rights of the many would prevail over the privileges of the few. You can see the Seeger brand of social collectivism more accurately in an Amish barn-raising than you can in a screed from any of today's misnamed "leftists."

All you have to do is just listen to him sing. His voice is sweet without being especially refined or trained; it has a throatiness and flatness of accent that brands it as unmistakably and universally American. It reminds you of the delightful and classic short story The Devil and Daniel Webster in which Stephen Vincent Benet relates the tale of an unfortunate New Hampshire farmer who in a moment of weakness has sold his soul to the Devil himself. In an effort to stay out of Hell, the farmer implores the legendary Daniel Webster to plead his case for him. Things seem to be going badly until Webster reaches his summation. Benet tells us

...he wasn't pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey....The fire began to die on the hearth and the wind before morning to blow.... And his words came back at the end .... For his voice could search the heart, and that was his gift and his strength. And to one, his voice was like the forest and its secrecy, and to another like the sea and the storms of the sea; and one heard the cry of his lost nation in it, and another saw a little harmless scene he hadn't remembered for years. But each saw something.

And that is what Pete Seeger has been doing for the last seventy years - he has been bringing us back to ourselves, by teaching us the songs that are our birthright - the birthright we have sold for a mess of pop-idol pottage. When Pete couldn't find a song to say what he was thinking, well, he'd just up and write one, and in a hundred years no one is likely to be able to tell the difference. That's because Pete Seeger is what many aspire to be and no one can become by trying: a genuine legend in his own time. In him, singer and song unite to become one sublime and very American and truly iconic presence. We are surely not likely to see his equal again.

Justice, Not Vengeance

That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
- Justice Robert H. Jackson, American Prosecutor, Nuremberg

Supreme Court Justice Jackson's words come echoing back across the decades today as a jury in Alexandria, Virginia chose to exercise its reason and the rule of law in making its binding recommendation that Zacarias Moussaoui be sentenced to life in prison rather than death.

The jury's action is not likely to be popular, and at first glance its reasoning seems muddy. Moussaoui knew of the plans for the attacks and contributed to destruction and mayhem of September 11th, asserted the jury, but was mysteriously somehow not responsible enough for the 3,000 deaths to warrant execution. The jury's refusal to condemn Moussaoui to death in this phase of the trial is based upon sometimes confused and even conflicting rationales of "mitigation." He is guilty, in other words, - but not guilty enough.

Initially, perhaps, the finding seems wrong. It feels wrong. Moussaoui is an admitted terrorist, member of Al-Qaeda, and conspirator in the fiery holocausts in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Surely no defendant since Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City infamy is more deserving of American justice's supreme penalty.

Yet the Virginia jury's decision, however muddled its rationale, may well be the most defensible one - and one that, like the Nuremberg trials extolled by Jackson, may well reflect more positively to posterity on the innate sense of justice on which we pride ourselves in this country than the easier and more widely (one might say hungrily) anticipated condemnation to execution.

Consider Nuremberg for a moment. The perspective of sixty years makes it seem a logical if somewhat problematic decision. The Allies had in their control scores of men who had perpetrated the largest mass murders in the history of the world and who had unleashed the greatest cataclysm of destruction and death that the world has ever known. The question of what to do with the Nazi leaders did not have a clear answer. Certainly, victors in past wars had punished their enemies, sometimes with humiliation and death, as the ancient Romans had, or with the kind of political and economic revenge exacted under the Treaty of Versailles by these same victors upon these same vanquished.

But the Nazi atrocities were a different matter altogether, and no one course of action seemingly could satisfy the competing demands of justice for the war's innocent victims with the avoidance of the appearance of "victor's justice" in a Soviet-style show trial. Some elements in the U.S. departments of War and State favored military tribunals, which were eventually employed in many of the 1,600 cases of less highly-placed officials of the Third Reich. The French expressed interest in Napoleonic Code-styled "courts of inquisition," and a significant element within the Russian government and military favored summary execution, perhaps understandably given that nation's 20 million dead.

The United States, however, with plans already in place from Roosevelt cabinet members Henry Morgenthau and Henry L. Stimson and impelled by the commitment of Harry Truman to an "American" sense of justice, pushed for and won approval for the trials, even over the initial objections of Winston Churchill.

The Nuremberg Trials were clearly and obviously not exercises in pure justice, and they had their critics on that basis even within the U.S., most notably that icon of true American conservatism, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio. Taft objected to the proceedings on grounds both practical and moral. The trials, he maintained, could never fulfill their objective of preventing future aggression because in his words "no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win."
Worse, contended Taft, the trials were in opposition to a "fundamental principle of American law that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute." Further, some American military leaders were uneasy with the precedent that Nuremberg seemed to be setting - a precedent that shadows foreign policy decisions in the U.S. to this day, at least as far as participation in the World Court is concerned.

It took the perspective of a man like Justice Jackson to make the enterprise succeed to whatever extent it did. Jackson's energetic and passionate prosecution was conducted strictly within limits of evidence and testimony that he felt history would unquestionably judge as right-minded and fair. That Jackson could prove beyond the shadow of any doubt the guilt of men like Goering, von Ribbentrop, and Streicher seems more inevitable now than it actually was.

Part of the claim that the Nuremberg Court ultimately did the right thing rests with the decisions it handed down that bear a striking resemblance to the Moussaoui verdict. Of the initial 24 defendants, all of them key figures in the Third Reich, several were acquitted outright and others sentenced to as little as ten years imprisonment. And despite the subsequent partial exoneration of Admiral Doenitz and General Jodl, a sense that right had been done and justice administered pervaded much of the post-Nuremberg world - quickly more preoccupied as it was with the intensifying conflict between the Americans and Soviets.

The principle that emerges from Nuremberg, however flawed and problematic the proceedings may seem today, is that justice must trump vengeance - or we all become moral descendants of the Nazis, exercising might without morality and justifying it with the same sense of exceptionalism that gave us the Third Reich and the Master Race.

The jury in Alexandria refused to do that. As former federal prosecutor Joshua Berman asserted on the PBS News Hour, "What the government ultimately argued was a lie should be punished by death, and that's highly unusual in our system and virtually unheard of." Whatever Moussaoui may have wanted to do and however evil he may have wanted to be, what he actually did was lie - and that crime, however serious, is not punishable by death in any of the fifty states nor in any federal statute.

As emotionally satisfying, then, as many might find the execution of Moussaoui, it simply would be incompatible with anything like a truly American sense of justice. In refusing to kill this pathetic fanatic under color of legality but under motivation of revenge, we remind ourselves and assert to the world just how completely unlike him we are. He comes at us with murderous intent; we respond to him with a dispassionate sense of proportion and fairness, one that Justice Robert Jackson would understand and commend.

No Lightweights

The Original Kingston Trio

For a group that was alleged to have been so determinedly and conscientiously apolitical for much of the first ten years of its existence, the Kingston Trio in fact managed to make its share of social comment, albeit in a primarily entertaining and highly polished manner - too polished, had you asked the Eastern urban folk "establishment" of the early 60s.

But from the first, the Trio had things to say. Even with its rehearsed and harmonic arrangements, the first eponymous album manages to include the kind of "working class hero" style of folk songs that the group had adapted from the Weavers' extensive repertoire of the same - songs like Saro Jane, Santy Anno, and even Sloop John B. The sly humor of songs like Three Jolly Coachmen and Banua also provided wry commentary on the social mores of the era.

Many of the succeeding albums continued the trend in some fashion or other. MTA is so delightfully a fun song to hear or sing that it's easy to overlook its original political intent, a sort of foreshadowing of the tax revolts and anti-government sentiments that swept the country decades later. As romantic and lovely as San Miguel may be, there is a definite comment on class and race in the song. The very selections on the Christmas album and the Trio's proclivity for singing in Spanish, Zulu, and Polynesian tongues made them (as has been observed here before) in many ways the first true exponents of "world music" - by itself a powerful and political statement.

The later arrival of John Stewart and the consequent inclusion of songs of commentary both literal and implied on most of the albums of that era - and the very dedication of New Frontier and the entire Time To Think venture - clearly did not spring from a vacuum but rather represented a logical progression of the group's approach.

Now it would be silly to suggest that the KT was trying to do what Peter, Paul and Mary were doing from the outset, or what the Chad Mitchell Trio made its stock in trade. But the Kingston Trio had a lot more to say in its song selection than is generally credited to it, and nowhere is this demonstrated more effectively than in its continuing use of Woody Guthrie's compositions. Hard Travelin' is one of Guthrie's Dust Bowl ballads and a good representation of the worker as hero songs (check out the full lyric: http://www.woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Hard_Travelin.htm). And the inclusion of two of Guthrie's more overt political statement songs on one album - "Goin' Places" - is truly remarkable. As most fans of the song know, This Land Is Your Land was Woody G.'s angry response to what he regarded as the fatuous jingoism of Irving Berlin's God Bless America. And if the Trio edited out some of the more inflammatory lyrics, no amount of editing can disguise the basic populism of the song.

More remarkable, I think, is the Kingston's inclusion of Pastures of Plenty on that album and later Deportee on Time To Think- both songs making a direct and unsparing commentary on the issues at the head of the news reports today. Though most of the migrants in the former song were in Guthrie's day Okies and other dispossessed farmers of the Steinbeck genre, the Trio's version appeared in the wake of Edward R. Murrow's classic documentary "Harvest of Shame," in which the plight of the exploited braceros of the day was examined in detail. That put a different spin on Woody's words:

"California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine

Green pastures of plenty from dry desert ground
From the Grand Coulee Dam where the waters run down
Every state in the Union us migrants have been
We'll work in this fight and we'll fight till we win."

And no different spin is necessary at all on Deportee - the final verse as the Trio sang it is as direct as commentary gets:

"Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?

Now I wouldn't assert nor presume to comment on the relationship of all of this to whatever political position anyone espouses today on the topic of immigration. The events of today, however - and hearing the phenomenal voice of Cisco Houston singing what I think is the second-best version of Deportee on record - simply reminded me of something that Milt Okun wrote about John Denver following Denver's tragic death. With apologies to Okun, I paraphrase: I knew the Kingston Trio. I know their music. They were no lightweights.

(This piece appeared in slightly different form at The Kingston Trio Place.)