America's Most Successful Communist

America's Most Successful Communist
Howard Husock
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_urbanities-communist.html

It was no surprise last year when rock stars, led by Bruce Springsteen,
barnstormed battleground states for John Kerry, and no surprise that, save
for a handful of country singers, George W. Bush could count on no similar
support from pop performers. After all, American music stars are
overwhelmingly left-liberal, and often publicly so-from punk rockers Green
Day, who recently recorded American Idiot, a "George W. Bush Rock Opera," to
Grammy-winning blues rocker Bonnie Raitt, who once dedicated an album to
"the people of North Vietnam." Asked why President Bush's iPod featured
songs by singers who'd campaigned against him, White House advisor Mark
McKinnon dryly observed: "The fact is that any president who would limit
themselves to pro-establishment musicians would have a pretty small
collection."

The conventional wisdom holds that it was ever so-that American popular
musicians have always been leftists, and that music-as-radical-politics has
stretched across the decades, expressing the nation's social conscience. The
late New Left chronicler Jack Newfield, for instance, celebrated a "native
tradition of an alternative America" that included not just such openly
activist musicians as Woody Guthrie but also apparently non-political
singers like Hank Williams and Mahalia Jackson.

Yet this "native tradition" is a myth. Until quite recently, popular music's
prevailing spirit was apolitical: "It has a good beat, you can dance to it,
I give it a 95," as fifties teens gushed about new records on *** Clark's
American Bandstand. The politicization of American pop dates from the 1960s,
but it grew out of a patient leftist political strategy that began in the
mid-1930s with the Communist Party's "Popular Front" effort to use popular
culture to advance its cause.

One figure stands out in this enterprise: the now-86-year-old singer,
songwriter, "folk music legend," and onetime party stalwart, Pete Seeger.
Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music,
Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever.

Adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, the
Popular Front tasked communists in the West with building "progressive"
coalitions with various institutions-including political parties and labor
unions-that the party had previously denounced as bourgeois and corrupt. The
front reflected fears haunting Stalinist Russia at that time. "Hitler had
shown a strength that made Communist predictions about his imminent collapse
seem grotesque," observed left-wing historians Irving Howe and Lewis Coser.
"In the Far East, Japan kept growing bolder. The Kremlin leadership . . .
now felt its sole hope lay in a military-political blockade with the Western
powers." Following this new strategy, the American Communist Party suddenly
asserted that it wanted to build upon, not destroy, American institutions.
"Communism is 20th century Americanism," Earl Browder, the American party's
general secretary, enthused, while extolling Abraham Lincoln in speeches.

The Popular Front sought to enlist Western artists and intellectuals, some
of them not party members but "fellow travelers," to use art, literature,
and music to insinuate the Marxist worldview into the broader culture. The
murals of Diego Rivera, the poetry of Langston Hughes, the novels of Howard
Fast-all exemplified this approach. It's an irony that communists should
seek to change the culture, of course, since Marxism holds that culture is
merely a reflection of underlying economic structures, whose transformation
will bring about capitalism's inevitable collapse.

Still, the party kept sending its legions to the cultural front lines, even
after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact abruptly ended the Popular Front
coalition-building. The American Communist Party's bluntest expression of
the idea of culture as a revolutionary tool came in writer V. J. Jerome's
talk "Let Us Grasp the Weapon of Culture," presented to its 15th national
convention in New York in 1951. "Cultural activity is an essential phase of
the party's general ideological work," Jerome observed. Federal officials
cited the speech as an "overt act" seeking the violent overthrow of the U.S.
government, landing Jerome in prison for three years.

It took a while for the Popular Front's strategy to get results in popular
music-and Pete Seeger was the catalyst. Many critics mark Elvis Presley's
arrival in the 1950s as a turning point in postwar American popular culture,
not just because he injected a more overt sexual energy into entertainment,
but also, they claim, because his rebellious spirit anticipated the
political upheavals of the 1960s. But neither Presley nor the newfangled
thing called rock 'n' roll had any explicit politics at the time (and Elvis
would one day endorse Richard Nixon). A better leading indicator of the
politicization of pop was the first appearance of a Seeger composition on
the hit parade.

It happened in early March 1962, when the clean-cut, stripe-shirted Kingston
Trio released their recording of Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"
Seeger's lament about the senselessness of war and the blindness of
political leaders to its folly soared to Number Four on Billboard's
easy-listening chart, and it remained on the list for seven weeks. "Where
Have All the Flowers Gone?" eventually became a standard, sung on college
campuses and around campfires nationwide. At the time, the song proved one
of the biggest successes yet of the folk-music revival then under way, and
it marked a major improvement in Seeger's fortunes. Not long before, his
career had suffered from the fifties anti-communist blacklist. Now it was on
a new trajectory-culminating in his 1993 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
and his 1994 National Medal of Arts.

For Seeger, the sixties breakthrough came after decades' worth of mixing
music and politics. His belief in music's potential political power ran in
the family, reports biographer David King Dunaway. Seeger's eminent father,
Charles Seeger, a musicologist teaching at Berkeley in the early 1900s (the
folk-music archive at Harvard is named after him), found the plight of
California migrant workers so disturbing that he joined the Industrial
Workers of the World, despite being a pure son of the American upper class
with Puritan ancestors; later, he conscientiously objected to World War I.
Anticipating the Popular Front, he yearned for a revolutionary classical
music that would help usher in a new political order. Though he ultimately
made little headway in marrying politics and music, his son-who shared his
view that realizing the American dream meant economic as well as political
egalitarianism, and that in turn meant communism-succeeded brilliantly.

Pete Seeger's life mission first took shape as he toured the rural South
with his father in the mid-thirties, listening to performances of
traditional music and thrilling to their authenticity as perhaps only a
Connecticut boarding-school product could. He listened attentively also to
his father's close friend Alan Lomax, assistant director for the Library of
Congress music archive and another man of the Left. Using primitive early
recording equipment, Lomax and his father, John Lomax, who preceded him at
the Library of Congress, brought to the library's vaults a priceless
treasure of traditional music from the Ameri-can South: the African-tinged
singing of the Georgia sea islands, the Elizabethan ballads of Appalachia,
the blues of the Mississippi Delta (including the first recordings of the
great Muddy Waters, made on the famous Stovall's Plantation outside
Clarksdale), and powerful gospel songs by poor whites and blacks alike.

The Popular Front Left saw such homespun music of poor rural
Southerners-eventually labeled American "folk" music-as perfect for molding
into a new Marxist cultural vernacular. "[W]hen the Communist Left and its
intellectuals . . . tried to sink roots in American tradition, radicals
turned a new ear to traditional folk tunes," notes Dunaway. They could cast
folk music as the politically pure art of America's noble rural
proletariat-plus, because this non-commercial music wasn't copyrighted, they
could adapt it freely.

Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax took on this project with gusto. Lacking a real
tradition of social protest in American folk music, the pair set out to
create one. The music served as the crucible of Seeger's own style: "Folk
songs, radicalism and patriotism blended in his mind," Dunaway observes.
Through Lomax, Seeger met Woody Guthrie at a March 1940 New York benefit
concert for California migrant workers. (The Popular Front might not have
invented the benefit concert to fund political causes, but it certainly
helped boost the institution, which lives on in the form of Farm Aid, Live
Aid, Live 8, and the like.) Made to order for the Popular Front, Guthrie was
a middle-class Oklahoman with a calculated aw-shucks cowboy manner, who just
happened to be a Communist Party sympathizer and had written for communist
newspapers. As Lomax later put it: "Go back to that night when Pete first
met Woody Guthrie. You can date the renaissance of American folk song from
that night."

Guthrie, with little or no popular following down home, was by no means an
indigenous representative of some vital American political folk-music
tradition. He owed his eventual lionization to Seeger, who formed with him
the Almanac Singers, which first brought his work to popular attention. If
Guthrie's songs based on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath ("Tom Joad"
and other "Dust Bowl Ballads") became some of the most influential American
recordings of the twentieth century, journalist Joe Klein, a Guthrie
biographer, argues, it was only because Seeger tirelessly promoted them.

Seeger and Lomax also helped popularize-and politicize-the blues music of
Huddie Ledbetter (nicknamed "Leadbelly"), another major figure in their
made-up "tradition" of American protest music. The African-American
Ledbetter had no real politics, and no commercial recognition, before the
Lomaxes helped get him out of a Texas prison and move him to New York. But
Lomax soon co-wrote a song with him called "The Bourgeois Blues": "Home of
the brave land of the free/I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie."

Before Leadbelly's radicalization, the traditional folk music of American
blacks-among whom social protest music would seem most likely to find a
home-tended to be personal and religious, not political. Gospel singer
Dorothy Love Coates, in her classic "That's Enough," expressed this
apolitical spirit: "The mean things you said don't make me feel bad/'Cause I
can't miss a friend that I never had/I've got Jesus, Jesus, and that's
enough." In the same spirit, Martin Luther King's favorite song, "Why Am I
Treated So Bad?," was a deeply personal response to injustice penned by
Mississippi Delta gospel musician Roebuck "Pops" Staples.

During the early 1940s, Seeger and the Almanacs-later reconstituted as the
Weavers-bluntly propagandized in their songs. Writes Dunaway: "They opposed
war and promoted unions the way early Christians believed in the Church."
Union organizers in the past had sometimes put political lyrics to gospel
music, as when Industrial Workers of the World organizer Joe Hill sang of
the wonder-working might of the union (rather than of the blood of the
lamb). Popular Front supporters, the Almanacs included, made this approach
their trademark.

Party stalwarts Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson had already penned one of the
classics of the form, a tribute to Joe Hill himself, a Swedish immigrant
executed in 1915 in Utah for committing a murder for which many leftists
believed the authorities, influenced by the mine owners, had framed him.
Hayes and Robinson composed the song during the summer of 1936, at Camp
Unity, a left-wing retreat in New York's Dutchess County, setting their
lyrics to a traditional folk melody ("Last Night I Had the Strangest
Dream"). Joan Baez later sang "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night" at
Woodstock in 1969:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead!"
"I never died," says he. . . .
"From San Diego up to Maine,
In every mine and mill,
Where workers strike and organize,"
Says he, "You'll find Joe Hill."
Another Popular Front success from this period was the 1937 reworking, at
Tennessee's communist-founded Highlander Folk School, of the traditional
black gospel number "I Will Overcome" into "We Shall Overcome," soon a labor
rallying song.

Though Seeger didn't formally join the Communist Party until 1942, the
Almanacs' lyrics marched in lockstep with the party's views well before
then. In keeping with the line adopted after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact
(which caused many U.S. party members to quit in disgust), for example, the
Almanacs warbled against American entry into World War II, foreshadowing the
preference for peace at any price that later characterized the McGovernite
Left. "Franklin D., listen to me,/You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea."
The group continued in this vein into the late 1940s. Campaigning for
Progressive Party anti-cold war candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, they
regularly performed a send-up of Harry Truman, to the tune of "Oh, Susannah"
:

We've got to jail the communists
To keep this country free.
And everyone's a communist
Who doesn't vote for me.
(The lyrics referred to the newly enacted Smith Act, requiring Communist
Party members to register with the government.) A more militant
Seeger-Guthrie song, "66 Highway Blues," threatened: "Sometimes I think I'll
blow down a cop/Lord, you treat me so mean. . . . I'm gonna start me a
hungry man's union,/Ain't a-gonna charge no dues,/Gonna march down that road
to the Wall Street Walls,/A-singin' those 66 Highway Blues."

The Almanacs/Weavers also dressed the part of authentic jes' plain folks,
sporting farmer's overalls on stage. Anticipating the fashion affectations
of later pop stars, in which studiedly grungy clothing often serves as both
costume and political statement, they suffered from what biographer Dunaway
calls "a bad case of proletarian chic."

Ironically, given such heavy-handedness, Seeger and company would gain a far
bigger influence over the broader culture through the subtlety of their
later work. It

was a changed America-a McCarthy-era country that now regarded the Soviet
Union as an enemy, not an ally-that pushed Seeger toward a more refined
style. "As the labor movement kicked out the radicals," Seeger recalled, "I
settled for 'Let's get America singing'; maybe the basic democratic
philosophy in these folk songs will filter out subliminally to the American
people."

After the Weavers had some mild commercial success, including the song
"Goodnight, Irene" (reportedly requested by atomic spies Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg to accompany their march to the electric chair), the group's
Communist Party connections drew the attention of those on the Right seeking
to expel the Left from American popular culture. After the onset of the
Korean War, the blacklisted group abruptly found itself without invitations
to record or perform. Seeger-whom critics dubbed "Khrushchev's
songbird"-made ends meet largely by playing children's concerts at such
venues as the Little Red Schoolhouse in Greenwich Village and its upper
school, Elisabeth Irwin High, which, as historian Ronald Radosh recounts,
was known for hiring former New York City public school teachers unwilling
to sign a loyalty oath.

In 1955, the House Un-American Activities Committee, holding hearings in New
York on communist influence in the entertainment industry, subpoenaed
Seeger. He refused to answer committee questions, including whether he was a
Communist Party member, not on the usual Fifth Amendment grounds but on the
grounds that he had a First Amendment right to sing and associate with those
interested in hearing him. Seeger thus opened himself to criminal charges of
contempt of Congress that would hang over him until 1962, when a federal
judge threw out a looming ten-year prison sentence, decreeing that the
singer couldn't be held to have violated committee rules because those rules
were unclear.

Shortly after his contempt indictment, Seeger wrote "Where Have All the
Flowers Gone?," adapted from a Ukrainian folk song (quoted by Soviet writer
Mikhail Sholokhov in his novel And Quiet Flows the Don):

Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the flowers gone?
The girls have picked them, ev'ry one.
Oh, when will you ever learn?
Oh, when will you ever learn?
And the young girls have gone to take husbands, the husbands have gone to be
soldiers, the soldiers have gone to their graves, and around and around in
the tragic cycle:

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Long time ago.
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers, ev'ry one.
Oh, when will you ever learn?
Oh, when will you ever learn?
Under duress, Seeger had replaced propaganda with a softer idealism. The
song portrayed all war as futile, only implying that those who saw the
Soviets as a threat worth fighting were-like warmongers
historically-misguided, or worse.

Seeger had composed one other such number. Written with Weavers bandmate Lee
Hayes and first performed at a 1952 benefit for communists in legal trouble,
"If I Had a Hammer" was an extraordinary anthem. It pulled off, with great
aplomb, the old Popular Front goal of linking the American revolutionary
past with the communist revolutionary future, joining the Liberty Bell with
the hammer and sickle, and extolling freedom and justice while implying that
these quintessentially American qualities were the very virtues that
American society lacked:

If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning,
I'd hammer in the evening,
All over this land.
I'd hammer out a danger,
I'd hammer out a warning,
I'd hammer out of love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.
And so, too, if he had a bell to ring and a song to sing:

Now I have a hammer
And I have a bell
And I have a song to sing
All over this land.
It's the hammer of justice,
It's the bell of freedom,
And a song about love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land.
"Only Commies used words like peace and freedom," Seeger later recalled.
"The message was that we've got tools and we are going to succeed. The last
verse didn't say, 'there's no hammer, there ain't no bell but honey I got
you.' " No flinching for Seeger.

Both songs owed much to Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land," his 1940
response to Irving Berlin's straightforwardly patriotic "God Bless America."
Guthrie's proclamation that "this land is made for you and me" contained an
accusation that an unjust social system was robbing the country's rightful
owners-an accusation that a couple of verses made quite directly:

As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, it said, "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Seeger, for his part, was leaving such rhetoric far behind. So brilliantly
understated did he become that he even crafted a protest song out of the Old
Testament. His musical version of chapter three of Ecclesiastes-"Turn, Turn,
Turn"-amended slightly the words of Scripture, transforming the meaning of
the biblical poetry. Ecclesiastes observed, but did not judge, the cycles of
life: "To everything there is a season." To the penultimate phrase, "a time
for war, a time for peace," Seeger added his own: "I swear it's not too
late," giving the words an activist edge. The song became an anti-Vietnam
War anthem and a Number One hit for songwriter Seeger, thanks to the Byrds'
folk-rock version, which topped the Billboard pop chart in December 1965.

Even earlier, of course, the civil rights movement had given further
momentum to the politicization of popular music. (The Popular Front had long
recognized that the plight of American blacks offered an effective tool in
its effort to discredit the American system as a whole.) Seeger ardently
supported the civil rights movement, and his "We Shall Overcome" concert at
Carnegie Hall in June 1963-two months before Martin Luther King's "I Have a
Dream" speech-marked a watershed in it. The "We Shall Overcome" concert
would have been notable for its name alone, which made a household word of
what had already become a civil rights standard. But there was much more:
the show ran through the whole Popular Front songbook, from Guthrie and
Leadbelly to a Spanish civil war ballad and the beautiful "Oh Freedom," a
song not originally of the Left but of black Union troops joining with other
Americans to bring slavery to an end.

I remember buying the album of the concert and singing along with it
endlessly. Among its songs was "Little Boxes," Berkeley songwriter Malvina
Reynolds's sarcastic dismissal of the aspirations of American suburban
homeowners. "Little Boxes," a sneer of alienation, expressed a new sort of
critique of capitalism-one that would have many echoes in later pop music.
For Reynolds, it seemed, mass prosperity was no better than the Great
Depression.

Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same
There's a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes and they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and there's lawyers, and business executives
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same.
The counterculture was knocking at the gate.
Seeger debuted another soon-to-be-classic left-wing war-is-never-the-answer
number at Carnegie Hall: "Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," a hymn-like vision of
nuclear apocalypse written by a talented young songwriter:

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.
The songwriter, Bob Dylan, would shortly overtake Seeger as the leading
force politicizing popular music.

The young Dylan quickly mastered the anthemic songwriting style of "If I Had
a Hammer." The same month that Seeger performed at Carnegie Hall, Peter,
Paul, and Mary released a version of Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," with its
unmistakable, though implicit, references to the civil rights struggle. It
suggested that America was no more just, and probably less so, than other
nations:

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man? . . .
How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, 'n' how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
How many years can a mountain exist
Before it's washed to the sea?
Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist
Before they're allowed to be free?
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head,
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind,
The answer is blowin' in the wind.
If Seeger was the Popular Front's Lenin, Dylan was its Che Guevara, complete
with motorcycle. Dylan clearly absorbed Seeger's lesson on subtle
songwriting. In his recent memoir, Chronicles, he notes that "protest songs
are hard to write without making them come off as preachy and
one-dimensional." But Dylan went beyond Seeger by being rock-star glamorous.
Heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac and the Beats as well as the political
Left, Dylan struck a pose of alienation and nonconformity that has served as
a model for so many popular musicians since. Picking up where "Little Boxes"
left off, he mocked the senseless striving and meaningless materialism of
American life, scoring hits like "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a surreal
pastiche of urban hopelessness boasting a line that would inspire a wave of
leftist extremism: "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind
blows."

Thirty years after the Popular Front issued its call to transform culture
through music, it had now become proper, even natural, for popular music to
embrace leftist moral and political causes and for many young Americans to
look to musicians for guidance on such matters. As Joan Baez, then emerging
as a glamorous folk diva and Dylan duet partner, put it: "There's never been
a good Republican folk singer." The Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, in his
great novel of post-colonial Africa, A Bend in the River, captured the
self-indulgence of these attitudes of opposition and protest when expressed
by those who enjoyed, as did Baez and Dylan, the prosperity and security of
a free society:

I asked Indar, "Who is the singer?"
He said, "Joan Baez. She's very famous in the States."
"And a millionaire," Yvette said.
I was beginning to recognize her irony. . . . You couldn't listen to sweet
songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of
the time. You couldn't sing songs about the end of the world unless . . .
you felt that the world was going on and you were safe in it.
By no measure has all, or even most, popular music since the 1960s been
overtly political. But the Popular Front's ethos, styles, and heroes have
become part of the American cultural mainstream. The annual Woody Guthrie
Award ceremony, recognizing singers "who exemplify Woody Guthrie's social
activism and personal commitment to the visions and hopes of people," takes
place at the Waldorf-Astoria, for instance. What Howe and Coser wrote in
1957 remains true: "Between the 'progressive' sentiments of Popular Front
politics, and a certain kind of urban middle-brow cultural yearning, there
was a deep rapport-most of all, a common anxiety and pathos-which the
Communists brilliantly exploited. . . . Even after the Popular Front lay
shattered . . . the style of American mass culture retained many of its
crucial elements."

Its echoes in music are ubiquitous. We hear them in John Lennon's "Imagine,"
a vapid celebration of moral relativism that, like "Where Have All the
Flowers Gone?," tells us that no cause is really worth fighting for:

Imagine there's no countries,
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
No religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace.
We hear the echoes, too, in the music of the man who organized the Artists
for John Kerry tour: Bruce Springsteen, who specializes in depicting the
desolation of American life in albums such as Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom
Joad (a self-conscious reference to Guthrie). The emblematic Springsteen
song, "Born in the USA," laments the meaningless sacrifice of the Vietnam
vet, the ultimate used and abused working-class hero:

Born down in a dead man's town
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
Till you spend half your life just covering up.
Born in the USA, I was born in the USA
I was born in the USA, born in the USA.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow man.
Born in the USA. . . .
Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says "Son, if it was up to me"
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said "Son, don't you understand?" . . . .
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go.
Born in USA, I was born in the USA. . . .
Juxtaposed with the bleak lyrical narrative of tragedy and indifference, the
song's seemingly celebratory chorus becomes a parody of patriotism, implying
the foolishness of the benighted blue-collar victim of the system, naive
enough to think that it's really a good thing to be an American-or, God
forbid, that America might be worth fighting for.

It's tempting to dismiss the politicization of popular music as of limited
consequence. But as the Popular Front keenly grasped, culture matters-and
music matters perhaps most of all. Allan Bloom, glossing Plato, wrote that
"to take the spiritual temperature of an individual or society, one must
'mark the music.' " In America, popular music provides a soundtrack for
growing up. And the lyrics of that music too often deliver the message that
our leaders are "idiots," that our politics are corrupt, that bourgeois life
is purposeless, that this country is no freer than any other-and probably
less so. How can we find ourselves surprised, then, by the cool indifference
that typifies many kids raised in times of affluence, freedom, and peace?

For his part, Pete Seeger, who lives near the Hudson in Wappingers Falls,
New York, continues to perform, now singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" as a protest
against the Iraq war, a radical to the end. "I'm still a communist, in the
sense that I don't believe the world will survive with the rich getting
richer and the poor getting poorer," he told Mother Jones last autumn. (The
lefty magazine crowns Seeger "the grand old lion of the Left.")

Happily, some have embraced the Popular Front's legacy in ways that Seeger
probably didn't anticipate and wouldn't likely approve. In March, a crowd in
Taipei, several hundred thousand-strong, sang "We Shall Overcome" and
"Blowin' in the Wind" as part of a protest against forcible annexation by
mainland China-and the prospect of Communist Party rule.


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