Ballads for Americans
My Song Is My Weapon: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of Culture, 1930-50.
by Robbie Lieberman.
University of Illinois Press. 201 pp. $23.95.
This book is perhaps the strangest example yet of what Theodore Draper has called the “curious academic campaign for the rehabilitation of American Communism.” Robbie Lieberman, a New Left academic and the daughter of an Old Left folk singer, concentrates here on the discovery by the Communist party of American folk music and the subsequent attempt to exploit it politically through an organization called People’s Songs. Created during World War II in the heyday of the party’s influence, People’s Songs managed to get the support of such musical luminaries as the composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Marc Blitzstein, as well as the active participation of performers like Paul Robeson, Earl Robinson, and—most importantly—Pete Seeger.
The author begins by tracing the origins of the CP’s interest in folk music. During the ultra-sectarian Third Period (1928-35), when Communists thought that America was on the verge of revolution, the Composers Collective, which included Blitzstein, Robinson, and Charles Seeger (Pete’s father), rejected American folk song as, in the words of the elder Seeger, “complacent, melancholy, defeatist, intended to make slaves endure their lot.” But with the advent of the Popular Front (1935-39 and 1941-46), and as part of its new campaign to make an alliance with the formerly despised liberal enemy, the party began to herald folk music as an “accessible form in which to express revolutionary ideas.” As the party’s leading cultural popularizer Michael Gold explained, the time had come to “write catchy tunes that any American worker can sing and like.” Or, as Lieberman writes:
Emotional and intellectual responses to folk music took place, then, in the context of the search for American roots, in labor organizing, in anti-fascist campaigns, and at left-wing summer camps. Perhaps the most important and lasting effect of the Popular Front in the cultural realm was the identification of the “folk” with left-wing politics, an identification that persisted both inside and outside the Communist movement.
Of course, as in other realms in which Communists were involved, an overriding commitment to the Soviet Union superseded any efforts to sink roots in America. The author herself admits, for example, that the “democratic spirit that defined Popular Front Communism in the U.S. turned out to be temporary,” and was “abruptly discarded . . . when Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939.” Pete Seeger may indeed have sought throughout his career to promote “Popular Front politics using folk-style song as a weapon,” but with Seeger, as with any devoted Communist cadre, obedience to the party line of the moment came first.
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Here, the story of the Almanac Singers is most instructive. Composed of Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, Butch Hawes, and Millard Lampell, the Almanacs were the very first bona-fide American folk group. Much to their consternation, their first album, Songs for John Doe, recorded in March 1941, was released during the very week in June when Nazi Germany broke its pact with Stalin and invaded the USSR. The album, which (following the line the party had adopted after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact) condemned FDR as a warmongering fascist and called for keeping American troops home, was withdrawn by the singers, and the few individuals who had already purchased copies were asked to return them. After a brief hiatus, the Almanacs reappeared, singing songs which, in keeping with the new party line, promoted anti-fascist unity and war. Even their most famous labor song—“Talkin’ Union”—was ditched, as the party (with victory in a war in which the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union now the uppermost consideration) pursued a no-strike pledge and business-labor cooperation.
Having recounted this episode, however, and having acknowledged that the Almanacs’ work “unapologetically reinforced the Communist world view,” Lieberman writes that they were “not responding to Comintern or CP-USA directives when they changed their repertoire to match a new political situation.” This may be literally true, but the point she misses is that the young members of the Almanacs had no need for a formal order—they voluntarily crushed any doubts they may have harbored to follow every new twist of the party line.
Indeed, Lieberman argues in general that the party kept its hands off the folk singers (in contrast to how, as she acknowledges, it operated in the realm of literature). During the war years, when the party line was indistinguishable from that of the broad Left/ liberal/labor coalition behind FDR, such permissiveness was possible. But numerous examples from the cold-war epoch—a period which Lieberman fails to explore—tell a different story.
Thus, with the adoption in 1947 of a harder line on domestic issues that echoed Stalin’s moves toward confrontation with the U.S., the broad-based People’s Songs was dissolved and replaced with a group called People’s Artists, which emphasized such songs as “Put My Name Down Brother, Where Do I Sign?” (about the Soviet-sponsored Stockholm Peace Petition). The new organization was administered by an apparatchik named Irwin Silber, who also took over as editor-in-chief of its magazine Sing Out!, where he launched a campaign against folk singers like Burl Ives, Tom Glazer, Josh White, and Oscar Brand, who refused to adopt the new line. Brand in particular was accused of “join[ing] the witch hunters,” and it was falsely suggested that he had named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Not even the faithful Pete Seeger and his new group the Weavers were safe. In the pages of Sing Out! they were attacked simply for being an all-white group singing songs of black America and being therefore guilty of “white chauvinism.” Lieberman contends that People’s Artists was simply trying to protest the “commercial exploitation of black culture by the entertainment industry”—and there was, of course, such crass exploitation, particularly by white artists who took over black songs and then got all the credit and money. (The classic example is Pat Boone’s “covering” of Fats Domino.) But the CP’s “white-chauvinism” campaign was not about this. Rather, it was a witch hunt which, as the ex-Communist historian Joseph Sta-robin has pointed out, “wrecked the lives of tens of thousands between 1949 and 1953.”
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In spite of all this, Lieberman insists that the party produced something of great value in the area of folk music. Sectarian and pro-Soviet as the party may have been, it promoted “traditional, rural, and folk music and topical songs in opposition to . . . corrupt, mindless popular culture.” Out of this came a vision of “an alternative future”—a “counter-hegemonic” challenge to the system that transcended the party’s narrow political agenda and that remains vital today.
Ironically, however, the current popularity of rural and folk music points to the very opposite of a commitment to political radicalism. In fact, the most popular such singers today—Loretta Lynn, Ricki Skaggs, Randy Travis, and Merle Haggard—are by and large politically conservative, and many of them are fundamentalist Christians. Even when they are found singing the very same Popular Front songs heralded by Lieberman as a challenge to the system—during the last presidential campaign, for instance, Crystal Gale, appearing with George Bush, regularly serenaded the crowds with Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”—they turn them into straightforwardly patriotic anthems. Similarly, when at the Statue of Liberty centennial, with Ronald Reagan at the podium, the orchestra played “Ballad for Americans,” hardly anyone in the audience would have dreamed that the composer of that song, Earl Robinson, once told Lieberman that its implicit message was the old Popular Front slogan, “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.”
As for the Popular Front tradition itself, it still has a few adherents who seek to reaffirm the Old Left, particularly Peter, Paul, and Mary, who along with the California folk-rock singer Jackson Browne use their talents to sing the praises of the Sandinistas, and to condemn American foreign policy. But for the most part, the tradition lies dormant, living on only in the minds of the unreconstructed Old Left and their New Left academic offspring.
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