The FBI’s 1,800-Page Obsession With Peace Activist Pete Seeger
It may not be surprising that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) snooped on renowned singer-songwriter Pete Seeger for decades and even that the bureau’s file on Seeger runs to nearly 1,800 pages. After all, Seeger was a high-profile opponent of the Vietnam War, and war is the health of the state. But, Seeger was targeted by the FBI before his singing and songwriting gained widespread attention. About twenty-five years before Seeger sang “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” on the Smothers Brothers national television show in 1968, Seeger drew the attention of the FBI by writing a letter to the California chapter of the American Legion.
The year was 1942, and the 23-year-old Seeger, who had been drafted into the United States Army, wrote a short letter to the American Legion chapter expressing his opposition to the chapter’s vote supporting action, as Seeger put it, to “1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!” Seeger characterized the vote as expressing “narrow jingoism” and noted that he “felt sick at heart to read of this matter.”
The American Legion chapter forwarded Seeger’s letter to the FBI, and the decades-long investigation and surveillance commenced. By 1943, a report sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, characterized Seeger as “potentially subversive” and “an idealist whose devotion to radical ideologies is such as to make his loyalty to the United States under all circumstances questionable.”
The investigation and surveillance continued with US government agents secretly reading Seeger’s mail, questioning friends and acquaintances of Seeger including fellow singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, and even sending a military intelligence agent to search for school records at a grade school Seeger had attended. The FBI also asked the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to share with the FBI any information the CIA had related to Seeger. In 1961 Seeger was convicted and sentenced to a year of incarceration – a sentence later overturned while Seeger was free on bail – for refusing to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities regarding his political associations.
Read here David Corn’s detailed report on the Seeger file that Mother Jones obtained recently in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Notably, Corn relates that the US government withheld 90 pages of the file. While the government spared no expense in snooping into the most private of Seeger’s affairs, it acts vigorously to protect its own secrets.
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
popeflores
December 28th, 2015 at 3:06 am
Pete joined the Communist Party USA in the 1930's. During the Hitler – Stalin Peace Pact he was ordered by the Party to support Hitler as a "new form of socialism". The reason the Party could dictate to it's members what to say and think without allowing members to question it is the discipline they used called, "democratic centralism", in theory allowing for debate on issues within the Party while presenting a united front in public. In reality, there was no discussion and party members were told what to say and do. Hardly an argument for free speech.
Prior to this he and Paul Robeson had done a series of benefits to send fellow capitalist haters to the Soviet Union to help build the worker's state. After those thousands of people were milked for publicity Stalin ordered them sent to the gulags. For decades family members wrote Red Pete and Paul asking to help find their relatives whose communications had stopped. Neither he nor Robeson ever put two and two together. When Robeson was told by the Russians while visiting Moscow what happened to all those people he attempted suicide. He never spoke or sang "for the workers" again. Unlike Red Pete, he had a sense of honor and shame.
To join the Communist Party one took an oath to work to make the United States part of the Soviet Union and to abandon all our legal protections to live like everybody else under Stalin. This is hardly a civil liberties group.
Then you had Marx and Engels own words until shortly after World War 2. Both called for the mass extermination of Jews who refused to renounce their religion. They both called for the annihilation of all Slavs to make way for the glorious German worker. All these quotes were removed from their writings by both socialists and communists after the second world war. Gee, I wonder why.
During the years the party supported Hitler they worked with the German American Bund on strikes against the defense industry meant to stop the U.S. from building its military up, preaching that Hitler was a man of peace. The refusal to speak to HUAC and other hearings of the time was the fear the collaboration with Hitler's agents would come out and ruin the party's narrative that they were "premature anti-fascists".
He put out an album, SONGS FROM JOHN DOE denouncing FDR but the second Hitler invaded parts of Poland that were supposed to be Stalin's he put out DEAR MR. PRESIDENT urging in every song America go to war. SONGS FROM JOHN DOE disappeared There was no discussion in the party. Members were ordered to do this.
Now, Mr. President
You're commander-in-chief of our armed forces
The ships and the planes and the tanks and the horses
I guess you know best just where I can fight …
So what I want is you to give me a gun
So we can hurry up and get the job done!
Some anti-war activist.
Decades later when Pete The Red was up for national honors he came close to an apology for wanting Stalin to take over America and the mass murder of slavs and Jews by saying:
I'll apologize for a number of things, such as thinking that Stalin was simply a 'hard driver' and not a supremely cruel misleader. I guess anyone who calls himself or herself a Christian should be prepared to apologize for the Inquisition, the burning of heretics by Protestants, the slaughter of Jews and Moslems by Crusaders. White people in the U.S.A. could consider apologizing for stealing land from Native Americans and enslaving blacks. Europeans could apologize for worldwide conquests, Mongolians for Genghis Khan. And supporters of Roosevelt could apologize for his support of Somoza, of Southern white Democrats, of Franco Spain, for putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps. PETE THE RED
What makes this "apology" unethical and immoral is that no one stands in front of a church yelling at Christians that they burned witches at the stake, or yells at Mongolians for the actions of Genghis Kahn. What Seeger supported, which included at the time rounding up Japanese Americans was ongoing. His apology sounds hollow when he supported not only famine in the Ukraine, show trials in Moscow, but he also helped send fellow reds to their deaths.
Lenin called people like Red Pete "useful dupes". So are writers who repeat the old KGB line that opposition to the Communist Party was a civil rights issue. No it wasn't.
GOERAN SEYDEL
December 28th, 2015 at 10:10 am
Its so typically for the
Government to get scarred
Of artists because they
Have a cnfluence on the
Way young thinks
hguf
December 28th, 2015 at 1:01 pm
thanks for sharing.
mew mee
December 28th, 2015 at 10:01 pm
You’ve got mental problems popey, get some help.
Popsiq
December 29th, 2015 at 5:46 pm
So I suppose all this is noted in J. Edgar's files but isn't mentioned in this piece? But why? Or maybe it's part of those missing 90 pages?
I don't know if Paul Robeson ever met Seeger but he didn't strop singing out of fear. He was blackballed. Ca you give us the date and details of one of those 'benefits ' they did together?