Pete Seeger

FBI Files: Military questioned Pete Seeger’s Wartime Loyalty

December 21, 2015 Michael Hill and George M. Walsh, www.ap.org Educate! FBI, Pete Seeger, Surveillance, Wars and Militarism

By Michael Hill and George M. Walsh for Associated Press. In a security investigation triggered by a wartime letter he wrote denouncing a proposal to deport all Japanese-Americans, the Army intercepted Seeger's mail to his fiancee, scoured his school records, talked to his father, interviewed an ex-landlord and questioned his pal Woody Guthrie, according to FBI files obtained by The Associated Press. Investigators concluded that Seeger's association with known communists and his Japanese-American fiancee pointed to a risk of divided loyalty. Seeger's "Communistic sympathies, his unsatisfactory relations with landlords and his numerous Communist and otherwise undesirable friends, make him unfit for a position of trust or responsibility," according to a military intelligence report. The investigation, forwarded to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, is detailed in more than 1,700 pages from Seeger's FBI file, released by the National Archives under the Freedom of Information Act.

FBI Files On Pete Seeger To Be Released Online

May 30, 2014 Jason Leopold, www.america.aljazeera.com Educate! Arts, FBI, Music, Pete Seeger, Surveillance

Thousands of investigative files that the FBI maintained for more than half a century on folk singer Pete Seeger are set to be released to the public online, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has told Al Jazeera. When Seeger died in January at the age of 94, dozens of journalists, researchers and curious members of the public sought his files from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act. The FBI has been informing requesters that it turned over all of Seeger’s files to the NARA before his death. NARA spokeswoman Miriam Kleinman said in an interview that the archive would now seek to publish the files once it completes processing them. They are thought to total about 2,500 pages and need to be screened for information that is exempt from disclosure, as well as names and details that might be redacted to protect the identities of informants or confidential sources. “As soon as possible, NARA will post this file online,” Kleinman said. “We are waiting for review to be complete.” The NARA initially decided to release the files only to researchers on request, for a hefty administrative fee of at least $2,000. But Kleinman said public interest in the files prompted a switch in policy.

This one time I played Pete Seeger’s banjo…

April 21, 2014 Evan Greer & Anne Feeney, www.labornotes.com Create! Activism, Labor, LGBTQ, Music, Pete Seeger, Unions

The first time I met Pete Seeger was at a People’s Music Network summer gathering about 10 years ago. I was a bright-eyed radical teenager who had just stolen all of my dad’s Phil Ochs CDs and was ready for revolution, but I was new to the folk scene and was probably the youngest person at the gathering by about 30 years. In terms of looks, I didn’t know Pete Seeger from Frank Sinatra.

A Final Q&A with Pete Seeger

February 1, 2014 Mike Elk, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Pete Seeger

The agricultural revolution took thousands of years. The industrial revolution took hundreds of years. But the information revolution is only taking decades. And if we use it, and use the brains God gave us, who knows what miracles may be invented in the next few years. Especially with the women’s revolution, now that women are doing things from which they were prevented from doing for so many millennia. . . I honestly think that participation is what saves the human race. Not just participation not just in the decisions of something, but in our arts. All the different kinds of arts: the visual arts, the musical arts, the cooking arts. … I’m sure there’s other arts I haven’t thought of. Participation is the thing that will save the human race.

Pete Seeger: The Man Who Brought Politics to Music

January 28, 2014 Dorian Lynskey, www.theguardian.com Educate! Arts, Music, Pete Seeger

Summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955, Seeger refused to wriggle out of trouble by taking the Fifth and made himself an "unfriendly" witness. While awaiting trial for contempt of Congress, and likely imprisonment, he threw himself into the civil rights movement. It was Seeger who introduced Martin Luther King to We Shall Overcome and advised civil rights activist to form their own group, the Freedom Singers. "Songs have accompanied every liberation movement in history," he wrote. "These songs will reaffirm your faith in the future of mankind." As a songwriter, Seeger was never mainstream again, not least because his protest songs were snubbed by broadcasters. With 60s anti-war songs such as Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Bring Them Home, he was largely preaching to the choir. But he retained his power to popularise other people's songs. At a New York hootenanny in 1946, he was the first to make Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land feel like a new American classic and 23 years later he led half a million anti-war protesters in a chorus of John Lennon's Give Peace a Chance, which, he said, "united the crowd as no speech or song had been able to all afternoon". In 1974, he was the first to record Estadio Chile, the last song Victor Jara wrote before his murder by General Pinochet's thugs. Throughout his 94 years, Seeger's principles never wavered, his optimism never faltered.

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