Leni Riefenstahl was the world’s first notable female filmmaker, and the greatest female filmmaker of the 20th century. She created innovations in the technique and aesthetics of film still used not only in cinema, but in the filming of crowds and athletic events; some of the techniques you see at the Super Bowl are evolutions of techniques Riefenstahl pioneered in filming the 1936 Olympics.
But it’s not considered polite to applaud Riefenstahl in public with out an emphatic verbal “asterisk”, because of her association with the Nazi Party. Her best-known work, Triumph Des Willens (Triumph of the Will) is an epic documentary and one of the world’s best known and most influential pieces of propaganda.
And so Riefenstahl was ostracized for the rest of her long life (she died at age 101 in 2002) as a Nazi impresario, for her association with a regime that killed 11 million people directly and triggered a war that swallowed tens of millions.
I write a fair amount about music in this blog. And when a major musical figure passes away, I often try to write something.
And in his way, Pete Seeger was one of the most important figures in popular entertainment, ever.
Not necessarily because of his music. Oh, he had a few classics of American folks music, to be sure. And dozens of forgettable songs – but that’s true for any songwriter, or any artist in any genre for that matter.
Many conservatives writing about Seeger’s passing note that he was a committed Communist. It’s true – he was, and in a way that seems straight out of Orwell, as during this episode after Stalin and Hitler signed their non-aggression pact in 1939:
In the “John Doe” album, Mr. Seeger accused FDR of being a warmongering fascist working for J.P. Morgan. He sang, “I hate war, and so does Eleanor, and we won’t be safe till everybody’s dead.”…The film does not tell us what happened in 1941, when — two months after “John Doe” was released — Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union. As good communists, Mr. Seeger and his Almanac comrades withdrew the album from circulation, and asked those who had bought copies to return them. A little later, the Almanacs released a new album, with Mr. Seeger singing “Dear Mr. President,” in which he acknowledges they didn’t always agree in the past, but now says he is going to “turn in his banjo for something that makes more noise,” i.e., a machine gun. As he says in the film, we had to put aside causes like unionism and civil rights to unite against Hitler.
For years, Mr. Seeger used to sing a song with a Yiddish group called “Hey Zhankoye,” which helped spread the fiction that Stalin’s USSR freed the Russian Jews by establishing Jewish collective farms in the Crimea. Singing such a song at the same time as Stalin was planning the obliteration of Soviet Jewry was disgraceful. It is now decades later. Why doesn’t Mr. Seeger talk about this and offer an apology?
It’s impolite in polite society to laud Riefenstahl after her association with a regime that murdered over 10 million people. Fair enough.
So why does Seeger escape any questioning for doing so much to support a regime that may have killed five times as many?
But as Howard Husock noted in his classic essay on Seeger, his most lasting impact on American culture may have had little to do with music.
Because there was a time when Hollywood’s political ideals weren’t all that different than the rest of the country’s. Seeger was a vital part of a movement that changed all that:
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… 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.
This led to the creation of the “Popular Front”, whose mission was not so much to assault capitalism as to co-opt it. And one of the institutions it marked for co-option was the entertainment industry.
And Seeger was a key cog in that machine:
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.
Seeger did not, himself, “make Hollywood leftist”. But he was a key part of that transition.
Forget his music. That was his real legacy.
Set me straight – Polular Front or Front of Populists?
I’ve wondered this since I was in high school; yes the fascists, who killed ten million people or so, are horrible, and anyone who fell for their theories is permanently blacklisted, even if they repented. On the other hand, the Communists killed over ten times that many, but a person can be a respected current Communist? Why?
Because they meant well.
There is one exception. In the Mideast, the fascists are heros to the looney left. The socialist-leaning Jewish state residents are the bad guys.
For Seeger (and Woody Guthrie) in the 1930s…you could excuse them as being dim-witted and ignorant. Not sure why the western left hates Israel. What makes this one tiny little country different from the rest of the world?
Yeah, because the FBI, at the direction of Alger Hiss, failed to find any intent on their part, right?
Like the equally loathsome Eric Hobsbaum, his commie shilling will be excused and/or overlooked by Team Blue’s cheerleaders. One more grave to piss on for my bucket list.
MBerg:
I would recommend to you the book Bloodlands, which details the many different ways that Stalin and then Hitler starved, imprisoned, executed and otherwise killed millions in the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and the Baltics.
http://timothysnyder.org/books-2/bloodlands/
I second Emery’s recommendation. I read it on his suggestion. The author, Timothy Snyder, is an academic historian, but he writes here for general audience. Snyder is not a conservative. He is young enough, however, that he is not of the generation of historians that felt obliged to diminish the horrors of Stalin in defense of anti-anti-communism. Snyder points outs out some very important differences between Stalinism and fascism — including the fact that Germany’s aggression was was mostly outward, towards Slavs and East European Jews, while Stalin’s aggression was directed towards Soviet citizens. The Soviet state was at war with its people. The German state was not.
A short threadjack-
The totalitarian statism that was responsible for so much horror in the first half of the 20th century was philosophically well-grounded. Individual personalities were the result of a person’s upbringing, what they had been taught, incidents that had happened to them in childhood, animal instincts, and perhaps genealogy or a chance mental quirk. It was ridiculous to look for the best of mankind in individuals, to speak of them as having rights. Only something larger than an individual could define the spirit of mankind and act for mankind. That ‘bigger thing’ was the State. Nearly all Western nations bought into this idea between, say, 1910 and 1960.
I’ve gotten both your recommendations. It’s on my list.
Pete Seeger was a gifted musician, capable of taking forgotten old songs dripping with history and tradition and transforming them into modern folk songs with relevance. His enthusiasm for the music was infectious, and I am prepared to forever brush away as unimportant that his politics were naive and idealistic. The man who recreated a powerful hymn like “We Shall Overcome” can do or believe almost any foolish thing and still come out on the positive side of my ledger. A cynical and realistic Pete Seeger could never have practiced his music as he did, and in his idealism he advocated for many good and worthy causes in his time (together with some stupid and self-defeating ones). The musical gifts that he granted to us make his politics shrink to insignificance.
Emery, you can’t subtract politics from the sum total of a person’s life to rationalize support for evil, which is what Pete Seeger did. Yes, he had enormous musical talent that he chose to employ supporting one of the monsters of the Twentieth Century. I can’t forget that.
apparently this needs to be said for those who don’t know the difference.
Pete Seeger was a fraud. A communist fraud who died with a net worth over $4million. Why didn’t he release his copyrights into the public domain so all the “people” could freely use them?
He was not a great musician. Unless your notion of a great musician is someone who can only adequately manage a 3 cord progression and then always the same 3 chords. He is only a great musician if your notion is someone who can, at best, get his instrument “close” to in tune.
I can, from my own music collection name some real and even great musicians who played banjo and Pete Seeger can’t compare favorably to any of them.
For instance listen to:
Stringbean,
Dock Boggs,
Grandpa Jones,
June Carter,
Jimmy Driftwood,
Revernd Gary Davis,
Gaither Wiley Carlton,
Earl Scruggs,
Tommy Makem,
Uncle Dave Macon,
Sonny Osborne,
Doc Watson,
Ralph Stanley,
Charlie Poole,
if you want hear good to great banjo playing.
Listen to Pete Seeger if you want to hear a dedicated proselytizer and Communist propagandist. The only thing naive about Seeger was the audience he sought out.
Remember Gus Hall? He used to run for for president on the ACP ticket — American Communist Party. He always insisted that the ACP was completely independent from Moscow. After the Cold War ended, Soviet archives revealed what everyone knew. Hall was in the pay of the Politburo. I remember in the early 90s, Hall was asked who American communists should look to for leadership, since the USSR was defunct. Hall responded that he thought North Korea had a pretty good system.
We’ll never know whether Hall was sincere in his praise of the Norks or if he was just looking for a new paymaster. He died in 2000. Most of the money the Politburo had sent him for organizing efforts he’d spent on a horse farm and other real estate. He died a wealthy man.
Angela Davis was one of Halls acolytes. The praise and rewards given to Davis by the American intellectual class is its own indictment. Anti-intellectualism is the wisest course to take when the intellectuals are mad.
America worships the new and disdains the old; Europe does the opposite. It has always been thus. By embracing the new, America is always the first in all trends both good and bad. It is a crass, uncultured place, seething with opportunity, disdained by the educated comfortable classes as forever nouveau riche, forever the ungainly and clumsy young adult, full of potential. May it ever remain so.
But I know that part of the restless juvenile exuberance that makes America great also leads to a disdain for non-practical education, too great a respect for the under-educated rebel, and too easy a dismissal of old truths learned long ago in a foreign land.
What “old truths”, Emery? It’s pretty well-accepted that the intellectual class in the New World and Australia has been more open to modernist and post-modernist ideas than the Old World, because the New World has a shorter history.
You miss the point. It’s not about who has the most clever scientists or inventors. It’s whether the market, the people of the country, the investors, and the ruling elite, embrace what’s new and exciting (whatever that may be today), or stick with what’s tried and proven. Of course Americans cling to superstition, but I read posts or comments that label it feudal as though this were a conservative act. Americans will always embrace the newest, hottest messiah. It is both their gift and their curse. Just as Europeans’ cynical rejection of religion and faith tells us that Europeans are a mature culture, impatient with foolishness of all sorts, and yet full of ennui and utterly incapable of the sort of bold and foolish energy that once led the world.
Lessee….Europeans cling to the old, which is why their old churches are empty, and Europeans are far more receptive to the overtures of Mr. Obama, pretend anointed, than the United States ever was or will be.
Sorry, Emery, mild little problem with your hypothesis.
“Of course Americans cling to superstition, but I read posts or comments that label it feudal as though this were a conservative act.”
This is gibberish!
Kel, I’ve been trying to eek a little meaning of Emery’s last post. I’m not having much luck.
Two things right off the bat: The New World is not eh United States. Canada has opted for a very ‘European’ style of politics, since at least the time of Trudeau.latin America has its own deal going. There is nothing else in the New World or the Old that resembles the Latin American latifundia system, and Latin America has been de-colonized for almost as long as has the United States.
Europe’s problems with creating stable political arrangement go back to ancient issues of social class and nationalism.
The United States is different thaneurope for a lot of reasons. People have made entire academic careers researching the reason why the United States never developed strong labor/socialist movement. I suspect one of the major reasons the United States is different than Europe is the constitution, and especially the separation of church and state.
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