Pete Seeger vs. HUAC: The First Amendment, Sung

I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this.

Pete Seeger told the House Un-American Activities Committee this on August 18, 1955, in a federal building in New York City, and it was a legal bet with almost nothing backing it. His lawyers had the safer play ready: plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination, and the questions stop with no additional charge attached. Seeger turned that down. He told the committee flatly that he did not “want to in any way discredit or depreciate or depredate the witnesses that have used the Fifth Amendment,” and that he was refusing on different grounds entirely: the First Amendment gave Congress no business asking an American who he associated with or what he believed. Nobody had won that argument before. The Hollywood Ten tried it in 1947, lost, and started serving prison sentences in 1950, which is why nearly every other blacklisted witness who came after them took the Fifth instead. Seeger took the harder amendment anyway, and it cost him most of the next seven years.

The singer before the subpoena

Seeger was born in Manhattan on May 3, 1919, the son of the musicologist Charles Seeger, and left Harvard in 1938 without finishing a degree. In 1939 he went to work with Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song, sorting through commercial and field recordings of American music. Two years later he helped form the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell, a group that wrote and sang for the labor movement, recording an entire album of union songs called Talking Union. The group’s timing was bad: their first record, released in the spring of 1941, carried antiwar songs written under the Communist Party’s line against American intervention. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union that June, the party’s line flipped overnight, and so did the Almanacs, who pulled their own record from distribution and started writing pro-intervention songs instead. It was a whiplash turn that left a public paper trail, one HUAC’s investigators would not have to work hard to find a decade later.

After the war, Seeger co-founded the Weavers in November 1948 with Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, and by 1950 the quartet had a number-one record in Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene.” That same June, the anti-communist pamphlet Red Channels named Seeger as a Communist sympathizer, and the effect was immediate: television and radio bookings the group had lined up started vanishing, one call at a time, with no network willing to say why out loud. By 1952 the Weavers had disbanded. They got a brief second act with a sold-out Carnegie Hall reunion in December 1955, four months after Seeger’s HUAC appearance, but by then the subpoena had already arrived.

The hearing

HUAC’s stated purpose that August was investigating communist influence in the entertainment industry, and Seeger was one of a string of performers called before the committee’s New York panel. Committee counsel Frank Tavenner pressed him directly on where he had performed and for whom. When Chairman Francis Walter asked why Seeger would not simply cooperate and help preserve American institutions, Seeger answered that he already had: “I feel that my whole life is a contribution.” It was not the answer of a man trying to avoid a fight. Seeger repeated, through round after round of questions, that he would discuss his songs freely but not his associations, his religion, his politics, or his vote, and that the line was one of principle, not evasion. The committee did not accept the distinction. Refusing to answer without invoking a recognized privilege was, on paper, contempt of Congress the moment the gavel came down.

Ten counts, one year, one reversal

A federal grand jury indicted Seeger on ten counts of contempt of Congress in 1957, one count for each question he had declined to answer. The case took four more years to reach a verdict: a jury convicted him on all ten counts, and on April 4, 1961, a judge sentenced him to a year in prison. Seeger stayed out of prison while his lawyers appealed, and the appeal took a little over a year, retracing free-speech ground the courts had first mapped during the Espionage Act prosecutions of the First World War. In May 1962, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed the conviction and dismissed the indictment outright, ruling that it had failed to properly establish the subcommittee’s authority to demand the answers in the first place. Seeger never served a day of the sentence. The reversal came on a technicality, not a ruling on his First Amendment theory. The argument he had staked his freedom on in 1955 was never tested on the merits, then or since.

What the banjo said

Seeger kept working through all of it. Starting in 1952, the same year the Weavers went under, he painted the words “This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender” around the head of every banjo he owned, an answer of sorts to Guthrie’s guitar, which read “This machine kills fascists.” He also had a hand, a real but partial one, in the song that became the anthem of the movement HUAC was supposedly protecting the country from. “We Shall Overcome” descends from Charles Tindley’s 1901 hymn “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” carried into the labor movement by Charleston tobacco workers on strike in the 1940s and taught to Seeger by Zilphia Horton at the Highlander Folk School. Seeger is usually credited with changing “will” to “shall,” explaining later that “we shall” opens the mouth wider than “we will,” and with adding verses of his own. Guy Carawan, who succeeded Horton as Highlander’s music director, taught the song to the founding meeting of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh in 1960, and from there it left Seeger’s hands for good.

The fight that outlasted the verdict

A cleared name did not mean an open microphone. In September 1967 Seeger taped “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a Vietnam-era song about a platoon captain who drowns leading his men into a rising river, for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. CBS’s own management cut the segment before it aired, judging the antiwar parable too close to the news. The Smothers Brothers said so publicly, and the pressure worked: Seeger came back and sang the song on the air on February 25, 1968, five months after the network first silenced it. In 1966 he had already founded, with his wife Toshi, the group behind the Hudson River sloop Clearwater, which launched in 1969 and turned his attention from what Congress could take away from him to a river he could still try to clean up. He died in New York on January 27, 2014, at 94. The committee that indicted him had been renamed the House Internal Security Committee in 1969 and was abolished outright on January 14, 1975, its files handed to the House Judiciary Committee. The transcript from that August afternoon in 1955 is still a matter of public record, filed exactly where he left it.