[U.S. music was shaped to a considerable extent by people the
government sought to destroy. Even as it mounted an effective attack
on the Communist Party, the government was unable to erase the
influence of musicians with which it was associated.]
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WAS FOLK MUSIC A COMMIE PLOT?  
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Mat Callahan
April 1, 2021
Monthly Review
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_ U.S. music was shaped to a considerable extent by people the
government sought to destroy. Even as it mounted an effective attack
on the Communist Party, the government was unable to erase the
influence of musicians with which it was associated. _

Pete Seeger entertaining at the opening of a canteen for the United
Federal Workers of America a trade union representing federal
employees in then segregated Washington DC with special guest Elinor
Roosevelt, Joseph Horne

 

AARON LEONARD, _THE FOLK SINGERS AND THE BUREAU: THE FBI, THE FOLK
ARTISTS AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY,
USA—1939–1956_ (LONDON: REPEATER BOOKS, 2020), 323 PAGES, $16.95,
PAPERBACK.

To fully appreciate Aaron Leonard’s book, _The Folk Singers and the
Bureau_, it is necessary to consider its broader historical and
musical context. The years between 1939 and 1956 were, by any measure,
of epochal importance. War and revolution marked the period as both a
culmination and a harbinger—the end of one world order and the
beginning of another. In particular, the fascist axis of Germany,
Italy, and Japan was defeated by the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and
the United States. The United States signaled its arrival as the new
imperial hegemon by dropping the atomic bomb and effectively replacing
the former European colonial powers. Yet, U.S. dominance was not
complete, as it faced two major challenges. First, the Soviet Union
enjoyed enormous prestige and influence among countries fighting for
independence from colonial masters. Second, these independence
movements resisted U.S. domination. Countries in Asia, Africa, and
Latin America looked to the Soviet Union for material aid and
strategic guidance.

On the home front, the suffering inflicted by the Great Depression and
the oppression of Black people made the image projected by the Soviet
Union attractive to millions of Americans. Furthermore, the renowned
photograph of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston
Churchill at Yalta reminded the public that the U.S. leader had
implemented the New Deal, recognized and then allied with the Soviet
Union, laid the foundations for the United Nations, and generally
presented the hope of liberal goodwill toward the world and its
people. The notion that another world was possible was very present.
But then, coincident with the death of Roosevelt, the United States
actively sought to counter radical conceptions and any support for
socialism. It worked to present the Soviet Union as a despised enemy.
These actions were central to U.S. imperial designs, as the labor and
combat-readiness of the U.S. people were essential to these
undertakings. The development of the hydrogen bomb, the launching of
the Korean War, the conflict over Berlin, and the rapid expansion of
the military-industrial complex all began in earnest under the fog of
the mass hysteria associated with McCarthyism. But it was in reality a
far more sympathetic and coordinated effort to forge a Cold War on
behalf of the entire U.S. establishment.

Something else also happened during this period: social and
technological developments forever changed the making and
dissemination of music. The great migration of hundreds of thousands
of workers from the South to the North and West coupled with new means
of amplification, recording, and broadcasting gave birth to urban
musical forms such as rhythm and blues, country and western, and rock
‘n’ roll, merging them with already established Broadway show
tunes, jazz, blues, hillbilly, and folk to appeal to a rapidly
expanding market of city-dwelling music lovers. These developments are
all the more important considering that the Great Depression almost
destroyed the music industry. From the beginning of the twentieth
century until 1929, purveyors of record players, radios, sheet music,
and musical instruments had made large fortunes and proved useful in
forging a culture with which people in the United States could
identify. In many ways, the music industry was a nation-building
force, which the country’s rulers needed to legitimize and propagate
their claims. Now, after almost total collapse during the depression,
the industry reestablished itself with new instruments, new sounds,
and, above all, a new public attuned to bright lights and the big
city.

In this context, the revival of folk music—that is, music derived
from rural southern sources, unamplified, and, to a large extent,
comprised of old songs of anonymous origin—was more than just
another fad. Folk music encapsulated longings for an idyllic past, for
a time before crass commercialism turned music into a commodity, and
for relationships between musicians and audiences that were
egalitarian and holistic. Folk music continues to have an appeal for
these reasons today. While a century separates contemporary folk
musicians from the sources of their inspiration, in the era under
discussion here, a young folky could still meet and play with one of
the “authentic” representatives of the tradition. For example,
Pete Seeger met and played with Bascom Lunsford, Aunt Molly Jackson,
and Leadbelly.

The sinews connecting folk music to historical events could (and still
can) be embarrassing and uncomfortable to the powers that be,
including those who ran the burgeoning music industry. Lyrics told of
battles against bosses, of heroes who fought for the people. They made
appeals for justice and spoke of biblical warnings as to the dire fate
awaiting the rich. Such unpleasantness could be tolerated within the
norms of academic folklore, but became dangerous when the songs were
popularized by union organizers and civil rights activists who,
following the Second World War, were advancing their demands more
boldly than ever before. This is how U.S. Folk music (note the
capital _F_) came into existence and why it was perceived as a threat
by the very forces that needed music to create the nation of their
dreams. Folksingers became the target of federal investigations, and
folk music, as such, was indicted as the vehicle of communist
propaganda. After all, singing “The Midnight Special” might mean
you were a dupe, if not a conscious agent, of Moscow!

This is where _The Folk Singers and the Bureau_ makes a vital
contribution. Due to the complicity of historians, folklorists, and
music industry flacks, important facts and necessary conclusions have
been obscured or erased, undermining an understanding of this period
and its major protagonists. Central to Leonard’s account are of
course musicians and federal agents, but also the Communist Party USA
and its many campaigns to organize workers, fight for civil rights,
and support the Soviet Union. Each has been the subject of numerous
books, articles, and documentaries, but few make the necessary
connections between all three. Leonard is, moreover, virtually unique
in having pored over thousands of pages of informant reports, as well
as FBI field summaries and assessments, to show how the Bureau viewed
its mission and the means it employed to accomplish its goals.

This approach has advantages, but it also contains hazards. Perhaps
the most significant and controversial is to what degree the reports
of agents or informants can be trusted or verified as factual, let
alone truthful. Leonard forthrightly addresses this question at the
outset. Yes, the FBI was determined to destroy or incapacitate any
individual or organization it perceived as a threat. Yes, J. Edgar
Hoover was notoriously vindictive and punitive in his campaigns of
vilification, harassment, and assassination. Yes, the Bureau knowingly
spread lies and slander for nefarious purposes. Nevertheless,
internally, the FBI had to have reliable information. It needed
verifiable data on the motives and activities of its targets, as well
as those in government or business whose support might be needed or
whose neutralization might be required if they presented obstacles. On
this basis, Leonard devised a method for sorting through the records,
which included comparing and contrasting them to testimony given under
oath as well as participant interviews and supplementary written
records. This additional material could then be used to corroborate or
disprove the information provided to Bureau chiefs by agents in the
field. Throughout, Leonard adheres to the dictum: objective and
partisan. While no doubt appalled and angered by the Bureau’s
depredations, he nonetheless takes seriously the reports filed, using
them to provide a more complete account of this period and certain key
players within it than what has previously been available.

Beginning with brief sketches of Woody Guthrie, the FBI, and the
Communist Party, Leonard then presents a much broader history that
entails musicians as diverse as Hans Eisler and Burl Ives, as well as
music industry figures as famous as John Hammond and obscure as Boris
Morros. Noteworthy is the fact that many musicians are included who
could not by any stretch of the definition be considered “folk.”
Furthermore, the folksingers referred to in the book’s title are
themselves quite diverse, including as many Black as white musicians,
and as many from the North as from the South. The defining
characteristic, in any case, is less musicological than it is
sociological and political. The fascinating account of New York’s
Café Society and Billie Holiday’s performance of Abe Meeropol’s
(aka, Lewis Allen) “Strange Fruit” is a prime example. These
legendary names connect a meeting place, a musical style, and a song
that have little to do with coal miners or sharecroppers but convey
the sensibilities of a milieu. This milieu was by no means solely the
creation of the Communist Party, but it owed a great deal to its
organizing and broad influence in New York and other major cities. Of
course, this milieu _did_ include musicians originating in the rural
South, such as Aunt Molly Jackson and John Handcox.

Its most famous exponents, Guthrie and Seeger, _did_ extol the
virtues of folk music as a form best suited to expressing and uniting
the voices of the common people. Yet the great controversies that
swirled around these figures, erupting with even greater force during
the folk music revival of the 1960s, cannot be understood without
grasping the role of the Communist Party and government efforts to
suppress it. The Bureau’s main objective, indeed their primary
reason for being, was to “hunt Reds” and to subvert every attempt
to organize workers or oppressed people—such as African Americans,
Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and other populations—who were at one
time or another successful in building large movements, especially
union organizing drives, in opposition to corporate and government
policy.

These movements help explain an apparent paradox: U.S. music was
shaped to a considerable extent by people the government sought to
destroy. Even as it mounted an effective attack on the Communist
Party, the government was unable to erase the influence of musicians
with which it was associated. It is more than ironic that musicians
who were once mercilessly hounded today appear on postage stamps (such
as Guthrie and Paul Robeson) or at presidential inaugurals (Seeger).
No doubt, Guthrie’s talent for lyrically capturing the spirit of the
times was a factor in his extraordinary popularity. But the spirit of
those times was largely an expression of a massive workers movement,
which not only inspired Guthrie’s songs but also made up his
audience. For example, the first major performance by the Almanac
Singers, which included Guthrie, was at a rally at Madison Square
Garden in support of striking transit workers. The Almanacs were well
received by the twenty thousand people in attendance.

The founding of the Almanacs was a result of an earlier concert held
in support of John Steinbeck’s California committee for relief of
dustbowl refugees, which featured musicians such as Leadbelly, Ives,
and Richard Dyer Bennett. Guthrie also appeared along with Alan Lomax
and Seeger, which led to the formation of the Almanacs and the
creation of the songbook _Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People_,
which remains a landmark document of U.S. music and labor history. The
fact that this book took twenty-five years to find a publisher—it
was compiled in 1941 and published in 1967—is one indication that
support for these artists came from popular movements and not from the
music business. While Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred
Hellerman did top the charts with Leadbelly’s song “Goodnight
Irene,” and were, in one sense, a conventional “pop” group, the
Weavers were nonetheless a product of earlier associations, including
personal ties with Leadbelly, himself, and Seeger’s and Hays’s
experiences in the Almanacs.

Indeed, the relationship between artists, audiences, and political
movements is exemplified not only by audience numbers or the talents
of people involved but also by the pathbreaking nature of events such
as the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts that twice filled Carnegie
Hall in the late 1930s. Defying the segregation that prevailed even in
“liberal” New York, Hammond brought together diverse musical
styles, multiracial musicians, and an integrated audience. This was a
bold move at the time and the conventional music industry would not
sponsor the event. Thus, in the face of threats to his reputation and
the concerts themselves, Hammond obtained the sponsorship of _The New
Masses_, a widely read Communist Party-oriented journal. The first
concert in 1938 was such a success it was repeated in 1939, this time
with the sponsorship of another Communist Party-oriented institution,
the Theater Arts Committee. It is difficult to overstate the impact
these concerts had at the time and have had since. Famous musicians,
from Count Basie to Benny Goodman, were involved. The performance
before an integrated audience of a range of music, including jazz,
swing, blues, Dixieland, Gospel, and folk music, broke the mold of
segregating music into genres, which was the stock in trade of the
music industry.

Not surprisingly, the Bureau sought to ruin Hammond’s reputation.
However, they were unsuccessful, partly due to his privileged
background, as he was a relative of the Vanderbilts, but more so
because he had support among the public in the growing opposition to
Jim Crow, lynching, and the oppression of Black people in general.
Needless to say, Hammond remained a crucial force, launching the
careers of Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen, among
others.

Leonard’s excavations include other important figures such as Lomax
and Robeson, who can certainly be connected to folk music in a broad
sense, but were sophisticated intellectuals widely known in their
respective fields when they came under attack by the postwar Red
Scare. Lomax had long established himself as a leading song collector
and ethnomusicologist and worked for the Library of Congress, all the
while being a member of the Communist Party. The latter fact was
secret as it was in many cases; the fate befalling leading communists
as well as fellow travelers prove it was not mere paranoia.

Robeson was perhaps the most extreme, yet exemplary, case of the
entire period. He was an individual of extraordinary and versatile
talent, world renowned for his magnificent bass voice, but, above all,
he was the champion of workers and oppressed peoples everywhere. What
the U.S. government did to Robeson is not only a crime against a
person, but an offence against music and, indeed, humanity as a whole.
Leonard shows, however, that this was part and parcel of a general
strategy applied wherever and whenever the Bureau got wind of a
person’s association, however tenuous, with the Communist Party. The
unfortunate stories of Josh White, Ives, and others who were pressured
to testify, indeed to prostrate themselves, before congressional
committees, compare unfavorably with the heroic stands taken by people
like Millard Lampell, Robeson, and Seeger. Robeson was prevented from
foreign travel, his career was stymied, and he was subjected to
intense psychological and physical intimidation throughout his life.
He never bowed or kneeled, however, ending his days still speaking out
on behalf of socialism and liberation. Seeger was more fortunate,
although he faced several years under threat of imprisonment. He
remained true to his communist convictions and dedication to human
emancipation up to his death in 2014.

What then does Leonard say about the twists and turns of the Communist
Party and its policies over the years? To what extent were the
party’s difficulties its own doing as opposed to government
repression? Space does not permit a thorough discussion of this
subject, but suffice it to say that the party’s positions were
fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. On the one hand, the party
enjoyed wide support or it would not have been considered a threat by
the government. On the other hand, the party frequently took positions
that alienated it from its own base, which often arose from it simply
following the dictates of the Comintern or the Cominform (which
replaced the Comintern after its dissolution by Joseph Stalin, at the
request of the Allies, in 1943). These issues played out in several
key historical moments, such as the policy of dual unionism that
eventually gave way to organizing within the Congress of Industrial
Organizations, the Black Belt theory regarding the national question
and the concomitant internal party campaign against white chauvinism,
and, most significantly, the change of position, from opposition to
U.S. entry into the Second World War to a resumption of the Popular
Front strategy of the 1930s of uniting to fight fascism. In each case,
there were contradictory results. Certain gains that were made might
appear to justify changes in line, but a price was exacted for what
amounted to opportunism. The popular front, for example, led to
perhaps the most dramatic rise in Communist Party membership and
influence in its history. In fact, the party went from being an enemy
to an ally of the state, from being a loathsome outcast to being a
welcome participant in a common U.S. effort. It also created the
conditions that, following the Second World War, made destruction of
the party a government imperative.

That imperative included the Taft-Hartley Act and the purging of
unions of communist leadership. It also involved the infamous
blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, the executions of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg, and the destruction of the careers of Robeson, the Weavers,
and numerous others. In all of this, Leonard’s research shows that,
to a great extent, anti-communism was used not simply to attack the
Communist Party, but to cover up systematic violations of the U.S.
Constitution and other outright criminal acts. Even as the Communist
Party retreated, jettisoning any semblance of a revolutionary
political line, the government relentlessly persisted, going on to
make the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr. its target.

Leonard’s inquiry eventually arrives at a number of important
conclusions. First, the FBI records indicate that to a large extent
the threat to the powers that be posed by the Communist Party was
real. In spite of many shortcomings, including some that were
ultimately incapacitating, the party was a leading influence within
vital sections of the U.S. populace, especially in key industries and
among oppressed nationalities. Denial of this fact and disavowal of
association with the party were a defensive posture flowing from a
flawed analysis that proved to be both ineffective and self-defeating.
Instead of proudly proclaiming the revolutionary aim of liberating
humanity from capitalism, the party declared “Communism Is
Twentieth-Century Americanism” on the dubious assumption that such a
slogan would win over the people and deflect government attack.

Second, the party had, almost accidentally, “discovered” the
importance of folk music. There was, in fact, no coordinated direction
or even much tangible support given by the party to groups like the
Weavers or related efforts such as People’s Songs. Indeed, party
member and publisher Irwin Silber wrote an unhelpful denunciation of
the Weavers, condemning them, a white group, for singing Black music,
at the very moment they were under attack by the federal government.
Such posturing is precisely what alienated many musicians and artists
from the party more generally. Not coincidentally, it was Silber who
wrote the notorious _Sing Out!_ attack on Dylan, accusing the singer
of abandoning his calling—a position Silber would eventually
retract. But that came later and was overshadowed by the rise of the
New Left and the musical renaissance of the 1960s.

What finally emerges, however, is perhaps more significant in
contemporary terms. The U.S. government did effectively suppress the
Communist Party. Ignoring the role of the FBI in this is as big a
mistake as denying the damage the Communist Party inflicted on itself.
In a subsequent period, the FBI was effective in undermining the Black
Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. The role of the U.S.
secret police should not be underestimated, even when criticizing
errors made by revolutionary organizations themselves. In an era
marked by increased government surveillance and the persecution of
whistleblowers and journalists such as Julian Assange, it is vital
that all freedom-loving people disabuse themselves of the notion that
the U.S. government is bound by its Constitution or that its police
forces, domestic and international, can be expected to protect
citizen’s rights. Leonard, however, does not end his account this
way. There is a cautionary tale here, to be sure, and all who fight
for a better world should duly take note. But the immortal question
posed by organizer Florence Reese aptly draws Leonard’s story to a
close and into the present day: “Which side are you on?”

_MAT CALLAHAN is a musician and author originally from San Francisco.
Recent projects include the republication of Songs of Freedom by
Irish revolutionary James Connolly, the recording and publication
of Working Class Heroes, and the launch of Songs of Slavery and
Emancipation. He is the author of five books including The Explosion
of Deferred Dreams (PM, 2017) and A Critical Guide to Intellectual
Property (Zed, 2017). Callahan can be reached at [email protected]
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