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The great thing about Pete Seeger, apart from his artistry, is that he has learned to question his own beliefs, and face his history squarely. Alec Wilkinson can't claim the last.
In a recent interview, Seeger went into his red diaper background, and how he was taught that there was nothing bad about communism. This was by a father who wrote for the Daily Worker.
http://www.rutherford.org/Oldspeak/Articles/Art/oldspeak-Seeger.html
Yet it was the son who absorbed the lesson for so long, as his father left the Party in 1938, over the Moscow show trials. Pete stuck with the Party until 1950, and did a song, during the Hitler-Stalin Pact days, claiming that FDR wanted to slaughter American boys. This, of course, is a position he immediately abandoned when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
As Pete himself admits, he was merely following the Party line. He is a great artist, but much more than that. He is an honest man who doesn't edit his own history to meet current New Yorker specifications.
I do admit that I got a kick out of some of the profile, though. Some things just don't change. There's the principal telling the students of the Beacon School that Seeger is "probably the person who's done more for this country than anyone else I can think of." Perhaps that was intended more as a commentary on the principal's lack of imagination, than anything else.
And then there is Wilkinson's claim that "Seeger's politics are of the most extravagantly conservative kind".
As they said in graduate school, that is a most imaginative thesis.
I view Seeger from a music history standpoint (since I've got background in that too). It's difficult to underestimate the sheer number of musical figures and movements Seeger has been connected with, played with, or otherwise been involved in. Given his family background, his decision to go into folk music was courageous in itself: his parents were uppercrust folk-music collectors (and his mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was also a classical composer of the first rank). For Seeger to begin a career with the Weavers, of all groups, was akin to Chelsea Clinton joining a grunge rock band -- truly shocking from a class perspective.
Communist? Pacifist? To me Seeger is simply a legend: a man who jammed with most of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century, and who would be an excellent subject for a detailed oral history.
In terms of his politics, this NYer profile from last year is a great read.
And Seeger rocks.
I'm always disappointed to see this kind of stuff: the ritual renunciation to somehow prove redemption... assumes a very Christian model of politics.
As the article you cite points out, he left the CP decades ago, denounced Stalinist repression decades ago, and has spent his career and his life supporting worthwhile cultural and political movements. How many times and how many ways must someone apologize for being wrong before the rest of their life matters again?
I don't just say this in defense of Seeger -- the "culture war" mentality of contemporary politics, the perpetual debate about hypocrisy and triangulation, the "one sin and out" model of public life "career-ending" incidents.... it's toxic.
Seeger's music was great and supported great causes. Seeger himself was a dogmatic and stubborn person who indirectly supported oppression, displacement and violence inflicted on way too many.
To be he was always the second.