Military Targeted Pete Seeger’s Wartime Loyalty, Reveals FBI
Pete Seeger was kept under surveillance, as he was leftist and had a Japanese-American partner.
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As Army Pvt. Pete Seeger eagerly waited for a chance to fight for his country during World War II, military investigators quietly built a case that the young folk singer was “potentially subversive.”
The musician and left-wing activist used to perform with Guthrie and leftist Almanac Singers. His famous songs included If I Had a Hammer, Where Have All the Flowers Gone and Turn, Turn, Turn.
Seeger trained as an airplane mechanic at Keesler Field in Mississippi, and according to his file, expressed frustration for not sending him to ground zero.
Ultimately, the singer and banjo player spent time in the Special Services, entertaining soldiers in the South Pacific.
In the 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 fiancée, 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 communistic sympathies, undesirable friends and his Japanese-American fiancée pointed to a risk of divided loyalty.
The newly released files show the lengths to which the government went to keep tabs on the singer’s travels, performances and rally appearances at least into the 1970s. The archives plan to release additional Seeger files in the future.
In 1942, Seeger underwent his first major investigation after he wrote a letter to the California American Legion, criticising the organisation’s resolution “advocating deportation of all Japanese, citizens or not, and barring all Japanese descendants from citizenship.” This was during a time Japanese Americans, many of them from California, were being forced to live in government internment camps.
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.
What followed was a wide-ranging probe by the military into Seeger’s background. Investigators found that Seeger – referred to as the “Subject” – was “intensely loyal at this time” and eager to be transferred overseas from Mississippi to fight fascism.
It was followed by a wide range probe and investigators found Seeger wanted to go to Mississippi to fight fascism and was a “close friend and associate” of Lead Belly, or Huddie William Ledbetter, the folk legend they described as a “negro murderer.”
The Almanac singers were described in the files as “spreading Communist and anti-Fascist propaganda through songs and recordings.”
The agent concluded Guthrie knew his friend quite well “but that he knew a great deal more about Subject’s politics and activities than he admitted.”
Months before the couple’s wedding in 1943, Toshi wrote in an intercepted letter that in one sense she didn’t mind him avoiding danger overseas – though she hinted that there might be perils stateside, too.