In April 1962, the folk musician Pete Seeger was “accused of Commie ties” and abruptly banned from performing a scheduled set for children on WQED in Pittsburgh. Yet just twenty years prior, the city welcomed Seeger when he came through on a tour with the Almanac Singers and performed for an industrial labor movement on the rise. This was before the Cold War, which beyond its international context was also a cultural war that changed the nation from within. The suppression of Seeger in 1962 and the subsequent protests in support of him revealed not only a divided Pittsburgh but a polarized nation still at tension between a lingering paranoia about communist infiltration into the arts and a growing resistance to censorship.
Featuring Seeger and Woody Guthrie, among others, the Almanac Singers ascended on the American stage in the early 1940s at a moment that Michael Denning has called “the age of the CIO.” Tying the material hopes of the Congress of Industrial Organizations directly to music, the Almanac singers traveled the country creating a folk songbook for the labor movement informed by local union struggles and the workers they met along their journey, from the Transport Workers Union to the International Longshoremen’s Association. It was a time of political and creative optimism on the American Left.
Pittsburgh became an evocative and meaningful stop in The Almanac Singers’ 1941 tour that fomented a creative dynamism for the group. During their visit, they performed for steel workers but also for the Tenants’ League, an organization fighting for fair rent. In the liner notes of his album Industrial Ballads, Seeger reflected on the experience of writing “Pittsburgh Town” while traveling through the city with this “jalopyful of modern troubadors.” For Seeger, Pittsburgh “was an awesome sight” amid the “early war boom.” Although the song came out of a “communal effort,” Seeger mostly credited Guthrie with the creation of this anthem that uses the melody from the traditional folk song “Crawdad Hole.” The song marvels at Pittsburgh while also confronting the environmental and economic impact of the steel industry. With its witty use of homophones, the lyrics accuse the steel industry of attempting to “steal” from the workers, hinting at the 1937 Supreme Court case National Labor Relations Board v Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation that upheld the Wagner Act, ensuring the rights of private sector workers to form unions and participate in collective bargaining. The final line of the song reflects the utopian spirit of the period, celebrating Pittsburgh’s prominent role in the formation of the CIO.
By the late 1940s, however, the CIO began to purge suspected communists from its ranks. With Cold War policy promulgating a doctrine of containment, the obstruction of communism became the imperative not only abroad but within the country. The cultural sector took a hit in 1947 when ten Hollywood screenwriters and directors were subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). After the Hollywood Ten refused to speak about their involvement in the Screenwriters’ Guild and their affiliations with the Communist Party, they were charged with contempt of Congress. A repressive state-private network began to form and consolidate in film, television, and radio. In 1950, Seeger’s name appeared in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, the notorious anti-communist guidebook put out by the publisher of Counterattack, a weekly newsletter that purported to disseminate the “facts to combat Communism,” Seeger was called to testify before HUAC in 1955. When he refused to cooperate, he was charged with contempt, too. Although blacklisted from major television networks and the airwaves, Seeger continued to perform concerts at schools, colleges, and community organizations.
When Seeger arrived in Pittsburgh in April 1962, he was out on bond while still in the process of appealing his case in the courts. His stop in Pittsburgh involved two planned events—a performance for WQED on a program titled Dimple Depot and a concert at the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association. Initially, everything appeared to be moving forward without much controversy. On April 10th, The Pittsburgh Press even published a short summation of the intended program on WQED. According to the ad, Seeger would talk about folk music and perform with children from the local Falk School.
Two days later, WQED announced a sudden change to their programming; Seeger would be removed from Dimple Depot. In a statement released to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the network placed the onus for the decision on the public: “From the number of protesting telephone calls and letters we have received, the public apparently does not want to hear him.” After the cancellation at WQED, A.J. Auerbach, the director of the Young Men and Women’s Hebrew Association, assured the public that Seeger’s concert at the organization’s venue would be a “non-political” performance with “no speeches.” Even though a concert promoter insisted that the performance would have nothing to do with Seeger’s “politics but with his talents as a folk singer,” the show was canceled shortly thereafter.
However, the impassioned response to these two acts of cultural suppression proved that Pittsburgh was no monolith. Protestors surrounded both venues, carrying signs such as “Let Freedom Ring, Let Seeger Sing!,” “Welcome Pete,” and “Don’t Judge Art by Politics.”
Other forms of resistance also emerged. City council member James Craig Kuhn and a group of prominent Pittsburgh figures in the public eye, including faculty from the University of Pittsburgh, issued a formal statement that petitioned WQED “to allow Pete Seeger to perform on Monday as originally scheduled” so as to “uphold American freedom of expression against the few in this community who would weaken it in the misguided belief that to censor music is to defend democracy.” Despite these campaigns, WQED did not retract the decision, and Seeger remained without a venue.
As the debate intensified, some critics of Seeger minced no words as they justified the suppressive actions. An editorial in The Pittsburgh Press described Seeger as an “effective exponent of the Communist Party line” whose “red propaganda” amounted to nothing more than “the party line in song.” In the article “WQED Did Right in Seeger Affair,” Win Fanning of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette offered an apologia for the network, underscoring Seeger’s alleged connections to “Communist front associations” as well as the artist’s refusal to deny his communist beliefs before HUAC. According to Fanning, Seeger should have never been invited in the first place.
Yet almost as quickly as Seeger was canceled, he was reembraced when the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh opened its doors for a performance. In a public statement, the board of the church articulated their support, not for the singer himself but for the freedom of artistic expression: “We wish to emphasize that we take this action not in defense of Seeger but in defense of due process and free speech, in defense of the principle that a citizen should be judged by the courts, not by popular pressure.” Responding to Seeger’s contempt of Congress charge, the board argued “that a singer should be judged by his performance and not by his alleged political activities.” Because of the high audience demand, the church scheduled two concerts on April 16th, which attracted approximately 900 guests, total. Reverend Ed Cahill described this lively crowd as a “representative Pittsburgh audience.” Seeger performed folk standards, labor songs, and several protest anthems, including “We Shall Overcome.” At the end of each performance, Seeger received a standing ovation. Seeger himself spoke out about the controversy, proclaiming, “I am appalled that an educational institution would not want to take on anything controversial . . . However, I feel that in the long run it might be an educational experience. You can learn from everything—even a crisis.”
Seeger’s hope for the controversy to provoke generative discourse came to fruition. Even after he left the city, the debate over his performance continued in the press for days, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette opened space for the discussion in a section entitled “The People Speak.” In a letter published on April 26th, ten days after the performance, Stanley Rosenblaum expressed “approval and support” for WQED’s ban. However, most of the published letters condemned the network’s decision. Many even offered detailed political and philosophical arguments in support of the freedom of expression. In his bold statement against WQED, Irwin J. Schulman maintained, “This is a form of censorship no less obnoxious for being nongovernmental. The self-appointed vigilante is a far greater menace to free, democratic institutions than even the most subversive folksinger.” Deirdre Watkins worried that the “provincial” ban seemed to be a rather ineffective “method of combating Communism” and urged WQED to consider creating educational programming about “the threats to our basic freedoms from other sources.” John Atlee went so far as to suggest that the cancellation of Seeger reflected “Pittsburgh’s shame” and expressed his disappointed that an injunction was not ordered by the court to allow the show to go on despite the controversy.
One month after this contentious concert, Seeger’s contempt charge was ultimately reversed. “Seeger Freed on Contempt,” the headlines around the country read on May 19, 1962. However, in Pittsburgh, the news took on a personal note shaped by the recent local controversy. An article in The Pittsburgh Press took the opportunity of Seeger’s win in the courts to add a jab about the folk singer’s recent “passable” Pittsburgh performance, noting that “when he tried to set the party line to music, he lost his audience completely.” A piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announced the news of the reversal, while also sardonically criticizing the censorship campaign, asserting that the “Folk singer Pete Seeger has gotten a better hearing from the U.S. Court of Appeals than he did from some groups in Pittsburgh a month ago.”
Seeger never forgot Pittsburgh town and those who defended his right to sing. He returned to the city many times despite the contested 1962 performance, but perhaps, the most telling concert occurred in 1977. As the city began to descend into economic decline, Seeger came out to support Edward Sadlowski’s longshot campaign for the United Steelworkers’ presidency. Cut from the cloth of the old CIO, Sadlowski represented a new face of labor—a grassroots, progressive force fighting union corruption from within. In the historical Leona Theatre in Homestead, just blocks from where the bloody Homestead Steel Strike transpired in 1892, Seeger admitted to the crowd that he hadn’t had the opportunity to sing for the AFL-CIO since “they kicked all the radicals out.”With “paint chipping off the walls and ceiling of the dingy” venue, Seegerpraised Sadlowski as “one of the greatest guys I know,” and the two sang “Pittsburgh Town” together. Although Sadlowski did not win, nobody picketed Seeger’s show this time.
Acknowledgments
I would like to extend my gratitude to Rev. Dr. Kate Walker, minister of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburgh, who pointed me to sources on this subject including the book, Here We Have Gathered. The Story of Unitarian Universalism in Western
Pennsylvania, 1808 – 2008 by Kathleen Parker. In Parker’s book, I found the quote by Reverand Ed Cahill about Seeger’s performance in the church. All other primary source quotes were taken from newspaper articles published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Pittsburgh Press, and local papers during the period.
