So in 1940, with “C for Conscription,” the Almanacs were proposing to offer working people who by then would have been listening to Ernest Tubb or Frank Sinatra a sound supposedly originating with the people themselves long ago and handed down traditionally, with the addition of some antiwar lyrics approved by the Communist Party for the avowed purpose of aiding the liberation of those very people. Yet the sound was really just a slightly outdated version of the capitalist Nashville-industry music of Tubb. And such was the snobbism of the folk revivalists regarding the pop charts that they somehow ranked their thuddingly obvious propaganda lyrics above the lyrics in songs produced by the capitalist New York City industry, written by, say, Yip Harburg, Dorothy Fields, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Duke Ellington and sung by Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and many other fine artists.
These delusions of the Almanac Singers about the nature of their own music—political delusions of communistic purity, historical delusions of the development of the American vernacular, aesthetic delusions of what constitutes quality in music—were totally unaffected by the astonishing reversal they had to make one day in June of 1941. Seeger was playing a rent party when somebody rushed in with the news that Germany had invaded Russia. The Hitler-Stalin pact was broken.
As we near the end of this story, I’m again struck by the mix of horror in Europe and goofiness in the U.S. with which I began Part One. Because now we’re back to the Holocaust.
And we’re in Ukraine, where horror reigns as I write this, and from which horrible questions about U.S. policy are now pressing. Neither the Almanacs nor anyone else in the U.S. knew it in 1941, but as bad as things had been before, the German invasion of Ukraine wasn’t only a breaking of the pact and a pitting of Stalin against Hitler, to the great hope of the western democracies. It also took the policy of exterminating the Jews to the levels represented—but only represented—by the most famous mass killing, at Babi Yar. So this juxtaposition is nearly incommensurable. Another reversal of the party line ensued, and Seeger and Guthrie had a rushed conversation about the need to turn on a dime. In Seeger’s memory it went like this:
“Why, Churchill said ‘All support to the gallant Soviet allied!’”
“Is this the same guy who said twenty years ago, ‘We must strangle the Bolshevik infant in its cradle?’”
“Yep. Churchill’s changed. We got to!”
And so, as instructed by The Daily Worker, the Almanac Singers now urged U.S. entry into the war with all the fervency they’d brought, literally days before, to opposing it.