Pete Seeger’s FBI File Reveals How the Folk Legend First Became a Target of the Feds
Here we are in 2015 and conservative candidates are still suggesting targeting groups of people based on religion and ethnicity. Here’s a reminder of the the (fairly recent) times when the nation’s surveillance apparatus had an enemies list. Let’s try not to ‘take our country back’ there.
In the fall of 1942, Seeger, who was then 23 years old, wrote a letter of protest to the California chapter of the American Legion. It was to the point:
Dear Sirs -
I felt shocked, outraged, and disgusted to read that the California American Legion voted to 1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!
We, who may have to give our lives in this great struggle—we’re fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism.
If you deport Japanese, why not Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians?
If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too.
America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed.
I felt sick at heart to read of this matter.
Yours truly,
Pvt. Peter Seeger
I am writing also to the Los Angeles Times.
………………….
David Corn: “Seeger was 94 years old when he died. His wide-ranging impact on popular culture, music, and politics had survived all the efforts—behind closed doors and in the public—to brand him a subversive and an enemy of freedom. This was seven decades after he first became a target of government snoops merely because he was upset about a racist and unconstitutional idea and, as a private citizen, wrote a letter about it.”
Read the rest at Mother Jones:
motherjones.com