Pete Seeger's Last War

On the day Ronald Reagan died, an atypically modest tribute to the patriarch of the right appeared at the foot of a veteran's monument in Wappingers Falls, a quiet town in upstate New York. A rough-cut chunk of granite dedicated the site to a local Marine lost in action during the Vietnam War; a wreath of fading red, white, and blue carnations was left over from Memorial Day. The pole of a dollar-store American flag was stuck into the earth, and a portrait of Reagan, cut from a magazine and taped onto a piece of cardboard, lay on the ground.

If you had pulled out of the parking area that the monument shares with Shorty's
Pizza and driven south on Route 9 for two miles, you would have found a contrapuntal scene that afternoon:
about a dozen people gathered at an intersection to protest the Bush administration's military
policies. A steel post was decorated with a peace symbol, made from a coat hanger, and an American
flag like the one at the veteran's memorial. A young woman sat in a folding lawn chair, holding
a sign asking, "Vietnam all over?" A teenage boy held up a bill imploring, "Stop
the War!"

An old man with a white straw broom of a beard stood in the midst of them.
He was wearing stained, torn blue jeans and a polo shirt that had probably been a color like burgundy,
perhaps 10 or 15 years and a few hundred washings ago. He stood straight-backed, his arms at his sides,
turning his head left to right, left to right, in rhythm as he watched the cars pass. His mouth moved
silently, as if he were singing to himself or trying to send messages through the windshields. He
wasn't holding a placard and needed none, because his very image is a symbol of political dissent.

Pete Seeger, who lives near Wappingers Falls, has been protesting the
Bush administration's actions in Iraq at these Saturday peace vigils, organized a few months
before the invasion—and at dozens of other anti-war events of all sizes around the country—with
the passion, if not the vigor, of a person one-fourth his age. Indeed, after an extended period of
low-key concentration on local issues, during which Seeger was most visibly absorbed with cleaning
up the Hudson River, the grand old lion of the American left has, in his 85th year, again taken
to challenging the state of world affairs. This is the latest—and perhaps the last—of
his great missions, a crusade with resonant echoes of his work in the eras of the civil rights movement
and the Vietnam War.

Last year, Seeger led thousands in song at the New York City arm of the Global
March for Peace. The veteran protest songwriter has since rewritten and rerecorded his Vietnam-era
broadside, "Bring Them Home," with three of his musical acolytes, Billy Bragg, Ani
DiFranco, and Steve Earle. ("Now we don't want to fight for oil / Bring 'em home,
bring 'em home / Underneath some foreign soil / Bring 'em home, bring 'em home.")
And in late June, as violence in Iraq erupted in anticipation of the formal transfer of authority
to an interim Iraqi government, Seeger prepared to lead a performance of antiwar songs at the Clearwater
Festival, the annual Hudson River event to raise social, political, and environmental consciousness
(and funds) that he and his wife, Toshi, launched 35 years ago.

The effort strikes some of his critics as quixotic, the tragicomic vagary
of a clinging, misguided anachronism. A lifelong Marxist blacklisted during the McCarthy era,
Seeger has long been an easy target for conservatives. (Seeger's early group, the Almanac
Singers, released an album of songs against American involvement in World War II, but recalled
it and replaced it with anti-Axis songs when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union.) Since the fall of
the Iron Curtain, Seeger's little-changed politics have proved vexing even to former fellow
travelers, such as Ronald Radosh, a fellow at the Hudson Institute and author of Commies: A Journey
Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left. A red-diaper baby who took banjo
lessons from Seeger and organized his first concert at the University of Wisconsin,
Radosh says, "I have known Pete for most of my life, and I think he is a national treasure for
his contribution to American music culture, for acquainting America with its own indigenous music.
But Pete doesn't understand that this is not the '60s, and Iraq and the war against terrorism
are not the war in Vietnam. He looks at things through his old lens, and that's more than unfortunate.
It's sort of sad and silly."

To those he still rallies to dissent and activism, however, Seeger remains
an inspiration, the unwavering embodiment of progressive idealism. After all, he has been using
music to stand up for the disenfranchised and to mobilize their sympathizers since the days of the
original American folk-music revival in the 1930s. Once Woody Guthrie's partner and traveling
companion, later the composer of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Turn,
Turn, Turn," now a friend and mentor to young artists such as DiFranco (who was born after "Turn,
Turn, Turn" was written), Seeger has lived the whole history of activist culture as we know
it.