Pete Seeger would have been a terrible hammer-wielder. Though an admirer, almost to the end, of Stalin (I'll come back to that), he was no dominator of men. When he spoke of the hammer of justice in his famous , and prosaically named, 'Hammer song' for at least part of the song, it's being used to hammer out a warning, rather than to fight. The only possible instance of him wielding weapons outside a military service is when he tried to take an axe to Bob Dylan's electric cables at Newport (allegedly).
I say this not to belittle him: he was tough, and exceptionally stubborn. Among the many obituaries, I discovered in one that he is the only member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to be convicted of contempt of Congress. He spent much of his prime years under the shadow of prosecution and indeed spent time in prison for it. This was no accident of course - he was a communist; and a proud one; a Stalinist long after most follow travelers had fallen away. We should be grateful that, by his lights, his activity was almost entirely unsuccessful. The image repeated in his obituaries is that he was 'America's tuning fork.' It's a hopeless metaphor: if America is using Pete Seeger as a tuning fork, then it's tone deaf. It's also woefully shortselling his potency - Seeger wasn't a tuner, he was a prophet - an Old Testament prophet. Like those men who came from the wild places (some having gone into them from rather more comfortable billets in the city, as Seeger did) and excoriated the people for failing to act justly. They placed themselves outside order, in opposition to authority, and preached righteousness. You wouldn't have put them in charge of government either: I love the writings of the prophet Amos, but I'm reading him for what he says about the poor, not the administration.
And that's how I think we should think about Seeger. Of course he was wrong about the remedy, but the sniping from the right misses the point. His songs and speeches weren't exam answers, but pricks of conscience. Just as we would be fools to import his doctrine into the exchequer, we'd be even more foolish to explain away his ideals or his criticism. They represent a bright vision of America and of humanity, and he sang proper protest songs for the right reasons. Along the way he helped inspire an extraordinary flowering of popular song. We won't see his like again.
