Tea at Trianon: America's Most Successful Communist

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, January 18, 2025

America's Most Successful Communist

From City Journal:

It happened in early March 1962, when the clean-cut, stripe-shirted Kingston Trio released their recording of Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” Seeger’s lament about the senselessness of war and the blindness of political leaders to its folly soared to Number Four on Billboard’s easy-listening chart, and it remained on the list for seven weeks. “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” eventually became a standard, sung on college campuses and around campfires nationwide. At the time, the song proved one of the biggest successes yet of the folk-music revival then under way, and it marked a major improvement in Seeger’s fortunes. Not long before, his career had suffered from the fifties anti-communist blacklist. Now it was on a new trajectory—culminating in his 1993 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award and his 1994 National Medal of Arts.

For Seeger, the sixties breakthrough came after decades’ worth of mixing music and politics. His belief in music’s potential political power ran in the family, reports biographer David King Dunaway. Seeger’s eminent father, Charles Seeger, a musicologist teaching at Berkeley in the early 1900s (the folk-music archive at Harvard is named after him), found the plight of California migrant workers so disturbing that he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, despite being a pure son of the American upper class with Puritan ancestors; later, he conscientiously objected to World War I. Anticipating the Popular Front, he yearned for a revolutionary classical music that would help usher in a new political order. Though he ultimately made little headway in marrying politics and music, his son—who shared his view that realizing the American dream meant economic as well as political egalitarianism, and that in turn meant communism—succeeded brilliantly.

Pete Seeger’s life mission first took shape as he toured the rural South with his father in the mid-thirties, listening to performances of traditional music and thrilling to their authenticity as perhaps only a Connecticut boarding-school product could. He listened attentively also to his father’s close friend Alan Lomax, assistant director for the Library of Congress music archive and another man of the Left. Using primitive early recording equipment, Lomax and his father, John Lomax, who preceded him at the Library of Congress, brought to the library’s vaults a priceless treasure of traditional music from the Ameri-can South: the African-tinged singing of the Georgia sea islands, the Elizabethan ballads of Appalachia, the blues of the Mississippi Delta (including the first recordings of the great Muddy Waters, made on the famous Stovall’s Plantation outside Clarksdale), and powerful gospel songs by poor whites and blacks alike. (Read more.)